Could nuclear power make a significant contribution to decarbonizing the U.S. energy system over the next three or four decades? The answer: probably not and that’s cause for major concern, according to a recently published paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
It is with great and wrenching sadness that we announce the passing of Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science Jeffrey L. Elman, who died suddenly on Thursday, June 28. He was 70.
Scientists have long pondered how non-living materials coalesced into the earliest life forms on Earth. Nearly 60 years ago Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, founding professors of the physical sciences at the University of California San Diego, established a tradition of working to answer questions about life’s molecular origins. Professor Neal Devaraj continues that UC San Diego legacy by using chemistry to solve questions in biology, while also developing new tools that uniquely perform tasks within living cells. For his inventive work, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences have announced Devaraj as the 2018 Blavatnik National Laureate in Chemistry.
Human activities—from growing rice and burning coal or wood, to driving cars and testing nuclear missiles—have impacted the Earth’s atmosphere over time. Cleansing the Earth’s environment is of growing interest in the new era of humanity, unofficially called the Anthropocene epoch. To better understand the impact of the human biogeochemical footprint on Earth, scientists at the University of California San Diego are literally climbing mountains to study the planet’s sulfur cycle—an agent in cardiovascular fitness and other human health benefits and resources.
For the second year in a row, the London-based Times Higher Education ranked UC San Diego the world’s number one research university founded during the “golden age” of higher education development, in the two decades between 1945 and 1967—when higher education was characterized by rapid university expansion and increasing investment in research.
To begin to understand the field of plasmonics, picture the rich colors of stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals; or, the pixelation of a digital photo on a laptop screen. In some way, shape or form these are plasmons on display. Basically, plasmons are traveling waves of rippling electrons that can be excited in plasmas, metals or semiconductors. They lie at the heart of plasmonics. In such systems, plasmons bunch up and spread out as a group, enhancing and manipulating electromagnetic energy and concentrating optical energy beyond the diffraction limit of light. But much of this energy in common materials is quickly lost, or dissipated, as heat. And, while plasmons have found commercial applications in chemical sensors (e.g., common drug-store pregnancy tests), they have not been applied more widely or ambitiously because of high dissipation, which has frustrated scientists—until now.
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