James Hung has collected more than 17,000 wild bees from coastal, desert and mountain areas of San Diego County. But many of his specimens bear little resemblance to the honey bees we normally think of as bees. To the casual observer, his bee collection looks more like a menagerie of Insects Gone Wild—gnat-sized bugs with long snouts, gigantic black bees and curious iridescent creatures with termite-like wings.
Turns out even the experts have difficulty wrapping their heads around the concept of how quickly – and drastically – what’s come to be called ‘big data’ has changed our daily lives. Defined as the gathering, storing and analysis of massive amounts of computerized data, both unstructured and multi-structured, big data keeps growing at almost unimaginable rates of speed.
A joint study by researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto has found that a computer system spots real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can.
The University of California, San Diego Library has become the official repository for the papers of Jonas Salk, noted physician, virologist, and humanitarian, best known for his development of the world’s first successful vaccine for the prevention of polio.
GPS technology has broadly advanced science and society’s ability to pinpoint precise information, from driving directions to tracking ground motions during earthquakes. A new technique led by a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego stands to improve weather models and hurricane forecasting by detecting precise conditions in the atmosphere through a new GPS system aboard airplanes.
A team of scientists from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, the Medical University of South Carolina and San Diego-based American Life Science Pharmaceuticals, Inc., report that cathepsin B gene knockout or its reduction by an enzyme inhibitor blocks creation of key neurotoxic pGlu-Aβ peptides linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, the candidate inhibitor drug has been shown to be safe in humans.