News Archive

November 14, 2018 — The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego has received two key HPCwire annual awards for 2018, recognizing the use of its Comet supercomputer in assisting scientists in finding the first evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, and for Comet’s role in a recent autism study led by a team of researchers at the university’s School of Medicine.

November 9, 2018 — An organic chemist who specializes in synthesis, catalysis and developing experimental methods, Valerie Schmidt, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego, recently published an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society outlining her team’s work on developing a new, low-cost method for chemical syntheses involving the use of ammonia.

November 7, 2018 — After eight years of study, a team of researchers from the University of California San Diego and Johns Hopkins University published new findings about how to read the body’s histone code in the Nov. 7 issue of Science Advances. The findings answer a key question in the dynamic research area of epigenetics—adding chemical tags to DNA and histone proteins to alter cell functions without changing DNA sequence. Understanding the fundamental principles of how epigenetic information is transduced in the cell eventually could lead to developing new drugs for fighting diseases like cancer.

October 16, 2018 — A consortium of nine University of California (UC), including UC San Diego, and 15 California State University (CSU) campuses recently received a five-year, $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to dramatically increase diversity in physics and astronomy through the Cal-Bridge program. Launched four years ago, Cal-Bridge creates a pathway for underrepresented minority (URM) students from multiple CSU campuses to attend PhD programs in physics and astronomy at UCs across the state. The new NSF grant allows Cal-Bridge to expand from about a dozen URM scholars per year, to as many as 50 statewide, who will benefit from substantial financial support, research opportunities and various workshops.

October 11, 2018 — The American Physical Society (APS) recently announced its 2018 fellowship class with a 77 percent increase in the number of women compared to last year’s class. According to the APS, this is the most women elected as fellows since tracking the number of females nominated and elected began in 2015, when just 13 percent of fellows were women.

September 25, 2018 — Like consumers investing in a pair of body-shaping jeans, the National Science Foundation (NSF) invests in basic research and people to mold the future. So, the government agency awarded more than $500,000 to the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to study, for the first time, the exploration of the electronic and magnetic behavior of one-dimensional (1D) metallic chains. In this case, these are ultra-short chains of atoms that can be fabricated using organic molecules called metallo-phthalocyanine (MPc)—flat molecules with a metal atom at the center commonly used in dyes present in the color of blue denim. The findings could lead to the development of new, smaller and faster electronic devices that can be used in computer memories, as well as to promising careers for future scientists.

September 19, 2018 — The words “fly like an eagle” are famously part of a song, but they may also be words that make some scientists scratch their heads. Especially when it comes to soaring birds like eagles, falcons and hawks, who seem to ascend to great heights over hills, canyons and mountain tops with ease. Scientists realize that upward currents of warm air assist the birds in their flight, but they don’t how the birds find and navigate these thermal plumes.

August 29, 2018 — Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, have been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant worth more than $818,000 to design and develop cyberinfrastructure that allows researchers to efficiently share information about their scientific data and securely verify its authenticity while preserving provenance and lineage information.

August 21, 2018 — A study by students attending this year's Research Experience for High School Students (REHS)summer internship program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, shows that many previous REHS participants followed a computer science and engineering (CSE) path into college, graduate school, and beyond.

August 20, 2018 — When it comes to fundamental physics, things can get spooky. At least that’s what Albert Einstein said when describing the phenomenon of quantum entanglement—the linkage of particles in such a way that measurements performed on one particle seem to affect the other, even when separated by great distances. “Spooky action at a distance” is how Einstein described what he couldn’t explain.