News Archive

October 29, 2015 — 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.

October 29, 2015 — Innovation. Exploration. Impact. All aptly describe the work of this year’s Founders Symposium speakers. The research and scholarly activities of our award-winning faculty advance the frontiers of knowledge, shape new fields, and disseminate solutions that transform lives. This year’s Symposium speakers exemplify UC San Diego’s impact as a public research university with TED-style talks that share how storytelling and multimedia narratives can amplify community voices; explore the prospects for a world free from hunger; and discuss ethics to guide society’s response to new science and technology. Attendees will also learn about the relational approach to change and learning; what works and what doesn’t in foreign aid; and how interactive documentary theatre can create institutional change.

October 29, 2015 — 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.

October 29, 2015 — 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.

October 29, 2015 — 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.

October 29, 2015 — A packed house at Mandeville Auditorium Oct. 22 welcomed Thomas Piketty, the French economics phenom who penned this decade’s most talked-about political book: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, has been compared to such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx. The main topic of Piketty’s work? Income inequality.

October 29, 2015 — The American Dream is less real than it used to be. On that, the evidence is clear. Incomes have grown slowly for all but the wealthiest since the late 1970s. And if you were born into a less advantaged family, the chances of making it into the middle class have diminished. But what to do? What will work best to restore the nation’s promise of upward mobility? The Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at UC San Diego will weigh 25 available options and, in two years, will release a ranking of the most effective.

October 29, 2015 — UC San Diego freshman Felipe Soltero always knew he wanted to go to college, but it was a dream that did not always seem attainable. “I knew I wanted to come to UC San Diego, but I had no idea how I would pay,” Soltero said.

October 29, 2015 — The University of California, San Diego today announced a $5 million gift from locally based medical device company ResMed, Corp. (RMD) to support sleep medicine research and care at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. The donation was made to the university in honor of ResMed’s founder and chairman of the board, Peter Farrell, M.D. ResMed is an international leader in the development of equipment to treat and manage sleep-disordered breathing and other respiratory conditions.

October 27, 2015 — Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a method that cuts down by half the time needed to make high-tech flexible sensors for medical applications. The advance brings the sensors, which can be used to monitor vital signs and brain activity, one step closer to mass-market manufacturing. The new fabrication process will allow bioengineers to broaden the reach of their research to more clinical settings. It also makes it possible to manufacture the sensors with a process similar to the printing press, said Todd Coleman, a bioengineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Researchers describe their work in a recent issue of the journal Sensors.