Science

Psychologist Ross Thompson’s new book, “The Brain Development Revolution: Science, the Media, and Public Policy” tells the story of the 1997 “I Am Your Child” campaign with an incisive analysis spanning how the campaign captured everyone’s attention, the backlash from scientists and the continuing reverberations today.

When researchers glimpsed the first images and data from the James Webb Space Telescope, humanity’s largest and most powerful space telescope, they noticed something peculiar. A large number of bright galaxies deep in the universe formed during a period called “Cosmic Dawn,” when the first stars and galaxies formed within 500 million years after the Big Bang. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that a theoretical model produced roughly five years ago predicted these very observations and credits them to bursty star formation.

This week, Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez returned to his alma mater in Mexico to host screenings of ‘Secrets of the Universe,’ an IMAX film that explores the formation of the universe through the eyes of Aggie researchers. Calderón de la Barca Sánchez, a UC Davis physics professor, hopes the film will inspire students to pursue STEM education and careers.

An economics doctoral candidate in the College of Letters & Science at UC Davis has been studying how 25 corporate mega-projects have affected local markets. Among the findings so far are that tax breaks and other incentives often don’t pay off by creating jobs as they were meant to.

A fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America, geochemist Kari Cooper, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, won the American Geophysical Union’s Norman L. Bowen Award, which honors a mid-career or senior scientist for outstanding contributions to the fields of petrology, volcanology and geochemistry.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that there is an association between how songs sound and their place in our emotional lives. Sourcing songs from across the globe, Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, and his fellow researchers found that people from different types of societies can successfully identify a song’s type by how it sounds, regardless of the language of its words.

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.

An international research team led by a UC Davis alum has created a new method to reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which went missing over the Indian Ocean with 239 passengers onboard.

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.