Science & Environment

Research

The Latest

Creating a New Kind of Climate Warrior

Project Surya, introduced by Scripps climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, found that women in poor Indian villages would more readily replace traditional polluting cookstoves with new clean-burning ones if the women could be more easily compensated for using such stoves and the stoves were easier to repair. If the use of cleaner stoves were scaled up, a very large but relatively short-lived contributor to global warming could be substantially diminished.

Engineers Develop New Magnetic Ink to Print Self-Healing Devices That Heal in Record Time

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego has developed a magnetic ink that can be used to make self-healing batteries, electrochemical sensors and wearable, textile-based electrical circuits. The key ingredient for the ink is microparticles oriented in a certain configuration by a magnetic field. Because of the way they’re oriented, particles on both sides of a tear are magnetically attracted to one another, causing a device printed with the ink to heal itself. The devices repair tears as wide as 3 millimeters—a record in the field of self-healing systems. Researchers detail their findings in the Nov. 2 issue of Science Advances.

Researchers Identify New Drug Target for Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Mayo Clinic provide the first evidence that the Hedgehog signaling pathway is central to the formation of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), which are frequently driven by the KIT oncogene.

DNA Day Features UC San Diego Faculty, Alumni Speakers

UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering department and Illumina Inc. co-sponsored DNA Day 2016, a day-long workshop featuring talks and cutting-edge bioinformatics and genomics research, including several speakers with dual appointments in CSE and the UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Live Long and… Facebook?

Is social media good for you, or bad? Well, it’s complicated. A study of 12 million Facebook users suggests that using Facebook is associated with living longer – when it serves to maintain and enhance your real-world social ties. Oh and you can relax and stop watching how many “likes” you get: That doesn’t seem to correlate at all.

UC San Diego Receives $2.5 Million Gift to Honor Late Scripps Oceanography Director

For the past three years, Joy Frieman has been searching to find a suitable way to honor her late husband, Edward A. Frieman, former director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Noting that, “Ed was one of the very early people to identify global warming,” Mrs. Frieman recently gave $2.5 million to endow a faculty chair and two fellowships in climate sustainability.