Media Coverage

The microscopic critter looks like a swimming potato chip with a tail, said Raphael Kudela, a phytoplankton ecologist at UC Santa Cruz. He said the organism thrives in the bay because the shallow water warms up quickly. “It’s just really happy when it’s in the bay,” he said. “As long as it’s happy, it’s just…

Professor of Computational Media Katherine Isbister's research on fidget objects is cited in a BBC story.

Ari Friedlaender, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is featured in this piece on researchers who study a variety of whales in the Antarctic Ocean.

The University of California admitted a record number of California applicants for fall 2023, as campuses received more funding to increase coveted seats, according to preliminary data released Tuesday. Michelle Whittingham, UC Santa Cruz associate vice chancellor of enrollment management, said the campus plans to enroll 4,189 first-year students this fall and winter thanks to such…

The long-term tide gauge at Fort Denison “has recorded a gradual … but fairly consistent rise in sea level of 0.1mm/yr or 3 inches/century,” said Gary Griggs, a professor of earth sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

Not every red tide, or algal bloom, is toxic — although they can be. The species behind the recurring algal bloom in San Francisco Bay is called Heterosigma akashiwo and isn’t known at this time to be toxic to humans. The microscopic critter looks like a swimming potato chip with a tail, said Raphael Kudela, a phytoplankton ecologist at…

Giant waves, measuring as high as 13 feet, are becoming more common off California's coast as the planet warms, according to innovative new research that tracked the surf's increasing height from historical data gathered over the past 90 years. Oceanographer Gary Griggs at the University of California, Santa Cruz said while a jump of a…

A 2019 study led by Borja Reguero, a coastal scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, found that the energy in ocean waves has increased over most of the last century because of climate change.

“This paper helps us further understand the underlying physiological complexity of these really large, charismatic, but also very ecologically important, species that just so happens is generally hard to study,” said Logan Pallin, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s work like this that incrementally moves…

The research uncovers “some really great information on a species we know very little about,” says Ari Friedlaender, an ocean ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, not involved in the study. Knowing how the whales react to these noises could help conservationists “act proactively” to protect the animals in their Arctic home where…

A recent study, co-authored by anthropologist Lars Fehren-Schmitz, analyzed the 500 year-old DNA of those buried near Peru’s iconic Incan citadel Machu Picchu and showed that the servant class that lived and died there — forcefully relocated to the structure by the Incan empire — hailed from more diverse backgrounds than scientists had anticipated. Additional…