Earth & Space
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‘Science is a human endeavor’: astrophysicist uses art to connect Black and brown kids to the STEM fields
So begins a chapter about our closest star in Painting the Cosmos, a recent book by UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Dr. Nia Imara. The book blends science and art in an ode to the diversity of the cosmos. While touching on astronomical tidbits, such as the fact that scientists measure the rate of the sun’s…
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Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill
The world of Bousso’s new theorem still departs from our universe in notable ways. For mathematical convenience, he assumed that there’s an unlimited variety of particles — an unrealistic assumption that makes some physicists wonder whether this third layer matches reality (with its 17 or so known particles) any better than the second layer does.…
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The Pacific Coast Highway, a Mythic Route Always in Need of Repair
Gary Griggs, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has advised on a major repair to the route, said that he doubted the highway would ever again be open in its entirety for an extended period. “Attaining stability is impossible,” he said.
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The Coyotes of San Francisco
“Did they walk over the Golden Gate Bridge?” asked Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “That’s my top theory.” Once the first coyotes returned to the city, she said, they probably howled to attract others to follow. “Coyotes will be where they want to be,” Wilkinson said.
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Intelligence on Earth Evolved Independently at Least Twice
“One of the reasons I kind of like these papers is that they really highlight a lot of differences,” said Bradley Colquitt, a molecular neuroscientist at UC Santa Cruz. “It allows you to say: What are the different neural solutions that these organisms have come up with to solve similar problems of living in a…
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Our moon may have once been as hellish as Jupiter’s super volcanic moon Io
“The moon gets sort of confused,” planetary scientist Francis Nimmo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Space.com. “It doesn’t know exactly what orbit it should be adopting, and so it can develop kind of a weird orbit.”
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Scientists once thought only humans could bob to music. Ronan the sea lion helped prove them wrong
Not many animals show a clear ability to identify and move to a beat aside from humans, parrots and some primates. But then there’s Ronan, a bright-eyed sea lion that has scientists rethinking the meaning of music. Ronan has been a resident at UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory, where UC Santa Cruz researchers have…
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Berkeley’s famous falcons are missing as bird flu spreads
Down in Santa Cruz, Dr. Zeka Glucs has been noticing the absence of peregrines as well. She explains what brings us to the coast today. “We’re going to take a look at a nest that has been occupied for about two, three years.” Zeka is the director of the Predatory Bird Research Group at UC…
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Ghostly galaxy without dark matter baffles astronomers
A team, led by astronomer Yimeng Tang at the University of California, Santa Cruz, compared FCC 224’s properties to other galaxies that seemingly lack dark matter, focusing on two ghostly objects within the NGC 1052 group about 65 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus. Tang and his colleagues propose that FCC 224, like those…
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Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?
Beth Shapiro, an expert on ancient DNA who is now on a three-year sabbatical from the University of California, Santa Cruz, as the company’s CSO, acknowledged in an interview that other scientists would bristle at the claim. “What we’re going to have here is a philosophical argument about whether we should call it a dire…
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Odd-Looking Blue Creatures Are Washing Up in Large Groups on California’s Beaches Once Again
Velellas typically wash ashore in Northern California in spring or early summer, because “in the spring is when we have upwelling,” explains Raphael Kudela, a marine scientist at University of California, Santa Cruz, to KQED’s Danielle Venton and Sarah Mohamad. “Upwelling brings lots of nutrients, and lots of nutrients bring phytoplankton and zooplankton.”