College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

Mary Droser, Distinguished Professor of Geology in the UC Riverside Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, likes to say that she is the luckiest and most privileged person she knows. To anyone considering her prodigious list of professional accomplishments, the eponymous head of the Droser Paleoecology Lab on campus certainly seems to have had a...

THE DEBRIEF - On New Year’s Eve 2023, amid appearances by Joss Stone and Rod Steward on Jools Holland’s holiday ‘Musical Hootenanny’, a major 2024 revelation was alluded to: soon, we might learn that we aren’t alone in the universe. The insinuations that the discovery of alien life could be imminent all followed news from...

FORBES - Mars remains a true puzzle, but not for the reasons most people would think. Sure, there's debate over whether it ever had surface water, oceans and life. But Mars’ small mass relative to earth and Venus have been a major conundrum that has plagued planetary scientists for decades. Because the red planet’s mass...

STUDY FINDS - For the millions of people living in earthquake-prone regions, from New Zealand to California, a few minutes of warning could mean the difference between life and death. Now, by studying ancient curved scratches left behind on fault surfaces from past seismic events, scientists have discovered a way to better predict how earthquakes...

SCIENCE MAGAZINE - Some of Ian Hughes’s earliest memories are of playing in the dust and digging holes while his mom and her colleagues searched for fossils in South Australia. His mother, University of California, Riverside, paleoecologist Mary Droser, was searching for fossilized remnants of animals from the Ediacaran era, stretching from approximately 635 million...

INTERESTING ENGINEERING - Over 500 million years ago, the ancestors of a diverse group of animals known as Ecdysozoans existed. This group includes various species of insects, arachnids, and nematode worms. For a long time, the group’s early history was a blank page until now. A team of researchers has identified the earliest known ecdysozoan...

IFL SCIENCE - Complementary studies by separate teams have explored the interactions between melting ice in the North Atlantic and the flow of a crucial ocean current. One intensifies the alarm many oceanographers have already expressed: that more rapid melting will cause a crucial part of the Gulf Stream system to slow or even stop...

EARTH.COM - Under the unforgiving Arctic sun, the wintry landscape swarms with shivers and whispers that tell tales of an unrelenting rise in temperatures. This icy expanse, our last bastion of frost, is experiencing a warming spree that outpaces the global average by three to four times. But here’s a twist: new research suggests that...

LIVE SCIENCE - The earliest known animal to show evidence of an asymmetrical body lived over half a billion years ago in what is now the Australian outback, a new study reports. The 555 million-year-old creature, dubbed Quaestio simpsonorum in a study published Sept. 3 in the journal Evolution and Development, was able to move...

FORBES - Carbon Dioxide is often vilified as a bugaboo greenhouse gas. But its presence here on early earth is likely one of the reasons we are here to talk about it. Carbon dioxide, or CO2, was likely needed in large quantities in earth’s early atmosphere to raise temperatures sufficiently to enable the onset of...