From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “JWST’s first direct spectrum of planetary-mass object reveals dynamic atmosphere”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

3.22.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Groundbreaking observations of exoplanets from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continue to emerge with the publication of the highest quality, most detailed spectrum ever obtained for a planetary-mass object outside our solar system.

This illustration conceptualizes the swirling clouds identified by the James Webb Space Telescope in the atmosphere of exoplanet VHS 1256 b. The planet is about 40 light-years away and orbits two stars that are locked in their own tight rotation. [Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)]

The object (called VHS 1256b) is a brown dwarf—a substellar object that is like a gas giant planet in most respects. The spectrum, which separates the light from the object into its component wavelengths, provides a wealth of information, including evidence of a dynamic atmosphere with clouds of silicate crystals (like hot sand condensing in the atmosphere).

A research team led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona used two instruments known as spectrographs aboard the James Webb Space Telescope, one on its Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and another on its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to observe a vast section of near- to mid-infrared light emitted by planet VHS 1256 b. They plotted the light on the spectrum, identifying signatures of silicate clouds, water, methane and carbon monoxide. They also found evidence of carbon dioxide. Credits: Image: J. Olmsted (STScI), NASA, ESA, CSA, ; Science: Brittany Miles (University of Arizona), Sasha Hinkley (University of Exeter), Beth Biller (University of Edinburgh), Andrew Skemer (University of California- Santa Cruz)

A paper on the new findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters [below].

“The richness of information in the spectrum is amazing—there’s never been a spectrum of an exoplanet like this before,” said coauthor Andrew Skemer, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

First author Brittany Miles worked on the study with Skemer as a UCSC graduate student and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona. Skemer is a co-principal investigator of the JWST Early Release Science (ERS) program for direct observations of exoplanetary systems. His team at UCSC has led the first two papers from the program, reporting JWST’s first direct image of an exoplanet in September and now its first direct spectrum of a planetary-mass object.

The planet is about 40 light-years away and orbits two stars over a 10,000-year period. “VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our sun, which makes it a great target for Webb,” Miles said. “That means the planet’s light is not mixed with light from its stars.”

Skemer explained that the main goal of the ERS programs is to test out the telescope’s instruments in all their observing modes and demonstrate their technical capabilities. The team chose VHS 1256b for the first direct spectrum because it is widely separated from its companions and is known to be similar to other gas giant exoplanets.

“In the ERS program, we’re learning how to use the telescope to do science, but of course we’re seeing new things while we’re doing that, and that’s especially the case with this spectrum,” he said. “There are so many features in the spectrum, it allows us to probe different depths of the atmosphere and really see a full picture of the planet.”

The spectrum was obtained using two spectrographic instruments, NIRSpec and MIRI, which combined to provide extremely precise measurements over a very broad range of infrared wavelengths (from 1 to 20 microns). The features observed in VHS 1256b’s atmosphere include water, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sodium, and potassium.

The methane features are not as strong as expected compared to similar objects, which Skemer said is the result of vigorous mixing of the atmosphere and chemical reactions leading to depletion of methane.

“It’s a highly dynamic atmosphere, with strong upwelling of hot gases, which are also condensing to form these silicate clouds,” he said.

According to Miles, the team has only begun to explore all the information contained in the spectrum. “We’ve identified silicates, but better understanding which grain sizes and shapes match specific types of clouds is going to take a lot of additional work,” Miles said. “This is not the final word on this planet—it is the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to fit Webb’s complex data.”

Previous ground-based observations had indicated that the luminosity of VHS 1256b is highly variable, increasing and decreasing in brightness by as much as 25 percent. Skemer said this variability is related to the silicate clouds and atmospheric turbulence.

VHS 1256b is relatively young (less than 300 million years), and its wide separation from its companion suggests that it did not form like a typical exoplanet. The spectroscopic analysis confirmed that its mass is less than 20 times that of Jupiter, but the researchers could not determine if it is above or below the mass often used as a dividing line between exoplanets and brown dwarfs (about 13 Jupiter masses). It does, however, have a very planet-like spectrum.

“It probably didn’t form like a planet, but it looks like a planet,” Skemer said.

The new observations of VHS 1256b provide a foundation for future spectroscopic observations of gas giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs with JWST, which will provide new insights into the physics and chemistry of their atmospheres.

The direct imaging ERS team includes more than 100 astronomers at institutions around the world. About 40 of them had gathered at UCSC for a summer workshop at the Other Worlds Laboratory in July, when the first data from JWST became available. Skemer, Miles, and UCSC postdoctoral scholar Aarynn Carter had been working together for years preparing for that moment.

“We knew what we wanted to do,” Skemer said. “Having people here for the OWL workshop made it easier to coordinate with everyone so they could contribute to different parts of the analysis.”

Other UCSC astronomers involved in this work include Jonathan Fortney, Sagnick Mukherjee, Bruce Macintosh, and Callie Hood, as well as Xi Xhang in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

The James Webb Space Telescope is an international mission led by NASA in collaboration with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

National Aeronautics Space Agency/European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU)/ Canadian Space Agency [Agence Spatiale Canadienne](CA) James Webb Infrared Space Telescope annotated, finally launched December 25, 2021, ten years late.

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “Young Supernova Experiment releases first set of transient survey data”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

3.15.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

UC Santa Cruz astronomers organized the survey, which has discovered thousands of cosmic explosions and other transient events of interest to astronomers and astrophysicists.

The Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) began surveying the night sky in 2019, using the Pan-STARSS1 telescope in Hawaii to detect cosmic explosions and other transient astrophysical events shortly after they occur.

Pann-STARS 1 Telescope, U Hawai’i, situated at Haleakala Observatories near the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii, altitude 3,052 m (10,013 ft)

Now, the first YSE data release is available to the entire astronomy research community.

Supernova SN2020oi in the spiral galaxy Messier 100, observed by the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), is one of the fastest declining and dimmest type-1c supernovae discovered to date. This image shows the supernova on the left and its evolving light curve on the right. (Image credit: Alex Gagliano/Young Supernova Experiment Team)

The fields (polygons) and 1975 supernovae (points) surveyed by the Young Supernova Experiment and included in Data Release 1. YSE combines its observations of over 1500 square degrees of sky taken every 3 nights with the Pan-STARRS telescopes on Haleakalā in Hawaii with publicly available observations from other surveys to discover supernovae in the hours to days after they explode. (Image credit: Gautham Narayan/Young Supernova Experiment Team)

“This survey is a discovery portal,” said Ryan Foley, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, who led the organization of the YSE survey project. “We are finding thousands of interesting objects, which we can then follow and study with additional observations to understand what we’re seeing.”

While most objects in the night sky remain the same night after night, transient or “time-domain” astrophysics focuses on dynamic sources that change on human time scales. These transient sources are typically highly energetic astrophysical events—such as supernovae, tidal disruption events, and kilonovae—which evolve quickly, rising to a maximum brightness and then fading away over days to months.

The Young Supernova Experiment surveys an area of the sky equivalent to 6,000 times the full moon (4% of the night sky) every three days and has discovered thousands of new cosmic explosions and other astrophysical transients, dozens of them just days or hours after explosion.

“We are effectively making movies of the night sky,” Foley said. “The sources we can detect this way are some of the most exciting things in the universe—the deaths of stars, the formation of black holes, and other extreme high-energy scenarios.”

The new YSE data release is the largest low-redshift multi-band data release of supernovae ever—slightly fewer than 2,000 objects—and is the first to use photometric classification and photometric redshifts extensively. This provides valuable precursor data for astronomers to study in advance of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is expected to transform time-domain astrophysics by discovering orders of magnitude more transient events per year.

“This is a sneak peak of what the Rubin Observatory will give us, so we can use it to train algorithms and prepare for when that massive data stream comes,” Foley said.

Taken with the Pan-STARRS1 telescope at the Haleakalāa Observatory in Hawaiʻi, the YSE data is transferred to the University of Hawaii’s Information Technology Center for initial processing and calibration. Image data was stored, processed, and analyzed on computing systems at UC Santa Cruz, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, and the Dark Cosmology Centre (DARK) at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Gautham Narayan, deputy director of the NCSA’s Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS), is leading the cosmological analysis for the data sample, and former CAPS graduate fellow Patrick Aleo is lead author of a paper on the data release, “The Young Supernova Experiment Data Release 1 (YSE DR1): Light Curves and Photometric Classification of 1975 Supernovae”
[ApJS].

“The data release is an important milestone for supernova science and a testament to the hard work of astronomers scattered across the world at all career stages—from undergraduate students to professors, pipeline scientists, observers and more,” Aleo said. “With further study, it will provide insights into the origin of the supernovae, the properties of their progenitor stars, and the structure of their host galaxies. I am excited to see it used as a reference point for future surveys and the research that the community produces with this dataset.”

“Much of the time-domain universe is uncharted,” Narayan said. “We still do not know the progenitor systems of many of the most common classes of transients, such as type Ia supernovae, while still using these sources to try and understand the expansion history of our universe. There are many kinds of transients that are theoretically predicted but have never been seen at all.”

Narayan added, “With high-redshift experiments such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope about to begin operations, we saw an opportunity to establish our Young Supernova Experiment to be a low-redshift anchor.

The National Science Foundation NOIRLab National Optical Astronomy Observatory Vera C. Rubin Observatory [LSST] Telescope currently under construction on the El Peñón peak at Cerro Pachón Chile, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the Gemini South Telescope and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Nancy Grace Roman Infrared Space Telescope [WFIRST] depiction.

We can probe time scales that these newer experiments cannot and find lots of transients in the nearby universe to compare to their samples in the distant universe.”

Foley’s team has published several papers based on follow-up observations of transients initially detected by YSE. But he said there is much more work to be done with the data now being released. “The real power here is in the sample sizes, not just the one-in-a-thousand events,” he said. “When you have a big sample of one kind of supernova you can really start to understand that population and its diversity, and that’s something we have not fully taken advantage of yet.”

YSE is a collaboration between UC Santa Cruz, the DARK Cosmology Centre (University of Copenhagen), the University of Illinois, and other partner institutions. In addition to Foley, other UCSC astronomers involved in the project, all coauthors of the paper, include Professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, postdoctoral scholars María José Bustamante Rosell, Phil Macias, Peter McGill, and Kirsty Taggart, and graduate students David Coulter, Kyle Davis, César Rojas-Bravo, Sierra Dodd, and Ricardo Yarza.

The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “Graphene quantum dots show promise as novel magnetic field sensors”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

3.6.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Physicists found that speeding electrons trapped in circular loops in graphene quantum dots are highly sensitive to external magnetic fields.

Physicist Jairo Velasco Jr. (left) and graduate student Zhehao Ge in Velasco’s lab at UC Santa Cruz. Behind them is the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) they use to create and study graphene quantum dots. (Photo by Tianhui Zhu)

Trapped electrons traveling in circular loops at extreme speeds inside graphene quantum dots are highly sensitive to external magnetic fields and could be used as novel magnetic field sensors with unique capabilities, according to a new study.

Electrons in graphene (an atomically thin form of carbon) behave as if they were massless, like photons, which are massless particles of light. Although graphene electrons do not move at the speed of light, they exhibit the same energy-momentum relationship as photons and can be described as “ultra-relativistic.” When these electrons are confined in a quantum dot, they travel at high velocity in circular loops around the edge of the dot.

“These current loops create magnetic moments that are very sensitive to external magnetic fields,” explained Jairo Velasco Jr., associate professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz. “The sensitivity of these current loops stems from the fact that graphene electrons are ultra-relativistic and travel at high velocity.”

Velasco is a corresponding author of a paper on the new findings, published March 6 in Nature Nanotechnology [below]. His group at UC Santa Cruz used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to create the quantum dots in graphene and study their properties. His collaborators on the project include scientists at the University of Manchester, U.K., and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

“This was highly collaborative work,” Velasco said. “We did the measurements in my lab at UCSC, and then we worked very closely with theoretical physicists at the University of Manchester to understand and interpret our data.”

The unique optical and electrical properties of quantum dots—which are often made of semiconductor nanocrystals—are due to electrons being confined within a nanoscale structure such that their behavior is governed by quantum mechanics. Because the resulting electronic structure is like that of atoms, quantum dots are often called “artificial atoms.” Velasco’s approach creates quantum dots in different forms of graphene using an electrostatic “corral” to confine graphene’s speeding electrons.

“Part of what makes this interesting is the fundamental physics of this system and the opportunity to study atomic physics in the ultra-relativistic regime,” he said. “At the same time, there are interesting potential applications for this as a new type of quantum sensor that can detect magnetic fields at the nano scale with high spatial resolution.”

Additional applications are also possible, according to co-first author Zhehao Ge, a UCSC graduate student in physics. “The findings in our work also indicate that graphene quantum dots can potentially host a giant persistent current (a perpetual electric current without the need of an external power source) in a small magnetic field,” Ge said. “Such current can potentially be used for quantum simulation and quantum computation.”

The study looked at quantum dots in both monolayer graphene and twisted bilayer graphene. The graphene rests on an insulating layer of hexagonal boron nitride, and a voltage applied with the STM tip creates charges in the boron nitride that serve to electrostatically confine electrons in the graphene.

Although Velasco’s lab uses STM to create and study graphene quantum dots, a simpler system using metal electrodes in a cross-bar array could be used in a magnetic sensor device. Because graphene is highly flexible, the sensor could be integrated with flexible substrates to enable magnetic field sensing of curved objects.

“You could have many quantum dots in an array, and this could be used to measure magnetic fields in living organisms, or to understand how the magnetic field is distributed in a material or a device,” Velasco said.

The co-first authors of the paper are Zhehao Ge, a graduate student in Velasco’s lab at UCSC, and Sergey Slizovskiy at the University of Manchester. Vladimir Fal’ko at the University of Manchester is a corresponding author, and the other coauthors include Peter Polizogopoulos, Toyanath Joshi, and David Lederman at UC Santa Cruz, and Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

Nature Nanotechnology

From the science paper.

Abstract
Materials such as graphene and topological insulators host massless Dirac fermions that enable the study of relativistic quantum phenomena. Single quantum dots and coupled quantum dots formed with massless Dirac fermions can be viewed as artificial relativistic atoms and molecules, respectively. Such structures offer a unique testbed to study atomic and molecular physics in the ultrarelativistic regime (particle speed close to the speed of light). Here we use a scanning tunnelling microscope to create and probe single and coupled electrostatically defined graphene quantum dots to unravel the magnetic-field responses of artificial relativistic nanostructures. We observe a giant orbital Zeeman splitting and orbital magnetic moment up to ~70 meV T^–1 and ~600μB (μB, Bohr magneton) in single graphene quantum dots. For coupled graphene quantum dots, Aharonov–Bohm oscillations and a strong Van Vleck paramagnetic shift of ~20 meV T^–2 are observed. Our findings provide fundamental insights into relativistic quantum dot states, which can be potentially leveraged for use in quantum information science.

For further images see the science paper.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “SpikeGPT: researcher releases code for largest-ever spiking neural network for language generation”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

3.7.23
Emily Cerf
ecerf@ucsc.edu

Language generators such as ChatGPT are gaining attention for their ability to reshape how we use search engines and change the way we interact with Artificial Intelligence. But these algorithms are both computationally expensive to run and depend on maintenance from just a few companies to avoid outages.

Jason Eshraghian

But UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jason Eshraghian created a new model for language generation that can address both of these issues. Language models typically use modern deep learning methods called neural networks, but Eshraghian is powering a language model with an alternative algorithm called a spiking neural network (SNN). He and two students have recently released the open-sourced code for the largest language-generating SNN ever, named SpikeGPT, which uses 22 times less energy than a similar model using typical deep learning. Using SNNs for language generation can have huge implications for accessibility, data security, and green computing and energy efficiency within this field.

“Brains are way more efficient than AI algorithms,” Eshraghian said. “Large scale language models rely on ridiculous amounts of compute power, and that’s pretty damn expensive. We’re taking an informed approach to borrowing principles from the brain, copying this idea that neurons are usually quiet and not transmitting anything. Using spikes is a much more efficient way to represent information.”

Neural networks in general are based on emulating how the brain processes information, and spiking neural networks are a variation that try to make the networks more efficient. Instead of constantly transmitting information throughout the network, as non-spiking networks behave, the neurons in SNNs stay in a quiet state unless they are activated, and therefore spike. This introduces a temporal dimension into the equation, because the functions are concerned with how the neurons behave over time.

Spiking neural networks, however, face their own challenges in the training of the models. Many of the optimization strategies that have been developed for regular neural networks and modern deep learning, such as backpropagation and gradient descent, cannot be easily applied to the training of SNNs because the information inputted into the system is not compatible with the training techniques. But Eshraghian has pioneered methods to circumvent these problems and apply the optimization techniques developed for traditional deep learning for the training of SNNs.

Large language models, such as ChatGPT, use a technique called self-attention, taking a sequence of data, such as a string of words, and applying a function to determine how closely each data point is related to each other. The mathematics behind this requires matrix-matrix multiplication, a complexity which is computationally expensive.

When trying to combine self-attention with SNNs, there was a similar complexity problem, until Eshraghian and his incoming graduate student Ruijie Zhu developed a technique to feed each data point in the sequence into the SNN model one by one, eliminating the need to do matrix-matrix multiplication.

“By coming up with a way to break down that backbone of language models into sequences, we completely squashed down that computational complexity without compromising on the ability of the model to generate language,” Eshraghian said. “It was taking the best of both worlds – the low complexity of sequential models and the performance of self-attention.”

In a preprint paper [below], Eshraghian describes three versions of SpikeGPT. The first is the smallest scale, at 45 million parameters, close in size to the largest-ever SNN that had been developed up to this point. Right now Eshraghian has only released the code for this smallest model, and he is still training the two larger ones.

The medium- and large-size models, at 125 million and 260 million parameters respectively, will likely become the second-largest and largest models when their training is complete and their code is released.

The preprint shows examples of language generation that these two models were able to produce, even in their not-yet fully trained states. Eshraghian found that his small-scale version is significantly more energy efficient than typical deep-learning models, and expects similar results for the other size models.

Using SNNs for language generation to power language generation in a more energy-efficient way can mean a decreased dependency on the large companies that currently dominate the language generation field. Making the technology more accessible will mitigate issues such as those that occur when gigantic servers running ChatGPT go down and render the technology useless for a time.

“If we manage to get this low-power enough to function on a scale comparable with the brain, then that could be something that everyone has locally on their devices, with less reliance on some monopolized entity,” Eshraghian said.

SpikeGPT also offers huge benefits for data security and privacy. With the language generator on a local device, data imputed into the systems are much more secure, protected from potential data-harvesting enterprises.

Eshraghian hopes that his models will show the language generation industry the vast potential of SNNs.

“This work shows that we can actually train models at the same scale with very similar performance, with far, far better energy consumption than what’s currently out there. Showing that in this paper could nudge industry in a direction to be more open to adopting SNNs as a full-fledged technique to address their power-consumption problems.”

However, this transition will require the development of brain-inspired hardware, which is a significant investment. Eshraghian hopes to work with a hardware company such as Intel to host these models, which would allow him to further demonstrate the energy-saving benefits of his SNN.

Since releasing the preprint paper and the code for the SNN, Eshraghian has seen a positive reaction from the research community. Hugging Face, a major company that hosts open-source models that are too large to live on GitHub, offered to host his model. He has also started a Discord server for people to experiment, build chatbots, and share results.

“What’s most appreciated by the community is the fact that we’ve shown it’s actually possible to do language generation with spikes.”

preprint paper

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “Marine mammal reproduction rests on a precarious tipping point of ocean resources”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

3.8.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

A pregnant female elephant seal arrives on the beach at Año Nuevo Reserve to give birth after seven months at sea. The reproductive success of female elephant seals depends on their ability to find prey and put on weight during their months-long foraging migrations. (Photo by Dan Costa)

A female northern elephant seal with her pup on the beach at Año Nuevo Reserve. (Photo by Dan Costa)
_______________________________________________________________________
From UCSC Elephant seal ‘supermoms’ produce most of the population, study finds 2019

A female elephant seal nurses her week-old pup on the beach at Año Nuevo. (Photo by Dan Costa, NMFS Permit 19108)

Elephant seal milk, which can be seen on this female with a pup about 3 weeks old, is 55% fat. The females rely entirely on stored energy reserves during the four weeks they spend nursing their pups on the beach. (Photo by B. Le Boeuf)

A bull elephant seal surrounded by females and their pups at Año Nuevo. (Photo by B. Le Boeuf)

See the full article 2019 UCSC article here.
_______________________________________________________________________

Changing environmental conditions may threaten marine mammal populations by making it harder to find prey, and a new study shows how small, gradual reductions in prey could have profound implications for animal populations.

The reproductive success of female elephant seals depends on their ability to find prey and put on weight during their months-long foraging migrations. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz studied the relationships between elephant seal behavioral strategies in the open ocean, weight gain, and lifetime success at producing pups.

Their findings, published March 8 in Ecology Letters [below], reveal a sharp threshold in the relationship between mass gain and pup production, suggesting a physiological tipping point at which insufficient mass gain leads to reproductive failure.

“We found that diving deeper during foraging allowed the females to gain more mass, and gaining more mass led to a marginal increase in their chances of survival and a massive increase in the number of pups they produced in a lifetime,” said corresponding author Roxanne Beltran, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

Beltran’s team used 25 years of data collected by the long-running UCSC elephant seal research program at Año Nuevo Reserve to investigate the influence of behavioral strategies and foraging success on survival and reproduction in female northern elephant seals. Biologgers carried by the seals recorded their activities during the months-long migrations, including where the seals went and the depth of their dives, while data collected on the beach at Año Nuevo told researchers which animals survived, how much weight they gained, and how many pups they had over their lifetime.

“Conceptually it makes sense that an individual would have to gain enough energy to survive and reproduce, but we were able to demonstrate how entwined these are and suggest when survival may be prioritized over reproduction,” said co-first author Keith Hernandez, who worked on the study as a postdoctoral scholar in Beltran’s lab at UCSC and is now at Oregon State University.

Female elephant seals give birth annually to a single pup in winter. They spend four weeks on the beach nursing their pup, relying entirely on stored energy until they can wean the pup and return to the ocean to feed. After the winter breeding season, they head out to sea for two months before returning to the colony to molt. Then they leave on a long post-molting migration, traveling thousands of miles across the North Pacific Ocean over seven to eight months.

Individual seals pursue different strategies during these foraging trips, going different distances from the coast, diving to different depths, and targeting different prey (various species of fish and squid). The researchers found that dive depth was the strongest predictor of mass gain. Deeper diving seals migrated farther from the coast and had more energy-rich diets than shallower diving seals.

The resulting mass gain directly affects a seal’s ability to produce a pup. A female that doesn’t put on enough weight won’t give birth to a pup after she returns to the beach. The threshold is around 205 kilograms (450 pounds): animals that gained less than that rarely pupped, while those gaining more than 260 kilograms (573 pounds) almost always pupped.

Survival also depends on putting on weight, and the longer a female lives the more pups she can produce. Previous research [Canadian Journal of Zoology 2019 (below)] has shown that in the long run, a relatively small number of long-lived female elephant seals produce most of the pups in the colony. These “supermoms” may live as long as 23 years and produce more than 15 pups in their lifetimes, while most females don’t live nearly as long and produce many fewer pups. The strategies that allow these moms to be so successful, however, have long been a mystery.

“We discovered that an additional 5 percent of foraging success led to a 300 percent increase in lifetime pup production due to the effects of mass gain on both survival and giving birth and raising a pup each year,” Beltran said. “These findings tell us which strategies allow these long-lived mammals to succeed at their most important job, which is to stay alive and contribute to the next generation.”

The study also provides a framework for studying demographic trends in other species, Hernandez said.

“Determining the relationship between foraging success, survival, and reproductive success can inform effective management practices once we understand the critical periods in an animal’s annual cycle,” he said.

The northern elephant seal population is currently doing quite well, increasing by about 4 percent each year, after being hunted to near extinction in the 19th century. At the same time, however, their ocean environment is changing due to climate change, and the fishing industry is exploring the potential of the deep “mesopelagic” zone where elephant seals find their most energy-rich prey, Beltran said.

“Open ocean fishing and climate change could both have dramatic impacts on food resources for elephant seals,” she said. “Elephant seals are incredibly successful now, but that could change as their environment shifts in the coming years.”

In addition to Beltran and Hernandez, the coauthors of the study include Richard Condit, Patrick Robinson, Chandra Goetsch, Marm Kilpatrick, and Daniel Costa at UC Santa Cruz, and Daniel Crocker at Sonoma State University. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

Canadian Journal of Zoology 2019
Ecology Letters

FIGURE 1

Mass gain is positively correlated with mean foraging depth, and diet and distance from the coast are positively correlated. Probability density plots of behavioural strategies (diagonal panels), correlations and p values of behavioural strategies (upper panels) and relationships between behavioural strategies (bottom panels). Blue colour indicates statistically significant relationships, and the shaded band around the linear model is a pointwise 95% confidence interval on the fitted values.

FIGURE 2

The relationships between mass gain and annual probability of producing a pup (a) or surviving (b). Seals with repeated measurements of mass gain and pupping success (seals O651, 3243, WX311) are shown in the upper panel as diamonds, squares and triangles, whereas all other seals are shown as circles. In (a), the line shows a generalised linear model fit of reproductive success (producing a pup) as a function of mass gain using a binomial distribution and a logit link (Intercept = −16.74 ± 6.06, z = −2.76, p = 0.0058; MassGain = 0.077 ± 0.026, z = 2.97, one-tailed p = 0.0015).

For further images see the science paper.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “Shrinking age distribution of spawning salmon raises climate resilience concerns”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

2.27.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Scientists measure an adult salmon during a tagging project off the coast near Bolinas. Chinook salmon return to spawn in the Sacramento River at different ages, but spawning salmon are increasingly younger and concentrated within fewer age groups. (Photo by Jeremy Notch)

By returning to spawn in the Sacramento River at different ages, Chinook salmon lessen the potential impact of a bad year and increase the stability of their population in the face of climate variability, according to a new study by scientists at UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries.

Unfortunately, spawning Chinook salmon are increasingly younger and concentrated within fewer age groups, with the oldest age classes of spawners rarely seen in recent years. The new study, published February 27 in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences [below], suggests changes in hatchery practices and fishery management could help restore the age structure of the salmon population and make it more resilient to climate change.

The researchers focused on Sacramento River fall-run Chinook salmon which contribute heavily to the salmon fisheries of California and southern Oregon. This population is particularly susceptible to the effects of increasingly severe drought conditions driven by climate change.

“As we get more variable climate conditions, with greater extremes of rainfall and drought, we are going to see more ‘boom-and-bust’ population dynamics unless we start to restore the age structure of the population, which can spread out the effects of good and bad years across time,” said senior author Eric Palkovacs, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Fisheries Collaborative Program at UC Santa Cruz.

If most of the salmon return to spawn at the same age one bad year could be devastating for the overall population. Spreading the risk over multiple years is an example of what ecologists call the “portfolio effect,” like a financial portfolio that spreads risk over multiple investments.

First author Paul Carvalho, a postdoctoral fellow with the Fisheries Collaborative Program, explained that juvenile salmon are especially vulnerable to the effects of drought as they migrate to the ocean from freshwater rivers and streams.

“We focused on the impacts of drought on the survival of juvenile salmon, but drought conditions can also increase mortality of returning adult salmon as they migrate upstream to spawn,” he said.

Carvalho developed a life cycle model of the Sacramento River fall-run Chinook salmon population to simulate the effects of different drought scenarios and other variables on the population. The model was grounded in data from field studies, such as research by NOAA Fisheries scientists that quantified the relationship between river flows and survival rates of juvenile salmon.

The model allowed the researchers to assess the effects of different mechanisms that can affect the age structure of the population. A century ago, most of the spawning salmon returning to the Sacramento River watershed were four years old, and some were as old as six years. Today, however, six-year-old fish are rarely observed and most of the spawners are three years old.

“Historically, you would have seen huge salmon coming back at older ages, but over the past century they’ve gotten smaller and younger,” Palkovacs said. “The dominant age class is now 3 years, and there are very few even at age 5, so there’s been a big shift in the age structure.”

Decreased size and age at maturity is a classic pattern of fisheries-induced evolution. A high mortality rate for older fish selects for fish that mature at earlier ages, because a fish that dies before it can spawn doesn’t pass on its genes. But fishing pressure is not the only factor driving changes in the age structure of the salmon population. Hatchery practices can also inadvertently select for earlier maturation.

“It’s pretty clear that current hatchery practices are resulting in very homogeneous populations returning at age three,” Palkovacs said. “Rather than producing a uniform product, it would be better to increase the diversity of the age structure by selecting older, larger fish and making sure you get as many of them into the spawning population as possible.”

Carvalho noted that improving the age structure of the population by selecting for fish that spend more years at sea (delayed maturation) would be most effective in combination with reduced harvest rates.

“Because the fish remain in the ocean longer, they are exposed to the fishery and other causes of mortality for a longer period, so that reduces the number returning to spawn if you don’t reduce fishing pressure on those older age classes,” he said.

Overall, the results show that maintaining or increasing the age structure through reduced mortality and delayed maturation improves the stability of the salmon population, buffering against the adverse effects of drought and making the population more resilient in an increasingly variable climate.

“Regardless of the mechanism, whether it’s reduced mortality or delayed maturation that’s driving it, increasing the diversity of the age structure will increase the stability of the population,” Carvalho said.

In addition to Carvalho and Palkovacs, the coauthors of the paper include William Satterthwaite, Michael O’Farrell, and Cameron Speir at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center. This work was supported by the Cooperative Institute for Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Systems (CIMEAS) and the NOAA Quantitative Ecology and Socioeconomics Training (QUEST) Program.

Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “Astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz wins 2023 AAAS Mentor Award”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

3.3.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz (Photo by Steve Kurtz)

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded the 2023 AAAS Mentor Award to Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

The award recognizes Ramirez-Ruiz for his direct mentoring of students and for the impact of the national program he created. Between the two, Ramirez-Ruiz has reached more than half of the students from minoritized groups who have received a Ph.D. in astronomy in the last five years.

“This award is an extraordinary honor,” said Ramirez-Ruiz, who holds UCSC’s Vera Rubin Presidential Chair for Diversity in Astronomy. “I hope my greatest contribution to science is not any particular discovery, but the creation of a new way of thinking that enables students from racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse families to make their own discoveries.”

The AAAS awards for mentoring honor individuals who have mentored significant numbers of underrepresented students and have demonstrated scholarship, activism, and community-building on behalf of underrepresented groups in STEM, as well as impacting the climate of a department, college, or institution to have significantly increased the diversity of students pursuing or completing Ph.D.s in STEM.

Ramirez-Ruiz has directly mentored 12 bachelor’s and master’s students from underrepresented backgrounds who went on to receive a Ph.D., as well as seven underrepresented students who he mentored through their Ph.D. programs. He has also been a research adviser for more than 200 students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty.

Ramirez-Ruiz created a mentoring program at UCSC called Lamat (Mayan for “star”), which is now a nationwide program supporting community college students who transfer to four-year institutions and continue on to graduate studies in astronomy. Those reached by the program are disproportionately women and historically marginalized populations—83% of the 93 participants since the program’s founding. Lamat has been transformative in increasing the number of historically marginalized students earning Ph.D.s in astrophysics.

In 2022, Ramirez-Ruiz was honored by the White House with a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. He has also received numerous awards for his research in astrophysics, including the HEAD Mid-Career Prize from the American Astronomical Society, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz Via “Sky & Telescope” : “A Fresh Look at Kepler-444’s Ancient Planetary System”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

Via

“Sky & Telescope”

2.28.23

Astronomers have taken a closer look at a system containing three stars and five planets and may have solved a mystery around its formation.

Artist’s impression of a star orbited by five planets. NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers have just taken a closer look at an unusual system containing three stars and at least five planets. In doing so they may have solved a mystery around its formation. The system, known as Kepler-444, is also around 11 billion years old, showing that such systems can be stable over a significant fraction of the universe’s current age.

One System, Three Stars, Five Planets

Located 117 light-years away toward the constellation Lyra, the system is centered around the K0 star Kepler-444 A. Then there’s a tight-knit binary pair of M-type stars orbiting it some 66 astronomical units away (known as Kepler-444 BC). A quintet of planets also orbits Kepler-444 A. All five worlds have radii between 0.4 and 0.7 Earth radius, and every one has an orbital period under 10 days.

A team of astronomers led by Zhoujian Zhang (University of California-Santa Cruz) recently set about measuring the properties of the crowded system more precisely in several different ways. They used the High Resolution Spectrograph of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas to measure Kepler-444 A’s radial velocity.

High Resolution Spectrograph on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the U Texas McDonald Observatory

U Texas McDonald Observatory Hobby-Eberly 9.1 meter Telescope, Altitude 2,070 m (6,790 ft).

The star’s speed changes as it is pulled around by the other objects in the system. Zhang’s team also measured the relative radial velocities between the binary pair and the central star using the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai’i.

Keck High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES), at the Keck I telescope, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i.

W.M. Keck Observatory two ten meter telescopes operated by California Institute of Technology and The University of California, at Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawai’i, altitude 4,207 m (13,802 ft). Credit: Caltech.

The gravitational pull of its companions causes Kepler-444 A to follow a wiggling path across the night sky. Measuring this changing position is known as astrometry. Zhang’s team conducted astrometric measurements of Kepler-444 A using Keck’s near-infrared imager (NIRC2).

Keck NIRC-2 Camera on Keck 2.

Expanding Planet-Forming Potential

Putting all these pieces of the puzzle together, the team arrived at a deeper understanding of the Kepler-444 system and its history. Previous measurements of the system suggested that the binary swings in to within 5 astronomical units of Kepler-444 A. That would have truncated Kepler-444 A’s protoplanetary disk, severely depleting the amount of planet-forming material available. It wasn’t clear how five rocky planets could have formed there.

Top panel: Observed (orange circles) and modeled (green lines) separations between Kepler-444 A and Kepler-444 BC. The black line shows the best-fitting model. Bottom panel: Observed values minus modeled values. Adapted from Zhang et al. 2023.

Now, based on their new measurements, Zhang’s team conclude that the Kepler-444 BC binary only gets within 23 astronomical units of Kepler-444 A. This wider separation would have led to a larger and more massive protoplanetary disk truncated to 8 astronomical units. The team calculate that there would have been 500 Earth masses’ worth of dust available from which to build planets. That compares to just 4 Earth masses of dust using previous estimates. Suddenly the presence of five planets is less perplexing.

As astronomers gain a greater understanding of exoplanets, it’s becoming clear that there’s more than one way to make a solar system.

The Astronomical Journal
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aca88c/pdf


Figure 1. Top left: a typical reduced and north-aligned J-band science frame of Kepler-444 observed on 2019 July 7 UT. Insets present the 20 pixel × 20 pixel vicinity of A (left) and BC (right) components with their centroids marked by plus signs, computed using a 3-pixel-radius circular region (white circle). A coronagraph mask is visible to the northeast of Kepler-444 A and does not impact our relative astrometry measurements. Top right: centroids of A and BC iteratively computed using a range of circular radii (Section 3.1). At each radius, we show the computed separation and position angle of individual science frames observed on 2019 July 7 UT (gray circle), as well as the resulting separation and position angle measurements with uncertainties computed from Equation (2) (black circle). Our final separation and position angle measurements for the J-band data are based on a circular radius of 3 pixels and are highlighted as blue stars. Bottom: analysis of K S-band data observed on 2022 July 12 UT with the same format as the top panel. The white circles in the insets and our final relative astrometry all correspond to a radius of 5 pixels.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “RNA Rescue challenge invites players to solve puzzles and advance RNA therapeutics”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

2.21.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Researchers at The University of California-Santa Cruz have developed a new puzzle challenge for the online game Eterna, enlisting players to help design a novel RNA drug to treat hemophilia A.

Introducing “OpenASO: RNA Rescue”

Researchers at The University of California-Santa Cruz working to develop novel RNA-based medicines are teaming up with a new group of collaborators—players of the online game Eterna. The game’s new “OpenASO: RNA Rescue” challenge will tap into the collective intelligence of Eterna’s 250,000 registered users to help design an RNA drug for the treatment of hemophilia A.

An antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) can bind to a messenger RNA molecule, as shown in this illustration, and, in some cases, can correct defects in RNA splicing caused by genetic mutations. (Image credit: Sharif Ezzat/Eterna)

“The Eterna player community may be able to come up with designs that we wouldn’t get using traditional screening methodologies for drug development,” said Michael Stone, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The University of California-Santa Cruz.

Eterna is an open science platform that has been engaging citizen scientists in RNA-related puzzles for over 10 years. Previous challenges have included “OpenVaccine”, to design a more stable mRNA vaccine against COVID-19, and “OpenTB”, to develop a new diagnostic device to detect tuberculosis.

Stone and his colleagues at The University of California-Santa Cruz—including molecular biologist Jeremy Sanford and geneticist Olena Vaske, both faculty in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology—have been working to develop therapies for diseases caused by genetic mutations that disrupt the processing of RNA in the cell. One approach that has shown promise in treating this type of disease is called antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapy.

In all cells RNA molecules copy information from DNA and direct the synthesis of proteins. ASOs are short segments of RNA designed to bind to specific cellular RNA molecules. They can modify gene expression or RNA processing and, in some cases, correct defects caused by genetic mutations. But developing an ASO that has the desired effect typically requires “brute force” screening efforts that can take many years to yield positive results.

“One of the goals of our project is to accelerate that discovery process,” Stone said. “That’s where Eterna comes in.”

Rhiju Das, who leads Eterna and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University School of Medicine, said Eterna players have come up with RNA design solutions that out-performed the results of supercomputers and expert research teams.

When Stone told Das about his team’s work on developing an RNA-based therapy for hemophilia A, Das said he thought the Eterna community might be able to help.

“The community of Eterna players has discovered unusual principles for designing new kinds of RNA diagnostics and stabilizing mRNA vaccines, resulting in dozens of scientific papers. It will be exciting to see what they can now do in ASO therapeutics with experimental feedback from experts at The University of California-Santa Cruz,” Das said.

Hemophilia A is caused by mutations in the gene for the blood clotting factor 8 (F8), a protein required for the normal clotting of blood to control bleeding. When a protein-coding gene like F8 is activated, its DNA code is copied into RNA molecules called messenger RNAs. Before these messenger RNAs can direct protein synthesis, however, they undergo a modification process called RNA splicing that involves removing certain sections of the sequence. This RNA splicing process can be derailed by genetic mutations.

“It turns out that many genetic diseases involve splicing defects,” Stone said. “Jeremy Sanford’s research team has identified hemophilia-causing mutations in the factor 8 gene that lead to RNA-splicing defects, and we want to target this ‘toxic RNA’ with ASOs.”

In the OpenASO: RNA Rescue challenge, Eterna players are tasked with designing an RNA oligonucleotide that can bind to the F8 messenger RNA in a way that will correct the splicing defect. “Our idea is to design an oligonucleotide to disrupt a certain tract of the RNA that modulates splicing,” Stone explained. “But as players start to dig in, they’ll come up with solutions based on their own criteria, which may have nothing to do with biology but which might actually work.”

Winning solutions are determined by the votes of the player community. The University of California-Santa Cruz researchers will then synthesize the top candidates and test them in laboratory experiments, reporting the results back to the players.

“We’re all very excited to see how this goes,” Stone said. “There is a long list of mutations that appear to cause RNA splicing defects and a lot of interest in exploring the potential for ASO therapies.”

The University of California-Santa Cruz team’s preliminary work on Factor 8 mutations was funded by a seed grant from The University of California-Santa Cruz Office of Research. In addition, critical contributions to the investigation of RNA splicing defects in F8 were made by undergraduates in Sanford’s lab, funded by a National Science Foundation grant to support course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) labs at The University of California-Santa Cruz.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.

From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “The University of California-Santa Cruz leads DOE program to train computational high-energy physicists”

From The University of California-Santa Cruz

2.3.23
Tim Stephens
stephens@ucsc.edu

Jason Nielsen, Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. Credit: UCSC.

The Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) at The University of California-Santa Cruz is leading a consortium of western research universities and national laboratories in a new program to train the next generation of computational high-energy physicists. Funded by a $3.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, the program addresses a critical need for advanced training in computational aspects of high-energy physics.

As physics and astrophysics experiments collect more data for high-precision measurements, researchers have come to depend on large-scale computing infrastructure and high-performance computing algorithms. Many collaborative research programs have dedicated experts in advanced computing technologies who are also experts in particle physics.

“Future high energy physics discoveries will require large accurate simulations and efficient collaborative software,” said Regina Rameika, associate director of science for high energy physics at DOE. “These traineeships will educate the scientists and engineers necessary to design, develop, deploy, and maintain the software and computing infrastructure essential for the future of high energy physics.”

The new Western Advanced Training for Computational High-Energy Physics (WATCHEP) program brings together six public universities and three national laboratories to create a tailored modular curriculum and offer intensive research opportunities during a two-year training period for graduate students. The specific training areas are hardware-software co-design, collaborative software infrastructure, and high-performance software and algorithms.

“The students from this program will become ‘computing ambassadors’ and take their cutting-edge expertise into the large science collaborations that are dealing with enormous datasets and computational complexity,” said WATCHEP principal investigator Jason Nielsen, director of SCIPP and professor of physics at UCSC. “A unique aspect of the program is additional training in communications, project leadership, and responsible conduct.”

The WATCHEP institutes joining The University of California-Santa Cruz in this program are The University of California-Berkeley, The University of California-Irvine, The University of California-San Diego, The Oregon State University, The University of Washington, The DOE’s Brookhaven National Lab, The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The project team has expertise in a wide range of computing topics. Some members have developed novel curricular materials for diverse graduate student cohorts in computing, others have led large computing projects for DOE science experiments, and all are currently engaged in relevant research and development projects that lend themselves to this initiative. Through the team members, students will have access to state-of-the-art computing facilities with the latest hardware accelerators and storage systems.

The training program will complement existing graduate programs by focusing on advanced topics and opportunities. An annual summer school will provide an opportunity for activities to strengthen relationships within the cohort.

“By the end of the five-year program, a new cohort of high-energy physics computing ambassadors will be ready to contribute to the science community and the DOE scientific workforce,” Nielsen said.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

UC Santa Cruz campus.

The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Founded in 1965, The University of California-Santa Cruz began with the intention to showcase progressive, cross-disciplinary undergraduate education, innovative teaching methods and contemporary architecture. The residential college system consists of ten small colleges that were established as a variation of the Oxbridge collegiate university system.

Among the Faculty is 1 Nobel Prize Laureate, 1 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences recipient, 12 members from the National Academy of Sciences, 28 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 40 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Eight University of California-Santa Cruz alumni are winners of 10 Pulitzer Prizes. The University of California-Santa Cruz is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. It is a member of the Association of American Universities, an alliance of elite research universities in the United States and Canada.

The university has five academic divisions: Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Physical & Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences. Together, they offer 65 graduate programs, 64 undergraduate majors, and 41 minors.

Popular undergraduate majors include Art, Business Management Economics, Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Psychology. Interdisciplinary programs, such as Computational Media, Feminist Studies, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and the History of Consciousness Department are also hosted alongside UCSC’s more traditional academic departments.

A joint program with The University of California-Hastings enables University of California-Santa Cruz students to earn a bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor degree in six years instead of the usual seven. The “3+3 BA/JD” Program between University of California-Santa Cruz and The University of California-Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco accepted its first applicants in fall 2014. University of California-Santa Cruz students who declare their intent in their freshman or early sophomore year will complete three years at The University of California-Santa Cruz and then move on to The University of California-Hastings to begin the three-year law curriculum. Credits from the first year of law school will count toward a student’s bachelor’s degree. Students who successfully complete the first-year law course work will receive their bachelor’s degree and be able to graduate with their University of California-Santa Cruz class, then continue at The University of California-Hastings afterwards for two years.

According to the National Science Foundation, The University of California-Santa Cruz spent $127.5 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 144th in the nation.

Although designed as a liberal arts-oriented university, The University of California-Santa Cruz quickly acquired a graduate-level natural science research component with the appointment of plant physiologist Kenneth V. Thimann as the first provost of Crown College. Thimann developed The University of California-Santa Cruz’s early Division of Natural Sciences and recruited other well-known science faculty and graduate students to the fledgling campus. Immediately upon its founding, The University of California-Santa Cruz was also granted administrative responsibility for the Lick Observatory, which established the campus as a major center for Astronomy research. Founding members of the Social Science and Humanities faculty created the unique History of Consciousness graduate program in The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first year of operation.

Famous former University of California-Santa Cruz faculty members include Judith Butler and Angela Davis.

The University of California-Santa Cruz’s organic farm and garden program is the oldest in the country, and pioneered organic horticulture techniques internationally.

As of 2015, The University of California-Santa Cruz’s faculty include 13 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 33 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Baskin School of Engineering, founded in 1997, is The University of California-Santa Cruz’s first and only professional school. Baskin Engineering is home to several research centers, including the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering and Cyberphysical Systems Research Center, which are gaining recognition, as has the work that UCSC researchers David Haussler and Jim Kent have done on the Human Genome Project, including the widely used University of California-Santa Cruz Genome Browser. The University of California-Santa Cruz administers the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics.

Off-campus research facilities maintained by The University of California-Santa Cruz include the Lick and The W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawai’i and the Long Marine Laboratory. From September 2003 to July 2016, The University of California-Santa Cruz managed a University Affiliated Research System (UARC) for the NASA Ames Research Center under a task order contract valued at more than $330 million.

The University of California-Santa Cruz was tied for 58th in the list of Best Global Universities and tied for 97th in the list of Best National Universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings. In 2017 Kiplinger ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 50th out of the top 100 best-value public colleges and universities in the nation, and 3rd in California. Money Magazine ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz 41st in the country out of the nearly 1500 schools it evaluated for its 2016 Best Colleges ranking. In 2016–2017, The University of California-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz was rated 146th in the world by Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2016 it was ranked 83rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 296th worldwide in 2016 by the QS World University Rankings.

In 2009, RePEc, an online database of research economics articles, ranked the The University of California-Santa Cruz Economics Department sixth in the world in the field of international finance. In 2007, High Times magazine placed The University of California-Santa Cruz as first among US universities as a “counterculture college.” In 2009, The Princeton Review (with Gamepro magazine) ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Game Design major among the top 50 in the country. In 2011, The Princeton Review and Gamepro Media ranked The University of California-Santa Cruz’s graduate programs in Game Design as seventh in the nation. In 2012, The University of California-Santa Cruz was ranked No. 3 in the Most Beautiful Campus list of Princeton Review.

The University of California-Santa Cruz is the home base for the Lick Observatory.

UCO Lick Observatory’s 36-inch Great Refractor telescope housed in the South (large) Dome of main building.

The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

The UCO Lick C. Donald Shane telescope is a 120-inch (3.0-meter) reflecting telescope located at the Lick Observatory, Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft).

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory

New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at The University of California-Santa Cruz’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at The University of Toronto (CA)’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at University of California’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at The University of California- San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a University of California-Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.

Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.

Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at The University of California-Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.

The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”

Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.

“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”

Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.