Physicist Boris Shraiman has led an intellectually peripatetic career, to great satisfaction, success and acclaim. The theoretician, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, was recently awarded the American ...

While doing research for his first book, “Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State” (Stanford University Press, 2024), Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky visited more than 20 ...

Sonia came to science writing after working many years as a journalist. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a degree in English, she’s thrilled to be writing for her alma mater and working with the ...

November 20, 2025 Michelle Zauner’s “Crying in H Mart” named UCSB Reads 2026 book November 20, 2025 Star panel to discuss moviegoing in an evolving marketplace Photo Credit courtesy Transdisciplinary ...

John Melack researches ecological processes in lakes, wetlands and streams, as well as the hydrology and biogeochemistry of catchments. His research combines state-of-the-art measurements, modeling, ...

Groundwater is rapidly declining across the globe, often at accelerating rates. Writing in the journal Nature, UC Santa Barbara researchers present the largest assessment of groundwater levels around ...

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the ...

Mantis shrimp are small creatures known for their superlatives. Their eyes have 12 to 16 different color receptors, versus our own three, and can detect the polarization of light. Their punches are ...

On May 12, 2008, the magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan Earthquake shook central China, its destructive tremors spreading from the flank of the Longmen Shan, or Dragon's Gate Mountains, along the eastern margin ...

Numbers like π, e and φ often turn up in unexpected places in science and mathematics. Pascal’s triangle and the Fibonacci sequence also seem inexplicably widespread in nature. Then there’s the ...

From Pong and Pac-Man to Minecraft and Fortnight, video games have always been a lot of fun. Sometimes, however, gamers become fixated, compulsive or — worse — spiral into a full-blown gaming disorder ...

While Hollywood and Silicon Valley love the limelight, California is an agricultural powerhouse, too. Agricultural products sold in the Golden State totaled $59 billion in 2022. But rising ...