Sneaky salmon-snatching sea lions. African island tree frogs and octopus-shaped sand dollars. A purge-inducing, shaman-administered hallucinogenic Peruvian brew. These stories and more appear in Science Notes 2011, the annual magazine published by UCSC's Science Communication Program.
You'll read about the perils of honeybees and the promise of native bees for pollinating California crops, and you'll delve deeply into glitchy video-game coding with an upstart software engineer. You'll go far into the field with biologists tracking mountain lions above Santa Cruz and long-lasting families of little lizards on remote rocky outcrops. You'll also find out why some channels in Elkhorn Slough are turning a disturbing pea green, how gigantic transnational gold mines affect the agrarian residents of the Andes, and what a magician named "The Great Blindini" has to say about a new app to help blind people navigate the world. Several of these stories feature UCSC researchers and students.
Now in its 30th year, Science Notes once again is graced by beautiful original artwork from the fifteen graduate students in the Science Illustration Program at CSU Monterey Bay. During the Science Communication Program's spring multimedia class, the ten writers also produced a podcast for each story, numerous videos and slideshows, and some still photography sprinkled throughout the issue.
