April 24, 2017
April 24, 2017 —
Wounds heal – the cells in a body knit over a cut. When a neuron dies, the brain can rewire itself to make up for the loss. And now, new research suggests, something similar seems to happen within a human social network after the death of a friend. Published in Nature Human Behavior, the study of 15,000 anonymized networks on Facebook was led by social scientist, alumnus William Hobbs.
April 21, 2017
April 21, 2017 —
The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the largest maritime oil spill in U.S. history. Almost seven years to the day after the start of the environmental disaster, researchers have published a price tag of the damage done to natural resources: $17.2 billion.
April 18, 2017
April 18, 2017 —
Philip Guo caught the coding bug in high school, at a fairly typical age for a Millennial. Less typical is that the UC San Diego cognitive scientist is now eager to share his passion for programming with adults age 60 and up. His paper, the first known study of older adults learning to program, has been selected for honorable mention by a leading human-computer interaction conference called CHI.
April 12, 2017
April 12, 2017 —
Three faculty members of the University of California San Diego and its chancellor have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the country’s most esteemed honorary societies and independent policy research centers.
February 23, 2017
February 23, 2017 —
The jewel—a jade pendant worn on a king’s chest during key religious ceremonies—was first unearthed in 2015. It is now housed at the Central Bank of Belize, along with other national treasures. Braswell recently published a paper in the Cambridge University journal Ancient Mesoamerica detailing the jewel’s significance. A second paper, in the Journal of Field Archaeology, describes the excavations.
December 21, 2016
December 21, 2016 —
In a paper published by Nature Neuroscience, UC San Diego cognitive scientists say they have found neurons that help an animal align itself within a cognitive map of its environment. The neurons signal “I’m on this line, in this orientation.”
November 17, 2016
November 17, 2016 —
Karthik Muralidharan joined UC San Diego’s Department of Economics in 2008, after earning his Ph.D. at Harvard University. An affiliate of several prominent research organizations, he recently accepted an invitation to serve as an honorary advisor to the National Institution for Transforming India, an initiative of the Indian federal government. He will be working with the secretaries of education in the Indian states.
October 31, 2016
October 31, 2016 —
Is social media good for you, or bad? Well, it’s complicated. A study of 12 million Facebook users suggests that using Facebook is associated with living longer – when it serves to maintain and enhance your real-world social ties. Oh and you can relax and stop watching how many “likes” you get: That doesn’t seem to correlate at all.
May 26, 2016
May 26, 2016 —
Not all habits are bad. Some are even necessary. But inability to switch from acting habitually to acting in a deliberate way can underlie addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders. Working with a mouse model, an international team of researchers demonstrates what happens in the brain for habits to control behavior
May 19, 2016
May 19, 2016 —
George Mandler – founding chair of the University of California San Diego’s Department of Psychology and one of the central figures in psychology’s cognitive revolution – died in his Hampstead, London home on May 6, 2016. He was 91.
