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California’s commercial Dungeness crab season delayed yet again
The reported numbers may be much lower than the actual number of entangled whales, said UC Santa Cruz professor of marine science Ari Friedlaender. He noted that the increasing humpback whale population is the result of years of conservation measures, including a ban on whaling. “We used to kill an awful lot of whales here…
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Radioactive Object Found at San Francisco's Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Raises New Concerns
Retired nuclear policy expert Daniel Hirsch, the former director of the Environmental and Nuclear Policy Program at UC Santa Cruz, said the most recent revelation — about the glass shard — is concerning because the Navy intends to eventually release the property to San Francisco and allow a developer to build over 10,000 homes there.…
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Controversy in California over ‘neutral’ Middle East history
There is no contradiction between having a viewpoint and producing history with integrity, says Jennifer Derr, founding director of the Center for Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz, who signed the letter. When students come to her class thinking of history as a collection of objective names and dates, she says, part…
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How Climate Data Gives Whales Room to Roam
“It really just helps give a lot more information and reduce some of that uncertainty about the future,” said Steph Brodie, lead author of the study. Brodie is currently a research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, but conducted this research while working at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the National Oceanographic and…
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Steps to Reviving Dodo Birds Approaching Reality
No one can predict with certainty when the dodo bird will come back to life, however, Beth Shapiro, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has sequenced the dodo bird genome. This process takes decades.
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In the Search for Life beyond Earth, NASA Dreams Big for a Future Space Telescope
"If there's a Jupiter right in the middle of the Goldilocks zone, you probably don't want to bother looking for an Earth there," says Bruce Macintosh, director of University of California Observatories at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But it's not actually that critical to mission success to know this star has an Earth…
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Mercury, Eris glacier make scientists rethink habitable zone
Eris’s glaciers are very different. They are entirely subsurface and instead of flowing downhill in response to gravity, they rise and fall through its interior carrying heat from its core, much like mantle plumes do on Earth. They were discovered by modeling the orbital dynamics of Eris’s 615-kilometer-wide moon, Dysnomia, says Francis Nimmo, a planetary…
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AI technology could soon save lives at the beach. Here’s how.
Researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, led by Computer Science Professor Alex Pang, are developing potentially life-saving A.I. algorithms geared toward detecting and monitoring potential dangers along the shoreline. Additional coverage in KSBW.
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The Second Most Powerful Cosmic Ray in History Came from–Nowhere?
Together the two projects have found dozens of UHECRs over the years, yet the estimated energies of only a few—the original OMG particle and Amaterasu among them—have eclipsed 200 EeV. Statistics suggest such mighty messengers only arrive at a rate of less than one per century per square kilometer of the planet’s surface. Of those confirmed in…
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Central Coast collaborative seeks to improve education-to-career pathways
“With educators, community leaders, and industry experts working together we have an incredible opportunity to align our shared goals and forge lasting connections to make transformative, equity-centered change across the region," said UC Santa Cruz Assistant Vice Chancellor of Education Partnerships Maria Rocha Ruiz who is also the principal investigator for the award. "Together, we…