News Archive

June 29, 2018 — PET plastic, short for polyethylene terephthalate, is the fourth most-produced plastic, used to make things such as beverage bottles and carpets, most of which are not being recycled. Some scientists are hoping to change that, using supercomputers to engineer an enzyme that breaks down PET. They say it's a step on a long road toward recycling PET and other plastics into commercially valuable materials at industrial scale.

June 27, 2018 — 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.

June 26, 2018 — The University of California San Diego and Spin, the dockless personal mobility company, are announcing the results of a bikeshare partnership pilot program which was created to provide more than 36,000 students, faculty and staff with an affordable, equitable and eco-friendly way to get around campus. The pilot, which launched in December 2017, is part of a university-wide initiative to become carbon-neutral by 2025.

June 21, 2018 — 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).

June 21, 2018 — Messages of hope, perseverance and giving back were delivered to thousands of members of UC San Diego’s graduating class of 2018 who gathered Saturday morning for All Campus Commencement. The campus’ next generation of groundbreakers heard from Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla, graduating student Lucero Camarena and alumna Kimberley Phillips Boehm,’82.

June 20, 2018 — 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.

June 19, 2018 — The West Big Data Innovation Hub (WBDIH) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego is one of four regional big data hubs partner sites awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the initial development of a data storage network during the next two years.

June 18, 2018 — 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.

June 18, 2018 — 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.

June 16, 2018 — It was emotional. It was inspirational. It was moving. The University of California San Diego held its All Campus Commencement today, celebrating the graduation of approximately 7,500 graduates from the university.