News Archive

August 13, 2018 — The University of California San Diego is a national leader in transforming lives of low-income students. One of the best schools for students to get a quality education at an affordable price, Money Magazine has listed the campus No. 2 in its new 2018 Best Colleges for Your Money ranking.

August 9, 2018 — The arts and humanities will have a stronger and more influential presence on the University of California San Diego campus, thanks to a new $750,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The three-year, matching grant is the largest single award ever received by the university’s Division of Arts and Humanities from the NEH.

August 6, 2018 — Early Earth was a hot, gaseous, dusty and dynamic planet with an atmosphere and an ocean. Then its surface cooled and stabilized enough for clouds, landmasses and early life to form about four billion years ago, during what’s called the isotopic age of rocks, or the Archean Period. Atmospheric chemical byproducts from that time traveled through the air and deposited inside the planet’s oldest rock, recording life’s earliest activities like photosynthesis and oxygen production. Sulfur isotopes can serve as tracers of atmospheric oxygen and new data collected from the present-day atmosphere in China by an international team of researchers, led by the University of California San Diego, indicate remarkable similarity to the isotopic footprint found in ancient rocks. This opens up new interpretations of the Archean Period’s sulfur isotope sedimentary signature—a proxy for the origins and evolution of atmospheric oxygen and early life on Earth.

August 5, 2018 — New research in climate science indicates that extreme events, such as heat waves, the collapse of major ice sheets, and mass extinctions are becoming dramatically more probable. Though cuts in rising emissions appear unlikely with the stalled 2015 Paris agreement, University of California San Diego scientists argue that new developments present an opportunity to shift the politics around climate change. For the first time, scientists can make a strong case that no one is exempt from the extreme and immediate risks posed by a warming world.

July 31, 2018 — UC San Diego Health and Rancho Family Medical Group (RFMG) announced today that they have entered into an exclusive strategic affiliation designed to enhance the delivery of high-quality care to patients in Southwest Riverside County.

July 31, 2018 — The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego a supplemental grant valued at almost $2.4 million to extend operations of its Comet supercomputer by an additional year, through March 2021. The extension brings the value of the total Comet program to more than $27 million.

July 23, 2018 — Like small-scale Legos clicking into place, nature autonomously puts together microscopic building blocks. Living systems are biochemical machines that excel at building and moving their parts. Just as machines need energy in some form to operate, living systems are energized by consuming “fuel”—substances or food—reliably. The human body, for example, contracts muscles by the motion of tiny nanomotors—molecular devices that convert energy at the nanoscale scale to generate movement at the macroscale. The ability to mimic nature’s self-assembly would revolutionize science’s approach to synthesizing materials that could heal, contract or reconfigure.

July 16, 2018 — Currently, information-processing tools like computers and cell phones rely on electron charge to operate. A team of UC San Diego physicists, however, seek alternative systems of faster, more energy-efficient signal processing. They do this by using “excitons,” electrically neutral quasiparticles that exist in insulators, semiconductors and in some liquids. And their latest study of excitonic spin dynamics shows functional promise for our future devices.

July 16, 2018 — Fifty years ago, the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” directed by Stanley Kubrick, who co-wrote it with futurist Arthur C. Clarke, changed the world. The groundbreaking cinematic revolution offered a visionary view of the future and of humankind’s place in the cosmos. The film inspired numerous changes in science, technology and art—demonstrating the lasting impact of its ingenuity and artistry.

July 13, 2018 — Amid contentious political rhetoric and tightening borders, global trade and investment are top of mind for national leaders and companies alike. To contextualize the importance of such international connectivity, World Trade Center San Diego, with support from the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, released “Trade and Competitiveness in North America,” a research summary that quantifies trade and competitiveness in the Cali Baja mega-region, spurred in part by the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).