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The Top 6 Biomedical Stories of 2025
IEEE Spectrum’s most popular biomedical stories of the past year centered both on incorporating new technologies and revamping old ones, featuring work from Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Katia Obraczka’s lab on using Wi-Fi to detect heartbeat.
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How Trump administration science cuts muffled one NIH institute
Jennifer Reardon, a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Science and Justice Research Center, has studied how dangerous ideas from eugenics can easily resurge. “It didn’t just go away; genomics has inherited that,” she said. “And so, if you take the thin structures we created to try to mitigate against that, and…
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Stunning art and design books that celebrate Bay Area talent
Acclaimed artist, filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor of The Arts and History of Consciousness Isaac Julien was featured in a story by arts writer Tony Bravo about new books focusing on design and culture.
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A ‘Third State’ Exists Between Life and Death—And That Suggests Your Cells Are Conscious, Some Scientists Say
“This is nothing new,” University of California, Santa Cruz plant biologist Lincoln Taiz, PhD and co-author of the letter, said in an email.
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First elephant seal pup of the season born in SLO County.
Supermoms account for more than half (55%) of the total pups born. Supermoms live longer, breed more frequently and raise bigger pups. Bernie LeBoeuf, now professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, led a research team that identified Supermoms in a 2019 scientific paper. Gingerbread’s mother chose a nice dry spot on the south beach.
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The return of Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ emphasizes the actual carols
Its success in that department is largely due to the show’s music director Luke Shepherd, a lecturer in UCSC’s Music Department who self-identifies as “a Christmas carol nerd.”
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Residents near Moss Landing fire provide samples to measure health impact
UC Santa Cruz toxicology professor Donald Smith says hair samples submitted by the Moss Landing community will contribute to a growing body of toxicology research. Smith’s lab will analyze the hair samples for manganese concentrations, but cannot yet interpret those results to connect exposure to symptoms without more long-term data.
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The Zombees Are Here (And That’s Probably OK)
Stacey Philpott, an ecology professor at UC Santa Cruz, has studied how honeybees and yellow-faced bumblebees interact with A. borealis, and her work suggests that honeybees fall victim to the fly more often in specific environments, like urban gardens.
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Watch orcas and dolphins team up to hunt—a possible scientific first
“In nature, mutualism—where both parties benefit—is the most likely reason that you would have two disparate groups coming together,” says Ari Friedlaender, professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz, who wasn’t involved in the study. Additional coverage in Smithsonian magazine.
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Which fault line do you live on? An earthquake guide for California.
While both the northern and southern sections of the San Andreas fault are locked, storing up energy that needs to be released, the central part is creeping and less charged.”The true nightmare scenario is that the southern San Andreas has so much extra energy in it because it’s so overdue that it blows through the…