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.
With microbial resistance to antibiotics growing into a major global health crisis, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in collaboration with national research institutions and private industry, are leveraging hard-won expertise to exploit a natural viral enemy of pathogenic bacteria, creating North America’s first Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH).
The University of California San Diego has been honored with the 2018 Grid Edge Innovation Award for serving as an epicenter for research, development and commercialization on smart electric vehicle (EV) charging. UC San Diego has collaborations with over 18 companies and organizations in providing 135 EV charging stations on campus. In May alone, more than 700 different EVs were charged by UC San Diego’s world-renowned microgrid.
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.
A graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and colleagues from NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries have discovered the world’s first known manta ray nursery.
Located in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas at NOAA’s Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, the juvenile manta ray habitat is the first of its kind to be described in a scientific study.
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine suggest higher levels of vitamin D are associated with decreasing risk of breast cancer. Their epidemiological study is published in the June 15 online issue of PLOS ONE, in collaboration with Creighton University, Medical University of South Carolina and GrassrootsHealth, an Encinitas-based nonprofit organization that promotes vitamin D research and its therapeutic benefits.
