By: Elizabeth Fernandez, UC San Francisco | April 21, 2021 Wildfire smoke can trigger a host of respiratory and cardiovascular symptoms, ranging from runny nose and cough to a potentially life-threatening heart attack or stroke. A new study suggests that the dangers posed by wildfire smoke may also extend to the largest organ in the human body, and our first line of defense ... Continue Reading »
Science + Environment
Monuments that matter
By: Holly Ober, UC Riverside | April 8 When most Americans imagine an archaeologist, they picture someone who looks like Indiana Jones. Or, perhaps, Lara Croft, from the Tomb Raider game. White, usually male but occasionally female, digging up the spoils of a vanished culture in colonized lands. Depictions of archaeologists in popular culture mirror reality. Many scholars ... Continue Reading »
Seagrasses turn back the clock on ocean acidification
By Kat Kerlin, UC Davis | March 31, 2021 Spanning six years and seven seagrass meadows along the California coast, a paper from the University of California, Davis, is the most extensive study yet of how seagrasses can buffer ocean acidification. The study, published today in the journal Global Change Biology, found that these unsung ecosystems can alleviate low pH, ... Continue Reading »
With drop in LA’s vehicular aerosol pollution, plants emerge as major source
Rober Sanders, UC Berkeley | March 23, 2021 California’s restrictions on vehicle emissions have been so effective that in at least one urban area, Los Angeles, the most concerning source of dangerous aerosol pollution may well be trees and other green plants, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, chemists. Aerosols — particles of hydrocarbons ... Continue Reading »
We’re surprisingly similar to Earth’s first animals, research says
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | March 18, 2021 The earliest multicellular organisms may have lacked heads, legs, or arms, but pieces of them remain inside of us today, new research shows. According to a UC Riverside study, 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures from the Ediacaran period share genes with today’s animals, including humans. “None of them had heads or ... Continue Reading »
Loss of variation within species amounts to a hidden biodiversity crisis
By Tim Stephens, UC Santa Cruz | March 1, 2021 The rapid loss of variation within species is a hidden biodiversity crisis, according to the authors of a new study looking at how this variation supports essential ecological functions and the benefits nature provides for people. Published March 1 in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the study highlights the need to better ... Continue Reading »
Northern California kelp forest collapse will be hard to reverse
By Tim Stephens, UC Santa Cruz | March 5, 2021 Satellite imagery shows that the area covered by kelp forests off the coast of Northern California has dropped by more than 95 percent, with just a few small, isolated patches of bull kelp remaining. Species-rich kelp forests have been replaced by “urchin barrens,” where purple sea urchins cover a seafloor devoid of kelp and ... Continue Reading »
Protein discovery could help enable eco-friendly fungicides
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | March 3, 2021 New research reveals an essential step in scientists’ quest to create targeted, more eco-friendly fungicides that protect food crops. Scientists have known for decades that biological cells manufacture tiny, round structures called extracellular vesicles. However, their pivotal roles in communication between invading ... Continue Reading »
Poking the paradigm
By Harrison Tasoff, UC Santa Barbara | February 17, 2021 Deprive a mountain range of its wolves, and soon the burgeoning deer population will strip its slopes bare. “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer,” wrote ecologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1949 title “A Sand County ... Continue Reading »
Our earliest primate ancestors rapidly spread after dinosaur extinction
By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley | February 24, 2021 The small, furry ancestors of all primates — a group that includes humans and other apes — were already taking to the trees a mere 100,000 years after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other terrestrial animals, according to a new analysis of fossil teeth in the collections of the University of ... Continue Reading »