The first thorough comparison of evidence for natural gas system leaks confirms that organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have underestimated methane emissions in the United States, as well as those from the natural gas industry. The review, published in the Feb. 14 issue of the journal Science, synthesizes diverse findings from more than 200 studies ranging in scope from local gas processing plants to total emissions from the United States and Canada.

 It's widely acknowledged that a common threat unites people. Individuals who were previously separated by social class, race or ethnicity come together, forming new cooperative alliances to defeat a common enemy. But does it take an external threat -- an attack like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 -- to make these social divisions melt away? 

A study by behavioral scientists at UC Santa Barbara demonstrates that peaceful cooperation has the same effect as intergroup conflict in erasing social boundaries connected to race. Their findings appear today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Carbon dioxide emissions from transportation, energy generation and built infrastructure may be major contributors to climate change, but they may not be the biggest ones. According to UC Santa Barbara environmental science professor David Cleveland, that dubious distinction could go to the agrifood system.

Researchers say that the combination of rising temperatures and protracted drought could have major environmental consequences, portending trouble for ecosystems, industries and people. “We’re at a lower level of soil moisture right now than we have been in three years,” says Dar Roberts, professor of geography. READ MORE (UCSB Featured News)

Could a comet have been responsible for the extinction of North America’s megafauna — woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths and saber-tooth tigers? UC Santa Barbara’s James Kennett, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science, posited that such an extraterrestrial event occurred 12,900 years ago.

Scott Grafton, director of UCSB's Brain Imaging Center, is one of the winners of the National Football League and GE $20 million Head Health Challenge. Grafton will receive $300,000 for research to help speed diagnosis and treatment for mild traumatic brain injury.

Researchers at UCSB and University of Bristol have found that when it comes to vision, the brain can perform more than one function without sacrificing time or accuracy. READ MORE (UCSB Featured News)

The weight-stigmatizing messages presented by the media — the ones that characterize overweight individuals as lazy, weak-willed, self-indulgent and contributing to rising health care costs — may be tipping the scales in the wrong direction. Designed to encourage weight loss, they may actually have the opposite effect.

The premier European science journal Nature opened its annual year-end special “365 DAYS: the year in science” with the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world. Physicist, Harry Nelson and team of scientists from UC Santa Barbara have been instrumental in the design, construction and filling of the sophisticated water tank that houses the LUX experiment.

The age and origin of the E280A gene mutation responsible for early-onset Alzheimer’s in a Colombian family with an unusually high incidence of the disease has been traced to a single founder dating from the 16th century.

Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor in Neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara and co-director of the campus’s Neuroscience Research Institute (NRI), conducted the study. The findings appear in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

Sepsis, the body’s response to severe infections, kills more people than breast cancer, prostate cancer and HIV/AIDS combined. On average, 30 percent of those diagnosed with sepsis die.

Among the most impressive ecological findings of the past 25 years is the ability of invasive plants to radically change ecosystem function. Yet few if any studies have examined whether ecosystem impacts of invasions persist over time, and what that means for plant communities and ecosystem restoration.

From better ways to detect post-traumatic stress disorder to a more efficient blood-clotting gauze for the battlefield, UC Santa Barbara scientists and students are conducting research to benefit the men and women who serve their country.

The November issue of the Ecological Society of America’s journal “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” contains papers from a diverse group of more than 50 ecological scientists, including UC Santa Barbara’s Joshua Schimel, professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Program. The paper he co-authored looks at how climate change affects terrestrial ecosystems.

Ben Mazin has taken the next step in astrophysical mapping by building a superconducting detector array can measure the energy of individual photons. The Array Camera for Optical to Near-infrared Spectrophotometry (ARCONS) is the first ground-based instrument based on Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs), superconducting photon detectors he developed a decade ago while earning his Ph.D. from CalTech. MKIDs are used for astronomy across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Sea urchins adapt so quickly they’re helping answer a question that’s key to understanding ocean acidification: As fossil-fuel emissions disrupt marine life, will evolution come to the rescue?

Like Darwin’s finches or Great Britain’s peppered moths, these hedgehogs of the sea increasingly embody nature’s stunning capacity for resilience.