The drought that has the entire country in its grip is affecting more than the color of people's lawns. It may also be responsible for the proliferation of a heat-loving amoeba commonly found in warm freshwater bodies, such as lakes, rivers and hot springs, which the drought has made warmer than usual this year.

What do mollusks, starfish, and corals have in common? Aside from their shared marine habitat, they are all calcifiers--organisms that use calcium from their environment to create hard carbonate skeletons and shells for stability and protection.

The July issue of The Biological Bulletin, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory, addresses the challenges faced by these species as ocean composition changes worldwide.

Douglas McCauley, a new assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, does fieldwork in one of the most isolated places in the world -- Palmyra Atoll. About halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa, this complex of small islands and inlets in the central Pacific is surrounded by more than 15,000 acres of coral reefs and encircles three lagoons.

A new study by UC Santa Barbara researchers demonstrates that a particular neuron, the cholinergic amacrine cell, creates a “personal space” in much the same way that people distance themselves from one another in an elevator. In addition, the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this feature is heritable and identifies a genetic contributor to it, pituitary tumor-transforming gene 1 (Pttg1).

In a paper published in the journal Nature Physics today, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) reports new results on an important property of the Higgs particle, the discovery of which was announced by the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and CMS experiments on July 4, 2012. The new CMS result follows preliminary results from both experiments, each of which both reported strong evidence for the fermionic decay late in 2013.

UCSB researchers quantify the numbers of 12 different cell types in the retinal pathway and find a surprising lack of correlation among them . The circuitry of the central nervous system is immensely complex and, as a result, sometimes confounding. When scientists conduct research to unravel the inner workings at a cellular level, they are sometimes surprised by what they find.  

For the more than 5 million Americans and 35 million people worldwide suffering from Alzheimer's disease, the rate of progress in developing effective therapeutics has been unacceptably slow.   To address this urgent need, UC Santa Barbara's Kenneth S. Kosik and colleagues are calling for a parallel drug development effort in which multiple mechanisms for treating Alzheimer's are investigated simultaneously rather than the current one-at-a-time approach. In an article published today in Science Translational Medicine, the research team -- Kosik; Andrew W.

UCSB study shows that key protein in epithelial cells plays important roles in how cells sense direction

What do sled dogs and cell clusters have in common? According to research by UC Santa Barbara's Denise Montell, they both travel in groups and need a leader to make sure they all follow in the same direction.

Our human brains are filled with maps: visual maps of our external environments, and motor maps that define how we interact physically within those environments. Somehow these separate points of reference need to correspond with -- and to -- one another in order for us to act, whether it's grasping a coffee cup or hitting a tennis ball.

How that happens is the focus of a new study by scientists at UC Santa Barbara. The researchers used neuroimaging to decode how the brain transforms sensory input into action. Their findings are reported in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The high affinity of the clamp for its target and the ability to add a fluorescent label that lights up when the clamp grabs the errant DNA sequence, make these new DNA clamp nanoswitches the state-of-the-art in highly-sensitive molecular diagnostics.

The international team includes NIBIB grantee Kevin Plaxco, Ph. D., University of California, Santa Barbara and his colleagues at the University of Rome in Italy and the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. The work is described in the December 2013 issue of the American Chemical Society Journal ACS Nano.

Research by Hillary Young, assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, directly links large wildlife decline to an increased risk of human disease via changes in rodent populations.

A group of UC Santa Barbara physicists has moved one step closer to making a quantum computer a reality by demonstrating a new level of reliability in a five-qubit array. Their findings appear Thursday in the journal Nature.

Quantum computing is anything but simple. It relies on aspects of quantum mechanics such as superposition. This notion holds that any physical object, such as an atom or electron — what quantum computers use to store information — can exist in all of its theoretical states simultaneously. This could take parallel computing to new heights.

A group of professors at UCSB are working on a way to help industry and consumers keep track of potentially dangerous new chemicals.

The EPA is funding the $4.8 million initiative called the Sustainable Chemical Network. Its goal, according to the University, is to provide scientific information on some of the thousands of synthetic chemicals registered to the American Chemical Society's chemicals list each day. It will look at the possible health and environmental impacts of these new substances and give scientists the ability to quickly assess the information.

UC Santa Barbara physicist Tarun Grover has provided definitive mathematical evidence for supersymmetry in a condensed matter system.

UCSB’s Fifth-Grade Chemistry Outreach Program, now in its 15th year, is designed to nourish natural curiosity in science and to stimulate an interest in science education. The program focuses on fifth-graders because the California physical science standards for that grade include many advanced and complex scientific concepts grounded in chemistry. These standards provide an opportunity for students to experience creative scientific thinking.

A new study by a UCSB oceanographer, Dave Siegel and colleagues uses satellite observations to assess the role of the biological pump in global ocean carbon export.  They incorporated the lifecycle of phytoplankton and zooplankton — small, often microscopic animals at the bottom of the food chain — into a novel mechanistic model for assessing the global ocean carbon export. Their findings appear online in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.