Earth & Space
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A world-renowned California scientist’s career is defined by chance
The minutes pass into hours as the swell rises and falls like craggy rock formations, lulling me into a meditative state. But the man at the helm, Ari Friedlaender, is on high alert. With a ball cap and sunglasses shielding his bearded face, and a pair of flip-flops on his feet, the world-renowned ecologist and…
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Five Astounding Ways Humans Are Driving Animal Evolution, Including Causing Lizards to Grow Longer Legs and Leading Moth Populations to Become Darker
Eric Palkovacs, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, says that fishermen often have a financial incentive to target and catch the largest fish.“That’s a direct selective pressure against large size,” he says, “and because fish get larger when they get older it’s also a selection against old age.”
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A Surprising Twist Puts Desalination Plants at the Bottom of the Ocean. Here’s Why
Although proponents of subsea desalination technology say it would have little effect on undersea life, others urge further research to gauge its impact on marine ecosystems. The twilight zone is “extremely important for many ocean processes such as the carbon cycle and nutrient cycling,” says Adina Paytan, a professor affiliated with the Institute of Marine…
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Mirror universe on the wall, is this where dark matter comes from after all?
A physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz has published 2 studies which put forward a new approach to explain where dark matter comes from. Professor Stefano Profumo has drawn from the well-established quantum chromodynamics. Additional coverage in Yahoo News, The Debrief, Science News Today, and IFL Science.
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Mysterious killer of sea stars finally identified
It seemed to come without warning. In 2013, divers and marine researchers began to notice sea stars dying in droves in the waters off Washington state. The deaths were gruesome—arms became twisted and fell off, bodies disintegrated. “It was creepy,” says Peter Raimondi, a marine ecologist at the University of California Santa Cruz who followed…
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Parts of Bay Area could experience longer earthquake shaking than previously expected
Emily Brodsky, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz who was not involved with the study, commented on the importance of new findings about where earthquakes resulted in longer periods of shaking than expected. “When you actually have to build a building, you don’t want to just know, in general, it…
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Meet the 24-armed sea star, a kelp forest’s bodyguard
“We show that the sea stars create a ‘landscape of fear’ among red sea urchins in degraded urchins barrens that reduces grazing on kelp,” study co-author and UC Santa Cruz ecologist Kristy Kroeker said in a statement. “These are very hungry urchins that are dissuaded enough by the scent of a sea star to deter…
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Myanmar’s Devastating Earthquake in March Split the Earth at ‘Supershear Velocity’
A seismic station near Nay Pyi Taw registered ground motion data that were “immediately convincing of supershear rupture given the time between the weak, dilational P wave first arrival and the arrival of large shear offset of the fault” at the station, UC Santa Cruz’s Thorne Lay said in a Seismological Society of America statement.
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Sea Level Rise – Iconic Santa Cruz surf spots could slip away with erosion
Gary Griggs, a coastal geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discussed measures the City of Santa Cruz has taken to protect West Cliff Drive. But, he notes the likelihood that storms will continue to wreak havoc in the long term. “Two studies show that waves seem to be getting bigger, more energetic. Not…
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The Hunt for a Fundamental Theory of Quantum Gravity
For mathematical convenience, Bousso assumed that there’s an unlimited variety of particles—an unrealistic assumption that makes some physicists wonder whether this third layer matches reality (with its 17 or so known particles) any better than the second layer does. “We don’t have an infinite number of quantum fields,” said Edgar Shaghoulian, a physicist at the…
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Astronomers discover strange solar system body dancing in sync with Neptune: ‘Like finding a hidden rhythm in a song’
“This new motion is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we knew,” team member and University of California, Santa Cruz scientist Ruth Murray-Clay said. “It could change how we think about the way distant objects move.” Additional coverage in IFL Science.
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‘It’s just a weird, weird bird’: Why we got the dodo so absurdly wrong
“The dodo laid a single egg in a nest on the ground, which made these eggs particularly vulnerable to predation by introduced species like rats and pigs, which arrived on Mauritius at the same time as people,” says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz.