Media Coverage
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The cell that wasn’t there
For decades, Jon Zehr was haunted by an organism he knew was here — but couldn’t see. It all started in the ‘90s on a research boat in the middle of the ocean. Zehr was an oceanographer studying nitrogen-fixing bacteria — simple, microbial life forms that could pull the element straight from the air, making…
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Why a growing mass of warm water in the Pacific could be trouble for future weather
Pacifica is developing plans to deal with the rising water. But Gary Griggs, who specializes in coastal processes and hazards at UC Santa Cruz, doesn’t think there’s much the city can really do to stop the waves. “We can put in sandbags. We can bulldoze up sand berms. But we have really big waves and…
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Can we predict deadly cliff collapses along the California coast? Scientists say it’s possible
Patrick Barnard, who spent years leading coastal erosion research for the U.S. Geological Survey, said the latest Scripps data are promising and the next big question is scalability. Crumbling cliffs loom over more than 530 miles of the California coast, and the cost of establishing a statewide sensor network would be significant.
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Ongoing missions
“I would definitely say the missions were spaces of compelled labor, which is a form of slavery,” said Martin Rizzo-Martinez, an assistant professor of film and digital media at University of California Santa Cruz who has researched the missions and the history of Indigenous people of California.
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How did a mental health crisis become a suicide in the Oakland County Jail?
“There are very few solitary confinement units anywhere in the world where prisoners are not able to call out to one another in nearby cells. This kind of strained communication hardly constitutes ‘meaningful human contact,’ ” wrote Craig Haney, a psychology professor at University of California Santa Cruz and nationally recognized expert on the psychological…
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Students take to the skies with drones
For assistant professor Javier Gonzalez-Rocha, the program is about much more than teaching students how to build drones. “It’s really about getting students exposed to science, technology, engineering and mathematics early on and helping them begin developing an identity around becoming an engineer, becoming a scientist, becoming a mathematician,” he said.
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An abundance of influence
University of California, Santa Cruz Sociology professor Katharyne Mitchell and PhD candidate Gregory Woolston have described this local political takeover as revanchist populism, plying a brand of“revenge” politics funded by conservative elites.
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Review: Isaac Julien at The Cosmic House
Arts writer Rob Wilson praised Distinguished Professor of History of Consciousness and the Arts Isaac Julien for his “sumptuous” installation, All That Changes You: Metamorphosis, created with his longtime partner, History of Consciousness Professor Mark Nash
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Uranus and Neptune may not be ‘ice giants’ after all
The evidence that Uranus and Neptune must be icy is “all indirect, it’s all circumstantial,” says Jonathan Fortney, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz. “This was always in the back of people’s minds: that the planets could be more complicated.”
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Scientists say Beefalo are all beef, no -alo. Breeders disagree
“It was a surprise to us to discover that most of the Beefalo individuals we sequenced did not have detectable bison ancestry,” says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Report: 5 unintended effects kicked in after California raised minimum wage
California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour. It was supposed to help workers earn more money. But a new study found something strange. Many workers are not better off. Some are working fewer hours. Some lost their jobs to robots. A college study looked at more than 100 restaurants.…
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Professor details scam horror that cost her nearly a half million dollars
A successful imposter scam involves “hiding the real” and “showing the fake,” explained Anthony Pratkanis, professor emeritus of social psychology at UC Santa Cruz. Pratkanis, who co-wrote the book “Weapons of Fraud,” said scammers use social influence tactics that appeal to human nature. “We could all fall prey to these crimes,” Pratkanis said, not just “little…