Aluminum Isotope in the Early Solar System

A little over four and a half billion years ago, dust circling our young sun was collecting into balls that would become planets. Heat from radioactive decay melted these balls of dust into blobs of molten rock, growing as they accumulated more material. A small piece of one of these molten objects broke away and traveled around the solar system for eons before falling to Earth as a meteorite in the Algerian desert. Now, very accurate dating of this meteorite is giving new insight into the formation of the Solar System. The work, by an international team including Professor Qingzhu Yin and colleagues at the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Science and collaborators at Australian National University, was published Aug. 29 in Nature Communications.

A Career Built in Deep Time: Geochemist and Paleoclimatologist Isabel Montañez Wins Arthur L. Day Medal

Over the course of her career, Distinguished Professor Isabel Montañez has created a research niche in the fields of geochemistry and paleoclimatology: applying an Earth systems science approach to recreate Earth from eons past. For her monumental work in the geology field, Montañez recently received the Geological Society of America’s Arthur L. Day Medal.

$900K NSF Grant to Help Researchers Probe the Cognitive Brain Mechanisms Behind Free Will

Funded by a three-year $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Distinguished Professor George R. Mangun, director of the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, is launching a project to better understand the cognitive mechanisms behind realistic voluntary attention, or attention directed by an individual’s free will. The project will be conducted in collaboration with engineering colleagues at the University of Florida.

How Do You Strip a Psychedelic of Its Hallucinogenic Properties? Chemical Evolution

While people have touted the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics for decades, it’s only been within the last five years that UC Davis researchers discovered that compounds like LSD, DMT and psilocybin promote neuroplasticity, spurring the growth and strengthening of neurons and their connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. But how do you strip a psychedelic of its hallucinogenic properties? David Olson, founding director of the UC Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics, walks us through this process.

'Oppenheimer' and UC Davis

Early in the movie 'Oppenheimer,' J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) visits the Berkeley laboratory where Ernest Lawrence is building a particle accelerator to study nuclear physics. The scene reminded me that the giant magnets from one of those accelerators later came to UC Davis, forming the core of the cyclotron at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory on campus. It is one of several links between Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and UC Davis.

Study Outlines COVID-19 Pandemic’s Effects on Immigration and US Labor Market

A prevailing narrative about immigration is that migrants displace U.S.-born residents in the workforce, but new research from UC Davis economists shows that’s not the case. The study published in the Journal of Population Economics details how the COVID-19 pandemic led to a decrease in immigration to the U.S. and how jobs often filled by migrants were not filled by U.S.-born residents.    

Art History Student Gets Backstage Look During London Art Week

Alumnus Alan Templeton (B.A., art history and psychology, ‘82), a longtime supporter of arts and humanities programs at UC Davis, recently started a program to give an art history graduate student a behind the-scenes-look at the art world. Second year master's student Lawrence Stallman joined Templeton for London Art Week, visiting museums and galleries, meeting with curators, collectors and professors, and attending art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.