Health
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Elizabeth Blackburn: On fighting for truth, inclusion and the next generation of scientists
“In my case, molecular biologist Carol Greider of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and I discovered telomerase decades ago, and we discovered it through its enzyme activity. Now, after a lot of biochemical work and big advances in imaging and cryoelectron microscopy, you can actually see what telomerase looks like.”
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The silent majority: RNAs that don’t make proteins
“You can think of them as acting as scaffolds, where they can bring in other binding partners,” says Susan Carpenter, a cell and molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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What Dreams Really Are
Distinguished professor emeritus G. William Domhoff speaks about his new book “Dreams, Sleep, and Consciousness.”
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Group seeking buffer zone for pesticides around schools
Joji Muramoto, a UC Santa Cruz associate professor who specializes in organic agriculture, said that it now accounts for 14% of the county’s strawberry crop, a sizable increase from the 1980s, at the dawn of the commercial organic agriculture movement. “Nobody believed organic strawberries possible in the 1980s,” he said.
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The silent majority: RNAs that don’t make proteins
“You can think of them as acting as scaffolds, where they can bring in other binding partners,” says Susan Carpenter, a cell and molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Clumps of mouse brain cells can learn to play a virtual game
The organoids didn’t retain that knowledge for long, says cognitive neuroscientist Ash Robbins of the University of California, Santa Cruz. But ultimately, researchers hope that brain organoids can help them understand how healthy human brains learn, as well as how cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease impair this capacity.
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New cause of dementia uncovered as scientists link ‘innocent’ peptide to devastating condition
In a new commentary, a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, argued that decades of dementia research has focused on the wrong protein. Also covered by Brighter Side and New York Post.
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UC Santa Cruz study finds link between pregnancy and reduced breast cancer risk
A recent UC Santa Cruz study, published in Nature Communications scientific journal, uncovered clues in a decadeslong mystery surrounding the relationship between early pregnancy and breast cancer risk.
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Lab-Grown Brains Growing More Powerful
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz are taking lab-grown mini-brains into their toddler era, after demonstrating that brain organoids can process information in real time.
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As Brain Organoid Science Grows More Complex, So Do the Questions
“If we can figure out ways in which living neural networks compute so efficiently, we would have a big breakthrough in terms of trying to find and develop a better architecture for artificial computing,” said Tal Sharf, an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Central Coast faces doctor shortage with plans for new medical school
UC Santa Cruz, in partnership with UC Davis, is addressing this issue with expansion of the PRIME program in which students will receive classroom training at Davis and clinical training on the Central Coast. Grant Hartzog, Executive Director of UC Santa Cruz’s Global and Community Health program, said, “Let’s start fast but small. So we’re…
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How Early Pregnancy Influences Aging and Its Implications for Breast Cancer Risk
A groundbreaking study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sheds light on how pregnancy may serve as a critical biological intervention, fundamentally altering the aging trajectory of mammary tissue and thus reducing cancer risk later in life.