66 Million Years of Earth’s Climate History Uncovered – Puts Current Changes in Context
A continuous record of the past 66 million years shows natural climate variability due to changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun is much smaller…
UC Santa Cruz
Jaw Dropping Observations of Black Hole Devouring a Star Reveal Rapid Disk Formation
First clear confirmation of accretion disk formation in a tidal disruption event without x-ray emissions supports theoretical predictions. When a star passes too close to…
Dramatically Shrinking Salmon Are Affecting Alaska’s People and Ecosystems
A comprehensive study of four salmon species across all regions of Alaska finds salmon are returning to rivers smaller and younger than in the past….
How Galaxies Die: New Insights Into Galaxy Halos, Black Holes, and Quenching of Star Formation
A simple model explains a wide range of observations by describing a contest between galaxy halos and their central black holes that eventually turns off…
Landmark Achievement for Genomics Researchers: First Complete Assembly of Human X Chromosome
The first end-to-end (‘telomere-to-telomere’) completely gapless DNA sequence of a human chromosome is a major milestone for genomics research. Although the current human reference genome…
Evidence Pluto Started Out With Liquid Oceans That Have Been Slowly Freezing Over Time
Evidence Supports ‘Hot Start’ Scenario and Early Ocean Formation on Pluto A new study suggests that Pluto and other large Kuiper belt objects started out…
Morpheus: Powerful New AI Technique Detects and Classifies Astronomical Objects
UCSC researchers developed a deep-learning framework called Morpheus to perform pixel-level morphological classifications of objects in astronomical images. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed…
Ecologist Warns: Planting Trees Is No Panacea for Climate Change
Campaigns to plant 1 trillion trees must be undertaken with care and a commitment to long-term management. Restoration ecologist Karen Holl has a simple message…
Widely Used AI Machine Learning Methods Don’t Work as Claimed
Researchers demonstrated the mathematical impossibility of representing social networks and other complex networks using popular methods of ‘low-dimensional embeddings.’ Models and algorithms for analyzing complex…
Mysterious Interstellar Object ’Oumuamua Explained by New Formation Theory
A new scenario based on computer simulations accounts for all of the observed characteristics of the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system….
Astronomers Search for Iron Volcanism on Metallic Asteroids
Metallic asteroids are thought to have started out as blobs of molten iron floating in space. As if that’s not strange enough, scientists now think…
Mysterious Features in Active Galactic Nuclei Due to Dust Clouds
Mysterious features seen in light emitted from active galactic nuclei may be due to partial obscuration by dust clouds, according to new study. Many large…
‘Deep Learning’ Algorithm Brings New Tools to Astronomy
A ‘deep learning’ algorithm trained on images from cosmological simulations has been surprisingly successful at classifying real galaxies in Hubble images. A machine learning method…
Geophysicists Reveal Megathrust Fault Off Costa Rica
Geophysicists have obtained detailed three-dimensional images of a dangerous megathrust fault west of Costa Rica where two plates of the Earth’s crust collide. The images…
Technical Advances Provide Big Improvements in HIV Vaccine Production
Research on HIV over the past decade has led to many promising ideas for vaccines to prevent infection by the AIDS virus, but very few…
UC Researchers Reveal Black Hole Regulated Star Formation in Massive Galaxies
Young galaxies blaze with bright new stars forming at a rapid rate, but star formation eventually shuts down as a galaxy evolves. A new study,…
Hydrocarbon Haze Keeps Pluto Cooler Than Expected
Observations from NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft show that Pluto is much colder than predicted, suggesting that atmospheric haze works as a novel cooling mechanism. The…
Supercomputer Simulations Reveal an Unusual Death for Ancient Supermassive Stars
New supercomputer simulations show that non-rotating supermassive primordial stars can die as highly energetic thermonuclear supernovae powered by explosive helium burning, releasing about 10,000 times…