UNM’s 2012 Top-10 Research News Stories

Annu­ally, the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Mar­ket­ing (UCAM) Depart­ment and the Office of the Vice Pres­i­dent for Research com­piles a list of its Top-10 Research News sto­ries from the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico dur­ing the course of the year. Below is the list of UNM’s Top-10 Research News sto­ries for 2012.

UNM Physi­cists Part of the Search for the Higgs Boson Par­ti­cle
UNM Physi­cists, includ­ing Pro­fes­sor Sally Sei­del and Research Pro­fes­sor Igor Gorelov, are among sev­eral thou­sand sci­en­tists around the world who have been col­lab­o­rat­ing for 17 years in the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Col­lider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzer­land. Recently, a new par­ti­cle was observed in the search, but whether the par­ti­cle has the prop­er­ties of the pre­dicted Higgs boson is now a mat­ter of intense scrutiny.

Nanoscale Mate­ri­als for Tar­geted Can­cer Treat­ment
C. Jef­frey Brinker, pro­fes­sor in Chem­i­cal and Nuclear Engi­neer­ing, Mol­e­c­u­lar Genet­ics and Micro­bi­ol­ogy, is devel­op­ing nanoscale mate­ri­als for cur­ing can­cer, micro­elec­tron­ics, and energy har­vest­ing. He and his stu­dents are build­ing and engi­neer­ing nanoscale mate­ri­als to deliver drugs directly to can­cer cells, there­fore avoid­ing the col­lat­eral dam­age asso­ci­ated with tra­di­tional chem­i­cal ther­a­pies. Brinker believes that nanopar­ti­cles may change the way per­son­al­ized med­i­cine is deliv­ered in the future. 

Cli­mate Change Played a Part in the Col­lapse of the Maya
An ongo­ing study of the Maya allowed an inter­na­tional research team to doc­u­ment cli­mate change using a chem­i­cal process that allowed analy­sis of a sta­lag­mite from a cave in Cen­tral Amer­ica. Asso­ciate pro­fes­sor Keith Prufer and grad­u­ate stu­dent Val­o­rie Aquino in the Depart­ment of Anthro­pol­ogy, and Pro­fes­sor Yemane Asmerom and Senior Researcher Vic­tor Polyak in the Depart­ment of Earth and Plan­e­tary Sci­ences, were co-authors of a paper fea­tured on the cover of “Sci­ence” mag­a­zine in November. 

Devel­op­ing Inno­v­a­tive Nano Tech­nolo­gies for Mobile Devices
UNM is part of a multi-institution effort to develop nanoscale man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems for mobile com­put­ing. Lead by the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin, and includ­ing the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Berke­ley, the project has been awarded $18.5 mil­lion from the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion. The Nanoman­u­fac­tur­ing Sys­tems for Mobile Com­put­ing and Mobile Energy Tech­nolo­gies (NASCENT) Cen­ter will develop inno­v­a­tive nanoman­u­fac­tur­ing, nanosculpt­ing, and nanometrol­ogy sys­tems that could lead to more ver­sa­tile mobile com­put­ing devices such as wear­able sen­sors, fold­able lap­tops, and rol­lable batteries.

Life on Mars?
Research Pro­fes­sor and Sci­en­tist Hor­ton New­som is part of the Chem­Cam team on the Mars Rover Curi­ousity. The Chem­Cam has been busy obtain­ing pho­tos and data in and effort to ana­lyze the chem­istry of rocks and soil on Mars and deter­mine if there is evi­dence of micro­bial life on the planet. So far, a major dis­cov­ery was made when ancient streambed mate­r­ial was found, deter­min­ing that there once was flow­ing water on Mars.

Earth­quake Poten­tial in Col­orado and New Mex­ico Alive and Active
The Rio Grande Rift — the north-trending con­ti­nen­tal rift zone that extends from Colorado’s cen­tral Rocky Moun­tains to Mexico—is not dead but geo­log­i­cally alive and active, accord­ing to a new study by sci­en­tists at the Coop­er­a­tive Insti­tute for Research in the Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ences (CIRES) in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico, New Mex­ico Tech, Utah State Uni­ver­sity and UNAVCO. The data indi­cates that researchers expect to see some earth­quakes in the con­ti­nen­tal rift zone.

Build­ing a Cell Replica
“Fri­day after­noon is usu­ally the best time to do sci­ence. There’s some­how less pres­sure. The week is behind you. You may get to sleep in tomor­row morn­ing, so why not just try some­thing?” Bryon Kaehr said. Kaehr is a research sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico and an advanced mate­ri­als researcher at San­dia National Lab­o­ra­to­ries. His sim­ple exper­i­ment may have far reach­ing impact for nano­ma­te­ri­als, for drug devel­op­ment, and for the whole field of bio-catalysis.

Con­vert­ing and Alter­ing Mus­cle Func­tion
Did you ever won­der why some Olympic run­ners are so good at short dis­tances, while oth­ers excel at long-distance exer­cises? Much of this dif­fer­ence is accounted for by the types of mus­cle fibers that pre­dom­i­nate in the indi­vid­ual: fast fibers for sprint­ers, and slow fibers for endurance ath­letes. How the ratio of dif­fer­ent mus­cle fiber types is pre­de­ter­mined in the body has always been of inter­est to researchers. Recently, sci­en­tists at UNM, includ­ing Research Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor Anton Bryant­sev, and Pro­fes­sor and Biol­ogy depart­ment chair Richard Cripps, used fruit flies to dis­cover a mech­a­nism that con­verts one mus­cle type into another, and thus, alter­ing the func­tion of the muscle.

A Quicker, Less Expen­sive Way to do High Qual­ity Ren­der­ing for Com­puter Gen­er­ated Films
Com­puter and Engi­neer­ing Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor Pradeep Sen and grad­u­ate stu­dent Soheil Darabi have found a new way to solve an old prob­lem in the dig­i­tal film indus­try. Nor­mally it takes thou­sands of hours of com­put­ing time to cal­cu­late the final image frames in films that use com­puter graph­ics, such as those with spe­cial effects or com­pletely computer-generated films. The rea­son is that com­put­ers typ­i­cally use an algo­rithm based on ran­dom num­bers to sim­u­late how the light bounces around the com­plex envi­ron­ments. In order to ren­der prop­erly, mil­lions of cal­cu­la­tions are per­formed over a long period of time. The researchers have devel­oped an new The newmethod is that it reduces the com­pu­ta­tion time by sev­eral orders of mag­ni­tude, thereby enabling the ren­der­ing of com­plex effects for quickly.

Native Amer­i­cas Sought Caf­feine Buzz Long Before Euro­peans Arrived
UNM Anthro­pol­ogy Pro­fes­sor Patri­cia Crown lead a team that iden­ti­fied the organic residue absorbed by pot­tery used by Native Amer­i­cas to process and brew a highly caf­feinated black drink from parts of holly plants. The research, pub­lished in the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, explains that the inhab­i­tants of North Amer­ica near St. Louis Mis­souri had com­plex rit­u­als involv­ing the drink.

** The selec­tions above are in no par­tic­u­lar order.