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Water, water everywhere, but not enough to drink

As climate change accelerates, worldwide fresh water supplies are predicted to become increasingly stressed. However, with all that sea sloshing around, there should be enough for everybody, right? Just remove the salt. Problem solved. Well, not quite.

Wired for Rewards

The maxim, “With age comes wisdom,” may in fact have a neurological basis.

12th century wisdom for the 21st

She may have lived in the 12th century, but the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen speaks to the 21st, says Margot Fassler, Notre Dame’s Keough-Hesburgh professor of music history and liturgy.

How is the brain wired?

How the brain works remains largely a mystery. But physicists at Notre Dame’s Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA), working with neuroscientists in France, have recently shed some new light on the process.

The Damage Done

It may have seemed that time heals the brain after severe blows to the head, but the evidence shows a cumulative effect may cause long-term suffering.

Walling off noise

Driving around, you’ve probably noticed those tall sound barriers erected to minimize highway noise near residential areas and wondered if they work. Notre Dame’s Joe Fernando and those who live near Arizona’s East Loop 101 Freeway answer: “Not always.”

Road Warrior app

Does the thought of merging onto the freeway cause you to break into a cold sweat? When you gun your car, hurtling down the entrance ramp, do you pray fast and furious to Everything Holy, begging for a gap that lets you ease into the flow alive and unscathed?

If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em

Notre Dame graduate students Matt Barnes, Andy Deines and Sheina Sim are not your average chefs — really they’re not chefs at all — but they are convinced their studies of invasive species can help you put together both an eco-friendly and appetizing menu for your next tailgate.

Culinary counterattack

In theory, the invasivore idea is brilliant: Eat what you want to reduce. But is it reasonable? Should people who don’t frequently peruse edible plant and survival encyclopedias forage in the woods and try to make use of nature’s ingredients? I decided to find out.

Proteins: Know when to fold ’em

Life owes a lot to origami. Seriously. It’s all about the fold. As with the ancient Japanese paper art form, newly synthesized proteins bend back on themselves to become functional, three-dimensional structures.

Protestant school graduates less political

Graduates of Protestant Christian schools place a higher value on family matters and are less likely to be engaged politically than their peers attending Catholic or nonreligious private schools, according to a recent study of Christian education in North America conducted by Notre Dame sociologist David Sikkink.

Rescuing brain cells

An estimated 300,000 Americans each year suffer a sports- or recreation-related “mild traumatic brain injury,” or concussion, as it is commonly known.

Cool CO2

Notre Dame engineering researchers have come up with a new, green take on an old air-conditioning technology that has the potential to save money and benefit the environment.

A cruel disease, a glimmer of hope

Niemann-Pick Type C may be the cruelest disease on the planet afflicting children. The National Institutes of Health refers to the disorder as “childhood Alzheimer’s,” and there’s no doubt the title is deserved.

Wonder of Wonders

Astronomy must be the most baffling of all sciences. In what other discipline do researchers freely admit they don’t yet understand 96 percent of their subject?

The power of wiND

A mini wind farm is about to sprout in White Field on the north edge of the ND campus this spring — if it hasn’t already.

Astronomy Past, Present and Future at Notre Dame

The study of astronomy at Notre Dame got a boost in 1867 when French emperor Napoleon III gave Father Joseph Carrier, CSC, a 6-inch refraction lens, which was state-of-the art technology for the time.

The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope

Many would be surprised to know that the Holy See maintains two observatories — one at Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence outside Rome, and another on a mountaintop in Arizona.

Fighting ovarian cancer

Currently, there is no reliable non-invasive test for ovarian cancer, but Notre Dame’s Crislyn D’Souza-Schorey hopes her work may one day change that, and perhaps even lead to a treatment.

Regulate rare plant sales

Thanks to Internet sales and quick FedEx-style shipping, endangered plants these days are growing in more places they shouldn’t. And that is a big, expensive problem that needs policing, ND ecologists Patrick Shirey and Gary Lamberti say.

No-boot compute

The age of instant-on computing could be just a click or two away. Recently, Notre Dame researchers demonstrated the feasibility of a revolutionary computer technology that uses incredibly tiny magnets to do the computing and information storage.

Psyching kids for physics

Notre Dame physics Professor Randy Ruchti believes the best way to turn kids on to science and research is to introduce them to it early in a big and impressive way. Like many people with a mission, he’s done something about it.

‘To infinity and beyond!’

Those in the field of particle physics study some of the deepest and oldest mysteries, which have perplexed humankind for millennia.

That's My Asteroid

A five-mile-wide rock floating between Mars and Jupiter has a Notre Dame scientist’s name on it.

The International Astronomical Union recently dubbed the rock, Asteroid Rettig in honor of Terry Rettig, associate professor of physics.

The naming came about on the recommendation of the asteroid’s discoverer, Ted Bowell of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Rettig, who specializes in the chemistry of comets, co-authored the book Completing the Inventory of the Solar System…

Gates Foundation Grant Targets Elephantiasis

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a $5.2 million grant to Notre Dame for a five-year program to research, treat and build resources for eliminating the disease that causes elephantiasis in Haiti.

Rev. Thomas G. Streit, CSC, research assistant professor of biological sciences, will direct the program in collaboration with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The effort focuses on lymphatic filariasis, a disease afflicting some 120 million people in the tropics. Often carried by mosquitoes, the disease is rarely fatal but permanently maims and disfigures its victims. It has been endemic in Haiti since at least the 17th century.…

Ideal for complex calculations or as a between-meals snack

When Peter Kogge, a 1968 Notre Dame graduate, makes presentations to his fellow computer scientists about the work he’s doing, helping develop a memory chip unimaginably smarter than anything in existence, he has a surprise waiting for the audience at the end: The miracle chip is already in production.…

Mosquito Sleuths: Frank Collins & Nora Besansky

One of the deadliest killers on the planet, a tiny vampire known as Anopheles gambiae, is becoming more dangerous. The African mosquito that spreads most of the world’s malaria has developed resistance to chloroquine, the drug traditionally used to treat the disease, and there are signs it is becoming resistant to the insecticide used against it as well. Unless a new strategy is devised to combat malaria, a monstrous public health disaster looms on the horizon. That ominous backdrop underscores the work going on in the lab shared by Frank Collins and Nora Besansky, scientists who joined the ND faculty about two years ago by way of the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control.…

Solvent Solver: Joan Brennecke

Joan F. Brennecke’s research interests — supercritical fluid technology and thermodynamics — are not the stuff of everyday conversation, but their implications could make a lot of manufacturing processes safer for workers and more benign to the environment. “In general,” she says, “what I work on is looking for substitutes for the normal solvents used in industry.”…

Poorer and richer

James X. Sullivan, Notre Dame associate professor of economics, argues that the conventional income-based measures of poverty used by the U.S. Census Bureau tell only part of the story.

Wii helps stroke victims

When Nintendo’s interactive Wii game system first came out, physical therapists were quick to see the therapeutic possibilities of “virtual/actual” golf, tennis and other exercises.