A largely overlooked but significant factor in marine ecology concerns the effects of variable pH on the growth rate and abundance of coastal marine phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain in productive coastal waters. The pH of the open ocean varies very little. This has led to the common, but faulty, assumption that the pH of coastal waters also varies little and is unimportant.

In an article in a recent issue of the scientific journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, URI Graduate

When men make lame excuses for a poor test performance, women don’t buy it, according to research just published by Edward Hirt, a social psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington.

Hirt has spent the last 10 years conducting research on this aspect of social psychology that involves the term self-handicapping. The associate professor of psychology is the lead author of “I Know You Self-Handicapped Last Exam: Gender Differences in Reactions to Self-Handicapping” in the current issue of

Insect Antibiotic, Cecropin A, Bypasses Outer Defenses to Kill Bacteria From The Inside

For antibiotics, the best way to beat bacterial defenses may be to avoid them altogether. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that Cecropin A, a member of a family of antibiotic proteins produced by insects, may kill bacteria and avoid resistance by entering bacterial cells and taking control of their genetic machinery.

While most antibiotics kil

Amphidinolides, a family of natural compounds that have shown promise as powerful antitumor agents, pose problems for cancer researchers because they are found in only minute amounts, and only in microscopic marine flatworms that live off the coasts of Japan and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Nature keeps a tight lock on its supply of amphidinolide.

Work by University of Illinois at Chicago chemistry professor Arun Ghosh may solve this problem. He’s successfully developed a way to synthesize

A visualization of satellite data captured and processed January 1–20, 2003, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows heavy pollution from China and Southeast Asia blowing out over the Pacific Ocean. The near-real time capability represented by the image is a breakthrough for NCAR team members working with the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.

The image shows levels of carbon monoxide (CO) in a

Although sweet, bitter and umami (monosodium glutamate) tastes are different, researchers are finding that information about each of these tastes is transmitted from the various taste receptors via a common intracellular signaling pathway.

The identification of a common pathway runs counter to widespread belief among some researchers in the taste field who have long held the view that the different tastes require distinct machinery within the cell to transduce their signals to the brain, wh