Crystallized Climate

California Cavern, in Calaveras County east of Stockton, is one of hundreds of caves hidden beneath the Sierra Nevada foothills. By cracking open stalagmites from these caves, Distinguished Professor Isabel Montañez and her students have teased out a timeline of Northern California’s climate history stretching back nearly 20,000 years.

Art History Alumna Wants to Make Everyone ‘ArtCurious’

Since shortly after its launch four years ago, Jennifer Dasal’s ArtCurious podcast has been a hit, garnering kudos from art historians and nods from O: The Oprah Magazine, Salon and National Public Radio. Now Dasal (B.A., art history, ’02) has taken some of those podcast stories and added many more for her book Art Curious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History

Deep Past Is Key to Predicting Future Climate

An international team of climate scientists, including Professor Isabel Montañez at the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, suggests that researchers using numerical models to predict future climate change should include simulations of past climates in their evaluation and statement of their model performance.

'Women Also Know Stuff' Recognized Nationwide in Fight Against Political Science Gender Bias

When UC Davis political scientist Amber Boydstun co-founded the Women Also Know Stuff initiative in 2016, the idea went beyond amplifying the voices of her female colleagues around the world. A primary goal was to improve political science. In a major nod to the project’s success so far, the American Political Science Association recently awarded Boydstun and 11 colleagues a $25,000 grant to broaden the impact of its searchable online database of female political scientists.

Observing Dusty Galaxies in the Early Universe

Astronomers are getting a look at the dusty part of the distant universe with a huge field of telescopes in the high, dry Atacama desert of Chile. New results are telling us about the structure of the distant universe and yielding surprises about the evolution of galaxies.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, collects infrared light, so astronomers can learn more about distant galaxies as well as picking up objects that they could not see at all in the visible or ultraviolet spectrum.

Free Textbooks Site Passes 500M Views

LibreTexts, a free textbook project launched by UC Davis chemistry professor Delmar Larsen, has now passed a half-billion page views since it was founded in 2008 as ChemWiki.

Empathy May Be in the Eye of the Beholder

Do we always want people to show empathy? Not so, said researchers from the University of California, Davis. A recently published paper suggests that although empathy is often portrayed as a virtue, people who express empathy are not necessarily viewed favorably.

Rethinking Wildfire: Cultural Burning and the Art of Not Fighting Fire

Devastating wildfires raging across California this year have been perceived mostly as a destructive force. But prior to European arrival in California, Native Americans used fire as a restorative land management technique that cleared underbrush and encouraged new plant growth.

The practice of “cultural burning” is being explored at UC Davis by students and faculty in collaboration with tribes through the Native American studies course “Keepers of the Flame.”