News Archive

November 12, 2015 — Just six months after coming online, Comet, the new petascale supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, is already blazing new paths of discovery, thanks in part to its role as a primary resource for an assortment of science gateways that provide scientists across many research domains with easy access to its computing power.

November 12, 2015 — The Open Science Grid, a multi-disciplinary research partnership specializing in high-throughput computational services funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, has added high-performance virtualized clusters to its global infrastructure by taking advantage of a new and unique capability of Comet, the National Science Foundation’s newest supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).

November 12, 2015 — The discovery of the first micro-tectonic plate in the Indian Ocean has allowed scientists to pinpoint the exact timing of the tectonic plate collision that gave rise to the Himalayas. The international team, which includes researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego suggests that the India and Eurasia plates initially collided 47 million years ago.

November 10, 2015 — NRG EVgo, America’s leader in Electric Vehicle DC Fast Charging Solutions, has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the University of California, San Diego to help support developments in sustainable energy technology. The agreement formalizes an already strong collaboration focusing on the intersection of electric vehicles and energy storage. 

November 5, 2015 — As one of the largest El Niños in recent years continues to develop in the Pacific Ocean, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is calling on the public to help document a historic climate event.

November 2, 2015 — The NSF has announced funding for a ‘Big Data’ Innovation Hub for the Western United States intended to facilitate collaboration among the region’s technology sector and other organizations to address research challenges across areas such as precision medicine, natural resource utilization, hazard management, and metro regional development. The Western Hub is part of an NSF program announced today that includes four awards totaling more than $5 million to establish regional hubs for data science innovation.

October 30, 2015 — A new study has shown that changing ocean conditions have adversely impacted fish off California. The researchers compared data sets from the CalCOFI program and power plant cooling water intakes along the California coastline. The data show that fish abundance from both studies has declined sharply since 1970, with a 72 percent decline in overall larval fish abundance in the CalCOFI data set and a 78 percent decline in fishes from the PPI sampling.

October 29, 2015 — University of California climate and energy experts announced 10 scalable solutions for moving the world towards carbon neutrality, a practical framework that outlines both immediate and longer-term actions for staving off catastrophic climate change. The solutions were announced during the UC Summit on Carbon and Climate Neutrality that was held at UC San Diego Oct. 26-27.

October 21, 2015 — Donald Walter Wilkie, director of the Scripps Aquarium-Museum from 1965-1993 and founding director of the Stephen Birch Aquarium-Museum (now known as Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego), died on October 5, 2015, in San Diego. He was 84 years old.

October 20, 2015 — A UC San Diego study of the underground “architecture” of harvester ant nests has found that the more connected the chambers an ant colony builds near the surface entrance, the faster the ants are able to collect nearby sources of food. The reason is simple: Increased connectivity among chambers leads to more social interactions among the ants within the nest. So when one group of ants within a colony—comprised of individuals working toward a common goal—finds a particularly good source of food, it’s able to more quickly communicate that finding to the rest of the colony.