UCSC in the News
November
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November 16, 2024 - Broadway World
World Premiere of ‘Here Comes the Night’ to Open at Moving Arts Theatre
UC Santa Cruz alumna Hailey McAfee, who graduated with a B.A. in Theater Arts, is currently directing a new play. Here Comes the Night is set to premiere in Los Angeles in January and run through mid-February. -
November 14, 2024 - Allure
We’re Much Closer to A Disney Princess With Type 4 Hair
A.M. Darke, a UC Santa Cruz professor of Performance, Play, and Design, recently released a paper with a colleague from Yale focusing on their research in animating coily hair. Animation didn’t even include texture in Black hair until 2021 with Disney’s Encanto. Darke’s research is game changing in the field of animation and will lead to greater representation in film, video games, and more. -
November 12, 2024 - San Francisco ChronicleA mysterious deep-sea creature appeared in Monterey Bay. Now scientists are finally telling the world
In 2000, a team of scientists first laid eyes on what they would later call the Mystery Mollusk via a remotely operated vehicle at 8,576 feet. After 150 viewings, many rounds of measurements, some genetic studies and 24 years later, a scientific description of the animal with the scientific name Bathydevius caudactylus has been published. The description was co-written by Steven Haddock at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz.
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November 12, 2024 - Modesto BeeS.F.’s Ocean Beach could be transformed with massive seawall. Surfers are not happy
An upcoming scientific article about the impact of development on California beaches by geologist Gary Griggs of UC Santa Cruz and coastal engineer Bob Battalio called armoring and repeated beach nourishment solutions that are expensive and only "effective over a few decades at best."
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November 11, 2024 - Australian Broadcasting Network
Composing music with AI isn't new, but recent advances have serious implications for the music industry
As AI quickly advances there are a lot of questions about its ethics. But whether it is good or bad there is no denying that AI plays a major role in the future of music making. One of the early pioneers of AI music was David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus of music. His work with computers starting in the 1980s laid the groundwork for the music we have today. -
November 12, 2024 - Santa Cruz SentinelUC Santa Cruz’s ‘Inspector General’ updates classic political play
The UC Santa Cruz Arts Division is premiering a new play this week. Inspector General, which is an adaption of a Russian play by the same name, raises a conversation around political corruption in the modern day. The Santa Cruz Sentinel spoke to Michael Chemers, the chair of the department of Performance, Play, and Design who wrote the play, to break down its importance in relation to contemporary politics. -
November 01, 2024 - Mother JonesEnvironmental Justice? Not if Project 2025 Has a Say.
Mijin Cha, a professor of environmental studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, says Inflation Reduction Act grant programs could be improved by providing benefits more directly to underserved people. “The federal government gives money to a third party, and then that third party distributes the money,” says Cha. “Is it not more efficient to just have that be a direct investment?” Project 2025, however, would eliminate these programs entirely.
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November 02, 2024 - BBC Wildlife MagazineAs scientists plot to bring back the dodo, Helen Pilcher asks whether we should—and what would happen if we did
In 2022, geneticist Beth Shapiro from the UC Santa Cruz, who is a scientific advisor to Colossal Biosciences, decoded the dodo’s genome. Scientists at Colossal are now determining the sequences which they will edit into cells collected from the dodo’s closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon. Then, just as for the passenger pigeon, the edited cells will be used to create adult birds that create dodo sperm and eggs. -
November 01, 2024 - Washington PostHow to use AI to help plan your vote
University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen was featured in a Washington Post story about using AI chatbot technology to help voters research long and complex ballots. -
November 01, 2024 - The AtlanticMAGA is tripping: Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has cemented the right’s romance with psychedelics.
University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen, author of Tripping On Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold Ward, and The Troubled Birth Of Pscyhedelic Science, was featured in an Atlantic Monthly feature story about the American hard right's recent embrace of psychedelics.
October
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October 30, 2024 - The Jewish News of Northern California
Founder of Center for Monster Studies isn’t scared when the lights go down
Michael Chemers, the chair of the department of Performance, Play, and Design and the founder of the Center for Monster Studies, talks about his role in monsters studies. In this Q&A for The Jewish News of Northern California Chemers explores monsters through the lens of Judaism, in particular discussing the golem which comes from Jewish folklore. -
October 28, 2024 - Santa Cruz Sentinel
Guest Commentary | Immigrant safety at risk from election rhetoric
Political leaders who use racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric are directly harming safety and wellbeing in our communities, write UC Santa Cruz faculty members Regina Day Langhout and Saskias Casanova. Recent research conducted in Santa Cruz County supports this assertion. In Fall 2023, youth researchers in United Way of Santa Cruz County’s Alzamos la Voz program worked with undergraduates and faculty from the University of California, Santa Cruz to analyze data from a survey of over 500 Santa Cruz County community members. Findings showed the importance of immigrant safety for the wellbeing of all community members. -
October 25, 2024 - Financial ExpressGrowth, jobs and manufacturing
Distinguished Professor of Economics Nirvikar Singh argues that increases in productivity and wages that come from investment in human capital are going to benefit a larger slice of the population than investment in physical capital that substitutes for workers, though both kinds of investment matter. -
October 24, 2024 - WIREDThis App Set Out to Fight Pesticides. After VCs Stepped In, Now It Helps Sell Them
Silicon Valley–style venture capital places enormous emphasis on scale and a startup’s ability to grow rapidly, says Madeleine Fairbairn, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, who studies agriculture and food systems. “Everybody’s used to this claim that we have a growing population, and they’re going to starve if we don’t feed them,” she says. For Fairbairn, this is a failure of imagination. “If the imperative for corporate and venture capital profit and rapid funder exit could be decentered from this drive for digital agriculture, it could potentially be something really amazing,” she says.
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October 31, 2024 - Los Angeles TimesA deadly fungus that has killed millions of bats may have arrived in Southern California
“Those early kind of signals can be helpful for understanding the progression of the fungus, of where it’s getting to,” said Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International and an adjunct professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. -
October 30, 2024 - earth.comWeddell seals have a surprising survival strategy
“Weddell seals live in one of the most hostile environments on the planet and need to keep their internal clock running during periods when the sun never sets or when the sun never rises,” noted Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. -
October 24, 2024 - Voices of Monterey BayMonsters under the microscope
Professors Michael Chemers and Renée Fox are featured in an article about the Center for Monster Studies, an interdisciplinary space where scholars from across the academic spectrum can come together to explore the role of monsters in culture, literature, politics, and even science and technology. The GoodTimes also featured the center. -
October 24, 2024 - earth.com
Military sonar does a lot more damage to dolphins than previously disclosed
Scientists from UC Santa Cruz and their collaborators have achieved something monumental — they’ve managed to directly measure the behavioral responses of these dolphins and unraveled some surprising findings. Also covered by Study Finds, Interesting Engineering, and others.
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October 23, 2024 - Radio New ZealandOur Changing World: Lead bullets – a health risk to humans and kea
Myra Finkelstein is an adjunct professor in the microbiology and environmental toxicology department at the University of California Santa Cruz and a world-leading researcher in the detection and impacts of lead on human and animal health. Myra's pioneering work with California condor has shown that the ingestion of lead from lead-based ammunition is preventing the highly endangered species from recovering.
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October 18, 2024 - New York Times
Gaming’s Uneven Progress Toward Diverse Female Figures
Soraya Murray, a professor of Film and Digital Media here at UC Santa Cruz, was interviewed about female representation in video games. Women are often overtly sexualized in video games, and there have been calls for more diversity in the gaming industry. -
October 17, 2024 - MongabayLargest dam removal ever, driven by Tribes, kicks off Klamath River recovery
Environmental studies Ph.D. student, artist, and Yurok Tribe restoration engineer Brooke Thompson celebrated dam removal on the Klamath River. “This has been 20-plus years in the making, my entire life, and why I went to university, why I’m doing the degrees I’m doing now,” she said. “I feel amazing. I feel like the weight of all that concrete is lifted off my shoulders.”
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October 16, 2024 - Lookout Santa CruzBuilding brighter futures in Santa Cruz County: Join us in building homes, communities, and hope!
Habitat for Humanity Monterey Bay shared findings from a collaborative study with UC Santa Cruz's Center for Economic Justice and Action on the improvements in economic stability, mental and physical well-being, family relationships, and community involvement that come from receiving housing. -
October 11, 2024 - High Country NewsMigrating birds find refuge in pop-up habitats
A program that pays rice farmers to create wetland habitats is a rare conservation win, and UC Santa Cruz conservation ecologist Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela explains why. “We thought we could rely on protected areas to conserve habitat globally, and we now know that’s not enough, and we need to complement that with a suite of different conservation strategies,” she said. While market-based solutions shouldn’t be the only answer, she said, they are “a piece of the puzzle.”
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October 09, 2024 - AFP/France 24British skull auction sparks Indian demand for return
UC Santa Cruz Anthropologist and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies Dolly Kikon recently helped stop the sale of Indigenous remains and demanded repatriation. Kikon is a member of the Recover Restore and Decolonise (RRaD) initiative, which works to return ancestor remains to their rightful communities. -
October 07, 2024 - KQEDUber and Lyft’s Appeal in California Labor Case Won’t Be Heard by Supreme Court
The Supreme Court's decision to kick a case on pay and benefits for gig workers back to state courts means there’s a continuing lack of clarity, according to UC Santa Cruz Sociology Professor Steve McKay, who directs the university’s Center for Labor and Community. “When we have a system where employers pay for a lot of the benefits, who’s covered and how?" McKay said. "That’s actually falling more and more to the state to provide that then, if employers aren’t doing it.”
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October 06, 2024 - Seattle TimesTwo WA men were arrested in mental health crises. Only one survived
Across the country, jails have become “the default placement” for people in mental crisis, said Craig Haney, a University of California, Santa Cruz, psychology professor. “In worst-case scenarios, that can have fatal consequences,” because mentally ill people “oftentimes react badly to the oppressive nature” of jail environments, Haney said.
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October 18, 2024 - The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
New faculty appointments for six black scholars
New art and photography professor Jonathan Jackson included in a list honoring black faculty in higher education. Jonathan Jackson has joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz as an assistant professor of photography. -
October 20, 2024 - CBS NewsScientists say they've made a breakthrough in efforts to bring back the extinct Tasmanian tiger
Colossal Biosciences in a Thursday press release said its reconstructed thylacine genome is about 99.9% complete, with 45 gaps that they'll work to close through additional sequencing in the coming months. ... "The thylacine samples used for our new reference genome are among the best preserved ancient specimens my team has worked with," said Beth Shapiro, Colossal's chief science officer and the director of the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab, where the samples were processed. "It's rare to have a sample that allows you to push the envelope in ancient DNA methods to such an extent." -
October 15, 2024 - Daily MailGlobal warming is NOT surging, scientists say
The team stress that a surge in global warming may be happening – just that it's not detectable yet. "Of course, it is still possible that an acceleration in global warming is occurring," said lead author Claudie Beaulieu, a professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz. "But we found that the magnitude of the acceleration is either statistically too small, or there isn’t enough data yet to robustly detect it." Also covered by AFP Fact Check, Carbon Brief, NY Breaking, and other outlets.
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October 15, 2024 - Yahoo NewsIncredible discovery on deep ocean floor: 'Could not believe our eyes'
Andrew Fisher, a hydrogeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz wasn't involved in the study, but he explained why the incredible breakthrough has important implications when it comes to cosmic exploration such as that on Europa, Jupiter's moon. "Where there is space, life often finds a place to take hold," Fisher said. "When probes finally land on Europa and burn through the ice to explore the underlying ocean, I would not be surprised if they find hydrothermal flow, but [finding] life is a bigger challenge." Also covered by the Austrialian Broadcasting Co. -
October 10, 2024 - Los Angeles TimesOpinion: When Trump talks 'bad genes' and 'racehorse theory,' he is telling us who he is
Among those aghast at this pseudo-science was Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz: “This is eugenics,” she tweeted. “As President of the American Genetics Association and a human, I reject this. We are better than this.” Also quoted in Scientific American.
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January 01, 2020 - AltaTrekking to Delta
Alta Journal is publishing a five-part serialization of “Trekking to Delta,” a historical essay by acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita, University of California, Santa Cruz Emerita Professor of Literature. -
October 08, 2024 - KBPSScientist looks for DNA evidence to trace the migration of his Polynesian ancestors
Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Alex Ioannidis was quoted in a KPBS story about research he is working on to trace genetic evidence of the migration of ancient Polynesian people. -
October 09, 2024 - Tech XploreStudy addresses challenges in digital animation of coiled hair
A. M. Darke, a UC Santa Cruz professor of Digital Arts and New Media, participated in a project to help animate coily hair. This research aims to help created animated characters who are Black with more realistic hair patterns. Previous animation work made curls go all in one direction, but this new research created an algorithm for a curling pattern with switchbacks that more closely resembles real-life coily hair. -
October 10, 2024 - PeopleHow Netflix’s “Rez Ball” Spotlights Indigenous Sports
Netflix's new movie, "Rez Ball", which premiered late in September highlights indigenous people in sports. The movie stars UC Santa Cruz student, Kauchani Bratt, who is also the nephew of the popular actor Benjamin Bratt. In the article Kauchani talks about his heritage and how he ended up in the movie. -
October 10, 2024 - Los Angeles TimesOpinion: Trump says he'll expel a million immigrants. Believe him. It's happened before.
Dana Frank, University of California, Santa Cruz Research Professor and History Professor Emerita wrote an opinion piece showing "a chilling precedent'' for Donald Trump's threats of mass expulsions if elected president. "During the Great Depression, when many falsely blamed Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans for the economic crisis, as many as a million were forced out of the country, a majority of whom were U.S. citizens," she wrote. -
October 10, 2024 - New York TimesWhen Harlem Was ‘as Gay as It Was Black’
Sir Isaac Julien, University of California, Santa Cruz Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities, was featured prominently in a New York Times feature story, "When Harlem Was 'as Gay as It Was Black,' mapping the people, homes and hot spots that transformed the neighborhood during its Renaissance. Julien is an acclaimed filmmaker and artist. -
October 09, 2024 - Lookout Santa Cruz
Festival of Monsters brings insight, scholarship to Halloween season
Lookout highlights the UC Santa Cruz Center for Monster Studies and professor Michael Chemers, the director of the program. October's annual Festival of Monsters highlights monster storytelling on stage, on screen, and more. This years festival is done in collaboration with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. -
October 08, 2024 - Santa Cruz Sentinel
Circus performance, silent film screening among Festival of Monsters highlights
Every year the Center for Monster studies, a multidisciplinary program in the Arts Division, hosts The Festival of Monsters. Through various performances, movies, and collaborations with outside organizations UC Santa Cruz celebrates the history of monsters and what they mean to our culture. Culminating in a monster ball, the next few weeks will be filled with exciting events that are open to the public. -
October 07, 2024 - Tech and Science PostEnding jet lag: Scientists discover secret to regulating our body clock
“Our findings pinpoint to three specific sites on CK1δ’s tail where phosphate groups can attach, and these sites are crucial for controlling the protein’s activity. When these spots get tagged with a phosphate group, CK1δ becomes less active, which means it doesn’t influence our circadian rhythms as effectively," said Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Carrie Partch, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the study. "Using high-resolution analysis, we were able to pinpoint the exact sites involved—and that’s really exciting.”
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October 05, 2024 - Popular ScienceAre you my baby? The clever ways that brood parasites trick other birds
“There’s always something new — it’s like, ‘Oh, man, this group of birds went down a slightly different pathway,’” says behavioral ecologist Bruce Lyon of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies the black-headed duck, the sole obligate parasitic duck species.
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October 03, 2024 - OceanographicExploring California's enchanting kelp forests
According to the a study from the University of California, Santa Cruz, led by adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Tim Tinker, satellite imagery has shown a dramatic reduction in kelp forest coverage, plummeting by over 95% in certain areas of the state. In Northern California, only isolated patches of healthy bull kelp remain. The decimated areas have been overtaken by what scientists refer to as "urchin barrens," where purple sea urchins dominate rocky reefs that were once vibrant with kelp and other algae.
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October 02, 2024 - National GeographicEuropa is an icy ocean world—and NASA is finally going to explore it
Hubble images from around a decade ago hinted that such plumes could be erupting. But “all the detections have been at the detection limits,” says planetary scientist Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “If [the plumes] exist, then they're pretty intermittent, and they may not actually be there at all.”
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October 02, 2024 - Mongabay
Across reforestation organizations, best practices claims abound, but details are scarce
Mongabay covered prior research by Environmental Studies Professor Karen Holl on the practices of tree-planting organizations and shared news about a new phase of the research, starting this month, in which the team plans to investigate links between reported practices and reforestation outcomes. -
October 02, 2024 - ScienceTo slow global warming, could methane be stripped from the air
Science interviewed Environmental Studies Professor Sikina Jinnah about a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that recommends a two-phase approach for studying the need and potential for methane removal technology in the United States. Jinnah was a member of a special committee formed by the organization to help develop a research agenda on methane removal.
September
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September 25, 2024 - NPRHow can we bring extinct species back from the dead?
“It's the icon of how awful we can be,” says Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “They went extinct within just a few decades of people first appearing on Mauritius, which is the only place that dodos ever lived.” Shapiro is also a MacArthur Fellow, which scientists commonly refer to as the “Genius Award.” -
September 26, 2024 - CNAExplainer: What sparked Sudan’s civil war and humanitarian crisis
Politics Professor Mark Fathi Massoud gave a 15-minute interview about the ongoing conflict in Sudan, including the history that led to the current civil war. -
September 26, 2024 - Los Angeles Times
Opinion: Imperial County residents deserve to benefit from a potential lithium boom
Environmental Studies and Sociology Professor Chris Benner, who is the faculty director for the Institute for Social Transformation, co-wrote an opinion article about the need for local communities to benefit from lithium extraction in the Salton Sea region. More detailed coverage is available in The Conversation. -
September 25, 2024 - The New York Times
Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet
Environmental Studies Professor Sikina Jinnah explained the harms of unregulated and uninformed solar geoengineering efforts, like the group Make Sunsets. “They are a couple of tech bros who have no expertise in doing what they’re claiming to do,” she said. “They’re not scientists and they’re making claims about cooling credits that nobody has validated.” -
September 17, 2024 - Financial Express
Deficits, debt and India’s growth prospects
Distinguished Professor of Economics Nirvikar Singh wrote an opinion article for Financial Express about the fiscal architecture necessary to managing public debt and deficits in India. -
September 17, 2024 - Space.comA 'primordial' black hole may zoom through our solar system every decade
"The black holes we consider in our work are at least 10 billion times lighter than the sun, and are barely larger in size than a hydrogen atom," said study co-author Sarah Geller, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Additional coverage in the Earth.com, Futurism, Gizmodo, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Popular Mechanics.
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September 18, 2024 - The 19thTrump’s claims about Haitians draw from a centuries-long narrative. These women explain why.
Haitian-American anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse, a professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was quoted in detail in a news story by The 19th about former president Donald Trump's debunked comments about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Ulysse said that she's tired of defending her personhood and identity. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Ulysse wrote a book called “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle” because she found the dehumanizing remarks about Haitians then disturbing. -
September 13, 2024 - WIRED
The Bird Flu Outbreak Takes a Mysterious Turn
“Regardless of the source, it’s concerning, because it suggests that there’s a lot of the virus out there,” says David Boyd, a virologist at UC Santa Cruz who studies influenza. “This indicates that there is widespread transmission among animal sources.”
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September 10, 2024 - The ScientistA Neural Circuit That Helps Flies Stay on Course
“These behaviors that they're looking at, goal-directed steering, are universal to animals that navigate,” said Daniel Turner-Evans, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the studies. “It's just beautiful to see how these behaviors unfold across these different layers and different neurons in the brain, and how you can create these really nice conceptual and quantitative models that really match the anatomy and the biology.” -
September 08, 2024 - ForbesOxygen-Poor Rocky Planets May Offer Shortcut To Microbial Life
Simple life emerged on earth within the first billion years of its habitable window, according to UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Piero Madau. But finding life in the habitable zones of solar type stars will ultimately require statistical analyses of the population of habitable systems, in-depth studies of the climates of individual planets, and searches for chemical biomarkers, Madau writes.
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September 08, 2024 - New York PostHow AI is helping scientists finally predict earthquakes
Researchers at the UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, including Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Emily Brodsky, are developing a new model, dubbed RECAST— short for “Recurrent Earthquake foreCAST” — that provides deep learning for earthquake forecasting. -
September 07, 2024 - CNNLandslides are destroying multimillion-dollar homes in California, and they’re getting worse
Rancho Palos Verdes sits on top of a volcanic ash bed, laid down about 10 to 15 million years ago, that slopes down to the Pacific shoreline. “It has weathered to a type of clay mineral that can expand and get slippery when it gets wet,” said Gary Griggs, distinguished professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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September 02, 2024 - GristAs ‘doomsday’ glacier melts, can an artificial barrier save it?
There are other glacier-protecting strategies that avoid the need for curtains or other barriers. Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has proposed stabilizing the two imperiled glaciers by draining the meltwaters that currently seep to their base, lubricating the pinning points and accelerating the glaciers’ seaward flow. By drilling holes through the glaciers and inserting pumps, engineers could dry up the lubricant and bring that flow to a halt. The extracted water could then be sprayed across the glacier surface, where it would freeze, helping to rebuild the glacier.
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September 11, 2024 - Science Magazine
Famed Polynesian island did not succumb to ‘ecological suicide,’ new evidence reveals
Anthropology Professor Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropological geneticist, commented on a new first-of-its-kind study of the genomes of ancient Rapanui, which demonstrates that Rapa Nui, or "Easter Island," did not experience a population crash caused by overexploitation of natural resources. The new results “deliver solid data that the ‘ecocide’ hypothesis is not supported,” said Fehren-Schmitz. -
September 10, 2024 - KQED
Kamala Harris Embraced Reparations 5 Years Ago. Her SF Pastor Says Criticism Is Unjust
Nolan Higdon, a lecturer of history and media studies at UC Santa Cruz, said the strategy of cherry-picking quotes to spread hate is antithetical to democracy. He added that Republicans over the last 50 years have used race-baiting to scare white people into voting for their candidates. “To amplify fear, division and hate, that’s something that all too often politicians do, and it may be good in the short term for their party or election, but it’s really bad in the long term for the country,” Higdon said.
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September 10, 2024 - KQED
Fire-Weary Lake County Again Faces a Tough Recovery and Questions Over Rebuilding
UC Santa Cruz professor Miriam Greenberg, who studies the interconnections between lack of affordable housing and climate catastrophes like fires, cautioned the city and its residents to think about whether rebuilding in Clearlake is a good idea. “It’s a question that should be asked sensitively because a fire may have already displaced them from an affordable housing community,” she said. “We haven’t had these conversations about fire-prone areas, but it’s beginning to happen.”
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September 09, 2024 - Mongabay
Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation at 60: A look back and forward
Colombian ecologist Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, an assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, discussed the impact of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. “When you bring conservation in—because conservation is a crisis discipline that deals with imperfect and incomplete data sets—there’s a tension,” she said. “But I’ve seen that tension dissolve at ATBC over the years as basic science is being used to ask conservation questions that could never be asked before.”
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September 09, 2024 - CalMattersHate crimes rise against Indian Americans in California, deepening a divide between Hindus and Sikhs
Distinguished Professor of Economics Nirvikar Singh, co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America, spoke with CalMatters about how issues from India are spilling over into hate crimes against Indian Americans. “The citizens themselves are in some sense all victims of this phenomenon, whether Sikh, Muslim or Hindu or any other religious tradition," he said. "Democracy allows us to work through differences in nonviolent and equalizing ways, but we’re seeing a lot of disruption.” -
September 04, 2024 - QuartzBanks seem to be falling totally flat on climate commitments
Quartz covered a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Economics Professor Galina Hale and her collaborators, which found that, while "all banks have reduced their loan-emission exposures over the last 8 years" banks that made public sustainability commitments didn't perform any better in these efforts than those that didn't.
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September 16, 2024 - Lookout Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz Symphony launches new season feeling the momentum of last season’s successes
Former astrophysics professor Martin Gaskell spends his free time writing and playing music. One of his works has been selected as part of the opening concert for the Santa Cruz Symphony. -
September 12, 2024 - Lookout Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz plays a key role in Eugene Rodriguez’s road to Mexican American musical tradition
UC Santa Cruz Alumni Eugene Rodriguez has become widely influential in Mexican American music, especially around the Bay. Along with founding the Los Cenzontles Mexican Art Center in San Pablo, Rodriguez recently released a book, "Bird of Four Hundred Voices." This Saturday Rodriguez will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz to discuss his new book. -
September 10, 2024 - New York Times
The Origin Story of Astro Bot’s Likable Little Guy
Professor of Computational Media Katherine Isbister spoke to the New York Times about what makes a cute video game character. -
September 11, 2024 - New York Times
Europeans Used Cocaine Much Earlier Than Previously Thought, Study Finds
University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen was quoted in detail in a New York Times story about Europeans using cocaine as early as the 17th century, much earlier than previously thought. -
September 05, 2024 - Santa Cruz SentinelUC Santa Cruz researchers awarded National Science Foundation funding
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported on UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics Ashesh Chattopadhyay and Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics J. Xavier Prochaska new NSF funded projects to leverage AI and geophysics to address climate change. -
September 08, 2024 - Yahoo NewsAwe and trepidation as AI comes for smartphones
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Leilani Gilpin comments on some of the potential issues with AI on smartphones.
August
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August 29, 2024 - National GeographicWhat would the world look like without mosquitoes?
Winifred Frick, a bat biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says most bats are actually generalist predators, meaning they eat whatever they can catch—mosquito, beetle, or otherwise.
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August 07, 2024 - Fast CompanyFake meat's false promise
Fast Company published an excerpt from Professor Julie Guthman's new book The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food. The article takes a critical look at efforts to develop alternative protein sources. -
August 30, 2024 - Financial Express
The politics of pensions and savings
Distinguished Professor of Economics Nirvikar Singh wrote an opinion article for Financial Express recommending that government policy in India should take a comprehensive look at the institutional landscape for pensions and savings.
