Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego scientists joined San Diego County Supervisor Greg Cox on Oct. 28, 2014, in a call to sustain funding for earthquake monitoring projects designed to provide critical information for the region.
A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700 degrees Celsius and survive many years outdoors in spite of exposure to air and humidity. Their work, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot program, was published recently in two separate articles in the journal Nano Energy.
What does it take to fabricate electronic and medical devices tinier than a fraction of a human hair? Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego recently invented a new method of lithography in which nanoscale robots swim over the surface of light-sensitive material to create complex surface patterns that form the sensors and electronics components on nanoscale devices. Their research, published recently in the journal Nature Communications, offers a simpler and more affordable alternative to the high cost and complexity of current state-of-the-art nanofabrication methods such as electron beam writing.
Cal-BRAIN—a statewide research grants program that aims to revolutionize our understanding of the brain—is officially underway. The first call for proposals has gone out, and the program expects to announce its first awards in early 2015.
Four undergraduate teaching laboratories for biology and chemistry students have undergone a $6.5 million makeover as part of implementation of the UC San Diego Strategic Plan. The renovated labs in York Hall will eliminate a key barrier to students accessing impacted laboratory science courses—making it easier for them to graduate in four years.
After a visit to UC San Diego in the early 1980s to give a lecture, the famed British biochemist Frederick Sanger was rewarded with a homemade T-shirt emblazoned with the letters DNA in sequins. It was the sort of joke only a person who studied genetics might immediately appreciate: DNA sequence, get it?
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