In an example of life imitating art, biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego have created a living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs.

Their achievement, detailed in this week’s advance online issue of the journal Nature, involved attaching a fluorescent protein to the…

LA JOLLA, CA – December 9, 2011 – New research by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has underlined the power of an endogenous anti-stress peptide in the brain to prevent and even reverse some of the cellular effects of acute alcohol and alcohol dependence in animal models. The work could lead to the development of novel drugs to treat alcoholism.

The new study, led by Scripps Research Associate Professor Marisa Roberto and now published online ahead of print by the…

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

Jeffrey B. Graham, a research physiologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, died of cancer at his home in San Diego, Calif., on Dec. 8, 2011. He was 70 years old.

Jeffrey Graham

For nearly 50 years, Graham's research focused on the evolution, comparative physiology…

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

The world's longest mountain chain stretches along the entire west coast of South America, but scientists have been struggling to explain how it formed.



Published Dec. 1 in Nature, research led by Fabio Capitanio of Monash University's School of Geosciences, Dave Stegman of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and others

describes new results of computer…

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

If the world must resort to geoengineering as a means of mitigating dangerous effects of anthropogenic climate change, how well would it understand what it is getting itself into?



Since Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Crutzen, formerly a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, lent credence to the idea of conducting large-scale efforts to influence Earth's…

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

It's no secret that scientists have extracted an abundance of data from the National Science Foundation's EarthScope-USArray and its unique transportable seismic network of 400 sensor stations leapfrogging across the United States.



But now scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego are

piggybacking onto the mobile network with instruments that go beyond…

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

Satellites have measured black carbon emissions generated by millions of wood-burning stoves throughout the developing world, but a project taking place in India's Uttar Pradesh province suggests the atmospheric heating effect of these soot emissions are at least twice as large as reported by many IPCC models.

Veerabhadran…

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

Researchers in a wide-ranging project to understand the climate forces that influence California's water supply found evidence that the character of aerosols carried across the Pacific affects how much precipitation winter storms produce.



Storms spaced one week apart from each other during February and March 2009 delivered one-fourth of the year's snowfall at a Sierra Nevada…

Is the Risk of Big Earthquakes on the Rise?

S11A-2186 · Monday, Dec. 5, 8 a.m. - 12:20 p.m. · Moscone Halls A-C

From March's devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan to last year's 8.8 quake off Chile and the 9.0 Sumatra-Andaman event of 2004, seismologists have recently wondered whether such massive events are on the rise. Perhaps such giant quakes are not independent, random events, but rather somehow connected, even triggering one another?…

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

Japanese seismologists required approximately 20 minutes to accurately determine the full magnitude of last March's massive earthquake off Japan, precious moments for disaster response activation. Now scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego are developing a next-generation detection system they believe could drastically shrink that assessment time down to two to three…

Amarnath Gupta, San Diego Supercomputer, UC San Diego

Amarnath Gupta, a researcher with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has been named a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

The Distinguished Scientist grade recognizes ACM members who have at least 15 years of…