Earth & Space
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How an H5N1 Outbreak in Elephant Seals Can Inform Pandemic Readiness
Johnson’s collaborator UC Santa Cruz physiological ecologist Roxanne Beltran, who regularly studies the elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park, will also integrate her spatial mapping of the seals to address the same seal-to-seal transmission question from an ecological angle.
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A Landslide in Alaska Set Off a Tsunami. There May Be More to Come.
“The bar is, can we do better than missing most of these,” said Noah Finnegan, a geomorphologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study. “So getting a handle on why these precursors happen and what their relationship is to catastrophic collapse is an area many people are interested…
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AI galaxy hunters are adding to the global GPU crunch
Brant Robertson, a UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist, has had a front-row seat to this step change in science while supporting or using data from these missions. Robertson has spent the past 15 years working with Nvidia to apply GPUs to the problems of understanding space, first through advanced simulations testing theories about supernova explosions, and…
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Officers recall rescue of Bordeaux, sea lion found on Google campus in Sunnyvale
University of California, Santa Cruz professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Daniel Costa said that sea lions are also more comfortable around humans. “Sea lions are probably losing a little bit of their fear of people as they get more accustomed to it,” Costa said. “So, my first thought is that sea lion you guys…
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California’s iconic trees may lose most of their habitat this century
“These trees are the backbones of our ecosystems,” said Blair McLaughlin, a climate change adaptation scientist at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of the study. “They grow nowhere else in the world and provide the essential habitat that native wildlife and humans alike depend on.”
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‘Chasing Whales’ film features UCSC ocean sciences research
“Chasing Whales” is a short documentary that follows a team of scientists in Antarctica, including UC Santa Cruz Professor Ari Friedlaender, as they come face to face with the whales they study—only to find the whales looking back. In a region with few marine protections, the team hopes their groundbreaking data can help drive new…
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Birds and monkeys in the Amazon share information via ‘internet of the forest’
UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Ari Martínez discusses his recently published study that shows how, when some animals spot a predator, they issue a warning cry that is picked up by others and spread through the rainforest canopy.
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New 3D map of Universe could solve dark energy mystery
“Some people have been working on this for decades, so it’s just amazing to see it come to completion,” DESI co-spokesperson Alexie Leauthaud of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Ars. “Anyone who does science knows that you rarely achieve more than you proposed you would. And you never achieve more on time. DESI…
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Bay Area coastal preserve to reopen after bird flu kills dozens of elephant seals
By March 20, Año Nuevo Reserve Director Patrick Robinson said the estimated total number elephant seal deaths from HPAI on the mainland beaches reached about 50, plus another 45 to 50 on Año Nuevo Island, situated a half mile offshore. At that time, UC Santa Cruz researchers were finding an average of two newly dead…
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Some black holes are ‘forbidden,’ ripples in spacetime reveal
“What they’re seeing is pretty much in line with what we predicted,” says Stanford Woosley, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) who predicted roughly the observed mass range in the early 2000s using theoretical models. “I’m personally very gratified to see it.”
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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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Scientists Identify the World’s First Known Dog, Which Pushes Back the Animals’ Genetic Record by About 5,000 Years
Regardless, the studies provide a “significant advance” in understanding the origins of dogs, Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the work, tells Science News.