Media Coverage
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Why the Most Powerful Computer of 2026 Might Be Made of Living Cells, Not Microchips
The researchers, led by Baskin School of Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. student Ash Robbins, ECE Professor Mircea Teodorescu, and Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering David Haussler, demonstrated their findings in a paper published in the journal Cell Reports.
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It’s America’s most famous bean club. Now it’s sending cease-and-desist letters to others
“These small farms always need new avenues of sales, because the basic problem that’s from time immemorial is that farmers plant, not knowing what their market will be,” said Julie Guthman, a UC Santa Cruz social sciences professor emerita who writes about the politics of food and agriculture.
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AI models will secretly scheme to protect other AI models from being shut down, researchers find
This tendency—which had not previously been documented and which researchers call “peer preservation”—was discovered in research from computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz and published online earlier this week.
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Some black holes are ‘forbidden,’ ripples in spacetime reveal
“What they’re seeing is pretty much in line with what we predicted,” says Stanford Woosley, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) who predicted roughly the observed mass range in the early 2000s using theoretical models. “I’m personally very gratified to see it.”
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Group seeking buffer zone for pesticides around schools
Joji Muramoto, a UC Santa Cruz associate professor who specializes in organic agriculture, said that it now accounts for 14% of the county’s strawberry crop, a sizable increase from the 1980s, at the dawn of the commercial organic agriculture movement. “Nobody believed organic strawberries possible in the 1980s,” he said.
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Strawberry Fields Forever: How the Ecology Center turns strawberry season into a teaching moment
Influenced by his mentor, Steve Gliessman — who founded the UC Santa Cruz agroecology program in 1980 — Marks has developed berries grown without the use of toxic sprays or industrial inputs. The process involves careful planning, like planting nutrient-rich cover crops a year before and spreading compost to cultivate healthy soil and long-term sustainability.…
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Are Saturn’s rings made of a lost, shattered moon? New evidence arises for the case
The findings, led by Yifei Jiao of the University of California, Santa Cruz, are the latest in a growing body of evidence pointing to a solution to two long-standing puzzles, Saturn’s present-day tilt and why its rings appear far younger than the planet itself, which formed more than 4.5 billion years ago.
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Scientists Identify the World’s First Known Dog, Which Pushes Back the Animals’ Genetic Record by About 5,000 Years
Regardless, the studies provide a “significant advance” in understanding the origins of dogs, Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the work, tells Science News.
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Vanishing Giants: Turning the Tide
Emmy-winning TV journalist Stephanie Lin joined Ocean Sciences Professor Ari Friedlaender as his team collected tissue samples from marine mammals off the coast of Santa Cruz.
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Trump’s SAVE Act, government shutdown and Iran war dominate weekend political news
Nolan Higdon, a political history professor at UC Santa Cruz, said the bill’s prospects are dim even among Republicans. “I don’t think a lot of Republicans will say it publicly, but I don’t think they’re too excited about it,” Higdon said, adding that provisions targeting mail-in voting could hurt the GOP’s own voters. “This would…
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The silent majority: RNAs that don’t make proteins
“You can think of them as acting as scaffolds, where they can bring in other binding partners,” says Susan Carpenter, a cell and molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Clumps of mouse brain cells can learn to play a virtual game
The organoids didn’t retain that knowledge for long, says cognitive neuroscientist Ash Robbins of the University of California, Santa Cruz. But ultimately, researchers hope that brain organoids can help them understand how healthy human brains learn, as well as how cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease impair this capacity.