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  • Regional equity movement is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, say authors of Ford Foundation report

    Across the country, many urban neighborhoods and entire regions are segregated as surely as if there were “whites only” signs posted. But leaders of the new “regional equity” movement are organizing to break down the divisions of race, income, education, and employment that cut off opportunity and polarize Americans. A new Ford Foundation report outlines…

  • A simple survey yields a cosmic conundrum

    A survey of galaxies observed along the sightlines to quasars and gamma-ray bursts–both extremely luminous, distant objects–has revealed a puzzling inconsistency. Galaxies appear to be four times more common in the direction of gamma-ray bursts than in the direction of quasars. Quasars are thought to be powered by accretion of material onto supermassive black holes…

  • Atomic-resolution structure of a ribozyme yields insights into RNA catalysis and the origins of life

    Which came first, nucleic acids or proteins? This question is molecular biology’s version of the “chicken-or-the-egg” riddle. Genes made of nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) contain the instructions for making proteins, but enzymes made of proteins are needed to replicate genes. For those who try to understand how life originated, this once seemed an intractable…

  • UCSC physicists explore a boundary of their discipline in new book, Quantum Enigma

    Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in all of science, says some strange things about the fundamental nature of the world. For all practical purposes, physicists can and do ignore the bizarre implications of the theory and use the equations of quantum mechanics to understand atoms and stars and to create the marvels…

  • Lessons of Japan’s economic downturn offered in new book

    The stagnation that plagued the Japanese economy throughout the 1990s lasted twice as long as it should have, according to the coeditor of a new book that says Japan was hobbled by weak monetary policy and its own dysfunctional financial institutions. Michael Hutchison, a leading authority on international finance and the Japanese economy, coedited Japan’s…

  • UCSC researchers use new technology to study Cape fur seals in South Africa

    Sophisticated electronic tagging technology developed as part of the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program is now being deployed to study Cape fur seals in South Africa. Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is currently in South Africa working with an international team of investigators to…

  • Increased flow of groundwater after earthquakes suggests oil extraction applications

    The most obvious manifestation of an earthquake is the shaking from seismic waves that knocks down buildings and rattles people. Now researchers have established a more subtle effect of this shaking–it increases the permeability of rock to groundwater and other fluids. The enhanced permeability caused by seismic shaking could potentially be harnessed to help extract…

  • Study shows earthquake shaking triggers aftershocks

    A new analysis of earthquake data indicates that aftershocks are triggered by the shaking associated with the mainshock, rather than by the added stress on nearby faults resulting from rearrangement of the Earth’s crust. The triggering of aftershocks by shaking may seem obvious, but is in fact a surprising result, said Emily Brodsky, assistant professor…

  • Saturn’s moon Enceladus may have rolled over to put a hot spot at the pole

    Enceladus, a small icy moon of Saturn, may have dramatically reoriented relative to its axis of rotation, rolling over to put an area of low density at the moon’s south pole. According to a new study, this reorientation process could explain the polar location of a region where NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently observed icy jets…

  • Professor contributes to Katrina report documenting environmental inequities in rescue

    As the next hurricane season quickly approaches, the Gulf Coast’s low-income communities of color are still left behind. For them, “days of hurt and loss are likely to become years of grief, dislocation, and displacement,” said Manuel Pastor, codirector of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Pastor…

  • Seismologists detect a sunken slab of ocean floor deep in the Earth

    Halfway to the center of the Earth, at the boundary between the core and the mantle, lies a massive folded slab of rock that once formed the ocean floor and sank beneath North America some 50 million years ago. A team of seismologists led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, detected the…

  • Hubble surveys find gamma-ray bursts and supernovae in different environments

    Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are associated with the deaths of only the most massive stars and occur relatively rarely in spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way, according to research published online in Nature this week. That’s good news, because a nearby gamma-ray burst could wreak havoc on Earth by destroying the ozone layer…

Last modified: Apr 28, 2025