Science & Technology

The UC Davis cosmological physics department discovered post-collision galaxy clusters 5 million light years away which may hold the potential to illuminate many mysteries of the universe. The Musket Ball Cluster, so named because it is older and slower moving than the Bullet Cluster, represents the aftermath of two galaxy clusters which moved through each […]

UC Davis colleagues are involved in a new joint project with an agency in Japan to explore new ways of creating biofuels for regular use, especially for use by automobiles, trucks and jets. “Oil reserves won’t last forever,” said Oliver Fiehn, the director of the Metabolomics Research and Core Laboratories in the UC Davis Genome […]

The Research Works Act, a bill introduced to the House of Representatives by Congressman Darrell Issa (CA-49), proposes to keep federal agencies from distributing privately or publicly funded scientific research without the consent of the publishers. The bill, formally called HR-3699, states, “No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any […]

Ben Sacks, the director of the Canid Diversity and Conservation Group in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine has a dream: to take on the huge task of compiling an “atlas” of all the world’s dogs — whether wild, domestic, stray, or something in-between — that includes information on what they eat, how they […]

We can build it. We have the technology. Research into unmanned robotics has received ample attention lately. This is mostly due to the military’s increased use of drones to fight remotely without endangering human life. However, unmanned robots are also receiving attention from engineers who wish to use them not for waging war but for […]

Of the myriad childhood illnesses and disorders that cause anxiety to pregnant women everywhere, few are as common yet mysterious as autism. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about one in every 150 children are born with autism; however, despite decades of research, scientists are left with scant clues on the […]

I’ve often heard students swear by the warming effects of alcohol in the winter cold. Even though college always seems to be booze season, can it really help you stave off the flu and cold season? Those of you who abide by the preachings of ethanol, I have some bad news. Alcohol actually lowers core […]

Too many of us are under the comforting illusion that we, humans, are the be-all-end-all of nature’s evolutionary process. We are the smartest, we build the biggest, we fly the highest and are the most creative of anything else out there. Among the numerous fields of study we seem to have mastered, cryptography (code making […]

If you’ve been reading political news headlines from websites as diverse as Fox News, MSNBC and the Huffington Post, you are probably under the impression that the U.S. Congress has recently reaffirmed that pizza is indeed a vegetable. Skimming those headlines, it’s easy to scoff at such a ridiculous notion, and easier still to believe […]

Picture yourself as you were when you were 14. You wake up one morning and you are a pound lighter. The next morning you are another pound lighter. And again the next morning, and so on. The doctors don’t think there is anything wrong; you’re supposed to hit puberty and lose that baby fat around […]

Cold and flu season is just starting to take off, and if you scroll down your Facebook news feed, chances are that one or more of your friends will have a cold. I’ve had three friends complain about it just this week alone. It’s also likely that when you or your friend posts a status […]

A new partnership formed by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Liquid Robotics could yield a substantial advancement for scientists and people throughout the world through the creation of an unmanned sea craft with attached seismometers. The device they will be using, which looks like a surfboard with solar panels mounted on it, […]