News

What if your house plant could tell you your water isn’t safe? Scientists are closer to realizing this vision, having engineered a plant to turn beet red in the presence of a banned, toxic pesticide.

Now is the time to identify the conditions that cause plants to die. Doing so will allow us to better protect plants by choosing conservation targets more strategically, UC Riverside botanists argue in a new paper.

Lack of rainfall is not the only measure of drought. New UC Riverside research shows that despite a series of storms, the impact of drought can persist in streams and rivers for up to 3.5 years. There are two measures of drought in streams. One measure is the total water...

A $5 million NIH grant is adding an ‘extra life’ to Parkinson’s research, with patients playing video games during brain surgery to help researchers understand better how the brain regulates movement.

UC Riverside chemical engineers have designed a fuel that ignites only with the application of electric current. Since it doesn’t react to flames and cannot start accidental fires during storage or transport, it is a “safe” liquid fuel.

This week, UC Riverside’s Botanic Gardens celebrates a major milestone — its 60th anniversary.

New UC Riverside research has revealed COVID’s Achilles heel — its dependence on key human proteins for its replication — which can be used to prevent the virus from making people sick.

Has the news about an Australian woman with a living, wriggling roundworm in her brain got you spooked? After experiencing abdominal pain and night sweats that developed into forgetfulness and depression, the 64-year-old woman was sent to a hospital. An MRI scan did reveal something unusual in her brain, but...

Indigenous land-management strategies have been largely missing from modern attempts to combat the effects of worsening climate change in California. A new $7 million grant aims to change that.

Given that many in this region have not experienced a storm as intense as the one forecasted in their lifetimes, we turned to an expert for guidance. Andrew Flores is director of UC Riverside’s Office of Emergency Management.

To some Inland Empire undergraduates, getting paid to learn microchip manufacturing, resume writing, and professional networking sounds like a dream. This year, UC Riverside is celebrating a decade of making this dream a reality.

New UC Riverside research confirms fracking causes slow, small earthquakes or tremors, whose origin was previously a mystery to scientists.

UC Riverside scientists have worked out how one unusual species of trilobite — an ancient, sea-dwelling relative of spiders and lobsters — was able to defend itself against predators and survive a bumpy ride as Earth’s oxygen levels fluctuated.

It’s a mold that causes billions in crop losses every year, infecting berries, tomatoes and most other fruits and vegetables. Now, researchers have found a way to defeat the mold without showering toxic chemicals on the crops.

A protein that packs massive DNA strands into tiny cells also moonlights as a cleaner of damaged genetic material. This discovery could help detect mitochondrial diseases, which can cause brain damage and organ failure.

Bluetongue virus, an incurable cattle and sheep-killing disease, is spread by tiny flies once thought to disappear in winter. New UCR research demonstrates that though they are harder to find when it’s cold, they remain active.

A new, $1 million project is testing a low-cost technology to make reclaimed water safer for agricultural re-use. The project will test how effectively biochar made from discarded plant materials can “polish” the water.

A groundbreaking machine-learning study has unmasked the best drug combinations to prevent COVID-19 from coming back after an initial infection. It turns out these combos are not the same for every patient.

A new material, created at the little-explored intersection of organic and inorganic chemistry, could not only enable more powerful solar panels, but it could also usher in the next generation of cancer treatments.

While honeybee workers are all the same size, that’s not true for bumblebees. Scientists aren’t sure what’s behind the wide variety in bumble body sizes, but a new UC Riverside project aims to find out.