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 »
UC Riverside
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 »
Childhood diet has lifelong impact
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | February 3, 2021 Eating too much fat and sugar as a child can alter your microbiome for life, even if you later learn to eat healthier, a new study in mice suggests. The study by UC Riverside researchers is one of the first to show a significant decrease in the total number and diversity of gut bacteria in mature mice fed an unhealthy ... 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 »
Parasitic plants conspire to keep hosts alive
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | February 23, 2021 The plant that encourages kissing at Christmas is in fact a parasite, and new research reveals mistletoe has an unusual feeding strategy. Like other plants, mistletoe is capable of using sunlight to create its own food, a process called photosynthesis. However, it prefers to siphon water and nutrients from other trees ... Continue Reading »
Polymer film protects from electromagnetic radiation, signal interference
By Holly Ober, UC Riverside | February 22, 2021 As electronic devices saturate all corners of public and personal life, engineers are scrambling to find lightweight, mechanically stable, flexible, and easily manufactured materials that can shield humans from excessive electromagnetic radiation as well as prevent electronic devices from interfering with each other. In a ... Continue Reading »
Partners help us stay connected during pandemic
J.D. Warren, UC Riverside | February 16, 2021 pair of UCR studies reveal that living with a romantic partner helps people feel more socially connected during COVID-19. But no other pandemic-era social dynamic carries notable benefits, the researchers found: not your kids, not kibitzing with your bestie on FaceTime, and not your adorable-adoring pets. “Research prior to ... Continue Reading »
UC Riverside Life Sciences Incubator goes live
The UC Riverside Life Sciences Incubator recently welcomed its first two tenants in line with the university’s guidelines for ramping up research during the COVID-19 pandemic. Karamedica Inc., a spinoff company from Loma Linda University Health; and Murrieta Genomics Inc. are the initial businesses to take advantage of the first wet lab incubator in the ... Continue Reading »