An international group of scientists led by UCSB researchers demonstrated the effects of carbon dioxide on the acidity of the ocean’s surface. The study’s results indicate that human greenhouse gas emissions play a critical role in ocean pH levels and, consequently, marine habitats.

The findings of the study were recently published in PloS ONE in an article by Paul Matson, a graduate student under ecophysiologist and professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology Gretchen Hofmann. The paper includes contributions from the Scripps Institute at UC San Diego, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn of Naples, Italy.

When carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, one-third is reabsorbed into the oceans where it reacts with water to form carbonic acid. The reabsorption increases the acidity of the ocean, which can stress sea organisms like coral and other marine invertebrates that depend on carbonate to make their skeletal structures.

According to Hofmann, the team’s main objective is to understand the long-term consequences of pH changes in the ocean, particularly in regard to ocean organisms.

“We’ve know for a really long time that ocean interacts with the atmosphere … CO2 dissolves into water, it changes the pH of the water, and changes how organisms make their hard parts” said Hofmann.

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Scientists from UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis recently published a paper in collaboration with Eric Davidson of Woods Hole Research Center and several Brazilian scientists, revealing how human activity and land use have begun to affect water and energy cycles in the Amazon Basin.

The research team’s primary goal was to understand the connections between climate change, agricultural growth and logging in order to gauge resulting fire risks.

“We are starting to see clear signs of the impacts of human activity on the forest ecosystems and rivers of southern and eastern flanks of the Amazon Basin,” lead scientist Davidson said. “The changes are not yet big enough to be detectable in other large segments of the basin, but we understand much more now about how climate change, deforestation and fire interact throughout the Amazon.”

One such sign of human impact on the area is the increase of fire in recent years. Compared to previous fire patterns in the Amazon Basin, these more frequent fires may be traced to human activity in the area.

“These fires are extremely frequent, occurring every few years, compared with every couple centuries in the past,” Jennifer Balch, co-author of the study and researcher at NCEAS, said in a recent press release.

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With most queries turning up millions of results, how does a site like Google deliver the most relevant and accurate data as top results? Most people do not give much thought to the intricate workings of the search engine that they use daily.

Computer science professor Tao Yang, a former chief scientist of Ask.com has done extensive work on this subject. According to Yang, the search engines help users avoid having to sift through irrelevant or repetitive information.

“What a search engine does is perform data mining on different websites to analyze their relevance,” Yang said. “What often turns up is that there are many duplicates posted in a variety of sites. By finding these duplicates, we can eliminate them, making searches more accurate and efficient.”

This process, combined with document clustering — which arranges results by their relevance to the query, — eliminates the potential hassle of manually searching through individual links.

While search engines are the main users of sorting and ‘mining,’ the practice of similarity computing has a wide variety of uses, some of which even involve saving lives. According to Maha Alabduljalil, a graduate student working with professor Yang, similarity computing may be useful for medicine, business and police investigations.

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A recent study led by scientists at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis demonstrated how globalization and the demand for drought-resistant plant species threaten to overcome native plants in the United States. Based on these findings, the scientists proposed that bio-imports be screened before entering the U.S.

The paper, co-authored by UCSB environmental studies professor Carla D’Antonio, was published in the online edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

According to D’Antonio, human interference with dams, roads, pollution and agriculture can create environmental changes for native plants and give exotic ones an ecological advantage.

“The places that an exotic plant species dominates have been altered by a disturbance or some kind of environmental stress usually induced by humans,” D’Antonio said.

In Santa Barbara, coastal sage scrub habitats are particularly susceptible, as are wild grasslands, which have a tendency to catch on fire during drier months, allowing non-native species such as Mediterranean grasses and mustards to invade.

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UCSB’s Dept. of Earth Science has received a $553,000 grant from Seismic Micro-Technology Inc. to fund research in 3-D visualization, mapping and modeling of seismic data.

So far, scientists involved in the project have used this software, “KINGDOM,” to study a range of relevant topics.

According to Craig Nicholson, a researcher at UCSB’s Marine Science Institute, the software allows for a more comprehensive visual presentation of data due to its capacity to create 3-D data sets and rotating 3-D images, including models of the sea floor, so that scientists can better visualize buried geologic surfaces.

“We use it [KINGDOM] for all sorts of interesting things, but we are mostly looking at active faults and the geometry of the active faults producing earthquakes,” Nicholson said. “What we are looking at are the active structures that are controlling the geometry of the basin, the creation of the mountains and things like that.”

Maura Quady, a graduate student in the Dept. of Earth Science specializing in hydrogeology, plans to use the software to investigate wells, variations on rock types and the water table.

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Would you jump off a cliff if everyone else was doing it? Well, according to new findings, chances are you just might take the plunge. Herd mentality is a commonly cited and studied human behavior. Its applications are prevalent in a variety of settings, ranging from investor confidence in the stock market to fashion trends.

One of the most well-known studies regarding this theory is the Asch conformity experiments, in which an unsuspecting participant was placed in a room with other “participants” who were actually actors. The group was then asked a series of questions, to which the actors were instructed in advance to provide the same incorrect answers. Though the questions were basic and the actors’ answers were clearly incorrect, the non-actor participants often agreed with the deceptive majority and echoed the same incorrect answers, demonstrating what we now call “herd mentality.” In fact, in over three-quarters of the cases, subjects conformed by responding with the actors’ incorrect answers.

You may be more familiar, however, with the “Candid Camera” elevator experiment, which found that people entering an elevator will generally face the elevator’s back wall if all of the other riders are facing that way as well.

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Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently published a study describing how underwater topography and currents affected the disappearance of methane plumes in the Gulf of Mexico following the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences follows up on oil spill researcher and UCSB geochemist David Valentine’s older publications. Valentine’s previous work has examined the ecological aftermath of the oil spill.

“Our original study was in 2010, published in the journal Science,” Valentine said. “We also had a series of papers in 2011, including another in Science, a third in Environmental Science and Technology and a fourth in PNAS. Each of these previous papers captured a snapshot of what was happening in the deep plumes. The current paper builds on these observational works and develops the theoretical framework to explain the many seemingly disparate observations.”

Valentine collaborated with Igor Mezić, professor of mechanical engineering at UCSB. Mezić’s previous work helped to predict how the oil would spread following the spill. Together, the two researchers combined Mezić’s hydrodynamic data and Valentine’s bacterial work to create a single, comprehensive model explaining how methane broke down and disappeared in the Gulf.

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Since we are now transitioning back to the reality of all-nighters and weekly “midterms,” it is more important than ever to hold on to that jolly disposition that a month of too much family, food and fun inspires.

Fretting away the quarter will not improve your performance in any arena, especially academics. Furthermore, stress can wreak havoc not only emotionally, but also physically.

Although debilitating back pain isn’t exactly prevalent among twentysomethings, slight symptoms can intensify over the years, progressing to an excruciating condition. In fact, back pain is the leading cause of work-related absences.

However, do not resign yourself to a lifetime of chronic back woes just yet. Research suggests that back pain is potentially treatable by regularly practicing yoga.

In a study featured in Spine, the test group that frequently attempted various yoga poses reported reduced pain, improved back function and even better moods.

In another study conducted by the University of York featured in Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers split a group of approximately 300 participants suffering from back pain in half. Half were treated by doctors while the other half were enrolled in a boot camp led by 20 yoga instructors. The results suggest that yoga may be a more effective long-term solution than traditional methods since it not only alleviated back pain slightly better than pain killers alone, but it also increased back function and flexibility among participants — an added benefit not offered in pill form.

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Researchers at UCSB have helped create a new method to increase wireless transmission speeds in data centers by up to 30 percent.

Scientists discovered that metal plates placed on the ceiling of data centers better transmit signals from directional antennas, thereby increasing the efficiency and speed of wireless communication.

Although wireless connections are not novel, previous systems required that Wi-Fi stations sending and receiving data have a line-of-sight connection. By angling the stream of data upward, signals can bounce off the ceiling. As a result, signals from densely packed areas can be transmitted regardless of their location within a data center.

To demonstrate this effect, UCSB associate computer science professor Heather Zheng and her team used a 60 gigahertz wireless device in spite of the fact that this type of data transmission is typically sensitive to interference between the transmitter and the receiver.

“Any obstacle larger than 2.5 mm can block the signal,” said Zheng. To avoid such reception problems, Zheng’s team used directional antennas to improve communication.

Rather than create a mesh network that could potentially further complicate route destination, Zheng and her team next placed flat metal plates on the ceiling of data centers.

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Once a website targeting mostly college students, Facebook’s popularity has exploded in recent years, a testament to its universal appeal. However, the numerous benefits of online social networking make it easy to overlook the risks associated with sharing private information on Facebook.

Boasting membership numbering into the several hundred millions, Facebook seems a ubiquitous part of modern day life. Many users, however, are unaware of the large number of fake accounts that actually function as advertisers for certain companies.

One popular way for companies to reach a large number of users with their advertisements is to pay individual account holders small amounts to perform a specified task geared toward attracting consumer attention.

“The process works very similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This project by Amazon hosts small tasks online, which users can complete for small amounts of money, like 25 cents per task, for example,” Christopher Wilson, a UCSB graduate student working in the computer science department, said. “Spammers of ads have successfully implemented a dark side of this system, where they pay people to create accounts and post content. Now it’s harder to detect spam accounts because the new ones are created by individual people, making each one unique.”

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Along with a group of researchers from Harvard University, Scott Hodges, professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UCSB, recently discovered a mechanism of flower petal evolution that contradicts previous scientific theories that have been widely accepted for the past 60 years.

Using Columbine flowers, also known as Aquilegia, the team monitored the evolution of petal spurs. Shaped like long tubes, these spurs hold nectar at their tips and are thought to have evolved to match the tongue length of the Columbine flowers’ pollinators. In fact, certain species of Columbine flowers exhibit spurs up to 16 centimeters in length.

For 60 years, the scientific community has assumed that petal elongation is the result of cell proliferation, or continued cell divisions. However, in his recent publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Hodges has challenged this hypothesis.

“Previously it was thought that small regions of the developing petal were sites of cell divisions that added cells and made the spur grow out. We found that cell division stops very early in development when the spurs are about eight millimeters in length, even though they can grow to 15 centimeters,” Hodges said.

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In a recent study, UCSB physicists were the first to successfully demonstrate how defects in silicon carbide can be controlled quantum mechanically at room temperature. The physicists’ achievement is particularly important since the ability to control electrons at a fundamental level is the key to developing quantum computers and ultra sensitive nanoscale detectors.

Lead researcher professor David Awschalom, director of both the California NanoSystems Institute and UCSB’s Center for Spintronics & Quantum Computation, worked on the study with graduate students William Koehl, Bob Buckley, Joseph Heremans and Greg Calusine. The results were published this month in Nature.

Until now, command over the spins of electrons could only be realized near absolute zero, when the electrons are in their ground state. Some control, however, was available in diamonds, where electrons are trapped in holes between carbon atoms called nitrogen-vacancy centers. The Awschalom group found that silicon carbide, a widely used semiconductor, contains defects allowing electrons in these nitrogen-vacancy centers to be manipulated using laser light and microwave pulses. Upon exposure to either laser light or microwave pulses, electrons are elevated to higher energy levels and emit a photon that provides scientists with information regarding the excited electrons’ spin.

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Though honey is a common natural sweetener used for generations, scientific evidence suggests that honey has and could be used for many unconventional purposes, in addition to satisfying your sweet tooth.

The latest research indicates that humans’ use of honey can be traced back more than 10,000 years. A standard sweet of many ancient cultures, honey has also been used for various health reasons: The Romans, for example, applied it on open wounds, burns and rashes to expedite the healing process, among other medical applications.

A study published last year from the Department of Medical Microbiology at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam examined defensin-1 — a naturally occurring protein found in honey — and noted its infection-fighting characteristics. These findings explain its success many years after its use as an antibacterial ointment in ancient times.

“Honey or isolated honey-derived components might be of great value for prevention and treatment of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” researcher Sebastian Zaat said in a press release.

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Using DNA to track the bacteria’s unusual diet, UCSB scientists recently discovered bacteria feeding on natural gas leaking from the ocean floor at unusually cold temperatures at the site of the Deepwater Horizons oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month, was led by UCSB professor, David Valentine, who was assisted by Molly Redmond, a postdoctoral scholar involved in the research. The National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy also participated in the project as part of their mission to understand how the oil spill disaster continues to affect the Gulf ecosystem.

The extensive depth and volume of the spill — predominantly comprised of methane, ethane and propane — allowed Valentine and Redmond to determine the role extreme temperature and natural gas play in bacterial ecosystems.

According to the report, “the colder temperature … [and] high natural gas content of this spill may have provided an advantage to these organisms.”

By June 2010 three bacterial species — Oceanospirillales, Colwellia and Cycloclasticus — residing in waters at 4 degrees Celsius and approximately 1,000 meters below the surface had already consumed the majority of the methane spilled.

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Although Halloween serves as a fine celebration for many, the weekend can take its toll.

So let’s get down to business — the word “hangover” comes from the medical term veisalgia. The first part, kveis, is a Norwegian word meaning “uneasiness following debauchery.” The second part, algia, is derived from the Greek word for pain. Although symptoms vary, the most frequently reported are: headaches, loss of appetite, nausea, fatigue and dehydration.

Interestingly, certain alcohols are more prone to cause hangovers than others. These disparities are the result of congeners, which are the byproducts produced during fermentation. Lighter alcoholic beverages tend to contain smaller amounts of these toxins than do darker-colored liquors. For instance, vodka or gin hangovers are generally less severe than those caused by red wine or whiskey.

In an experiment conducted by Thomas Jefferson University, rats were subjected to alcohol consumption and given caffeine and anti-inflammatory drugs 4 to 6 hours later. Based on the results of this study, lead researcher Michael Oshinsky has recommended the combination of coffee and aspirin for the day after your debauchery.

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