Seal pup season is coming to a close in California. When adult elephant seals leave the beach, pups are on their own as they prepare to live out at sea for months at a time. This means pups must learn to sleep underwater. Jessie Kendall-Barr and other researchers at the Dan Costa lab at UC Santa Cruz are studying how.

A groundbreaking exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium is bringing deep-sea animals from the midnight zone up to the surface and into public view for the first time.

As the climate crisis continues, scientists are looking into different seafoods both for their nutritional value and environmental impact.

A new green energy project at UC Berkeley involves drilling a 400 foot deep, 8-inch diameter hole under campus to research whether a new system for storing warm and cold air underground.

You can’t hear them ticking, but our bodies are full of tiny clocks—and scientists have just taken a major step toward understanding how they work. A collaboration of three University of California research labs has created a biological clock in a test tube.

“Understanding how these clocks work provides a powerful tool for future researchers to figure out–and perhaps one day even manipulate–the rhythms that govern our lives,” says Carrie Partch, a UCSC scientist who studies the biochemistry of biological clocks.

Biological clocks in our cells work together like an orchestra of timekeeping, controlling the circadian rhythms—the mental, physical and behavioral changes within a 24-hour cycle—that keep our bodies in sync with day and night. Circadian rhythms have a major influence on human health, from getting a good night’s sleep to improving chemotherapy treatments. Partch and other biological clock researchers hope that advancing our understanding of circadian rhythms will revolutionize medicine.

“There’s a growing awareness of the effect that time has on biology,” says Partch. “Understanding the environment that you live in and that you create for yourself can have a really powerful effect.”

San Jose Mercury News

Atmospheric rivers are narrow bands of moisture that travel across the lower troposphere, generally at the leading edges of massive low-pressure systems. At their peak, they can carry as much water through the sky as the Amazon River does on land. They unleash intense winds and heavy rain as they surge across the Pacific Ocean, eventually making landfall on the U.S. West Coast, contributing to many high-tide flooding events. However, the detailed relationship between atmospheric rivers and coastal high-tide flooding has not been well described.

In new research that will be presented on 17 December at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2021, scientists revealed how atmospheric rivers affected many high-tide flooding events on the U.S. Pacific coast over the past 4 decades. The team determined that depending on the location, anywhere from 10% to 63% of coastal high tide flood events observed from 1980 to 2016 occurred in confluence with atmospheric river events. Pacific Northwest sites experienced more high-tide floods and atmospheric river events overall, with the exception of more secluded Puget Sound sites.

The first surveys to count jaguars in Mexico revealed a 20% increase in the population from 2010 to 2018, up to 4,800 animals.

Conservation strategies targeted the most urgent threats to jaguars, and prioritized protecting wildlife preserves and natural corridors.

Mexico’s National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation united the government, people living near protected areas, and the private sector in plans to conserve the iconic species.

The jaguar population in Mexico increased by about 800 animals from 2010 to 2018, according to the first two censuses of the elusive carnivores ever conducted in the country. The news confirms that Mexico’s national strategy to protect jaguars is working, researchers reported recently in the journal PLOS One.

“It was incredible to see jaguars in so many places where there weren’t any before,” said ecologist Gerardo Ceballos of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, founder of Mexico’s National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation and lead author of the paper.

At Watsonville High School, students packed the quad during the first few weeks of school while classrooms sat empty. There were not enough teachers to teach them.

And though Santa Cruz County schools reopened in August—after 19 months of pandemic distance learning—the turmoil is far from over.

“This year is much harder than even last year was,” says Travis Walker, a history teacher at Watsonville High. “We’re trying to carry on like school is normal, but at pretty much every level, we’re failing to make changes to accommodate for the new normal.”

“I’ve never seen teachers as stressed as they are now, never heard as many teachers saying, ‘I need to go on leave, I can’t do this anymore,’” says Casey Carlson, president of the City of Santa Cruz teachers’ union.

Most of the teacher vacancies at Watsonville High School have been covered since September by pulling other staff from their duties. While students are no longer stranded in the quad, 20 credentialed teacher positions remain unfilled.

“Welcome back slugs!” proclaim banners in downtown Santa Cruz as UCSC students return to in-person classes. But the slimy critters behind the school’s mascot are becoming a rare find on the dusty trails beneath the redwoods.

Even scientists are having trouble spotting banana slugs these days, according to Janet Leonard, a research associate and banana slug expert at UCSC. Last winter, Leonard tried to collect banana slug species in Big Sur, a typically reliable site.

“In three trips I found three slugs,” she says.

Despite being squishy and porous, banana slugs are quite resilient. In experiments, they were able to withstand losing as much as 30% of their body weight through dehydration and still recover. But over the last 40 years, California droughts have been getting longer and more severe, straining majestic old-growth and slow gastropods alike.

After nearly two years of being closed due to the pandemic, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center is fully reopening its exhibits to members and the general public this month.

“It’s been 19 months since this place closed down, and this is the first time we’re welcoming folks back into the building,” said Seymour Center Executive Director Jonathan Hicken. “I’m excited to see this place full of people discovering and seeing the ocean the way scientists see it.”

All the iconic Seymour attractions are back on display, including the gray and blue whale skeletons outside and the indoor touch tanks and aquarium exhibits. “The seawater table is back open, the sharks are back, you can touch a shark,” said Dale Bieser, volunteer and member of the Seymour Center board.

During more than a year of pandemic shutdowns, universities have faced a barrage of challenges and barriers to hiring new faculty. Department heads have had to meet ongoing crises and adapt to the new needs of their institutions, from disrupted interviewing practices to budget restrictions and complete hiring freezes.

Here, five members of the board of directors of the Association of Medical and Graduate Departments of Biochemistry, or AMGDB, share the difficulties their departments have faced in hiring faculty during the pandemic, the lessons and new perspectives gained from the disruption, and some advice and optimism they would like to offer potential applicants. All are department heads at their institutions.

Researchers around the world are racing to develop COVID-19 vaccine options at a record pace, but the logistical challenge of getting vaccines to everyone who needs them remains daunting. Most vaccine formulas must be kept at very low temperatures during their journey from assembly to a person's arm, a major obstacle for those living in remote locations or underserved communities without access to long-term refrigeration.

In a recent paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, researchers at the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, India, address distribution challenges by designing a coronavirus vaccine that can withstand four weeks at temperatures as high as 37 degrees Celsius (about 98 degrees Fahrenheit) as well as 90 minutes at 100 C (212).

Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from gallstone disease, due to estrogen’s role in triggering cholesterol gallstone formation. While small gallstones are common, in some people cholesterol forms crystals that build up and become too large for the gallbladder to expel. The resulting gallstone disease causes excruciating pain and sometimes sepsis. The standard treatment is surgical removal of the entire organ.

Christopher Arnatt, a researcher in the department of chemistry at St. Louis University, has been working to address the role of estrogen in gallstone disease. “Having a preventative cure out there for all at-risk people would be amazing,” he said.

When Febin Varghese is not puzzling out enzyme structures in the lab, there’s a good chance he’s out on the trail.

“When I was really young, I used to watch a lot of documentaries on National Geographic and Discovery Science and such,” Varghese said. “We would watch as a family, and I think that’s where it all started.”