Media Coverage

"If there's a Jupiter right in the middle of the Goldilocks zone, you probably don't want to bother looking for an Earth there," says Bruce Macintosh, director of University of California Observatories at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But it's not actually that critical to mission success to know this star has an Earth…

Eris’s glaciers are very different. They are entirely subsurface and instead of flowing downhill in response to gravity, they rise and fall through its interior carrying heat from its core, much like mantle plumes do on Earth. They were discovered by modeling the orbital dynamics of Eris’s 615-kilometer-wide moon, Dysnomia, says Francis Nimmo, a planetary…

Together the two projects have found dozens of UHECRs over the years, yet the estimated energies of only a few—the original OMG particle and Amaterasu among them—have eclipsed 200 EeV. Statistics suggest such mighty messengers only arrive at a rate of less than one per century per square kilometer of the planet’s surface. Of those confirmed in…

“With educators, community leaders, and industry experts working together we have an incredible opportunity to align our shared goals and forge lasting connections to make transformative, equity-centered change across the region," said UC Santa Cruz Assistant Vice Chancellor of Education Partnerships Maria Rocha Ruiz who is also the principal investigator for the award. "Together, we…

As a plant becomes more rare or its range more confined, its genetic diversity — sometimes called “cryptic diversity” — can be reduced. “That’s something that we’re not really quantifying, the loss of that ‘cryptic’ diversity,” said Lucy Ferneyhough, native plant program project manager at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum.

Even if exoplanets like those in this study have the conditions necessary to maintain water in some form once their solar systems have matured, M-dwarfs are 100 to 1,000 times more luminous when they’re young. And they can be temperamental, with lots of solar flares and ultraviolet radiation, said Jonathan Fortney, an astrophysicist at UC…

"The nature of the most powerful particle accelerators in the universe is a 60-year-old mystery," said Noemie Globus, one of the authors of the study, who is affiliated with the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The ongoing struggle between techno-optimism and doomerism gets exaggerated in every period of rapid technological change, says Benjamin Breen, a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of an upcoming book on utopian science in the mid-20th century. No one knows where AI will take humanity. If history is any guide, he…

"What's fascinating about the history of Notch2NL is that there actually was an original event that happened in our common ancestor with gorilla, where the original Notch2 gene was duplicated," says Sofie Salama, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, who was involved in one of the research studies.