Why are so many of us afraid of snakes? And more curiously, why does our unconscious mind recognize them as a threat before our conscious mind? Distinguished Professor Emerita of Anthropology Lynne A. Isbell dives into how our relationship with snakes is an ancient one that reaches back to the evolutionary origins of primates.
Sameer Iyer, an associate professor of mathematics at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, recently received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program to advance his theoretical work on two enigmatic aspects of the Navier-Stokes equations: the boundary layer between an object and a fluid, and the large time dynamics of a fluid’s flow.
Using a global network of telescopes, astronomers have detected the lowest-mass dark object yet found in the universe. The work is described in two papers published Oct. 9 in Nature Astronomy and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
On Tuesday, Nov. 4, Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Adam Riess will give a free public lecture titled “The Surprising Expansion History of the Universe.” The lecture will start at 7 p.m. with a reception before the lecture at 6 p.m. The event is being hosted by the College of Letters and Science and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Your DNA may be a string of code, but it’s also made of shapes that twist and fold. By combining math and biology, UC Davis researchers are able to predict R-loops, tiny structures that influence gene expression and even diseases like cancer.
In a first-of-its-kind study appearing in Nature Communications, an interdisciplinary team from the university’s Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics (IPN) dosed mouse mothers with psilocybin and found that the drug amplified anxiety and depressive-like symptoms associated with perinatal mood disorders — mental health conditions that can arise during or after pregnancy.
UC Davis Professor Tessa Hill spoke about the benefits that can come from fast action on methane with the hosts of We Don’t Have Time during this year’s Climate Week NYC, held Sept 21-28. She was joined by Fatima Denton, director of the United Nations University-Institute for Natural Resources in Africa.
Two projects at the University of California, Davis, that use artificial intelligence to design and engineer proteins for industrial and health applications have been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The grants are part of a $32 million investment in AI and protein engineering by the NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships.
A genomic analysis of over 1,200 people from across South Africa reveals how colonial-era European, Indigenous Khoe-San peoples, and enslaved people contributed to the modern-day gene pool in South Africa.
New results from the Hayabusa-2 space probe show that asteroids formed at the very beginnings of our Solar System retained substantial amounts of water for hundreds of millions of years, potentially delivering water to Earth and other planets for much longer than previously thought.
