Earth & Space
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Bird flu rips through another beloved Bay Area species
“The depth of the data is something we’re really proud of,” Zeka Glucs, the director of the Predatory Bird Research Group at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of the study, told SFGATE. “And while the situation seems grim, as long as there are nests, there is hope.”
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Seymour Studios goes live with new community science podcast
The center’s new podcast, “Science, Solutions, Santa Cruz,” debuted Tuesday, marking the first production to come out of Seymour Studios, a newly built, state-of-the-art recording space located on UC Santa Cruz’s Coastal Science Campus. It was designed to make professional audio and video storytelling accessible to people across the community who lack the technical experience…
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Big cats, bigger protections: Santa Cruz County mountain lions now listed as threatened
Few people have tracked that tension more closely than UC Santa Cruz wildlife ecologist Chris Wilmers, who leads the long-running Santa Cruz Puma Project, a partnership between the university and the state. He called the listing “the appropriate thing to do,” emphasizing that it’s a long-overdue course correction for a species becoming gradually boxed in.
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Were Neanderthal men the Romeos of the prehistoric world?
Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study, says he’s not surprised to see potential evidence of mate preference in Neanderthals, given its prevalence in human history.
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Popular honeymoon destination faces avian malaria threat, spread by mosquitoes
“Avian malaria has taken a devastating toll on Hawaii’s native forest birds, and this study shows why the disease has been so difficult to contain,” Christa M. Seidl, who conducted the research as part of her PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, stated in the release.
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An Asteroid Might Slam Into the Moon in 2032-and Create a Fiery Flash That’s Visible to Earthlings
The situation is “a rare ‘natural experiment’: a forecastable small-body impact whose signatures could be scientifically rich and operationally relevant,” writes study co-author Yifei Jiao, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Tsinghua University in China, in an email to Live Science’s Deepa Jain.
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Astrobiologists are searching for traces of coal and other fossil fuels to find intelligent life on exoplanets
By tracing that chain, plant biologist Lincoln Taiz at the University of California, Santa Cruz documented how coal availability governed whether biological productivity ever translated into sustained technological power.
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Protection for California mountain lions could become permanent
Chris Wilmers, a researcher at UC Santa Cruz, was one of the outside experts who reviewed the Center for Biological Diversity proposal and worked with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to provide input on how to improve it.
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‘System in flux’: Scientists reveal what happened when wolves and cougars returned to Yellowstone
“Yellowstone is a fascinating system because it’s got the full complement of large carnivores and migratory ungulates that North America used to have,” Chris Wilmers, a wildlife ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science. “A lot of these species are coming back ––…
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Mountain lion spotted in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood captured by animal control
The Santa Cruz Puma Project was also called to help. It was founded in 2008 in partnership with UC Santa Cruz to research how mountain lions and their habitats are impacted by people and housing construction.
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Joel Primack, Physicist Who Helped Explain the Cosmos, Dies at 80
A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he was a key contributor to a landmark paper that laid out how the universe came to look like it does today.
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This Diminutive Reptile Plays Rock-Paper-Scissors
Dr. Sinervo, who later joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and who died in 2021, grew fascinated by the strange mating habits of the lizards. At the start of every breeding season, the males developed one of three colors on their throats: blue, orange or yellow. And depending on their color,…