by Rina Shaikh-Lesko | Mar 12, 2013 | Posts
Environmental art pioneers Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison have an exhibit at UC Santa Cruz’s Sesnon Gallery this quarter. It’s part of a larger focus on environmental art, including a series of lectures on Wednesday nights. I’m in Mountain View on Wednesdays and...
by Jessica Shugart | Mar 7, 2013 | Posts
Billions of years after going on a cannibalistic binge, our own Milky Way galaxy has been implicated by the stale crumbs it left behind. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used Hubble Space Telescope data to spot the crumbs – ancient stars...
by Liz Devitt | Mar 5, 2013 | Posts
I started writing this post when I discovered one of my fittest friends, Rick*, a 50-year-old Ironman triathlete and veteran marathoner, has a surprisingly unfit heart. So unfit, that he didn’t show up for the Sunday morning run, a ritual rarely missed in our running...
by Laura Poppick | Feb 26, 2013 | Posts
Earlier this month, I joined biologist Steve Haddock and his research group from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for a daylong cruise aboard MBARI’s R/V Rachel Carson. We left from Moss Landing, CA and travelled about 15 miles out into Monterey Bay,...
by Chris Palmer | Feb 24, 2013 | Posts
The Obama administration may urge Congress in March to invest billions of dollars to develop biotechnology and nanotechnology tools for the creation of comprehensive maps of brain activity that can help diagnose and treat brain diseases. The plan has already ignited...
by Ryder Diaz | Feb 19, 2013 | Posts
Detectives look to insects for clues to crack cases A lot of dead bodies turn up on Mount Hamilton and in the Santa Cruz Mountains, two natural areas near San Jose, Calif. Some bodies are found decomposed beyond recognition. Jeffrey Honda has worked on a number of...
by Paul Gabrielsen | Feb 14, 2013 | Posts
In the future, scientists want to be able to send spacecraft to study asteroids such as the one that will approach the Earth on Friday. A concept for these landers may look familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s. Egg-shaped and weighted at the bottom, the...
by Jessica Shugart | Feb 14, 2013 | Posts
I’ve had the same name my entire life. It was printed out on my birth certificate, right next to a stamp of my teeny tiny foot. Nothing changed when I got married, but ironically this lack of action threw some members of my family for a loop. During the holidays, when...
by Rina Shaikh-Lesko | Feb 12, 2013 | Posts
Protecting endangered species is tough enough when it’s not easy to agree on what’s endangered and what’s not. But what about cases where it’s tough to define “species”? California tiger salamanders (Ambystoma californiense), a threatened native species, has had to...
by Kelly Servick | Feb 5, 2013 | Posts
While covering Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project symposium last fall, I learned a term that has been bouncing around in my head ever since: Gandhian engineering – the development of technology to benefit the world’s poorest citizens. The concept led me to a...
by Laura Poppick | Jan 31, 2013 | Posts
I’m sure I was not the only person relieved to see November headlines with news of bendy cell phones set to hit shelves sometime in 2013. Now, with fewer consequences than ever, I will be free to drop my phone, step on it, fold it into my back pocket, all without...
by Liz Devitt | Jan 29, 2013 | Posts
I’ve spent decades running trails that wind through the state parks of California. But even though I’ve logged at least ten thousand miles in the middle of nature, I just discovered I’ve been a stranger to an entire kingdom living among the trees—the realm of...
