News Archive

October 5, 2017 — “UC San Diego is a community of changemakers and innovators,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla Sept. 28 as he welcomed a crowd in Atkinson Hall at the IBM-UC San Diego signing ceremony celebration. “It is not an exaggeration to say that at this campus, which in its short time of 57 years is the top ten in the country and top 15 in the world, we must have done something right.

October 4, 2017 — Walter Munk joined Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a young doctoral student in 1939 in what would start a nearly eight-decade-long career of scientific discovery, daring science and transforming how the world understands the ocean. The ocean science pioneer is being honored throughout 2017, including in a visit from His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco on Oct. 26.

October 3, 2017 — Patients at UC San Diego Health in need of radiation therapy now have access to the next generation of radiation treatment technology. The new radiotherapy system significantly reduces treatment times with improved accuracy.

October 3, 2017 — Living things reproduce and after billions of years of evolution, modern living organisms are molecularly complex. But scientific interest in developing simple self-reproducing living systems is gaining attention. This is because such molecular assemblies could answer key questions about the origins of life. With this in mind, biochemical researchers at the University of California San Diego—Neal K. Devaraj, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Roberto J. Brea, postdoctoral scholar in the department—set out to design an autocatalytic peptide system for the development of functional self-synthesizing biomaterials, which may clarify life’s chemical origins.

October 1, 2017 — In a first-of-its-kind study, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers report that a blood sample, or liquid biopsy, can reveal which patients will respond to checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapies.

September 29, 2017 — Without significant improvements, the state of nuclear power in the United States — and of nuclear science itself — will likely steadily decline, researchers at the UC San Diego Deep Decarbonization Initiative conclude in a set of articles assessing the state of U.S. innovation in advanced fission.

September 29, 2017 — Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have developed the first mice that lack the Upf3b gene, providing a new model for studying its underlying role in intellectual disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders.

September 28, 2017 — Using a form of low-impulse electrical stimulation to the brain, documented by neuroimaging, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System (VASDHS) and collaborators elsewhere, report significantly improved neural function in participants with mild traumatic brain injury (TBI).

September 28, 2017 — As the University of California San Diego’s second college, John Muir College admitted its first students in 1967. 50 years later, the college is celebrating its golden anniversary with a year-long series of festive events. Muir’s current students and alumni are invited to the college for a kick-off festival for the reveal of the time capsule sealed and buried by the founding class from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 2. Other events include a talk from one of the college’s founding faculty, Irwin Jacobs, a week of celebratory events for John Muir’s birthday, which coincides with the campus’s Earth Month activities, as well as an environmental conference featuring Muir biographer Donald Worster.

September 28, 2017 — A team of researchers has engineered smart protein molecules that can reprogram white blood cells to ignore a self-defense signaling mechanism that cancer cells use to survive and spread in the body. Researchers say the advance could lead to a new method of re-engineering immune cells to fight cancer and infectious diseases. The team successfully tested this method in a live cell culture system.