Media Coverage
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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.
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Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds
Claudie Beaulieu, a climate scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz, said the findings imply that the window for limiting warming even to 2C above preindustrial levels would “narrow substantially” if faster warming persists. “An important caveat, however, is that the acceleration may prove temporary,” said Beaulieu, who has published on the topic but…
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Bird flu rips through another beloved Bay Area species
“The depth of the data is something we’re really proud of,” Zeka Glucs, the director of the Predatory Bird Research Group at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of the study, told SFGATE. “And while the situation seems grim, as long as there are nests, there is hope.”
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New cause of dementia uncovered as scientists link ‘innocent’ peptide to devastating condition
In a new commentary, a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, argued that decades of dementia research has focused on the wrong protein. Also covered by Brighter Side and New York Post.
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It’s a colorful pangenome world
A pangenome can reveal the spectrum of genome variation within a species. The toolbox for working with pangenomes is filling up.
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Seymour Studios goes live with new community science podcast
The center’s new podcast, “Science, Solutions, Santa Cruz,” debuted Tuesday, marking the first production to come out of Seymour Studios, a newly built, state-of-the-art recording space located on UC Santa Cruz’s Coastal Science Campus. It was designed to make professional audio and video storytelling accessible to people across the community who lack the technical experience…
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Big cats, bigger protections: Santa Cruz County mountain lions now listed as threatened
Few people have tracked that tension more closely than UC Santa Cruz wildlife ecologist Chris Wilmers, who leads the long-running Santa Cruz Puma Project, a partnership between the university and the state. He called the listing “the appropriate thing to do,” emphasizing that it’s a long-overdue course correction for a species becoming gradually boxed in.
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UC Santa Cruz study finds link between pregnancy and reduced breast cancer risk
A recent UC Santa Cruz study, published in Nature Communications scientific journal, uncovered clues in a decadeslong mystery surrounding the relationship between early pregnancy and breast cancer risk.