Science & Technology

It comes as no surprise that the most common procedure done in veterinary medicine is sterilization in the form of castration. Animal science students are exposed to the procedure fairly early in their undergraduate career, and most likely will be performing the operation themselves after graduating from veterinary school. It is also no surprise that […]

Let’s just forget the racist, nostalgic diatribe pining over the good ol’ days. Let’s pretend that this isn’t a geriatric rant about how the price of gas is too damn high and that kids need to stay the hell off my lawn. OK, not really, but that’s how I feel as a naive young adult […]

We’ve all heard the tragic stories of gun violence. Columbine, Virginia Tech, the shootings in Connecticut … the stories play for weeks, if not months, on the news, showing the possible horrors guns can bring to society. These are only a few infamous events that have brought the attention of loose gun control to the […]

All people from all social classes and ethnicities are vulnerable to the ubiquitous presence of drug addiction. Yet research into a cure gets less than 2 percent of the funding of other, more mainstream diseases like cancer. To make up for this discrepancy, Karen Szumlinski, professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara, has paired her […]

Researchers from UC Davis and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have revealed the various parts of the brain that work together to recollect memories. According to Andrew Watrous, the lead author of the study and a UC Davis graduate student, other researchers and doctors have looked at the brain through fMRI […]

The dreaded hangover — the punishment of a night out for college students. With the headache, nausea and sensitivity to light, it will ruin your next day and make you regret everything when you have three midterms and a lab report due that week. What causes a hangover in the first place? “[It is a] […]

As natural disasters go, earthquakes are among the most destructive, as well as the most mysterious. Originating beyond the range of direct observation, miles below the surface, they usually strike with little or no warning. The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan on March 11, 2011 was a humbling reminder that even […]

The problem: Finals are just around the corner. We all know what that means: the library has never been so packed and you are Googling the symptoms of a caffeine overdose (just to be safe). The icing on the cake? In that post-midterm slump you decided to treat yourself to a few days off of […]

In some dialects, the term “sucker” refers to one who is easily swindled or deceived. The natural world isn’t without its share of suckers in this sense. For instance, the cuckoo is a species of bird whose key reproductive strategy involves laying eggs in the nests of unsuspecting other species. The unfortunate parents fail to […]

With the ever-rising costs of textbooks, many students are looking for cheaper, or even free, alternatives to help alleviate the financial burden. Amazon and other used book sources can provide many of the required books at a much cheaper rate than the campus bookstore, but some web-savvy students have started scouring the web for free […]

*Editor’s note: I realize that I have drastically oversimplified many of these concepts, but there is just too much information to adequately express it all. You could easily fill 500 single-spaced pages explaining just the first paragraph. For you organic chemistry people, the size of this column is limited by steric hinderance. For the non-o-chem […]

Robots. They’re everywhere around us. We work with them in factories and use them in conditions unsuitable for humans. As ubiquitous as they are, relatively few people actually understand the underpinnings and complexities of these man-made creations. Programming a robot to perform multivariable tasks is a difficult job, and overcoming these issues takes quite a […]