Media Coverage
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Composing music with AI isn't new, but recent advances have serious implications for the music industry
As AI quickly advances there are a lot of questions about its ethics. But whether it is good or bad there is no denying that AI plays a major role in the future of music making. One of the early pioneers of AI music was David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus of music.…
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UC Santa Cruz’s ‘Inspector General’ updates classic political play
The UC Santa Cruz Arts Division is premiering a new play this week. Inspector General, which is an adaption of a Russian play by the same name, raises a conversation around political corruption in the modern day. The Santa Cruz Sentinel spoke to Michael Chemers, the chair of the department of Performance, Play, and Design who…
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Founder of Center for Monster Studies isn’t scared when the lights go down
Michael Chemers, the chair of the department of Performance, Play, and Design and the founder of the Center for Monster Studies, talks about his role in monsters studies. In this Q&A for The Jewish News of Northern California Chemers explores monsters through the lens of Judaism, in particular discussing the golem which comes from Jewish folklore.
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Environmental Justice? Not if Project 2025 Has a Say.
Mijin Cha, a professor of environmental studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, says Inflation Reduction Act grant programs could be improved by providing benefits more directly to underserved people. “The federal government gives money to a third party, and then that third party distributes the money,” says Cha. “Is it not more efficient to…
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Guest Commentary | Immigrant safety at risk from election rhetoric
Political leaders who use racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric are directly harming safety and wellbeing in our communities, write UC Santa Cruz faculty members Regina Day Langhout and Saskias Casanova. Recent research conducted in Santa Cruz County supports this assertion. In Fall 2023, youth researchers in United Way of Santa Cruz County’s Alzamos la Voz program worked with…
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Growth, jobs and manufacturing
Distinguished Professor of Economics Nirvikar Singh argues that increases in productivity and wages that come from investment in human capital are going to benefit a larger slice of the population than investment in physical capital that substitutes for workers, though both kinds of investment matter.
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This App Set Out to Fight Pesticides. After VCs Stepped In, Now It Helps Sell Them
Silicon Valley–style venture capital places enormous emphasis on scale and a startup’s ability to grow rapidly, says Madeleine Fairbairn, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, who studies agriculture and food systems. “Everybody’s used to this claim that we have a growing population, and they’re going to starve if we don’t feed them,” she says. For…
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As scientists plot to bring back the dodo, Helen Pilcher asks whether we should—and what would happen if we did
In 2022, geneticist Beth Shapiro from the UC Santa Cruz, who is a scientific advisor to Colossal Biosciences, decoded the dodo’s genome. Scientists at Colossal are now determining the sequences which they will edit into cells collected from the dodo’s closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon. Then, just as for the passenger pigeon, the edited…
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A deadly fungus that has killed millions of bats may have arrived in Southern California
“Those early kind of signals can be helpful for understanding the progression of the fungus, of where it’s getting to,” said Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International and an adjunct professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.
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Weddell seals have a surprising survival strategy
“Weddell seals live in one of the most hostile environments on the planet and need to keep their internal clock running during periods when the sun never sets or when the sun never rises,” noted Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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How to use AI to help plan your vote
University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen was featured in a Washington Post story about using AI chatbot technology to help voters research long and complex ballots.
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MAGA is tripping: Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has cemented the right’s romance with psychedelics.
University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen, author of Tripping On Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold Ward, and The Troubled Birth Of Pscyhedelic Science, was featured in an Atlantic Monthly feature story about the American hard right's recent embrace of psychedelics.