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.

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.

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.

An artificial intelligence model has successfully identified coronaviruses capable of infecting humans, out of the thousands of viruses that circulate in wild animals. The model, developed by a team of biologists, mathematicians and physicists at UC Davis, could be used in surveillance for new pandemic threats. The work was published in Scientific Reports.

As we reckon with the effects of climate change, so too must the other organisms that call Earth home. But what if you couldn’t move away from your dwelling to escape a threat? What if your shelter, your refuge, was a part of your body? Shellfish face this plight. Supported by an $80,000 California Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellowship, UC Davis doctoral candidate Hannah Kempf is exploring how to unify modern scientific techniques with Indigenous shellfish management practices to help protect shellfish from ocean acidification.

The UC Davis campus is readying to host the 35th International Conference on Formal Power Series & Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC), a prestigious event that attracts a global audience and runs from July 17 to 21. Since 1988, FPSAC has brought together the brightest minds in mathematics to discuss the latest advances in algebraic and enumerative combinatorics, and to explore the field’s impact on other disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology and computer science. 

A UC Davis doctoral candidate investigating the hydrochemistry of southern Africa’s largest and most precious freshwater wetland was recently selected as a winner of the National Geographic Society’s 2023 Wayfinder Award. Goabaone Jaqueline Ramatlapeng joins 14 other trailblazers who were selected for their exemplary achievements in exploration through science, education, conservation, technology and storytelling.

How did the universe become so good at hiding quantum physics? In two new papers appearing in Physical Review Research, UC Davis and Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers introduce a new model to explain the phenomenon of decoherence, when a system’s behavior shifts from being explainable by quantum mechanics to being explainable by classical mechanics. The new model divorces the arrow of time from the go-to theoretical tool for understanding decoherence: the Caldeira-Leggett model.

UC Davis political scientists receive a $1.35 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop new models for keeping a cold war from turning hot.

Working in the lab of Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Ryosuke Motani, doctoral candidate Benjamin Faulkner is exploring how plant-eating developed in diapsids, a lineage that includes dinosaurs and modern day lizards, snakes, turtles, birds and crocodilians.