News Archive

October 30, 2015 — Patients with glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor, usually survive fewer than 15 months following diagnosis. Since there are no effective treatments for the deadly disease, University of California, San Diego researchers developed a new computational strategy to search for molecules that could be developed into glioblastoma drugs. In mouse models of human glioblastoma, one molecule they found shrank the average tumor size by half. The study is published October 30 by Oncotarget.

October 30, 2015 — A new study has shown that changing ocean conditions have adversely impacted fish off California. The researchers compared data sets from the CalCOFI program and power plant cooling water intakes along the California coastline. The data show that fish abundance from both studies has declined sharply since 1970, with a 72 percent decline in overall larval fish abundance in the CalCOFI data set and a 78 percent decline in fishes from the PPI sampling.

October 30, 2015 — The brain cells of patients with bipolar disorder, a manic-depressive illness characterized by severe swings in mood, energy and ability to carry out daily tasks, are more sensitive to stimuli than other people’s brain cells, reports an international team of scientists headed by researchers at Salk Institute for Biological Studies and University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

October 29, 2015 — University of California climate and energy experts announced 10 scalable solutions for moving the world towards carbon neutrality, a practical framework that outlines both immediate and longer-term actions for staving off catastrophic climate change. The solutions were announced during the UC Summit on Carbon and Climate Neutrality that was held at UC San Diego Oct. 26-27.

October 29, 2015 — Innovation. Exploration. Impact. All aptly describe the work of this year’s Founders Symposium speakers. The research and scholarly activities of our award-winning faculty advance the frontiers of knowledge, shape new fields, and disseminate solutions that transform lives. This year’s Symposium speakers exemplify UC San Diego’s impact as a public research university with TED-style talks that share how storytelling and multimedia narratives can amplify community voices; explore the prospects for a world free from hunger; and discuss ethics to guide society’s response to new science and technology. Attendees will also learn about the relational approach to change and learning; what works and what doesn’t in foreign aid; and how interactive documentary theatre can create institutional change.

October 29, 2015 — Researchers at the American Gut Project, the world’s largest crowdsourced, crowdfunded science project, are celebrating a big milestone this week—in the past two years, they have raised more than $1 million from over 6,500 “citizen scientists” who have agreed to have their microbiomes sequenced.

October 29, 2015 — You are only 10 percent human. Ninety percent of the cells that make up our bodies are actually bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes. And researchers are now finding that these unique microbial communities — called microbiomes — can greatly influence human and environmental health. The human gut microbiome alone has now been linked to allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and many other conditions.

October 29, 2015 — The Jacobs School of Engineering and Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego have launched the Contextual Robotics Institute to develop safe and useful robotics systems. These robotics systems will function in the real world based on the contextual information they perceive, in real time. Elder care and assisted living, disaster response, medicine, transportation and environmental sensing are just some of the helpful applications that could emerge from tomorrow’s human-friendly robots.

October 29, 2015 — A packed house at Mandeville Auditorium Oct. 22 welcomed Thomas Piketty, the French economics phenom who penned this decade’s most talked-about political book: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, has been compared to such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx. The main topic of Piketty’s work? Income inequality.

October 29, 2015 — The American Dream is less real than it used to be. On that, the evidence is clear. Incomes have grown slowly for all but the wealthiest since the late 1970s. And if you were born into a less advantaged family, the chances of making it into the middle class have diminished. But what to do? What will work best to restore the nation’s promise of upward mobility? The Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at UC San Diego will weigh 25 available options and, in two years, will release a ranking of the most effective.