Physical Sciences News

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Seven Scholars Honored for Academic Excellence and Advocacy

Five Ph.D. students and two postdoctoral scholars from UC San Diego have joined a national network of researchers through the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society.

How Does Turbulence Spread?

Researchers observed turbulence in a pure environment without external interference. They discovered a sharp front separating turbulence from non-turbulent fluid, agreeing with earlier theory. However, their data about turbulence decay were not consistent with other theories.

Hearing a Molecule’s Solo Performance

Each molecule has its own unmistakable tone, but the voices of individual molecules are so faint that traditional infrared spectroscopy can only detect the collective chorus of millions of molecules at once. Now researchers at UC San Diego have found a way to hear a single molecule sing.

Four UC San Diego Faculty Earn Prestigious 2026 Sloan Research Fellowships

UC San Diego faculty members Valentina Di Santo, Fleur Ferguson, Mattia Serra and Hao Zhang have been named 2026 Sloan Research Fellows. The four scientists represent UC San Diego’s Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), the School of Physical Sciences and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

How Does the Brain Control Its Own Blood Flow?

Blood vessels in the brain are highly interconnected yet the mechanisms that regulate flow are not well studied. To learn more, UC San Diego Professor of Physics David formulated a mathematical model to predict the impact of a change in a single vessel on the flow through all the other vessels.

How Big Can a Planet Be? With Very Large Gas Giants, It Can Be Hard to Tell

The largest gas giants in our galaxy blur the line between planets and brown dwarfs. How do these very large gas giants form? UC San Diego researchers used spectral data from the James Webb Space Telescope to probe the HR 8799 star system, leading to a surprising answer to this longstanding question