Media Coverage
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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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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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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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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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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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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.

