Cathy Gudis, UCR history professor, co-curated an exhibit at the Riverside Art Museum with her students and two environmental justice groups. It explores the effects of San Bernardino and Riverside counties having the most concentrated cluster of warehouses in the world.
UCR's Haizhou Liu is using "deep UV" – extremely low wavelengths (below 220nm) of ultraviolet light – to break PFAS down under ambient conditions without producing secondary waste. UCR environmental microbiologist Yujie Men is also developing microbes that could biodegrade PFAS.
Playwright and UCR Professor Rickerby Hinds has adapted the autobiographical story of abolitionist turned magician Henry “Box” Brown for the stage. The story covers what Brown endured while enslaved until he decided to ship himself to freedom in a three feet long by two feet tall and two feet wide wooden box.
Hoori Ajami, associate professor of groundwater hydrology, and a former UCR doctoral student, Sanghyun Lee, devised a new method of determining the beginning, ending, and severity of droughts that affect streams and rivers. Using 30 years of data from more than 350 locations around the U.S., they found that drought often persists in these waterways for years despite a year of heavy rainfall.
In time for Halloween, residents in the Bay Area and Central California are seeing clumps of web-like substances hanging from trees or drifting in the wind. They are most likely baby spiders, but Rick Vetter, retired Department of Entomology research associate, says Los Angeles area residents are not likely to see these same clumps.
Danielle Stevenson, a PhD candidate in environmental toxicology at UCR, is working with an indoor mushroom farm to take its spent mushroom fruiting blocks and introduce them in contaminated sites throughout Los Angeles to measure levels of toxins the mycelium have absorbed from the soil.
UCR Chancellor Kim Wilcox makes the case that it is to higher education’s best advantage to keep advocating for reform rather than abandoning a rankings methodology that has evolved — very slowly in the right direction — over the past 40 years.
Tim Lyons, distinguished professor of biogeochemistry, serves as science advisor for this PBS NOVA series on our planet's history, and is featured in the episode "Birth of the sky."
In honor of California Clean Air Day, UCR’s R'Garden, Metrolink, and the City of Riverside hosted a painting event on Tuesday, Oct. 3, alongside Riverside muralist Ekaterina Orlovie, who guided participants in creating a colorful scene promoting the outdoors and sustainable ways to get around campus. Orlovie used paint with Photio, a paint additive that helps transform surfaces into air purifying agents.
As any car-chase action movie will tell you, the gasoline used in our vehicles is flammable, explosive stuff. However, scientists working with Michael Zachariah, UCR chemical engineering professor, have created a new combustible fuel which stays safely non-flammable for transport and storage.
UCR scientists are researching the response of roots to flood stress; a key finding is that the roots of rice, a perennial, produce the lipid molecule suberin that helps water reach the shoots and helps oxygen in the shoots reach the roots. Research continues to determine if suberin can help plants combat climate change.
Chemical engineering Professor Michael Zachariah and his colleagues at UCR have invented a new type of "safe" fuel that won't ignite unless an electric current is applied, making it safer than conventional fuels that can ignite from a flame.
The University of California, Riverside's School of Medicine is marking its 10th anniversary with a significant building expansion that will cater to the increasing demand for Inland Empire healthcare professionals.
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 astrobiologist Eddie Schwieterman and biogeochemistry professor Timothy Lyons discuss the complexity of identifying life on planets around other stars, called exoplanets.
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.
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.