Media Coverage
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NASA’s Webb telescope discovers a planet where rock clouds vanish every night
“With the Hubble telescope, when we used to do this type of observation, we got an average view of the whole planet with data from the clouds and the atmosphere squished together and indistinguishable,” said first author Sagnick Mukherjee, a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University who was a student at Johns Hopkins and UC…
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UCSC and NASA team up to launch new educational and career-development program
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) is teaming up with NASA to launch a program that creates educational and career development opportunities for students. The program is in collaboration with the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View. The agreement, which runs through December 2028, will see both institutions develop new research…
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California’s salmon fishery is reopening after a population crash led to a 3‑year closure, but that doesn’t mean all is well
Written by UC Santa Cruz’s Eric Palkovacs (professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; director of the Institute of Marine Sciences) and Steven Lindley (Fisheries Collaborative Program researcher)
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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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‘They’re torturing me’: ICE uses solitary confinement to scare people into self-deporting
Craig Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychology professor and solitary confinement expert, described social isolation as a “psychological toxin.” He said solitary confinement can cause depression, anxiety, hopelessness, the atrophy of social skills, and in more severe cases, hallucinations, cognitive impairment and PTSD. “It’s cruel because it hurts people,” Haney said of solitary confinement. “It’s…
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Redistricting battles and primary fights reshape political landscape ahead of midterms
Nolan Higdon, a political history lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, said the redistricting push will make things more difficult for Democrats but may not be a decisive blow. “A lot of this redistricting is attempting to cut into any lead Democrats may have in the general,” Higdon said. “But this could be something that backfires…
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Have astronomers spotted an exploding primordial star?
“It’d be great if it’s true, and it might be,” says Stan Woosley, a theorist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who has played a key role in developing models of pair-instability supernovae. Detecting even one such bright example corresponding to a star at the heavy end of the mass range would imply that…
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How damaged is Angeles Crest Highway? I hiked it to find out
“If our storm and other conditions were normal, we would expect closures and losses at some points,” said Michael Beck, director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience.
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Why are so many Bay Area theaters staging ‘Dracula’ in 2026?
If you need a symbol for fascism, economic precarity or rapid technological advancement, try “Dracula.” Renee Fox, an associate professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz and a co-director of the school’s Center for Monster Studies, sees a throughline in the eras when vampire stories peak.
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Luminous new historical fiction
The New York Times’ book columnist Alida Becker called Emeritus Professor of Literature Karen Tei Yamashita’s new book ‘luminous’ and listed it among the month’s best new book releases.
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The Book That Plunges You Into Messy American History
The Atlantic Monthly ran a detailed feature story about Professor Emeritus of Literature Karen Tei Yamashita’s new book and how she “challenges readers to join her in deciphering a shameful moment from the nation’s past.”