Media Coverage

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…

Jim Zachos, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was interviewed about confirming scientific data that indicates the globe is hotter now than the last 24,000 years.

In the last 500 million years, Earth has experienced a handful of mass extinctions, causing nearly all of life to disappear in the blink of an eye. Now, scientists at UC Santa Cruz are recreating the planet’s most famous extinction event to find out why one plant survived when everything else was wiped out.

“The engine that keeps our magnetic field going may be dependent on the chemical behavior of oxygen or sulfur embedded within Earth’s roiling outer iron core,” said Quentin Williams, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Bats have come back to the Bay Area from winter migrations and are raising young all around the region. Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International and an ecology and evolutionary biology research professor at UC Santa Cruz, tells Lookout how and where to find bats — and when you might catch a glimpse…

Nico Orlandi, a philosopher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says, "This gives reason to suppose that silences are treated by the auditory system in the same way sounds are treated."

Brant Robertson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discussed images from the James Webb Telescope with The Guardian and Business Insider.