A team of UBC researchers has re-classified an ancient line of aquatic plants previously thought to be related to grasses and rushes. The discovery clarifies what may be one of the biggest misunderstandings in botanical history.

"It’s a classic case of mistaken identity," says Sean Graham, an associate professor and researcher with the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems.

A team from Centre de recherche Université Laval Robert-Giffard (CRULRG) has made significant progress toward finding a way to determine whether a child is likely to one day suffer from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The findings of the research team supervised by Dr. Michel Maziade, director of CRULRG, professor in Université Laval’s Faculty of Medicine, and Canada Research Chair in the Genetics of Neuropsychiatric Disorders, will be presented at the International Congress on Schizophrenia Research on March 31 in Colorado Springs.

Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are problems that emerge early on in life, but that are usually not diagnosed before the age of 20 or 25. The participants in Dr.

Obese men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer have more than two-and-a-half times the risk of dying from the disease as compared to men of normal weight at the time of diagnosis, according to a study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The findings by senior author Alan Kristal, Dr.P.H., and colleagues appear online and will be published in the March 15 print edition of the journal Cancer.

“I was very surprised by the findings,” said Kristal, member and associate head of the Cancer Prevention Program in the Hutchinson Center’s Public Health Sciences Division. “We found the prostate-cancer-specific mortality risk associated with obesity was similar regardless of treatment, disease grade or disease stage at the time of diagnosis,” he said.

Inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative Colitis, severely impair the lives of more than four million people worldwide. The development of effective therapies against these diseases requires an understanding of their underlying molecular mechanisms. Researchers from the Universities of Cologne and Mainz in Germany, the Mouse Biology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Italy and their collaborators, have now deciphered a molecular signal that triggers chronic intestinal inflammation.

More than three-quarters of the particulate pollution known as black carbon transported at high altitudes over the West Coast during spring is from Asian sources, according to a research team led by Professor V. Ramanathan at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

Though the transported black carbon, most of which is soot, is an extremely small component of air pollution at land surface levels, the phenomenon has a significant heating effect on the atmosphere at altitudes above two kilometers (6,562 feet).

As the soot heats the atmosphere, however, it also dims the surface of the ocean by absorbing solar radiation, said Ramanathan, a climate scientist at Scripps, and Odelle Hadley, a graduate student at the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at Scripps.

Despite advances in experimental nuclear physics, the most detailed probing of atomic nuclei still requires heavy doses of advanced nuclear theory. The problem is that using theory to make meaningful predictions requires massive datasets that tax even high-powered supercomputers.

In a March 16 Physical Review Letters article, researchers from Michigan State and Central Michigan universities report dramatic success in stripping away much of this stubborn complexity. The advance, which slashes computational time from days or weeks to minutes or hours, may help address one of the most important questions in nuclear physics today: what is the structure of heavy atomic nuclei?