News

Though prescribed burns reduce wildfire threats and even improve habitat for some animals, new research shows these fires also spread stinknet, an aptly named weed currently invading superblooms across the Southwestern U.S.

Imagine an Earth-sized planet that’s not at all Earth-like. Half this world is locked in permanent daytime, the other half in permanent night, and it’s carpeted with active volcanoes. Astronomers have discovered that planet. The planet, named LP 791-18d, orbits a small red dwarf star about 90 light years away...

Even without body parts that allowed for movement, new UC Riverside research shows — for the first time — that some of Earth’s earliest animals managed to be picky about where they lived.

Land where a UC Riverside paleontology professor unearthed whole communities of Earth’s oldest animals is opening today to the public as a new national park in the Australian Outback.

UC Riverside scientists are taking a modern approach to studying a murky subject — the quantity, quality, and sources of microplastics in Los Angeles County’s urban streams.

Using a new detection method, UC Riverside scientists found a massive amount of methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, coming from wildfires — a source not currently being accounted for by state air quality managers.

UCR faculty expert on municipal water helps readers make sense of seemingly conflicting headlines about California's drought status and water supplies.

Water in California’s Central Valley contains enough manganese to cause cognitive disabilities and motor control issues in children, and Parkinson’s-like symptoms in adults.

A new UC Riverside training program will help undergraduates transition into regenerative medicine careers, infusing the Inland Empire with expertise in cutting-edge trauma and disease treatments.

Most climate models do not yet account for a new UC Riverside discovery: methane traps a great deal of heat in Earth’s atmosphere, but also creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat.

In North America’s hottest, driest desert, climate change is causing the decline of plants once thought nearly immortal and replacing them with shorter shrubs that can take advantage of sporadic rainfall and warmer temperatures.

UC Riverside scientists have significantly advanced the race to control plant responses to temperature on a rapidly warming planet. Key to this breakthrough is miRNA, a molecule nearly 200,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

With the first paper compiling all known information about planets like Venus beyond our solar system, scientists are the closest they’ve ever been to finding an analog of Earth’s “twin.”

New UC Riverside research makes it likely that proteins responsible for activating mosquito sperm can be shut down, preventing them from swimming to or fertilizing eggs.

A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment.

When global temperatures increase by 4 degrees Celsius, harmful plant emissions and dust will also increase by as much as 14 percent, according to new UC Riverside research.

UC Riverside researchers have identified tiny organisms that not only survive but thrive during the first year after a wildfire. The findings could help bring land back to life after fires that are increasing in both size and severity.

Many in California have questions about the conditions that caused the Turkish earthquake, and wonder whether the western U.S. is likely to suffer a similar fate. UC Riverside seismologist David Oglesby weighs in with answers.

New UC Riverside research suggests nitrogen released by gas-powered machines causes dry soil to let go of carbon and release it back into the atmosphere, where it can contribute to climate change.

New research from the University of Quebec declares coffee pods are “better for the planet than filtered brew.” Here to weigh in on the matter is UCR's Andrew Gray, who studies the movement of plastic pollutants through the environment.