Media Coverage
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Georgia prison system engages in deception as crisis builds
A leading expert on prison conditions and solitary confinement, Craig Haney, was brought in to study the unit, and he described the SMU as "one of the harshest and most draconian" solitary confinement facilities he had ever seen. … "The atmosphere inside E Wing was bedlam-like, as chaotic and out of-control as any such unit…
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Luigi Mangione: Societal support for alleged criminals isn't unprecedented
"Sometimes communications online, particularly social media, can kind of give us an idea of where the public is at. And I don't think anybody can dismiss the fact that there are divergent opinions on this murder," said Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This story was picked up by Yahoo News.
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Scotts Valley didn’t get a tornado warning, but San Francisco did. Why?
Environmental Studies Professor Michael Loik explained how climate change could potentially lead to increased opportunities for tornado development. “From a mechanistic standpoint, if you warm up the atmosphere, you warm up the ocean, you create more evaporation, you create more storminess,” he said. “From a statistical standpoint, then that might lead some to predict more…
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Cold War Human Radiation Experiments Pushed Ethical Boundaries
“This testing on people who were not genuine volunteers, who were not genuinely informed of the risk — they were human guinea pigs in an experiment that had no value at the end of the day,” said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the former Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of…
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Climate change swiftly remaking region’s grasslands
Climate change is altering regional grasslands at remarkable speed as species that thrive in hotter, drier conditions dominate the ecosystem, scientists reported in a recent study. The researchers found this strong trend at test sites across California, with the most notable results near Elkhorn Slough, at UC Santa Cruz and in coastal Mendocino County. "I…
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How to keep a dream journal — and why you should
Thematic dream analysis can help you uncover the repetitive thoughts, emotions and behavioral patterns that could use some addressing. Thematic analysis as a dream method has been developed and refined by several researchers over time, including the prominent work of G. William Domhoff, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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The litmus test posed by ‘Lithium Valley’
The jury is still out on whether lithium development at the Salton Sea will help the majority-Latino communities living in California’s second-poorest county. This is the topic of a new book from Chris Benner, sociologist and director of the Institute for Social Transformation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and scholar-activist Manuel Pastor, director of the University…
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Why thousands of people are traveling to one country to see these birds
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela is a conservation ecologist who has been studying the explosion of bird-watching tourism in Colombia. Activity on eBird, a platform where birders can record their observations, increased more than 27-fold in Colombia since 2010, according to unpublished research by Ocampo-Peñuela and other authors that’s currently under review.
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Mangroves save $855 billion in flood protection globally, new study shows
Mangroves have been shown to provide $855 billion in flood protection services worldwide, according to a new study from the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at UC Santa Cruz. The research, conducted by project co-lead, Pelayo Menendez and center director, Michael W. Beck, is featured in the World Bank’s 2024 edition of The Changing Wealth…
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Tsunami reality check
Although it’s unlikely, Steven Ward, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has created a series of animations to show how a big tsunami might spread through San Francisco Bay. In Ward’s simulations, the incoming wave stands just over 16 feet tall.
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Tsunami warning along Northern California coast canceled, Bay Area residents react
"It’s really a subtle effect between an earthquake that can cause a very large tsunami and one that doesn’t at all, and that has to do with what direction the fault moves. If it’s moving side to side it’s not very likely to push up a big pile of water and make a tsunami, but…
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Scientists achieve major step forward in developing innovative diesel fuel alternative: 'This could really impact people'
University of California, Santa Cruz, researchers say they have improved the waste oil-to-biodiesel production process with a simple, circular method involving mild heat. "I always wanted to work on biodiesel," said doctoral student Kevin Lofgren, the study's lead author. "I started exploring this new material that we made to see if it could attack the…