May 27, 2015
May 27, 2015 —
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that a tiny single-celled parasite may have a greater-than expected impact on honey bee colonies, which have been undergoing mysterious declines worldwide for the past decade.
May 14, 2015
May 14, 2015 —
An unusual genomics research paper published this month by 940 students at 63 universities around the nation provided 16 undergraduate biology students at UC San Diego with an opportunity to conduct original research in a classroom setting, while becoming co-authors in a peer‐reviewed scientific journal.
March 19, 2015
March 19, 2015 —
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a new method for generating mutations in both copies of a gene in a single generation that could rapidly accelerate genetic research on diverse species and provide scientists with a powerful new tool to control insect borne diseases such as malaria as well as animal and plant pests.
March 19, 2015
March 19, 2015 —
When students ask Stephen Mayfield what to do when they graduate—what sort of career would provide them with a decent income, expanding professional opportunities and a chance to give back to society—the UC San Diego biology professor is quick to respond.
January 15, 2015
January 15, 2015 —
We’ve all seen them. The senior scientist with his back turned away from the audience, trying to explain a data-filled slide to a puzzled group of nonscientists that has long ago tuned him out. Or the junior professor, head down, reading a lecture word for word in a monotone voice from behind the podium.
December 24, 2014
December 24, 2014 —
When a rapidly-growing cell divides into two smaller cells, what triggers the split? Is it the size the growing cell eventually reaches? Or is the real trigger the time period over which the cell keeps growing ever larger? A novel study published online today in the journal Current Biology has finally provided an answer to this long unsolved conundrum. And it’s not what many biologists expected.
October 30, 2014
October 30, 2014 —
Four undergraduate teaching laboratories for biology and chemistry students have undergone a $6.5 million makeover as part of implementation of the UC San Diego Strategic Plan. The renovated labs in York Hall will eliminate a key barrier to students accessing impacted laboratory science courses—making it easier for them to graduate in four years.
October 20, 2014
October 20, 2014 —
Physicists have come up have with a mathematical explanation for moths’ remarkable ability to find mates in the dark hundreds of meters away.
October 13, 2014
October 13, 2014 —
Long assumed to be destructive to tissues and cells, “free radicals” generated by the cell’s mitochondria—the energy producing structures in the cell—are actually beneficial to healing wounds.
That’s the conclusion of biologists at UC San Diego who discovered that “reactive oxygen species”—chemically reactive molecules containing oxygen, such as peroxides, commonly referred to as free radicals—are necessary for the proper healing of skin wounds in the laboratory roundworm C. elegans.
October 9, 2014
October 9, 2014 —
President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, a federal research effort designed to help researchers answer fundamental questions about how the brain works, has in recent months awarded scientists at UC San Diego with more than $10 million in grants, cementing the campus’s reputation as one of the world’s top centers for neuroscience research.