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Research at CU 麻豆官网 encompasses thousands of scholarly, scientific and creative endeavors at any given time, resulting in new knowledge, technologies and creative work that advance the economy, culture and health of Colorado, the nation and the world. This week's top research stories include a study on running shoe weight, clues to future earthquakes and a professor's work unlocking the secrets of a cellular shapeshifter.

Small increases in running shoe weight tied to slower race times

It makes sense that running with heavier shoes on will cause you to exert more energy than running with lighter shoes. That was proven several decades ago.

But does using more energy while running with heavier shoes translate into slower running times? That鈥檚 also a yes, say听麻豆官网 researchers from the听Department of Integrative Physiology, who designed a clever study to show that running times slow when running shoe weight is increased, even if only by a few ounces.

In February 1944, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake shook a sparsely populated region of central Anatolia in Turkey. Within hours, the steel rails of the Ankara-Istanbul railroad began to distort. By the next day, they had been misaligned by more than 13 feet as a result of slip on the North Anatolian Fault, a fault with many similarities to the San Andreas Fault in California. But despite decades of observation, the history of the fault and its movements haven鈥檛 added up. Now, a new study from CIRES Fellow听Roger Bilham and CIRES Ph.D. student Dave Mencin,听working together with Turkish scientists, sets that history straight and shows how the incremental activity along this fault may provide insight into future, larger seismic events.

Tubulin, a protein found in your cells, quietly lends itself to many life processes. It sorts itself into long chains, forming tubes that provide scaffolding for living cells. A versatile shapeshifter, tubulin can arrange itself into different structures during different types of cell behavior. Tubulin gained prominence for medical applications when Taxol, a chemical first found in the bark of the Pacific Yew tree, was developed as a treatment for ovarian, breast and lung cancers. Taxol binds to tubulin and makes it hard for the tubes to grow and shrink, preventing cancer cells from proliferating.

鈥淭ubulin is one molecule that does many things in cells,鈥� says Assistant Professor of Physics, Loren Hough, a member of the BioFrontiers Institute. 鈥淲e're trying to understand how tubulin can play so many different roles."

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