Supermassive black holes power brilliantly luminous, rapidly growing objects called active galactic nuclei suspected of helping to bring about the end of star formation because they were found primarily in old "dead" galaxies. But now a new survey led by UC San Diego astronomers sees them in every type of galaxy, even young, star-making machines.

Illustration: Aurore Simonnet, NASA, E/PO, Sonoma State University

Developmental programs to create patterns like stripes are complex and difficult to untangle. Physics professor Terry Hwa took a quantitative approach to the problem and found a simple solution.

VIDEO: Fine-scale view of magnetic domains revealed with a computer program, rather than a lens.

Like swarming insects drawing crowds to a food source, a system of nanoparticles and engineered proteins can communicate with one another to raise the concentration of systemically administered drugs at the site of a tumor.

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The sun sends a torrent of energy toward the Earth, yet only a tiny fraction is captured. Clifford Kubiak's chemistry group is part of an effort to harvest that energy in an entirely new way.

More than a dozen high school students from Chula Vista, California, rendered biodiesel from spent coffee grounds, and got aquainted with university life.

A new algorithm dramatically improves software used to sequence DNA, an advance that will allow scientists to sequence the genomes of the huge numbers of microbes that can't be grown in the lab.