Social Sciences
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Fewer teens are applying for California’s nonbinary driver’s licenses
Phillip Hammack, a psychology professor and director of the Sexual & Gender Diversity Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz(opens in new tab), said these policy shifts may explain the decline in nonbinary identification among California teens.
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Climate change is outpacing evolution. Scientists are using DNA to catch up
“It can be helpful, but it’s not a solution unto itself,” said Karen Holl, a distinguished professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “What should be prioritized is reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
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It’s America’s most famous bean club. Now it’s sending cease-and-desist letters to others
“These small farms always need new avenues of sales, because the basic problem that’s from time immemorial is that farmers plant, not knowing what their market will be,” said Julie Guthman, a UC Santa Cruz social sciences professor emerita who writes about the politics of food and agriculture.
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Group seeking buffer zone for pesticides around schools
Joji Muramoto, a UC Santa Cruz associate professor who specializes in organic agriculture, said that it now accounts for 14% of the county’s strawberry crop, a sizable increase from the 1980s, at the dawn of the commercial organic agriculture movement. “Nobody believed organic strawberries possible in the 1980s,” he said.
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Strawberry Fields Forever: How the Ecology Center turns strawberry season into a teaching moment
Influenced by his mentor, Steve Gliessman — who founded the UC Santa Cruz agroecology program in 1980 — Marks has developed berries grown without the use of toxic sprays or industrial inputs. The process involves careful planning, like planting nutrient-rich cover crops a year before and spreading compost to cultivate healthy soil and long-term sustainability.…
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Trump’s SAVE Act, government shutdown and Iran war dominate weekend political news
Nolan Higdon, a political history professor at UC Santa Cruz, said the bill’s prospects are dim even among Republicans. “I don’t think a lot of Republicans will say it publicly, but I don’t think they’re too excited about it,” Higdon said, adding that provisions targeting mail-in voting could hurt the GOP’s own voters. “This would…
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California’s $20 fast food wage yields higher prices, fewer jobs, more automation
On Wednesday, University of California – Santa Cruz released a real world appraisal of how the $20 mandate has affected owners and employees of fast food franchises. Stephen Owen, an economics lecturer, and a team of undergraduate helpers visited and studied more than 100 outlets in Santa Cruz and the Central Valley and came away with data…
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Detrás de la ‘ensalada del mundo’: la dura realidad de los trabajadores del Valle de Salinas
El informe es resultado de una colaboración de cinco años entre el Instituto para la Transformación Social de la Universidad de California en Santa Cruz y el Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO).
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‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI
Megan McNamara, who teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and created a guide for faculty across disciplines to deal with AI-related academic misconduct, noted that “cultural” differences in the humanities versus Stem disciplines, or in qualitative social sciences versus quantitative ones, tend to shape faculty members’ responses to students’ use of AI.
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Bay Area gas prices spike following Iran conflict
Nolan Higdon, a political history professor at UC Santa Cruz, says the numbers spell potential trouble for the Trump administration. “The Trump administration is going to have some serious difficulties in the midterms keeping the House or the Senate,” Higdon said. “And if this economy persists, this could be an issue as late as 2028.”
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Big cats, bigger protections: Santa Cruz County mountain lions now listed as threatened
Few people have tracked that tension more closely than UC Santa Cruz wildlife ecologist Chris Wilmers, who leads the long-running Santa Cruz Puma Project, a partnership between the university and the state. He called the listing “the appropriate thing to do,” emphasizing that it’s a long-overdue course correction for a species becoming gradually boxed in.
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Were Neanderthal men the Romeos of the prehistoric world?
Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study, says he’s not surprised to see potential evidence of mate preference in Neanderthals, given its prevalence in human history.