The official Mastodon account of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Go Slugs!
🌍 Emily Brodsky, an earth and planetary sciences professor at UC Santa Cruz, is unlocking the secrets behind earthquakes.
A world-renowned expert on the mechanics behind seismic shifts, Brodsky’s research delves into the triggers and forces at play during seismic events, providing insights into the processes inside fault zones during a slip.
Watch: https://youtu.be/QQQM67wuiy0
24 in 2024! We've got 24 scientists and engineers from UC Santa Cruz who have earned a spot on the 2024 Highly Cited Researchers list, recently unveiled by Clarivate.
This prestigious list acknowledges researchers globally whose papers rank in the top 1% by citations for their respective fields and year of publication, highlighting their substantial influence in the research community.
See who made the list: https://bit.ly/3Zm1qd8
Making scientific breakthroughs over here! Researchers from our Braingeneers at USCS, UCSF, and UC Berkeley have used pulses of light to prevent seizure-like activity in neurons in what could one day become a new treatment for epilepsy.
They hope the technique will replace surgery to remove the brain tissue where seizures originate, providing a less invasive option for those whose symptoms cannot be controlled with medication.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3Od7Qoo
Take a look at the three “Red Monsters,” captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
An international team of astronomers—led by the University of Genova and UCSC's Garth Illingworth—identified these three ultra-massive galaxies as already present within the first billion years after the Big Bang.
This discovery is challenging current models of galaxy formation.
Find out why: https://bit.ly/3ACMVIo
UC Santa Cruz chemists have discovered a new way to produce biodiesel from waste oil that both simplifies the process and requires relatively mild heat.
This discovery has the potential to make alternative fuel sources much more appealing to the nation's massive industrial sectors, which are the backbone of its economy.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3Cjyolf
For the first time a team, including several UCSC scientists, has directly measured the behavioral responses of some of the most common marine mammals to military sonar.
The finding that surprised them most was that these animals were sensitive to the sounds at much lower levels than previously predicted.
The researchers then determined the types and likelihood of responses to known sonar exposures, which revealed unexpected behaviors.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3UtMx5G
Citizen scientists show up to help create new mapping techniques to empower bird conservation in Colombia!
UCSC's Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela and a team of Columbian researchers have introduced a transformative approach to mapping bird species distribution across Colombia, harnessing community science data and innovative modeling techniques.
These new sophisticated bird range and habitat maps will support conservation efforts for threatened species.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3AdmZ5S
Along coastal California, the possibility of earthquakes and landslides are commonly prefaced by the phrase “not if, but when.”
This precarious reality is now a bit more predictable thanks to researchers at UCSC and The University of Texas at Austin, who found that conditions known to cause slip along fault lines deep underground also lead to landslides above.
This new study advances our understanding of tectonic-plate dynamics.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3zQxWdC
UC Santa Cruz's Environmental Studies Professor Sikina Jinnah co-authored a new NASEM report outlining a national research agenda for atmospheric methane removal.
With methane's potent role in climate change, the report calls for urgent research into technologies that remove methane from the atmosphere, assessing their social, technical, and environmental impacts, while emphasizing that emissions reduction remains critical.
Read more: https://bit.ly/4dFF7TB
Will AI tools revolutionize public health?
UC Santa Cruz's Lucia Vitale examines the dual promises and concerns of AI in healthcare.
While AI could improve diagnostics and resource management, it also raises privacy, bias, and equity issues.
Vitale warns that focusing on AI might distract from deeper public health issues.
Read more on her study: https://bit.ly/47YV3z4
🦣 🦤 🧬 Could we bring back the wooly mammoth or the dodo bird? Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, is pushing the boundaries of what's possible through paleogenomics and ancient DNA research.
Watch the full video of Beth's work: https://youtu.be/KTp8T4miOzM
The UC Santa Cruz Office of Research presents the “Research with Impact” video series highlighting the innovators and changemakers at UCSC.
What's that Mars? You've got dark matter?
A new study co-authored by UC Santa Cruz's Sarah Geller finds that a wobble from Mars could be a sign of dark matter.
New simulations suggest that there are enough primordial black holes—potential dark matter candidates—in the universe for one to pass through the inner solar system every decade. The work builds upon an astrophysical theory that has growing popularity.
Today's most powerful telescopes can't give us a clear picture of the Milky Way from an outsider's point of view. There isn't "a selfie stick long enough to take those kinds of photos."
Enter UC Santa Cruz astronomer Puragra "Raja" GuhaThakurta, his students, NASA, and more who are all collaborating on new plans to use a powerful space telescope that's currently under construction to capture high-resolution images of galaxies in the nearby universe.
In the late 1800s, the brown-bear population throughout the lower 48 U.S. states was estimated at over 50,000. Today, there are less than 2,000.
Enter conservation genomics.
The National Science Foundation will fund research at UCSC that will examine the DNA of brown bears and use genetic-sequencing technologies to study the effects of this rapid population decline, as well as the impacts of previous conservation-management actions.
Like to sing in the shower? New research from UC Santa Cruz is telling you to sing loud and proud because you actually probably sound pretty good.
UC Santa Cruz psychologists studied “earworms,” the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop, to show that highly accurate pitch memory is much more common than might be expected.
Read more: https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/08/earworms-music-memory-perfect-pitch.html
We love Banana Slugs, but our 2nd favorite critter is the Santa Cruz long toed salamander who is the 16,000th species to crawl onto National Geographic Society’s Photo Ark!
The Ark project draws attention to species at risk of extinction around the world -- the Santa Cruz salamander being one of them.
UCSC professor Eric Palkovacs and team have been studying the salamander with the goal of helping to conserve the species.
UC Santa Cruz continues to be a leading voice in climate-change research!
In a new essay UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral research fellow Erica Ferrer and her co-authors show how deoxygenation of the world’s marine and freshwater ecosystems represents an additional boundary that is critical to the integrity of Earth’s ecological and social systems.
“Deoxygenation” is a worldwide phenomenon of the rapid loss of dissolved oxygen in our natural bodies of water due to humans.
UC Santa Cruz's Professor Carrie Partch is one of 26 top scientists chosen by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to be HHMI investigators and receive the support needed to move their research in creative new directions and make groundbreaking discoveries.
Partch’s lab researches the molecular basis of circadian timekeeping to improve human health and well-being.
Congrats Professor Partch!
Students across the region are invited to help shape the future of semiconductors at UC Santa Cruz next weekend!
An NSF-funded workshop focuses on materials and devices for brain-inspired computing and is part of the special NSF "Future of Semiconductor" program.
The imperative to make such processing much more energy efficient, and faster, means that those who can design and build these next-generation devices will be in high demand on the job market.
A team of more than 60 scientists - including UC Santa Cruz astrophysicists PBSci Dean @SciBry and J. Xavier Prochaska were presented with the Marcel Grossmann Award for their "innovative detection and comprehensive analysis of a large population of fast radio bursts."
But what is a fast radio burst and why are they fascinating to scientists?
We asked UCSC astrophysicists. Here is what they had to say: https://bit.ly/3XXDr3M