Science
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Friends of Long Marine Lab will honor Secretary of State Bruce McPherson with Global Oceans Award
The Friends of Long Marine Lab will present a Global Oceans Award to California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson at the group’s annual Gourmet Dinner benefit event on Sunday, March 12. The award recognizes McPherson for his leadership in the Friends of Long Marine Lab and his commitment to the local coastal environment. Awards will…
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Student research focus of weekend symposium hosted by UCSC
Student research will take center stage on March 4-5 at the annual Koret UC Leadership Excellence through Advanced Degrees (UC LEADS) Research and Leadership Symposium, hosted by UC Santa Cruz. The event at UCSC’s University Center draws undergraduates from the nine University of California campuses displaying research they have done in UC labs. “This symposium…
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UCSC presents free public lecture on 1906 San Francisco earthquake on Wednesday, March 15
With the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake approaching, UC Santa Cruz will host a free public talk next month on the earthquake that devastated San Francisco and marked the birth of modern earthquake science. Mary Lou Zoback, a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, will speak on…
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Authors of The View from the Center of the Universe will discuss our place in the cosmos in a free public lecture on Thursday, March 9
In a free public lecture and multimedia presentation next month in Santa Cruz, cosmologist Joel Primack and his wife, Nancy Abrams, will offer a preview of the remarkable ideas in their forthcoming book, The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (Penguin/Riverhead, April 2006). Primack, a professor of…
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Studies of ancient climates suggest Earth is now on a fast track to global warming
Human activities are releasing greenhouse gases more than 30 times faster than the rate of emissions that triggered a period of extreme global warming in the Earth’s past, according to an expert on ancient climates. “The emissions that caused this past episode of global warming probably lasted 10,000 years. By burning fossil fuels, we are…
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High-tech tags on marine animals yield valuable data for biologists and oceanographers
Researchers are enlisting seals, sea lions, tunas, and sharks to serve as ocean sensors, outfitting these top predators with electronic tags that gather detailed reports on oceanographic conditions and, in many cases, transmit the data via satellite. The data are proving useful to both biologists and oceanographers, yielding new information about the migrations and behavior…
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Library ceremony honors UCSC faculty and the books that influenced them
The Honored Faculty, Honored Books Program at UC Santa Cruz will hold a ceremony next week in celebration of the bond between the written word and the achievement of scholars. The event recognizes UCSC faculty who have attained tenure or received promotion and showcases the books that have influenced them. The faculty and their selected…
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New study highlights role of hit-and-run collisions in the formation of planets, asteroids, and meteorites
Hit-and-run collisions between embryonic planets during a critical period in the early history of the Solar System may account for some previously unexplained properties of planets, asteroids, and meteorites, according to researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who describe their findings in a paper to appear in the January 12 issue of the…
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Large survey of galaxies yields new findings on star formation
New findings from a large survey of galaxies suggest that star formation is largely driven by the supply of raw materials, rather than by galactic mergers that trigger sudden bursts of star formation. Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under the force of gravity, and the study supports a scenario in which…
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Astrophysicists detect very high-energy gamma rays from the Milky Way
Scientists using the Milagro Gamma-ray Observatory in New Mexico have captured evidence of radiation emitted from the plane of our home galaxy at extremely high energies. The researchers detected “TeV gamma rays”–electromagnetic radiation in the one trillion electronvolt energy range, about a trillion times more energetic than visible light–and determined that the gamma rays were…