June 20, 2017
June 20, 2017 —
It’s a cheesy pick-up line: “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” It might also be something that profoundly alters how we perceive other people. According to research from UC San Diego, familiar faces look happier to us than unfamiliar ones, even when faces are objectively expressing the same emotion to the same degree.
May 26, 2017
May 26, 2017 —
Unusually warm nights can harm human sleep, researchers show, and the poor and the elderly are most affected. Rising temperatures could make sleep loss more severe.
May 16, 2017
May 16, 2017 —
Arguing against the current conventional wisdom – that there is an evolved capacity for number and arithmetic that we share with other species – Rafael Nunez says numerical cognition is not biologically endowed.
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.
