Science
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UC Santa Cruz medical training partnership with UC Davis to launch with 6 students in 2027
UC Santa Cruz is launching a new medical training program in partnership with UC Davis, aiming to address a regional physician shortage and lay the groundwork for a future UCSC medical school.
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Tom Lehrer, singer and influential political satirist, dies at 97
Satirical singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer, who was also a mathematician and later taught math and musical theater at UC Santa Cruz, died on July 26. Also covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, AP News, NPR, and additional outlets.
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Sea Level Rise – Iconic Santa Cruz surf spots could slip away with erosion
Gary Griggs, a coastal geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discussed measures the City of Santa Cruz has taken to protect West Cliff Drive. But, he notes the likelihood that storms will continue to wreak havoc in the long term. “Two studies show that waves seem to be getting bigger, more energetic. Not…
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Myanmar’s Devastating Earthquake in March Split the Earth at ‘Supershear Velocity’
A seismic station near Nay Pyi Taw registered ground motion data that were “immediately convincing of supershear rupture given the time between the weak, dilational P wave first arrival and the arrival of large shear offset of the fault” at the station, UC Santa Cruz’s Thorne Lay said in a Seismological Society of America statement.
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The Hunt for a Fundamental Theory of Quantum Gravity
For mathematical convenience, Bousso assumed that there’s an unlimited variety of particles—an unrealistic assumption that makes some physicists wonder whether this third layer matches reality (with its 17 or so known particles) any better than the second layer does. “We don’t have an infinite number of quantum fields,” said Edgar Shaghoulian, a physicist at the…
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Astronomers discover strange solar system body dancing in sync with Neptune: ‘Like finding a hidden rhythm in a song’
“This new motion is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we knew,” team member and University of California, Santa Cruz scientist Ruth Murray-Clay said. “It could change how we think about the way distant objects move.” Additional coverage in IFL Science.
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Evolution in overdrive as Baltic cod shrink due to fishing pressure, study shows
“The study is a wonderful example of genomic time travel,” said Malin Pinsky, an associate professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of the 2023 paper. “The broad message that humans are altering the course of evolution resonates far beyond Baltic cod,” Pinsky, who wasn’t involved in this study, added.
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‘It’s just a weird, weird bird’: Why we got the dodo so absurdly wrong
“The dodo laid a single egg in a nest on the ground, which made these eggs particularly vulnerable to predation by introduced species like rats and pigs, which arrived on Mauritius at the same time as people,” says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
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UC Santa Cruz researcher develops innovative CRISPRware software
Eric Malekos, a graduate student in biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz with a background in computer science and mathematics, along with fellow Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology Department Ph.D. student Christy Montano A Ph.D., has created an innovative software program called CRISPRware, which makes the process of gene editing faster and easier for researchers,…
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Conference organizers, potential participants fault US policies for falling attendance
This year’s International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions is planned for mid-August at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Conference cochair Howard Haber expects about 150 participants, down from around 200 in recent years. He says that some international scientists have canceled their participation because they are “spooked by stories in the…
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Astronomers discover a pulsar and a helium star orbiting each other
“There’s a physical law that if a binary system loses more than half its mass, the system will become unbound,” says Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study. When the more massive star exploded and became a neutron star, Ramirez-Ruiz…
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How did these class rings stay put for decades? Santa Cruz County beach mystery delights ocean expert
UC Santa Cruz coastal scientist Gary Griggs sees a scientific mystery in two lost-and-found class rings — including one buried for 44 years at Main Beach. Griggs says the stories challenge assumptions about coastal sand movement, raising new questions about how objects can remain so close to where they were lost despite decades of shifting…