News Briefs
Apr 22, 2020
Katherine Mackey studies the boundary between the living and the nonliving worlds. She wants to know how those two worlds define one other, as things like aquatic microorganisms can alter the chemistry of the water they live in, and the chemistry of the water can then affect the kinds of organisms able to live there.
Apr 22, 2020
In January, UCI chemistry doctoral student Brenna Biggs visited a dairy farm in Visalia, California where there are lagoons churning with cow manure. Biggs drove around the farm in a white Sprinter van owned by the University of California, Riverside, and the van had nothing in its trunk but empty space and lab equipment.
Apr 21, 2020
As the pandemic rages, Department of Earth System Science Chair Eric Rignot defines what coronavirus means for climate change and those who study it.
Apr 20, 2020
This simulated galaxy image, representing a structure spanning more than 200,000 light-years, shows the prominent plumes of young blue stars born in gas that was originally rotating and then blown radially outward by supernova explosions.
Apr 16, 2020
The air that pours into your lungs when you breathe travels, on average, at about 10 centimeters a second. But it’s often not just air you’re breathing. There can be dust, pollen, soot and bacteria in air, and now, floating inside the droplets that people emit when they cough and sneeze and talk, there can be coronavirus.
Apr 8, 2020
When a snake bites, it can inject a toxic cocktail of venom that can kill soft tissues in the body. The venom can be fatal — between 81,000 and 138,000 people die every year from snake bites, according to the World Health Organization — which is one of the reasons why Ken Shea in the Department of Chemistry, along with a team of researchers, just made a new synthetic antivenin that could help treat far more snake bites than is possible right now.
Apr 3, 2020
For work, Francisco Mercado spends his days thinking about stars and metals. He usually does his thinking at UCI in Frederick Reines Hall where he works during the week as a third-year graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. But when there’s a pandemic, Mercado can do his work just as well at home where he lives in the Campus Village. Mercado’s an astrophysicist who studies how metals distribute themselves in faraway galaxies, and since he does all his work on a computer,…
Apr 3, 2020
Coronavirus is not the only virus plaguing humanity. Human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, began befalling us in 1981, and with about 32 million people dead to date due to complications caused by the virus, it has yet to loosen its chokehold.
Mar 13, 2020
Paata Ivanisvili, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, wants to know how to answer seemingly unanswerable questions. That’s why he applied for — and was just awarded — an NSF CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation.
Mar 13, 2020
There are some problems in the field of mathematics that have been around for a long time, and which no one has ever been able to solve. One of the them, proposed in 1900 in Paris at the International Congress of Mathematicians by mathematician David Hilbert, is one that Department of Mathematics Assistant Professor Jesse Wolfson wants to solve.
Mar 13, 2020
Come July 1, Stephanie Sallum will become a new assistant professor of astronomy in the
Physics and Astronomy Department. She comes to UCI from her postdoctoral position at UC
Santa Cruz with plans to capture, along with a team of other researchers, direct images of
exoplanets that are still forming around distant stars.
Mar 10, 2020
The Simons Foundation awards fellowships to mathematicians and theoretical physicists with remarkable bodies of work.