Engineering
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The next AI safety fight may actually be about DNA
“[Gene synthesis] companies have to agree to have their order screened not just against a list of sequences but by an AI that people agree is smart enough to recognize and thwart an adversary who’s trying to build a deadly pathogen,” David Haussler, the scientific director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.
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UCSC researcher aims to fill gaps in Pajaro Valley air monitoring data, help farmworkers deal with pollution health impacts
Javier González-Rocha, an assistant professor of mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, has been working to identify air monitoring data gaps in the Pajaro Valley to better inform farmworkers and the local community.
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Community sensors provide Pajaro Valley with air quality info
Javier Gonzaléz-Rocha, a Watsonville native and applied mathematics professor at UC Santa Cruz, is developing a network of drones and small sensors that can be attached to homes. He uses data collected from these monitors to try and paint a clearer picture of the air quality in the Pajaro Valley, as data that appears on…
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Why the Most Powerful Computer of 2026 Might Be Made of Living Cells, Not Microchips
The researchers, led by Baskin School of Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. student Ash Robbins, ECE Professor Mircea Teodorescu, and Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering David Haussler, demonstrated their findings in a paper published in the journal Cell Reports.
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AI models will secretly scheme to protect other AI models from being shut down, researchers find
This tendency—which had not previously been documented and which researchers call “peer preservation”—was discovered in research from computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz and published online earlier this week.
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Clumps of mouse brain cells can learn to play a virtual game
The organoids didn’t retain that knowledge for long, says cognitive neuroscientist Ash Robbins of the University of California, Santa Cruz. But ultimately, researchers hope that brain organoids can help them understand how healthy human brains learn, as well as how cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease impair this capacity.
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Opinion: We’re scientists. We use AI. And we fear it.
Opinion piece by UC Santa Cruz Professors J. Xavier Prochaska and David Haussler issuing a stark warning about the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, along with a call for urgent global cooperation to ensure that technology remains a tool for human benefit rather than a force for societal displacement. Also in the East Bay Times…
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Scientists Are Trying to Train Lab-Grown Brains. The Brains Have Started to Solve Problems.
In a new study published in the journal Cell Reports, a team of scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz successfully trained a brain organoid, developed from mouse-derived stem cells, to solve an engineering benchmark known as the “cart-pole problem.”
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‘The warming trend nearly doubled after 2014’: The rate of global warming has accelerated more in the past decade than ever before
Robert Lund, a statistician at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also agrees there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming, but was less sure if we’re experiencing an accelerated warming rate.
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It’s a colorful pangenome world
A pangenome can reveal the spectrum of genome variation within a species. The toolbox for working with pangenomes is filling up.
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Lab-Grown Brains Growing More Powerful
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz are taking lab-grown mini-brains into their toddler era, after demonstrating that brain organoids can process information in real time.
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Research Shows How Self-Driving AI Can Be Hijacked With Nothing But Ink and Paper
A team at the University of California, Santa Cruz has published new research showing how visual-language AI models that help control self-driving cars can be exploited or hijacked with carefully coded real-world commands. Or, in other words, tricking them by holding up a sign.