News Archive

November 10, 2014 — Imagine being able to recognize your car as your own but never being able to remember where you parked it. Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have induced this all-too-common human experience permanently in rats and from what is observed perhaps derive clues about why strokes and Alzheimer’s disease can destroy a person’s sense of direction.

November 10, 2014 — A new class of apps and wireless devices used by private pilots during flights for everything from GPS information to data about nearby aircraft is vulnerable to a wide range of security attacks, which in some scenarios could lead to catastrophic outcomes, according to computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and Johns Hopkins University. They presented their findings Nov. 5 at the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Scottsdale, Ariz.

November 10, 2014 — The Assyrian Empire once dominated the ancient Near East. At the start of the 7th century BC, it was a mighty military machine and the largest empire the Old World had yet seen. But then, before the century was out, it had collapsed. Why? An international study now offers two new factors as possible contributors to the empire’s sudden demise – overpopulation and drought.

November 10, 2014 — Updating its unique Hospital Safety Score, which assigns A, B, C, D and F grades to hospitals nationwide based on their ability to prevent errors, injuries and infections, UC San Diego Health System has again been awarded separate A ratings for its hospitals in Hillcrest and La Jolla by The Leapfrog Group, an independent industry watchdog.

November 10, 2014 — Wireless technologies have revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives: the way we work, interact, and socialize. Global adoption and emerging applications are fueling expectations and debate about so-called fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless technologies, and the expectations, needs, and directions for 5G are not as clear as those for the previous digital generations (3G and 4G). The Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) at the University of California, San Diego is organizing and hosting the 5G Forum on Next-Generation Wireless Systems and Applications, bringing together key experts from industry, government and academia to present and discuss their vision and research roadmaps for 5G.

November 7, 2014 — After a two-year hiatus, a team from the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) at the University of California, San Diego came roaring back to set three new world records in a data processing competition for industry and academe. CNS associate director George Porter, former CNS director Amin Vahdat (now at Google), and Computer Science and Engineering Ph.D. student Michael Conley set a world record in the 100 Terabyte Daytona (think speed) GraySort category. They outperformed everyone else, sorting 100 TB in less than 23 minutes, but tied with the startup company Databricks (which sorted the same amount of data in 23.4 minutes). Both used the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

November 7, 2014 — Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine are launching a new program to help businesses in the San Diego region end the epidemic of distracted driving and the suffering and loss of life that can result.

November 6, 2014 — Engineers at the University of California, San Diego, are proposing a new surgical intervention for children born with a single ventricle in their heart—instead of the usual two. The new approach would potentially reduce the number of surgeries the patients have to undergo in the first six months of life from two to just one. If successful, it would also create a more stable circuit for blood to flow from the heart to the lungs and the rest of the body within the first days and months of life.

November 6, 2014 — On Nov. 6, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced a Long-term Stability Plan for Tuition and Financial Aid that she will present to the Board of Regents on November 19. The plan – the first of its kind at the university – is a new five-year roadmap for low, predictable tuition that allows students and their families at all income levels, and at all levels of study, to budget for the total cost of their UC education. The Stability Plan will end the volatility in UC’s tuition-setting process.

November 6, 2014 — Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine describe the surprising and crucial involvement of a pro-inflammatory signaling protein in the creation of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) during embryonic development, a finding that could help scientists to finally reproduce HSCs for therapeutic use.