News Archive

May 16, 2018 — Undergraduate students from UC San Diego designed and built an extremely affordable solar-powered lantern to provide not only light, but a source of income to a partner village in the Philippines. Their engineering and business savvy earned them the top spot in the Energy and Resources category at the Big Ideas social innovation competition at UC Berkeley, a third place finish at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Ideas Festival, and a spot at the Clinton Global Initiative University.

May 9, 2018 — University of California San Diego’s Wei Xiong studies the science of “in between.” Specifically, the physical chemist studies mixed states of light and matter in order to better understand how the two forms of energy interact and communicate. Xiong does this by mixing light and matter to create hybrid quantum combinations whose properties he and his team measure and analyze. Recent research by Xiong; Bo Xiang, a Ph.D. candidate in his group; and postdoctoral scholar Raphael Ribeiro, from the Joel Yuen-Zhou Group, was published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in an article titled, “Two-dimensional infrared (2D IR) spectroscopy of vibrational polaritons.”

May 7, 2018 — Exploring space beyond our solar system, UC San Diego Professor of Physics Adam Burgasser collaborated with an international team of astronomers, led by Nikolay Nikolov from the University of Exeter, to discover that the atmosphere of an exoplanet named WASP-96b, a so-called “hot Saturn,” is cloud-free. Their research is now published in the scientific journal Nature in an article titled, “An absolute sodium abundance for a cloud-free ‘hot Saturn’ exoplanet.”

May 3, 2018 — Researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California San Diego mixed together unlikely materials to create a new hybrid form of crystalline matter that could change the practice of materials science. The findings, published in "Nature," present potential benefits to medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.

May 1, 2018 — The All of Us Research Program officially opens for enrollment Sunday, May 6. Led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), All of Us is an unprecedented effort to gather genetic, biological, environmental, health and lifestyle data from 1 million or more volunteer participants living in the United States. A major component of the federal Precision Medicine Initiative, the program’s ultimate goal is to accelerate research and improve health.

April 30, 2018 — By stretching the amount of time proteins can be simulated in their natural state of wiggling and gyrating, a team of researchers at Colorado State University -- using supercomputers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center -- has identified a critical protein structure that could serve as a molecular Achilles heel able to inhibit the replication of dengue virus and potentially other flaviviruses such as West Nile and Zika virus.

April 5, 2018 — In 1895 Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite sat at a desk in Paris and secretly wrote out his last will and testament. In that document, the man known to many as “the Merchant of Death” stipulated that his vast wealth be distributed in the form of yearly prizes to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.” In the following years, the Nobel Prize would become the world’s most prestigious honor. Each December, thousands of the world’s elites arrive in Stockholm to dine on reindeer with the King of Sweden in celebration of the achievements of humankind.

April 2, 2018 — Established in 1988 by a group of dedicated staff and grassroots activists, the University of California San Diego’s CARE at the Sexual Assault Resource Center has been a standard-bearer of survivor support services and prevention education for campus sexual assault, relationship violence and stalking. As the campus recognizes Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) in April, the center will hold events looking back at the pioneering work in support services and rape prevention, while moving forward to inform individuals how they can use their voice to promote a safe and respectful community and stop sexual violence before it happens.

April 2, 2018 — The vast majority of genetic mutations associated with cancer occur in non-coding regions of the genome, yet it’s unclear how they may influence tumor development or growth. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center identified nearly 200 mutations in non-coding DNA that play a role in cancer. Each mutation could represent a new cancer drug target. The study is published April 2 in Nature Genetics.

March 27, 2018 — UC San Diego Health has been named a “Leader in LGBTQ Healthcare Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation, the educational arm of the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer civil rights organization.