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California Condors Are Still Dying—Despite a Lead Ammo Ban
“Condors are very long-lived, so very small changes in their survival rate can make big differences on whether or not they will go extinct or not go extinct,” said Myra Finkelstein, an environmental toxicologist at UC Santa Cruz and senior author on the paper.
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Galaxies without dark matter mystify astronomers
Hubble data confirmed the overly bright nature of the globular clusters in a study led by University of California, Santa Cruz, Ph.D. student Yimeng Tang. We then used the Keck data to study the stars and measure their velocities, confirming the lack of dark matter.
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Salmon survival: Betting on the right fish
“Just like you don’t want all your stocks in one company … you also don’t want all your individuals to be represented by exactly the same genetic type” or the same age, said Eric Palkovacs, UC Santa Cruz Fisheries Collaborative Program director.
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27 elephant seals test positive for bird flu in Bay Area outbreak
Patrick Robinson, the Año Nuevo Reserve director at UC Santa Cruz, shared that scientists have found about 47 dead seals — both pups and adults, particularly males — along the shoreline since the outbreak began. “Although some mortality of weaned pups are expected, this year’s mortality rate has been about four times higher compared to…
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Detrás de la ‘ensalada del mundo’: la dura realidad de los trabajadores del Valle de Salinas
El informe es resultado de una colaboración de cinco años entre el Instituto para la Transformación Social de la Universidad de California en Santa Cruz y el Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO).
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Scientists Are Trying to Train Lab-Grown Brains. The Brains Have Started to Solve Problems.
In a new study published in the journal Cell Reports, a team of scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz successfully trained a brain organoid, developed from mouse-derived stem cells, to solve an engineering benchmark known as the “cart-pole problem.”
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‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI
Megan McNamara, who teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and created a guide for faculty across disciplines to deal with AI-related academic misconduct, noted that “cultural” differences in the humanities versus Stem disciplines, or in qualitative social sciences versus quantitative ones, tend to shape faculty members’ responses to students’ use of AI.
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Bay Area gas prices spike following Iran conflict
Nolan Higdon, a political history professor at UC Santa Cruz, says the numbers spell potential trouble for the Trump administration. “The Trump administration is going to have some serious difficulties in the midterms keeping the House or the Senate,” Higdon said. “And if this economy persists, this could be an issue as late as 2028.”
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What could Santa Cruz’s disappearing sand mean for its iconic beaches and surf breaks?
Patrick Barnard, research director at UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience, said each approach has tradeoffs. At Its Beach and Lighthouse Point, nature-based solutions may be difficult because the beach is already so narrow, he said. Meanwhile, hard structures like seawalls tend to accelerate beach erosion. “If you want to have a beach…
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‘The warming trend nearly doubled after 2014’: The rate of global warming has accelerated more in the past decade than ever before
Robert Lund, a statistician at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also agrees there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming, but was less sure if we’re experiencing an accelerated warming rate.