UC Riverside researchers have found evidence, for the first time, that desert mosses may host fungi inside their tissues. The finding offers a clue about how ancient life crawled from oceans onto dry land.
Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood? The answer is almost certainly no, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. In a new working paper, Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the...
The New World screwworm lays its eggs in open wounds and burrows into skin. While human infections are rare, the insect poses an existential threat to cattle farming and dairy production. And it is now in Texas.
For generations, scientists believed a queen honeybee was made almost entirely by diet: feed an ordinary larva enough royal jelly and a ruler emerges. But new research suggests queens are created through a more elaborate process.
Scientists have identified the two biggest reasons that once-pristine rivers across the Arctic are growing cloudy with toxic orange iron particles that smother insects and suffocate fish.
Though a major fire killed a million Joshua trees in the Mojave desert, researchers found that fungi and bacteria underneath the scorched earth were totally unaffected.
QuVET at UC Riverside studies how quantum wave functions move through ultra-thin materials
Is the internet losing its soul? A collaborative study by UC Riverside computer and social scientists suggests so. As artificial intelligence increasingly answers our online questions with quick summaries and polished explanations, we may be gaining efficiency while losing something distinctly human in the process. The study found that large...
UC Riverside study shows how the brain abandons outdated strategies and adapts to new rules
In northern Argentina, one bird courts romance by snapping its wrists together, producing a sound scientists have puzzled over for decades. Now, researchers have captured the behavior in detail, revealing how scissor-tailed nightjars create one of the most curious sounds in the avian world.
For the first time, scientists have directly measured how smoking changes the mechanical behavior of human lung tissue.
Computer scientists at UC Riverside have identified troubling flaws in a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents designed to take over routine computer chores while users are away — sorting emails, organizing files, analyzing data, and handling other everyday digital tasks that might otherwise consume hours. The researchers found...
International study used data from the James Webb Space Telescope
New UCR research shows that the search for life beyond Earth could benefit from a statistical approach that prioritizes patterns rather than searching for individual chemical or molecular traces.
Amidst the many attention-grabbing headlines of 2026, there is a recent one that may have flown under the radar but shouldn’t have. On April 24, the White House dismissed the entire 22-person board that oversees the National Science Foundation. The NSF is an independent federal agency that supports science and...
Experiments shed new light on the ways gravity influences biology.
High in the forests of Hawai‘i, songbirds are stealing twigs and moss from one another’s nests. Researchers find this quiet canopy crime is surprisingly common and could threaten species already struggling to survive.
Dark matter decays could be the missing ingredient explaining how giant black holes formed before the first stars
Findings point to SIDM as a promising candidate for explaining small-scale cosmic structure
A unique hybrid honeybee found only in Southern California has demonstrated the ability to survive attacks from deadly mites.
