A new study has shown that changing ocean conditions have adversely impacted fish off California. The researchers compared data sets from the CalCOFI program and power plant cooling water intakes along the California coastline. The data show that fish abundance from both studies has declined sharply since 1970, with a 72 percent decline in overall larval fish abundance in the CalCOFI data set and a 78 percent decline in fishes from the PPI sampling.
The brain cells of patients with bipolar disorder, a manic-depressive illness characterized by severe swings in mood, energy and ability to carry out daily tasks, are more sensitive to stimuli than other people’s brain cells, reports an international team of scientists headed by researchers at Salk Institute for Biological Studies and University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
University of California climate and energy experts announced 10 scalable solutions for moving the world towards carbon neutrality, a practical framework that outlines both immediate and longer-term actions for staving off catastrophic climate change. The solutions were announced during the UC Summit on Carbon and Climate Neutrality that was held at UC San Diego Oct. 26-27.
Researchers at the American Gut Project, the world’s largest crowdsourced, crowdfunded science project, are celebrating a big milestone this week—in the past two years, they have raised more than $1 million from over 6,500 “citizen scientists” who have agreed to have their microbiomes sequenced.
You are only 10 percent human. Ninety percent of the cells that make up our bodies are actually bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes. And researchers are now finding that these unique microbial communities — called microbiomes — can greatly influence human and environmental health. The human gut microbiome alone has now been linked to allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and many other conditions.
The Jacobs School of Engineering and Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego have launched the Contextual Robotics Institute to develop safe and useful robotics systems. These robotics systems will function in the real world based on the contextual information they perceive, in real time. Elder care and assisted living, disaster response, medicine, transportation and environmental sensing are just some of the helpful applications that could emerge from tomorrow’s human-friendly robots.