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…
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…
The University of California San Diego ranked 3rd among public research universities in the United States in this year’s annual ranking of high-quality scientific research papers by the journal Nature. In the Nature Index 2018 Annual Tables, the La Jolla campus ranked 12th in the…
For the second year in a row, the London-based Times Higher Education ranked UC San Diego the world’s number one research university founded during the “golden age” of higher education development, in the two decades between 1945 and 1967—when higher education was characterized by rapid university…
To begin to understand the field of plasmonics, picture the rich colors of stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals; or, the pixelation of a digital photo on a laptop screen. In some way, shape or form these are plasmons on display. Basically, plasmons are traveling waves of rippling electrons that…
The race is on between new antibiotics and drug-resistant bacteria—and scientists are challenged to keep up. By 2050, according to a Wellcome Trust study, deaths from deadly infections will be more common than cancer deaths. Scientists report that currently antimicrobial resistance causes 23,000 deaths…
The headaches of heavy traffic may be universal, but University of California San Diego’s Ruth Williams works to ease the pain. The Department of Mathematics professor analyzes traffic congestion within the field of stochastic networks. This area of math describes real-world systems running at near-maximum…
A new world ranking names the University of California San Diego among the globe’s top 20 best universities; the campus netted the 16th spot on among U.S. universities. The annual rankings from the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), released today, measure universities’ quality of research,…
As if taken from a Star Wars or Star Trek movie script, the term “exciton” (pronounced ˈek-sə-tän) comes from condensed matter physics. Excitons are bound states of electrons and electron holes attracted to each other by electrostatic force. They can be created both by light and transformed into…
University of California San Diego’s Wei Xiong studies the science of “in between.” Specifically, the physical chemist studies mixed states of light and matter in order to better understand how the two forms of energy interact and communicate. Xiong does this by mixing light and matter to create…