Author: Mike Peña
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New exoplanets catalog showcases diverse, exotic worlds
Our understanding of exoplanets, those strange worlds that orbit stars beyond our solar system, is now broader and deeper thanks to separate studies published this week featuring the work of researchers at UC Santa Cruz.
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Sea otters use tools when feeding to survive a changing world
Sea otters are one of the few animals that use rocks and other objects to access their food, and a new study has found that individual sea otters that use tools—most of whom are female—can eat larger prey and reduce tooth damage when their preferred prey becomes depleted.
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UC Santa Cruz biologist tapped to contribute to national report on nature’s role in society
For America’s first-ever report on nature’s inherent worth, and its contributions to the economy, our health and well-being, UC Santa Cruz’s Malin Pinsky will co-author a chapter on nature and climate change. He is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and one of 10 authors contributing to the chapter.
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Improved nutrition, sanitation linked to beneficial changes in child stress and epigenetic programming
A new study led by a global-health researcher at UC Santa Cruz provides some of the clearest and most comprehensive evidence to date on what is known about stress physiology and “epigenetic programming.”
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UC Santa Cruz scientists reveal new path to increasing lactation for nursing mothers
Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have discovered a cellular process in the breast that can increase milk production by pregnant women, revealing a potential path to addressing lactation insufficiency syndrome—the inability of a nursing mother to produce sufficient milk to meet their infant’s nutritional needs.
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UC Santa Cruz ‘Shadow the Scientists’ program honored for astronomical DEI efforts
A science-inclusion program based at UC Santa Cruz that has allowed thousands of school-age children, educators, and inquisitive individuals to look through world-class telescopes alongside trained astronomers has been honored for opening up scientific exploration to those from underrepresented backgrounds around the world.
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New study finds potential targets at chromosome ends for degenerative disease prevention
Published online today in Science, a new study finds that telomere lengths follow a different pattern than has thus far been understood. Instead of telomere lengths falling under one general range of shortest to longest across all chromosomes, this study finds that different chromosomes have separate end-specific telomere-length distributions.
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Ph.D. student takes gut-wrenching research to the stage
Natalie Pedicino, a Ph.D. student in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology, will bolt up to San Francisco on May 3 to distill her past three years of research into a three-minute lightning talk that will test her stage presence and science-communication skills.
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First results from DESI make the most precise measurement of our expanding universe
We now have the largest 3-D map of our cosmos ever created, thanks to DESI—a powerful instrument mounted atop a telescope in Arizona with a robotic array of 5,000 fiber-optic “eyes” that look into the night sky.
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Equity, civic-mindedness drive UC Santa Cruz’s Global and Community Health Program
Many of UC Santa Cruz’s core values are embodied in the Global and Community Health Program, which draws students who seek to study real-world problems encountered locally and worldwide, preparing them for a career in health care, policy, research or advocacy.
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Industrial fishing poses greater risk to marine life due to untracked activity, UC Santa Cruz researchers find
A new study led by a scientist at UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences finds that blue whales, tunas, and other top predators in the northeast Pacific Ocean face greater risk of harm from industrial fishing than previously thought.
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Closer water monitoring needed as wildfires increase
UC Santa Cruz researchers warn that wildfires can change the chemistry of nearby streams that people and wildlife depend on for drinking water. But they found that the baseline water-chemistry data needed to detect such changes aren’t always available.