News

The Luna UCR, a new, more environmentally friendly avocado that has been 50 years in the making, may dominate American guacamole bowls in the future. The new trees are slender, shorter and have a smaller footprint. Luna trees use less water, a big advantage for a fruit that requires extensive irrigation. They also produce more fruit on less land.

David Lo, a UCR professor of biomedical sciences, led a study last year that determined the Salton Sea itself is responsible for the high incidence of asthma for those who live near it. It found that the contaminants in the sea could be causing lung inflammation in surrounding residents.

Unscientific claims of alien life and far-from-confirmed findings risk undermining the possible moment when life somewhere in the universe is discovered. "There should be a lot of value assigned to that finding," said Eddie Schwieterman, a UCR astrobiologist.

UCR scientists Jiayu Liao and Quanqing Zhang have identified what may be considered as COVID's ultimate weakness: the virus's reliance on essential human proteins to replicate and, subsequently, its ability to make individuals ill.

UCR bioengineer Jiayu Liao and analytical chemist Quanqing Zhang have identified how the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 takes advantage of our cellular machinery to replicate and spread in the body, and, importantly, a way to stop it.

UCR astrobiologist Eddie Schwieterman and biogeochemistry professor Timothy Lyons discuss the complexity of identifying life on planets around other stars, called exoplanets.

Miguel Arratia, a UCR physicist, has therefore proposed using AI to integrate measurements from multiple fundamental physics experiments (and even cosmological observations) so that theoretical physicists can quickly explore, combine and re-use the data in their own work.

Article features the research of Anandasankar Ray, a professor in UCR's Molecular Cell & Systems Biology Department, who has predicted how compounds smell based on which of the approximately 400 human odorant receptors they activate.