May 4, 2017
May 4, 2017 —
A team of researchers at the University of California San Diego has been selected to take part in the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE ®. The competition aims to accelerate the development and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that are truly scalable and have the capacity to solve grand challenges facing society.
May 4, 2017
May 4, 2017 —
Being a woman can mean many things. That’s what Maria Elena Hewett discovered when she became one of the first student staff members of the UC San Diego Women’s Center in 1998. During her tenure, she met and was inspired by women who were in arranged marriages; single moms; women who were not born female; and those who embraced femininity as a form of activism. The experience taught Hewett about herself, what it means to be a Latina woman, and how to see the world through a critical lens.
May 4, 2017
May 4, 2017 —
With a three-minute talk entitled “Using Geometry to Build Better Birth Control,” engineering graduate student Geoff Hollett took first place at the UC San Diego Grad Slam competition held April 5. Now in its fourth year, the event challenges graduate students across campus to break down their research into bite-sized, jargon-free presentations that can be enjoyed by a broad audience.
May 4, 2017
May 4, 2017 —
How can California better prepare for droughts and floods? Tashiana Osborne, a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is studying atmospheric rivers—the primary source of rainfall in the region. These ribbons of water in the atmosphere make the difference between a prolonged dry spell and an unusually wet winter.
May 4, 2017
May 4, 2017 —
UC San Diego’s Divisions of Biological and Physical Sciences will launch a Research Communications program designed to address that need. Funded by a two-year, $225,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the new effort seeks to improve the ability of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and other researchers on campus to communicate their work to the public.
May 3, 2017
May 3, 2017 —
Researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego mined the FDA Adverse Effect Reporting System (FAERS) database for depression symptoms in patients taking ketamine for pain. They found that depression was reported half as often among the more than 41,000 patients who took ketamine, as compared to patients who took any other drug or drug combination for pain.
May 2, 2017
May 2, 2017 —
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences announced today the membership election of Christopher K. Glass, MD, PhD, professor in the Departments of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
May 2, 2017
May 2, 2017 —
Pancreatic beta cells help maintain normal blood glucose levels by producing the hormone insulin — the master regulator of energy (glucose). Impairment and the loss of beta cells interrupts insulin production, leading to type 1 and 2 diabetes. Using single-cell RNA sequencing, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have, for the first time, mapped out pathways that regulate beta cell growth that could be exploited to trick them to regenerate.
May 2, 2017
May 2, 2017 —
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego has been granted a supplemental award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to double the number of graphic processing units, or GPUs, on its petascale-level Comet supercomputer in direct response to growing demand for GPU computing across a wide range of research domains.
May 2, 2017
May 2, 2017 —
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) — a condition that can lead to liver cirrhosis and cancer — isn’t typically detected until well advanced. Even then, diagnosis requires a biopsy. To more easily detect NAFLD, UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers and their collaborators report that the microbial makeup of a patient’s stool — gut microbiome — can be used to predict advanced NAFLD with 88 to 94 percent accuracy. The study is published May 2 in Cell Metabolism.
