Features 2025
The Color of Biodiversity: How Segregated Cities Altered Urban Wildlife
“Redlining” partitioned cities throughout the United States across racial and ethnic lines. Decades later, these practices still shape the urban environment and the wild creatures that call these cities home, Jasmin Galvan reports.
A Natural Fix for Flooding
UCSC researcher Mike Beck is shaping policy that is replacing seawalls with salt marshes, Mark DeGraff reports.
Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms
The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan, Jenna Ahart reports.
This Tiny California Town Is Flooded, Broke — and Reimagining Climate Insurance
As climate change drives up flooding risk, the safest move for Isleton residents might be to abandon their small city — but short of that drastic option, insurance could provide a safety net, Anna FitzGerald Guth reports. Illustrations by Rushi Tawade and Elise Cypher.
Captive breeding program hatches hope for the endangered Santa Cruz long-toed salamander
University of California, Santa Cruz researchers aim to rescue one of the world’s most endangered species from the brink of extinction, Carly Kay reports.
Researchers quest for an ovarian cancer screening test
After decades searching for ovarian cancer markers in blood, researchers turn to tampon samples to get a more complete picture, Rita Aksenfeld reports.
The Fight Against Valley Fever
Valley Fever cases are on the rise in California. Researchers at UC Davis are working to find more bearable treatments for the most severe cases, Caroline Hemphill reports. Illustrations by Kara Mohr.
A Library of Life – Building a Genetic Archive from Historic Insect Specimens
Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences have fine-tuned a method to carefully extract tiny amounts of DNA from century-old insect specimens, aiming to catalogue every insect to build a repository of life, Mahima Samraik reports.
Day & Night: How Infection Changes Our Biological Clock
What if the difference between getting better and getting sicker depended not just on *what* treatment you got, but *when* you got it? A UC Santa Cruz scientist has discovered that even “dead” bacteria can throw off the body’s internal clock. Her findings could change how doctors time medicines, vaccines, and therapies—showing that in health, timing can be just as important as the cure, Farah Aziz Annesha reports.
