How do people develop absolute pitch? Do tremors in Earth's magnetic field precede major earthquakes? Is raw food good for you? If the answers might intrigue you, then you'll enjoy diving into the 2008 issue of Science Notes, the annual magazine published by UCSC's Science Communication Program.
In addition to the usual in-depth features, you'll find podcasts, video packages, and slideshows that explore various aspects of each story. So, a report on San Francisco Bay's oil spill of 2007 includes a video on the inhabitants of California's intertidal zone. An examination of genetically modified drought-tolerant tobacco takes readers into the UC Davis greenhouse where the plants grow. And the author of a story on fungal infections in forests walks into the woods on campus for her podcast interview from a research plot there. The students produced all of these packages in the program's new spring course.
Several of the stories focus on UCSC researchers, including biologists Peter Raimondi and Ingrid Parker, anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy, biomolecular engineer David Haussler, computer scientist Yi Zhang, and others.
