There's been a longstanding controversy about whether or not there is magma coming up in the overlapping spreading center, and why these breaks form. Dunn's research provides the first images of the system of magma just below the crust. The research was published in the March 9 issue of Science magazine. To create images of the magma, an airgun towed behind a ship sent a pressure wave through the water and into the ground. The seismic energy was recorded on instruments on the sea floor.
Details are available online.
Dunn's team presented preliminary results at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Chemistry Professor David Cane and colleagues at Stanford University have shown that the E.coli bacterium can be genetically manipulated to produce advanced chemical building blocks of the broad-spectrum antibiotic erythromycin. The antibiotic is widely used for respiratory infections. Using these methods should someday allow the production of improved erythromycins. E.coli provides a much more powerful method for modifying the way erythromycin is made than the soil bacterium now used for commercial erythromycin production, Cane said.