“Going back and forth is beneficial,” says Alber, the Notre Dame Chair in Applied Mathematics, concurrent professor of physics and director of the Center for the Study of Biocomplexity. “If you’re looking at individual bacteria, you can think that the beneficial behavior for one bacterium would be to keep on moving in one direction. But it’s going to interfere with the swarming behavior of the population because behavior results in the formation of traffic jams.” The myxobacteria are elongated and move by propelling themselves with slime from the back and reaching out with pili in front to grasp other cells and pull. They reverse the direction of their motion every eight minutes by cutting pili at one end and re-growing them at the other and starting producing slime at the opposite end.…

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Some 200 K-12 teachers and parents attended the second Partnership for Education and Research Forum on Jan. 24 at the Jordan Hall of Science – nearly twice as many as the initial forum drew in 2007, with many of them returning after successful application of forum ideas and activities in their classrooms. The event was part of the University’s increasing efforts to connect faculty and graduate students to local educators and students in K-12.…

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The Dean of the College of Science, Gregory Crawford, and his College of Science Committee on Sustainability (COSCOS) recently surveyed our buildings and associated infrastructure with an eye towards reducing energy consumption and promoting sustainability.

To complement ongoing investments in energy-conserving technologies on campus, the College of Science believes it can reduce its energy footprint substantially and experience a substantial savings annually. This can be accomplished by promoting cultural change in its students and faculty and by managing energy use more closely in its lecture halls and laboratories.…

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Gregory P. Crawford, the William K. Warren Foundation Dean of the College of Science, will teach a daylong workshop on Friday, Jan. 16 to new patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va.. Crawford, who became dean in July, is an expert on soft matter materials. His research focus has been on liquid crystals, used in the most prominent display technology in the marketplace.…

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