May 15, 2014
May 15, 2014 —
An astronomer long fascinated with contacting civilizations beyond our solar system becomes involved in a government-funded project to search the heavens for extraterrestrial radio signals. When the federal government ends funding for her project, she continues the effort with private support, eventually detects the radio signal she’s been hoping for and is chosen to make the first contact with an advanced civilization.
May 13, 2014
May 13, 2014 —
Astrophysicists at UC San Diego have measured the minute gravitational distortions in polarized radiation from the early universe and discovered that these ancient microwaves can provide an important cosmological test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
May 4, 2014
May 4, 2014 —
UC San Diego neurobiologists discovered that the motor cortex of the brain plays an active role in learning new motor movements. In a series of experiments using mice, the researchers showed in detail how those movements are learned over time.
April 23, 2014
April 23, 2014 —
Two UC San Diego faculty members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, which includes accomplished leaders from academe, business, public affairs, the humanities and the arts.
April 17, 2014
April 17, 2014 —
Scientists studying the most common form of inherited mental disability—a genetic disease called “Fragile X syndrome”—have uncovered new details about the cellular processes responsible for the condition that could lead to the development of therapies to restore some of the capabilities lost in affected individuals.
April 15, 2014
April 15, 2014 —
Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in visualizing the movement within plants of a key hormone responsible for growth and resistance to drought. The achievement will allow researchers to conduct further studies to determine how the hormone helps plants respond to drought and other environmental stresses driven by the continuing increase in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, or CO2, concentration.
April 9, 2014
April 9, 2014 —
A team of UC San Diego biologists and engineers has developed a "rapid and tunable post-translational coupling for genetic circuits."
March 20, 2014
March 20, 2014 —
James Hung has collected more than 17,000 wild bees from coastal, desert and mountain areas of San Diego County. But many of his specimens bear little resemblance to the honey bees we normally think of as bees. To the casual observer, his bee collection looks more like a menagerie of Insects Gone Wild—gnat-sized bugs with long snouts, gigantic black bees and curious iridescent creatures with termite-like wings.
March 3, 2014
March 3, 2014 —
In a detailed study of the neurons linking the eyes and brains of mice, biologists at UC San Diego discovered that the ability of our brains and those of other mammals to figure out and process in our brains directional movements is a result of the activation in the cortex of signals that originate from the direction-sensing cells in the retina of our eyes.
February 20, 2014
February 20, 2014 —
Arthur M. Wolfe, an American astrophysicist who for a decade directed the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego and achieved widespread recognition for his discoveries about star formation and the early universe, died on February 17 following a battle with cancer in La Jolla, Calif. He was 74.
