News
February 12, 2008
National Engineers Week at UCSD
They say that everyday should be Mothers Day. Considering how crucial technology is for everything we do from communication and banking, to environmental sustainability and health care, everyday should also be Engineers Day. Nevertheless, Feb 18-22 is the one week out of the year that is carved out as National Engineers Week – and the students at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering took part in a big way. Full Story
January 23, 2008
Kauffman Foundation Says von Liebig Center Fills Seed-Stage Funding Gap
A Kauffman Foundaiton study has highlighted two university "proof of concept" centers, the von Liebig Center at UCSD and the Deshpande Center at MIT, which since the two centers’ creation in 2002, have collectively awarded nearly $10 million in seed grants and launched 26 seed-stage companies that have accumulated more than $159 million in private capital. Both centers are funded from philanthropic donations. Full Story
December 5, 2007
A Unique Way To Lower Energy Costs
UC San Diego undergraduate students have designed, built and deployed a network of five weather-monitoring stations as a key step toward helping the university use ocean breezes to cool buildings, identify the sunniest rooftops to expand its solar-electric system, and use water more efficiently in irrigation and in other ways. Full Story
November 21, 2007
Flip-Flopping Gene Expression Can Be Advantageous
One gene for pea pod color generates green pods while a variant of that gene gives rise to the yellow-pod phenotype, a feature that helped Gregor Mendel first describe genetic inheritance. However, many modern-day geneticists are focused on the strange ability of some genes to be expressed spontaneously in either of two possible ways. UCSD researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that variability due to the phenomenon is larger and persists much longer than they had expected. Full Story
November 9, 2007
Renewable Plastics, Poster Initiative and E. coli: UCSD Bioengineering Grad Student Wins Leadership Award
The plastic containers Adam Feist uses to carry his lunch to his UC San Diego lab are petroleum based. This may change. Feist – a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate at UCSD – is doing fundamental research that could lead to more efficient ways to churn out renewable biopolymers for “green plastics” using microorganisms as factories. Within the bioengineering department at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, Feist is a natural leader, a dedicated team player and a top-notch metabolic engineer. This combination of leadership, service and scholarship has earned him the 2007 Woolley Leadership Award. Full Story
November 7, 2007
UCSD Engineering Honor Society Wins Most Outstanding Chapter Award
Flip through the 133 page record of the 2006-2007 activities of UCSD’s engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi, and you’ll see why they recently took home the “nation’s most outstanding chapter” award. Full Story
October 18, 2007
Undergrads Dream with QUALCOMM Chips
The biggest challenge for one of the four winners of last weekend's QUALCOMM Innovator Challenge came at a surprising moment: after his team won first prize and $5,000 in the engineering design contest. Over the phone, freshman David Wong had to convince his parents to hand over his social security number so he could fill out the necessary tax-related paperwork to get his cut of the $5,000. Money the team won for their ideas for what is possible with QUALCOMM’s new ultra powerful chip set for mobile devices, called Snapdragon. Full Story
October 16, 2007
Will Breast Cancer Spread? UCSD Bioengineers Answer
One of the many unknowns facing women who are diagnosed with breast cancer is the likelihood that the cancer will spread to other parts of the body – metastasize. Researchers from UC San Diego are looking to change that. UCSD bioengineering professor Trey Ideker is pioneering a more accurate approach for predicting the risk of breast cancer metastasis in individual patients. Full Story
October 8, 2007
Which came first, the chicken genome or the egg genome?
New research published in Nature Genetics provides the first evolutionary history of the duplications in the human genome that are partly responsible for both disease and recent genetic innovations. This work marks a significant step toward a better understanding of what genomic changes paved the way for modern humans, when these duplications occurred and what the associated costs are – in terms of susceptibility to disease-causing genetic mutations. Full Story
September 25, 2007
Primate Sperm Competition: Speed Matters
UC San Diego and UC Irvine researchers have reported that sperm cells from the more promiscuous chimpanzee and rhesus macaque species swim much faster and with much greater force than the sperm of humans and gorillas. Full Story