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Evolution of Kangaroo-Like Jerboas Sheds Light on Limb Development

With their tiny forelimbs and long hindlimbs and feet, jerboas are oddly proportioned creatures that look something like a pint-size cross between a kangaroo and the common mouse. How these 33 species of desert-dwelling rodents from Northern Africa and Asia evolved their remarkable limbs over the past 50 million years from a five-toed, quadrupedal ancestor shared with the modern mouse to the three-toed bipedal jerboa is detailed in a paper published in this week’s issue of the journal Current Biology.

A Pediatric Cancer Drug Three Decades in the Making

By the age of 4, Matthew Haemsch had undergone 16 rounds of chemotherapy and a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his adrenal gland. Yet, his small body remained riddled with a rare pediatric cancer.

UC San Diego Researchers Team Up with Illumina to Speed-Read Your Microbiome

University of California, San Diego School of Medicine’s Rob Knight, PhD, and his team built a microbiome analysis platform called QIIME (pronounced “chime” and short for “Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology”). This software will now be more readily accessible to hundreds of thousands of researchers around the world through BaseSpace, a cloud-based app store offered by Illumina, a San Diego-based company that develops life science tools for the analysis of genetic variation.

U.S. News Global Rankings Name UC San Diego 19th Best University in World

The University of California, San Diego is named the 19th best university in the world in U.S. News and World Report’s second-annual global rankings, released today. The campus is one of only five public universities in the U.S. to make the top 20 in the list of the world’s top 750 colleges. The rankings measure factors such as research, global and regional reputation, international collaboration as well as number of highly-cited papers and doctorates awarded. The U.S. News Best Global Universities 2016 edition also features 22 subject rankings, in which UC San Diego received high marks for its academic areas, such as pharmacology and toxicology (4), neuroscience and behavior (6), biology and biochemistry (6), psychiatry and psychology (7), computer science (9), as well as molecular biology and genetics (10).

Four UC San Diego Faculty Receive NIH New Innovator Awards

Four professors at UC San Diego will receive New Innovator Awards from the National Institutes of Health of approximately $2.2 million over the next five years to support their “unusually innovative research,” the NIH announced today.

New Video Series Chronicles AIDS Epidemic in Tijuana

The new documentary “HIV/SIDA: The Epidemic in Tijuana” offers an unflinching look at the challenges facing researchers from the University of California, San Diego as they attempt to identify and treat people who inject drugs, sex workers, transgender women and others who are at high risk for HIV infection in Tijuana.