Science

Dialing up history The patent for the telephone turns 150 on March 7; the first call was made three days later on March 10, 1876. Related Articles Verizon issues $20 credits to customers affected by outage As protests rage, Iran pulls the plug on contact with the world Before the phone: One of the earliest ways to communicate outside of mail was the telegraph, invented by Samuel Morse in 1837. The telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication by transmitting messages in Morse code over wires. It required skilled operators to encode and decode. 1876 – The very first telephone was developed. Two inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electronically.Bell reached the patent office mere hours before Gray and won the famous battle over the invention when his patent was passed on March 7, 1876. Three days later, Bell transmitted the first discernible speech over the telephone to his assistant: “Mr. Wat...

SANTA CRUZ — A recent UC Santa Cruz study, published  in Nature Communications scientific journal, uncovered clues in a decadeslong mystery surrounding the relationship between early pregnancy and breast cancer risk. Early pregnancy, between the ages of 20 and 30, has been shown to reduce the risk of breast cancer later in life. The reason why has stumped scientists for years. Now, a research group from UC Santa Cruz has found evidence suggesting that early pregnancy can permanently change the way breast cells age, preventing the accumulation of a type of cells that may contribute to tumor growth. Shaheen Sikandar is an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz. (Courtesy Shaheen Sikandar)  Shaheen Sikandar, an assistant professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz, noticed a gap in breast cancer research. Though many studies had looked at aging and breast cancer risk, most of those studies were done on mice that had never been pregnant. “That reall...