The lineup of presentations at an extreme weather workshop taking place today at Scripps Institution of Oceanography sounds like an overview of biblical plagues, but in fact the event’s conveners said California needs to expect more episodes of what insurers would consider “acts of God.”
When it officially comes online in early January, Gordon, a unique new supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), will help researchers tackle the most vexing data-intensive challenges, from mapping genomes for personalized medicine to rapidly calculating thousands of “what-if” scenarios affecting everything from traffic patterns to climate change.
Nine professors at the University of California, San Diego have been named 2011 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest scientific organization.
Overeating, whether in children or adults, often takes place even in the absence of hunger, resulting in weight gain and obesity. Current methods to treat such overeating in youth focus on therapies that restrict what kids may eat, requiring them to track their food intake and engage in intensive exercise.
Computer scientists at UC San Diego, who set out to simulate all rainbows found in nature, wound up answering questions about the physics of rainbows as well. The scientists recreated a wide variety of rainbows – primary rainbows, secondary rainbows, redbows that form at sunset and cloudbows that form on foggy days – by using an improved method for simulating how light interacts with water drops of various shapes and sizes. Their new approach even yielded realistic simulations of difficult-to-replicate “twinned” rainbows that split their primary bow in two.
The Leapfrog Group’s annual class of top hospitals – 65 from a field of nearly 1200 – was announced December 6th in Washington, D.C. and included UC San Diego Health System in San Diego, California for the first time. The 2011 list includes university and other teaching hospitals, children’s hospitals and community hospitals in rural, suburban and urban settings. The selection is based on the results of the Leapfrog Group’s national survey that measures hospitals’ performance in crucial areas of patient safety and quality.
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