News Archive - Environment

Shutdown of Coal-Fired Plants in U.S. Saves Lives and Improves Crop Yields

The decommissioning of coal-fired power plants in the continental United States has reduced nearby pollution and its negative impacts on human health and crop yields, according to a new University of California San Diego study.

SDSC’s Comet Supercomputer Helps Researchers Predict Carbon Dioxide Levels

The amount of carbon in the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems is likely to decline by about 10 percent through the year 2100, according to USGS researchers who used SDSC's 'Comet' supercomputer to conduct simulations.

Atmospheric River Storms Create $1 Billion-a-Year Flood Damage

Atmospheric rivers pose a $1 billion-a-year flood risk in the West, according to a study released today.

Driven by Realities of Climate Change, Composer Lei Liang Receives Classical Music’s Top Honor

UC San Diego professor and world-renowned composer Lei Liang wins the 2020 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his orchestral work that both evokes the realities of climate change and offers the enduring potential for healing.

SDSC, Wisconsin University IceCube Center Conduct GPU Cloudburst Experiment

SDSC and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) successfully completed a computational experiment as part of a multi-institution collaboration that marshalled all globally available for sale GPUs (graphics processing units) across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google.

UC San Diego Named Nation’s 6th Best Public University by U.S. News and World Report

The University of California San Diego has been named the nation’s sixth best public university, according to U.S. News and World Report’s Best Global Universities.

Using Machine Learning to Hunt Down Cybercriminals

MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at SDSC have developed a new machine learning system to identify "serial hijackers" of internet IP addresses.

Cracking How ‘Water Bears’ Survive the Extremes

Scientists have gained a new understanding of how ultra-resilient tardigrades, or “water bears,” are protected in extreme conditions. The researchers discovered that a protein named Dsup binds and forms a protective cloud against extreme survival threats such as radiation damage.

Biologists Untangle Growth and Defense in Maize, Define Key Antibiotic Pathways

Studying natural defenses in maize, a staple of diets around the world, UC San Diego biologists describe how they combined an array of scientific approaches to clearly define six genes that encode enzymes responsible for the production of key maize antibiotics known to control disease resistance.

Supercomputer Simulations Help Optimize Floating Wind Farms

Researchers used SDSC's Comet supercomputer to better understand the wake effects of large floating wind farm arrays, which have become more prevalent in recent years.