University of Florida News

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — For the manatees who call Florida’s coastal tributaries home, speeding boaters are like charging bulls in an underwater china shop.

LAKE ALFRED, Fla. — While the state’s citrus canker eradication program has been mired in controversy and legal action – resulting in a stop-and-go approach to removing infected trees – a new University of Florida study indicates the benefits of the eradication program outweigh the costs eight to one.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Patients who hear the dreaded words “you have cancer” invariably look forward to the day the doctor tells them “you’re cured.” But University of Florida researchers say survival often comes at its own price — the mind may need mending even after the body heals.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Americans believe parents bear some responsibility when their children break the law but are reluctant to throw the book at mom and dad when the kids go awry, says a University of Florida researcher.

Ernst Mayr, the world renowned evolutionary biologist who died recently at the age of 100, spent most of the 20th Century studying and promoting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But if you’ve followed American media in recent months, you might think Mayr and his colleagues were failures, and that evolutionary theory is suspect, full of holes in evidence and logic, and kind of a religion of its own.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Open records laws in North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Missouri and Indiana provide the best access to members of the public requesting records, according to new findings compiled by University of Florida researchers.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Ecologists know that when it comes to habitats, size matters, and now a new study finds that contrary to earlier beliefs, that maxim holds true right down to the tiny plants at the bottom of many oceanic and freshwater food chains.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The engineers who built the massive external fuel tank that will power the shuttle Discovery into orbit this spring used sophisticated X-ray detectors developed by UF researchers to reduce the chance of a defect in the foam insulation covering the tank.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Tossing out tobacco, noshing nutritious foods and exercising are heart healthy habits key to slashing stroke and heart attack risk. But some patients also must take medicines when these efforts aren’t enough to rein in high blood pressure, long linked to the debilitating, often deadly condition.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A genetic tool with the potential to identify which trauma and burn patients are most likely to become seriously ill has worked consistently in a wide range of experimental clinical settings — an important hurdle to overcome before the method is routinely used in emergency rooms and intensive care units.