Media Coverage

 You may have heard about the pioneering research of anthropologist Margaret Mead, but do you know about her work with psychedelics? Mead and her husband, Gregory Bateson, thought psychedelics might reshape humanity by expanding consciousness

“We discovered that northern elephant seals appear to develop their diving capabilities more quickly than southern elephant seals, which allows them to reach deeper depths during their first oceanic migration,” says Roxanne Beltran, a physiological ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

After moving to the University of California, Santa Cruz, Sandra Faber, together with John Gallagher, wrote a hugely influential review article about dark matter for Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics, published in 1979. By presenting all the available evidence, the two authors convinced the scientific community that dark matter was not just a figment of…

UC Santa Cruz historian Benjamin Breen was interviewed in NPR's Fresh Air about his new book, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science." The book explores the intertwined lives of two cultural anthropologists — Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who were married for 14 years — and the extraordinary circle…

This breakthrough builds upon earlier indications from Hubble telescope observations, suggesting that ancient galaxies exhibited pickle-like shapes, as highlighted by Joel Primack, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“This is not a one-off. This is a pattern,” said Dan Hirsch, retired director of environment and nuclear policy programs at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “This suggests the lab does not have sufficient controls to undertake the extraordinarily hazardous, new operations of pit production. They are having repeated contamination events, which shouldn’t be…

UC Santa Cruz oceanographer Gary Griggs discusses human-caused climate change impacts on California coast on NPR's All Things Considered. Griggs says that human-caused climate change will force seas to rise in the future, making waves even bigger.

“[Creative technologies] went through way more scrutiny than any in-person degree that I have witnessed,” said Jody Greene, associate campus provost for academic success at Santa Cruz. “We have a quality control built in. Why close the door to these programs when you yourself [as the academic senate] will get to decide about quality?”

In 2022, Ricardo Yarza, a stellar astrophysicist at UC Santa Cruz, simulated what happens when a red giant swallows a planet. He found that if the planet starts out close enough to the star, its orbit rapidly decays.

“If you talk to folks who handle a lot of fish — fishers or biologists that have handled fish in Alaska and other places over the last 20 to 30 years — they almost to a person will tell you the fish are smaller,” says Eric Palkovacs, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the…