UCLA researchers built new genes into mice that kept the mice skinny even when fed a high-fat diet. The big idea behind their unconventional approach to the nation’s obesity epidemic? Borrow from the way plants and bacteria digest fat. <more>

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Imagine a pacemaker powered by sugar – which it gets from the glucose in your blood. See what else Dr. Bruce Dunn is cooking up in his lab.

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Xbox + math = virtual surgery? Joseph Teran is using mathematical modeling to create a “digital double” with a patient’s tendons, muscles, fat and skin. Surgeons can “practice” on the double in a video-game-like environment. <more>

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Diviner is one of six instruments aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission – the first mission in NASA’s program to get astronauts back on the moon by 2020 – and UCLA’s David Paige is principal investigator. Diviner will make the first global radiometric survey of the temperature of the surface of the moon, identifying cold [...]

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UCLA professor Christopher T. Russell has spent more than 15 years working on NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. After launching September 2007, Dawn will travel for more than four years before reaching the “dwarf planet” Ceres and the massive asteroid Vesta – two of the first bodies formed in [...]

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The competition: Design, build, and launch a rocket capable of taking a 10-pound payload to 10,000 feet. The victors? UCLA Rocket Project team. Bruins won the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association’s Rocket Competition the first time they competed. <more>

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When it launches in 2009, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), an unmanned satellite that will scan the entire sky in infrared light, will use detectors 500 times more sensitive than those used in previous missions. Ninety-nine percent of the sky has not yet been observed with this kind of sensitivity – and the survey [...]

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“The plane will be flying as high as you can ask a 747 to fly, but yet not go into space” said UCLA’s Mark Morris, one of three astronomers selected to participate in the first scientific observations to be conducted by SOFIA, a specially modified Boeing 747 carrying the world’s most versatile airborne astronomical observatory. [...]

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Solved! UCLA space scientists and colleagues have identified the mechanism that triggers substorms in space; wreaks havoc on satellites, power grids and communication systems; and leads to the explosive release of energy that causes the northern lights. <more>

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“It’s as if Earth and Venus collided with each other,” said UCLA’s Benjamin Zuckerman. “Astronomers have never seen anything like this before.” Learn more about what happened to two terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300 light-years from Earth.

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The truth about black holes is perhaps less dramatic and menacing than movie blockbusters suggest. Rather than sucking everything into them like some cosmic vacuum cleaner, Professor Andrea Ghez says black holes “kind of mind their own business unless you get really, really close.” <more> PDF

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