research – Page 8 – College of Arts & Sciences

UA Chemistry Professor to Receive Honorary Doctorate from Russian Academy of Sciences

March 19, 2018

From the March 2018 Desktop News | UA chemistry professor Dr. Michael Bowman is being honored for his leading-edge work at the N.N. Vorozhtsov Novosibirsk Institute of Organic Chemistry in Russia with an honorary doctorate. The doctorate comes from Bowman’s ground-breaking work in pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and its applications to triarylmethyl, or trityl, radicals, which can be used to enhance the identification of tumors. “EPR, or electron paramagnetic resonance, basically looks at unpaired electrons,” said Molly Lockhart, a chemistry PhD […]

Professor Publishes Book on WWI with Oxford University Press

March 19, 2018

From the March 2018 Desktop News | Dr. Andrew J. Huebner, an associate professor of history, recently published a book with Oxford University Press titled Love and Death in the Great War. Through the use of real stories and letters exchanged between loved ones, the book delves into the intricate relationship between World War I propaganda and the lived experience of the war itself. “I’ve been interested for as long as I can remember in the study of what we call ‘war […]

New Mothers, Affluent Areas Drive ‘Anti-Vaccine’ Sentiment on Twitter

February 8, 2018

From the February 2018 Desktop News | The anti-vaccination crowd is thriving on Twitter, where the negative sentiment clusters geographically across the United States, according to a recent study by an autism researcher at The University of Alabama. Dr. Theodore S. Tomeny, UA assistant professor of psychology, and colleagues used a machine-learning algorithm to examine nearly a half-million tweets over a five-year span that included mentions of “autism” and “vaccines.” Tomeny and co-author Chris Vargo, assistant professor of communication at the University […]

Solving Galactic Mysteries a Few Minutes at a Time

February 8, 2018

From the February 2018 Desktop News | A project led by an astronomer at The University of Alabama will use 12-25 minute gaps in the regular imaging schedule of the Hubble Space Telescope to get a better look at oddities found in the sky. Dr. William C. Keel, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, led an effort to use Hubble to investigate unusual objects found by volunteer astronomers in a crowd-sourced astronomy project, Galaxy Zoo, and its companion Radio Galaxy […]

UA Chemist’s Work in Understanding New Materials Gets Boost

January 10, 2018

From the January 2018 Desktop News | Dr. Jared Allred, assistant professor of chemistry at The University of Alabama, was recently awarded a grant from the 2017 Early Career Research Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate properties of novel metal compounds and develop a new way to analyze certain aspects of these materials. “Anytime you are working on new materials, you need to be able to understand the physics of what’s going on – the interactions,” Allred […]

An Insomnia Label More Harmful Than Poor Sleep

January 10, 2018

From the January 2018 Desktop News | People who worry about poor sleep have more emotional and physical problems during the day than those who do not worry, regardless of how well either sleep, according to research conducted at The University of Alabama. In a review of more than a dozen sleep studies going back more than 20 years, Dr. Kenneth Lichstein, UA professor of psychology, defines something he calls insomnia identity, a person’s conviction of having poor sleep. This belief […]

UA Scientist Helps Show How Earth Stops Tiny Particles in Their Tracks

January 9, 2018

From the January 2018 Desktop News | An international group of researchers, including several from The University of Alabama, measured the interaction between tiny particles, called neutrinos, that travel the cosmos and Earth. The findings, which carry implications for our understanding of physics and Earth’s core, were published in the journal Nature. Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles famous for passing through anything and everything, rarely interacting with matter. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second. Now, scientists have demonstrated […]

UA Political Science Professors Publish Paper on Gender Bias in Supreme Court

November 16, 2017

From the November 2017 Desktop News | Drs. Dana Patton and Joseph Smith, both associate professors with The University of Alabama’s Department of Political Science, recently published their paper “Lawyer, Interrupted: Gender Bias in Oral Arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court” in the Journal of Law and Courts. The paper discusses the disparities in how male and female lawyers are treated while arguing in front of the Supreme Court. Patton originally noticed the difference while playing a transcript of oral arguments […]

Anthropology Graduate Student Finds Rare Research Experience on Creighton Island

November 16, 2017

Cayla Colclasure uses new equipment on Creighton Island.

From the November 2017 Desktop News | If there’s anything anthropology graduate student Cayla Colclasure has discovered in her research, it’s that studying those who have gone before us is an important part of moving forward. Alongside her mentor, Dr. Elliot Blair, Colclasure is doing just that in a revolutionary way on Creighton Island, a privately-owned island in McIntosh County, Georgia. The pair is utilizing an upgraded piece of equipment to gather information from Creighton about indigenous communities from the Mississippian […]

Virtual Reality Sandbox

November 14, 2016

Dr. Sagy Cohen doing a demonstration in the sandbox.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZUAFNVx2-w] From the November 2016 Desktop News | The newest interactive exhibit at the Alabama Museum of Natural History is part sandbox, part Xbox, and it’s teaching students of all ages about topography, flood hazards, and watersheds. “With Google maps and other applications, people aren’t used to reading paper maps anymore,” Dr. Sagy Cohen, a professor in the Department of Geography, said. “But in my field—and even for people who like hiking or hunting—reading topographical maps is still a very […]