The Mason Spirit

What causes childhood obesity? Mason College of Health and Human Services researchers Panagiota Kitsantas, Lisa R. Pawloski, and Kathleen F. Gaffney believe that obesity risk factors begin even before a child is conceived. Pediatric obesity affects one out of every seven low-income, preschool-age children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To understand…

Continue Reading Mother’s Pregnancy Weight Linked to Childhood Obesity

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a research project that Mason recently signed on to, was listed by the National Academy of Sciences as one of the most important astronomical endeavors of the next decade. The telescope, which researchers hope will be built and on line by the end of the decade, will create a…

Continue Reading Top Telescope Project to Create “Movie” of the Night Sky

How can humans best interact with and manipulate complex machinery? What are the challenges of designing computer systems that can easily be understood and used with minimal error? And can we monitor brain structure and function to find out how to train people to perform complex tasks in the workplace? These are just some of…

Continue Reading New Center Focuses on Neuroergonomic Research

Mason sociologist Amy Best has explored the lives of American youth, first looking at the prom, then driving, and now their relationship to food and dining out.

Continue Reading Would You Like Fries with That?

More than 107,000 people in the United States are waiting for organ transplants, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Studies of the current organ transplant system report disparities in terms of race, socioeconomic status, insurance type, and candidate location. With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, an interdisciplinary team of researchers…

Continue Reading Mason Teams with Inova to Improve Transplant Allocation

Economics has long been called the “dismal science,” but at Mason it is anything but dull. From rap songs about economic booms to decisions about family planning, nothing escapes the scrutiny of our energetic economists.

Continue Reading The Wonderful World of Masonomics

Everyone has heard that you should conserve water by taking short showers and turning off the faucet when you brush your teeth. But did you know that you also conserve energy—electricity—by doing so?

According to Mason engineer Sharon deMonsabert, water usage consumes more energy than all other energy consumers, such as appliances, in the average household. The reason is that the water must first be pumped from the source to a water treatment facility, treated to drinking water standards, and then pumped to a residence or business. Finally, the wastewater must be pumped back to the facility for retreatment. All that pumping and treatment demands a huge amount of electricity.

Continue Reading Working the Kinks Out of Sustainability

Galaxy Zoo Mergers, a new web site developed by researchers at Mason and Oxford University, will give anyone—scientist or not—the chance to contribute to space research. By playing a “cosmic slot machine,” site visitors can compare images of colliding galaxies with millions of simulated images of galactic pileups. These collisions, which astronomers call “galactic mergers,”…

Continue Reading Web Site Allows Citizen Scientists to Analyze Galaxy Collisions

Imagine if treatments for disease could be based not on patients’ diagnoses, but rather on the characteristics of their tissues. That’s exactly what researchers at Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM) are trying to accomplish. Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin III, codirectors of CAPMM, have launched a clinical trial in partnership with…

Continue Reading Novel Personalized Medicine Trial Launched for Colorectal Cancer

A new paper by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Otago in New Zealand shows a strong link between the diversity of organisms at the bottom of the food chain and the diversity of mammals at the top. Mason geologist Mark D. Uhen says that throughout the past 30 million years, changes…

Continue Reading New Study Finds Link between Marine Algae and Whale Diversity