Technology & Engineering

Undergrads Create New Rocket Fuel as Part of Engineering Design Class

How many undergraduates can say they published a paper on a new rocket fuel? Students in a mechanical and aerospace engineering senior design class at UC San Diego can.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Elects UC San Diego Chancellor and Three Professors

Three faculty members of the University of California San Diego and its chancellor have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the country’s most esteemed honorary societies and independent policy research centers.

‘Neuron-reading’ Nanowires Could Accelerate Development of Drugs to Treat Neurological Diseases

A team led by engineers at the University of California San Diego has developed nanowires that can record the electrical activity of neurons in fine detail. The new nanowire technology could one day serve as a platform to screen drugs for neurological diseases and could enable researchers to better understand how single cells communicate in large neuronal networks.

Big Pixel Initiative Invites Public to Help Map our World

Big Pixel Initiative researchers at the University of California San Diego are partnering with Columbia University and Arizona State University to create a continuous, global map of the urbanization process, and they’re looking to the public to help make it happen.

UC San Diego Biologists Discover Timesharing Strategy in Bacteria

Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that communities of bacteria have been employing a social timesharing strategy for millions of years. The team found that bacteria faced with limited nutrients will enter an elegant timesharing strategy--a concept used in computer science, vacation homes and social applications--in which communities alternate feeding periods to maximize efficiency in consumption.

Microgrid Business Models Analyzed in UC San Diego Study

UC San Diego researchers published a systematic analysis of microgrids in Southern California to better understand business cases for private investment in microgrids. From the abstract: “Decentralization [of the electric power grid] could radically reduce customer energy costs, but without the right policy framework it could create large numbers of small decentralized sources of gas-based carbon emissions that will be difficult to control if policy makers want to achieve deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.”