Media Coverage
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The Scientist
A Neural Circuit That Helps Flies Stay on Course
“These behaviors that they're looking at, goal-directed steering, are universal to animals that navigate,” said Daniel Turner-Evans, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the studies. “It's just beautiful to see how these behaviors unfold across these different layers and different neurons in the brain, and how you…
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Forbes
Oxygen-Poor Rocky Planets May Offer Shortcut To Microbial Life
Simple life emerged on earth within the first billion years of its habitable window, according to UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Piero Madau. But finding life in the habitable zones of solar type stars will ultimately require statistical analyses of the population of habitable systems, in-depth studies of the climates of individual planets, and searches for…
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New York Post
How AI is helping scientists finally predict earthquakes
Researchers at the UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, including Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Emily Brodsky, are developing a new model, dubbed RECAST— short for “Recurrent Earthquake foreCAST” — that provides deep learning for earthquake forecasting.
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CNN
Landslides are destroying multimillion-dollar homes in California, and they’re getting worse
Rancho Palos Verdes sits on top of a volcanic ash bed, laid down about 10 to 15 million years ago, that slopes down to the Pacific shoreline. “It has weathered to a type of clay mineral that can expand and get slippery when it gets wet,” said Gary Griggs, distinguished professor of earth and planetary…
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Grist
As ‘doomsday’ glacier melts, can an artificial barrier save it?
There are other glacier-protecting strategies that avoid the need for curtains or other barriers. Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has proposed stabilizing the two imperiled glaciers by draining the meltwaters that currently seep to their base, lubricating the pinning points and accelerating the glaciers’ seaward flow. By drilling holes…
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National Geographic
What would the world look like without mosquitoes?
Winifred Frick, a bat biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says most bats are actually generalist predators, meaning they eat whatever they can catch—mosquito, beetle, or otherwise.
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Science Magazine
Famed Polynesian island did not succumb to ‘ecological suicide,’ new evidence reveals
Anthropology Professor Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropological geneticist, commented on a new first-of-its-kind study of the genomes of ancient Rapanui, which demonstrates that Rapa Nui, or "Easter Island," did not experience a population crash caused by overexploitation of natural resources. The new results “deliver solid data that the ‘ecocide’ hypothesis is not supported,” said Fehren-Schmitz.
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KQED
Kamala Harris Embraced Reparations 5 Years Ago. Her SF Pastor Says Criticism Is Unjust
Nolan Higdon, a lecturer of history and media studies at UC Santa Cruz, said the strategy of cherry-picking quotes to spread hate is antithetical to democracy. He added that Republicans over the last 50 years have used race-baiting to scare white people into voting for their candidates. “To amplify fear, division and hate, that’s something…
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KQED
Fire-Weary Lake County Again Faces a Tough Recovery and Questions Over Rebuilding
UC Santa Cruz professor Miriam Greenberg, who studies the interconnections between lack of affordable housing and climate catastrophes like fires, cautioned the city and its residents to think about whether rebuilding in Clearlake is a good idea. “It’s a question that should be asked sensitively because a fire may have already displaced them from an…
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Mongabay
Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation at 60: A look back and forward
Colombian ecologist Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, an assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, discussed the impact of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. “When you bring conservation in—because conservation is a crisis discipline that deals with imperfect and incomplete data sets—there’s a tension,” she said. “But I’ve seen that tension dissolve at ATBC over…
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CalMatters
Hate crimes rise against Indian Americans in California, deepening a divide between Hindus and Sikhs
Distinguished Professor of Economics Nirvikar Singh, co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America, spoke with CalMatters about how issues from India are spilling over into hate crimes against Indian Americans. “The citizens themselves are in some sense all victims of this phenomenon, whether Sikh, Muslim or Hindu or any other religious tradition," he said.…
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Quartz
Banks seem to be falling totally flat on climate commitments
Quartz covered a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Economics Professor Galina Hale and her collaborators, which found that, while "all banks have reduced their loan-emission exposures over the last 8 years" banks that made public sustainability commitments didn't perform any better in these efforts than those that didn't.