Science
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San Jose City Hall falcon brings rat back to nest, raising poisoning fears for chicks
“They were fighting over it,” said Zeka Glucs, director of the UC Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group, which works with the City of San Jose to monitor and study the City Hall falcons. But peregrines rarely catch rats, raising fears that the rodent had been poisoned and the young falcons may have ingested toxic…
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Santa Cruz wharf collapse: Plans take shape for rebuilding as summer beach season begins
The wharf has more than 4,400 wooden pilings, made of Douglas Fir. They are pounded roughly 20 feet into the ocean bottom, and city crews replace several dozen each year. But piers come and go. There have been five others back to the mid-1800s in that area, noted Gary Griggs, a distinguished professor of Earth…
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The Pacific Coast Highway, a Mythic Route Always in Need of Repair
Gary Griggs, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has advised on a major repair to the route, said that he doubted the highway would ever again be open in its entirety for an extended period. “Attaining stability is impossible,” he said.
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Vitamin D may slow a process related to aging, new study suggests
Carol Greider, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for her discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that protects telomeres from shortening, said that she was skeptical of the new study’s findings.
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How do clownfish survive a heat wave? By shrinking themselves down
Many animals around the world are getting smaller, says Alexa Fredston, a quantitative ecologist at University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t involved in the study. … By measuring individual fish, “the results paint a fascinating and complex picture of how individual animals respond to a prolonged marine heat wave,” Fredston says.
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The Coyotes of San Francisco
“Did they walk over the Golden Gate Bridge?” asked Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “That’s my top theory.” Once the first coyotes returned to the city, she said, they probably howled to attract others to follow. “Coyotes will be where they want to be,” Wilkinson said.
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As Coastline Erodes, One California City Considers ‘Retreat Now’
“We overall are much better at spending recovery money — that is, addressing issues after disasters — than we are at spending hazard mitigation,” said Michael Beck, director of the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at the University of California, Santa Cruz. On the East Coast, the predominant strategy for protecting shorelines has been to…
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Intelligence on Earth Evolved Independently at Least Twice
“One of the reasons I kind of like these papers is that they really highlight a lot of differences,” said Bradley Colquitt, a molecular neuroscientist at UC Santa Cruz. “It allows you to say: What are the different neural solutions that these organisms have come up with to solve similar problems of living in a…
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Our moon may have once been as hellish as Jupiter’s super volcanic moon Io
“The moon gets sort of confused,” planetary scientist Francis Nimmo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Space.com. “It doesn’t know exactly what orbit it should be adopting, and so it can develop kind of a weird orbit.”
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Bay Area universities reel from cuts in research funding from National Institutes of Health
“I think the big concern is, if this goes on too long, then we’re just going to lose a generation of researchers who are going to have to go find other jobs,” UC Santa Cruz biology professor Grant Hartzog said. “I’ve got a 21-year-old son who’s a biochemistry major and has been thinking about whether…
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Scientists once thought only humans could bob to music. Ronan the sea lion helped prove them wrong
Not many animals show a clear ability to identify and move to a beat aside from humans, parrots and some primates. But then there’s Ronan, a bright-eyed sea lion that has scientists rethinking the meaning of music. Ronan has been a resident at UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory, where UC Santa Cruz researchers have…
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Plastic is harming seabirds even more than we realized
A new study co-led by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that ingested plastic can release hormone-altering chemicals in northern fulmars, a species of seabird that inhabits the North Atlantic and North Pacific.