Earth & Space
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UC Santa Cruz’s first student-built satellite deployed from International Space Station
Hundreds of miles above Earth, a small satellite built by University of California, Santa Cruz students deployed from the International Space Station on July 2, 2026, becoming the university’s first student-built satellite to reach space.
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Decoding the North American bison’s genome to better inform conservation efforts
UC Santa Cruz researchers lead analysis of ancient DNA that yields a genomic roadmap for the restoration of the continent’s largest land mammal, pushed nearly to extinction because of past human activities
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UC Santa Cruz team helps state better understand how wetlands sequester carbon and improve air quality
Atmosphere-monitoring towers operated by the Paytan Lab will tell the tale of two very different Southern California wetlands over the next two years
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Postdoctoral researcher to develop instrumentation to detect distant protoplanets
Supported by the new Astronova Fellowship program, Christina Vides will advance her research in a technique that sharpens the images from astronomical telescopes in order to detect faint planets in the glare of their bright host stars
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The color of penguin poo: Satellites reveal the chilling truth of global warming’s impact on an iconic polar species
Scientists study poop patterns of Adélie penguin colonies across all of Antarctica over a 30-year span using Landsat satellite images, a first for capturing food-web and population trends at continental and decadal scales relative to climate change
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UC Santa Cruz researchers at NASA COFFIES Science Center make breakthrough on solar enigma
Researchers are closer to unraveling a long-standing solar mystery surrounding the extreme thinness of the Sun’s tachocline layer
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Team builds best-performing detection system for next-generation accelerators
At the high beam-repetition rates of advanced accelerators, eventually reaching beyond one billion times per second, existing detection systems that are critical for ensuring precise measurements fail
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Toxic algal blooms linked to deaths of recently stranded humpback whales
Lab tests conducted at UC Santa Cruz of samples taken from the two carcasses found domoic acid, the biotoxin that causes neurological impairment, seizures, and death in marine mammals.
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Celebrating a shared cosmos and advancing Black equity in space science
Black in Astro, co-led by an astronomy postdoc at UC Santa Cruz, welcomes all to join the grassroots organization’s virtual conference to find inspiration and connection in a vibrant global community
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Bradley Colquitt wins McKnight Foundation award to continue neuroscience research
The Colquitt Lab studies neural circuits in songbirds to understand how complex behavior emerges and evolves
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The best pollinators can drive evolutionary changes in flowers, new study finds
Researchers find hummingbirds to be better pollinators of mountain flowers than bees, prompting the plants to adopt traits that favor the fast, feathered carriers over the fuzzy, buzzy ones
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Astrophysicist Stan Woosley awarded two of astronomy’s top prizes for seminal studies of supernovae
Longtime professor wins the 2026 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2026 Gruber Cosmology Prize back to back