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In Costa Rica, Natural Farms Provide Refuge for Birds
Natalia Ocampo-Penuela is a University of California, Santa Cruz environmental scientist who was not involved in the study. She said the findings may seem to make sense without research. But she added that it is very rare to have detailed data over a long time from tropical areas to show that diversified farming can support…
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Autopsy of a star reveals what was eviscerated by a monster black hole
“ASASSN-14li is exciting because one of the hardest things with tidal disruptions is being able to measure the mass of the unlucky star, as we have done here,” said astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of UC Santa Cruz, one of the authors of the study.
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'Creating Characters That Look Like Us': The Video Game Company Bringing Type 4 Hair Into Gaming
Since they were invented, video games have received constant upgrades, be it in graphics, new worlds, or expanded options for play. But one thing has been largely missing: “[o]ptions are still pretty limited for creating characters of color, particularly for creating Black characters. And a huge component is a lack of Black hairstyles and textures,”…
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Opinion: Oceans are heating up. Who will protect the turtles, whales and fish crossing borders into cooler waters?
Heather Welch, a marine spatial ecologist at UC Santa Cruz who develops climate-ready tools to manage biodiversity and fisheries, penned this op-ed highlighting the dangers and complexities of marine heatwaves.
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$7 million project begins to rebuild historic Northern California wharf wrecked in huge winter storms
It was arguably the most dramatic image from the powerful storms that battered Northern California’s coastline in January: The Capitola Wharf, an 855-foot-long landmark that dates back to 1857, torn in half by pounding waves. “Maybe it will do fine for 10 or 20 or 30 years,” said Gary Griggs, a professor of Earth sciences…
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Birds of a Feather Do Indeed Flock Together, According to New Research
When former University of California, Santa Cruz graduate students Alexis Chaine and Daizaburo Shizuka started banding birds on their campus arboretum, they hoped to explore crown plumage variation among various visiting sparrows. Soon after, they noticed that the birds they banded, among them Golden-crowned Sparrows, consistently returned to the same section of the arboretum. This…
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Architecture's Second Looks, and Second Acts
Kresge College is included in this list of buildings, sites, streets, design movements and architects that have received updates this year. The 1973 U.C. Santa Cruz dormitory complex by the postmodernist architects Charles Moore and William Turnbull Jr. and the landscape architect Dan Kiley — a self-styled Mediterranean village tucked in a redwood grove —…
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New effort aims to revamp calculus to keep students in science, technology, engineering fields
Math professor Martin Weissman is rethinking how his university teaches calculus. Over the summer, the professor from the University of California at Santa Cruz, spent a week at Harvard to learn how to redesign the mathematics for life sciences courses his institution offers. Called Math 11 A and B, these classes, which students take as…
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Here's Which Sea Animals Are Hurt Most by the U.S. Heatwaves
Heatwaves can have a devastating impact on some marine predators such as sharks but other species can adapt, scientists have discovered. Heather Welch, associate specialist with the Institute of Marine Sciences, noted that, "instead of being a story about winners and losers, this is a story of how variable marine heatwave impacts can be. To understand…
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Star blows giant exoplanet's atmosphere away, leaving massive tail in its wake
Astronomers have monitored the trailing gas tail of HAT-P-32 b created from helium flowing from its atmosphere with telescopes from Earth. "We have monitored this planet and the host star with long time series spectroscopy, observations made of the star and planet over a couple of nights," research lead author and University of California Santa…