SCRIBD | UC SANTA BARBARA - California’s superblooms are amazing, but also fragile. Researchers have guidance for how to preserve the native flowers and landscape for the future. In remote places, hiking off trails isn’t going to destroy the wildflowers forever since seeds can lie dormant in the soil for many years. “However, in highly...
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE - Heavy rain has transformed normally dry fields and numerous backyards across the Inland Empire into soggy breeding grounds for mosquitoes. As a result, bug experts are bracing for what could be one of the region’s worst mosquito seasons in recent memory. When mosquitoes do emerge in a big way, their disruption to...
EARTH.COM - Scientists at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have discovered that wildfires are releasing a massive amount of methane gas into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. This source of methane was previously unaccounted for. It could make it challenging for states to achieve their cleaner...
ATLAS OBSCURA - Meyer lemon trees could carry the citrus tristeza virus (CTV) and flourish for years without showing any symptoms. The urgent situation incited the first meeting of the International Organization of Citrus Virologists at the The University of California, Riverside in 1957. This group of scientists and citrus growers urged drastic measures towards...
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - For decades, humans have set traps for cockroaches and laced them with sugar to attract the insects to their doom. But in response, some populations of cockroaches developed a self-preserving distaste for glucose, which allows them to steer clear of the traps. As it turns out, though, a glucose aversion can kill...
THE DAILY MAIL - More than 1.3 million Californians may be drinking high levels of manganese, enough to cause cognitive disabilities in children and Parkinson's-like symptoms in adults. The discovery was made by researchers at the University of California - Riverside (UCR), who discovered the mineral is thriving in untreated wells throughout Central Valley. The...
THE MERCURY NEWS - The same climate changes known to be reshaping mountain ecosystems in places like the Alps and Yosemite also are driving alarming new patterns in the Sonoran Desert near Palm Springs, according to the latest findings from a long-running study by UC Riverside. If temperatures continue to rise and droughts continue to...
THE HILL - Some of the Southwest’s most iconic desert trees are running for their lives in what could be a grim harbinger for more temperate ecosystems across the West. A study in Functional Ecology offers evidence that desert ecosystems, long perceived as the most resilient to climate change, may be hitting their limits. Researchers...
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - Some of this variability in motivation or ability to do hard exercise is related to genetics. For example, Theodore Garland, Jr., an evolution biologist at the University of California Riverside, wanted to understand how complex traits—like marathon running—evolve at multiple levels of organization, ranging from behavior to DNA. He has shown in...
ENTOMOLOGY TODAY - Jacqueline Serrano, Ph.D., is a research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) in the Temperate Tree Fruit and Vegetable Research Unit, in Wapato, Washington. She earned her B.S. in biology (2012) and Ph.D. in entomology (2019) at the University of California, Riverside. She first joined USDA-ARS as...
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER - When you think of plant breeding at UC Riverside, the university’s work with citrus to combat Huanglongbing, or citrus green disease, might be what comes to mind, but researchers there are also working to advance the way rice and even tomatoes are grown. The Center for Plant Cell Biology is...
THE ATLANTIC - In 2018, I paid a man a couple hundred dollars to repeatedly jam several needles into the skin of my right wrist. I felt as if I were being attacked by a microscopic cavalry of crabs. Into every jab went black ink, eventually forming the shape of double quotation marks. It was...
COSMOS - We all learned about the solar system in school and, apart from one notable demotion of Pluto to the rank of dwarf planet in 2006, things are pretty straight forward in terms of the planets and their orbits. But we still don’t understand everything about the solar system or how the planets formed...
TODAY - A Utah school district responded to claims that students were fed bugs as part of a writing assignment. A description of the assignment posted to the school’s website reads in part: “Students just wrapped up a unit on if bugs are a good source of protein or not which culminated in an extra...
POPULAR SCIENCE - While increasingly longer summers and shorter and warmer winters could mean more mosquitoes in the future, some new research might help control increasing populations of the common pest. In a study published March 16 in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers find that it’s likely that the proteins that activate mosquito sperm can...
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - For half a century, scientists have dreamed of spying erupting volcanoes on Venus. This unfathomably hot world is obfuscated by noxious clouds, but past missions have revealed the surface is covered in volcanic features. And now, thanks to the recorded memories of a long-dead spacecraft, scientists have struck scientific gold: They’ve seen...
SPACE.COM - What would happen if we had an additional planet in our solar system? Not in the fringes like the hypothetical Planet Nine way beyond Pluto, but smack in the middle of Mars and Jupiter? Such a world would wreak havoc on the orbits of most planets, according to new research that simulated a...
THE WASHINGTON POST - While we know that exercise can influence the health of the microbiome, it’s much less clear whether the effects work the other way, and your microbiome can influence your exercise. Anecdotally, people and lab mice taking antibiotics don’t exercise much, but the reason might be that they probably felt ill before...
VICE - What if a beefed-up version of Earth were suddenly dropped into the solar system between Mars and Jupiter? That’s the mind-boggling question posed in a new study that seeks to understand how “super-Earths,” a class of planets that is very common in other star systems, might affect our own solar neighborhood. The thought...
INTERESTING ENGINEERING - A new experiment shed new light on the role Jupiter has played in the evolution of life on Earth. In a series of simulations, scientists showed that an Earth-like planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter would be able to alter Earth's orbit and push it out of the solar system. Such an...