A look back on notable scientific happenings and achievements at UCSB during the 2024-25 school year.
Black bear on campus
By Jesse Chamberlain
BEA LEO / DAILY NEXUS
On April 15, a furry visitor came to UC Santa Barbara but it wasn’t here for a tour.
A black bear was first spotted meandering near West Campus, and shortly thereafter, near the bus loop. It was here that it managed to scurry up a tree just shy of Kerr Hall. This adventure seems like something out of a cartoon — a bear taking a beach vacation. However, this behavior isn’t abnormal for these young creatures during the springtime, according to bear ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant.
An affiliated researcher with UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, Dr. Wynn-Grant explained that springtime is when yearling bears, bears approximately one to two years old, leave their mothers. This can be a confusing experience for the animals due to their heightened sense of smell. Their strong sniffer can lead them to appealing odors, but potentially dangerous areas. Unfamiliar with new environments besides the territory their mother inhabited, the young bear was most likely trying to find a home of his own … or perhaps a snack from De La Guerra Dining Commons. After the bear was guided away from campus, it was spotted a few days later along the Mesa. After this sighting, however, the rest of his journey is unknown. There were further reports of a dead bear on April 23 near Summerland, but whether or not this was the same animal was not confirmed.
Although the black bear’s visit might be considered an inconvenience by some, his journey to campus serves as a reminder: as natural habitats continue to be restored, coexistence is a necessity. Although strange for us to see, the bear’s behavior is not unusual but customary.
Government transparency, air pollution and public health
By Jessica Arocho
SEETHA RAO / DAILY NEXUS
It is widely known that air pollution poses a major risk for both public health and the Earth’s climate, yet efforts to hinder the truth about these negative impacts are still underway. UC Santa Barbara researchers such as Sarah Anderson and Mark Buntaine of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management dedicate their work to government transparency on these topics.
Anderson and Buntaine were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) for their research that investigated the effects of transparency from Chinese municipal governments on air pollution amounts and overall public health. In order to determine the direct influence of government transparency, their research team needed to analyze the effects independent of additional pressures to perform ethically. So, 50 cities in China were randomly assigned to two groups: 25 were presented with public ratings representing transparent environmental information (e.g. air quality data and pollution inspections), and the remaining half were not rated.
Analyzing the differences between the two groups required records of pollution violations from organizations, government inspections and air quality. These measurements allowed researchers to underscore the direct results of transparency while excluding additional possible explanations for the changes.
Now, what exactly could this mean for countries like the United States who are currently facing environmental crises linked to air pollution? Anderson and Buntaine suggest that if policies are established to require government transparency for the public, then it will also put pressure on contributors to air pollutants and encourage more environmentally friendly regulations.
Pregnancy brain
By John Cho
ZOE GONZALES / DAILY NEXUS
On top of dealing with usual pregnancy hardships, a 38-year-old mother E.R.C., visited the UC Santa Barbara Brain Imaging Center (BIC) and the UC Irvine Facility for Imaging and Brain Research (FIBRE) 26 times before, during and after her pregnancy. She was the sole subject of a unique study by researchers, Laura Pritschet and colleagues, aiming to understand how pregnancy changes the brain.
Despite popular acknowledgement of “mommy brain,” which is characterized by forgetfulness and brain fog among other symptoms during and after pregnancy, research on the phenomenon has been inadequate. Previous research compared scans of the brain before and after but not during pregnancy, especially not with the same persistence required to perform 26 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans across approximately three years.
Pritschet and colleagues uncovered profound changes to the grey and white matter in the brain throughout pregnancy. The grey matter houses cell bodies, and the white matter houses axons, the highways along which signals travel. The grey matter in 80% of evaluated regions in the cerebral cortex shrunk as the pregnancy progressed. In contrast, the white matter of the brain generally increased in connectivity. Two years after giving birth, the lost grey matter volume only recovered partially while the increased white matter connectivity returned to normal levels before conception.
Presumably because baseline white matter connectivity is restored completely, previous research that only examined brain changes before and after pregnancy did not detect changes in white matter connectivity; Pritschet and colleagues were the first to do so, bringing us closer to grasping the myriad of changes millions of women undergo every year.
Neurodegenerative diseases demystified
By Katharine Chi
BETHANY CLOSE / DAILY NEXUS
On April 28, science and engineering professors from UC Santa Barbara and Northwestern University published a study that unfolded the mystery of neurodegenerative diseases.
The group of scientists developed the first synthetic fragment of tau proteins that act like a prion. A prion folds and stacks into fibril strands, which then transmit their abnormal shape to other normal tau proteins. Once a tau fibril is formed, it does not simply go away. The abnormal tau protein will grab another tau protein and fold into the same shape. This pattern continues without a stop.
Misfolded proteins drive the progression of tauopathies, a group of neurodegenerative diseases. Diseases like Alzheimer’s are characterized by abnormal amounts of misfolded tau proteins in the brain. Studying the synthetic version of a full-length tau protein could lead to targeted tools for diagnosis and therapy for those with neurodegenerative diseases. Stopping the activity of abnormal tau proteins can lead to the development of new therapeutic methods.
Coastal dune restoration
By Olivia Lohrer
BROOKE POLLOCK / DAILY NEXUS
As California’s coastal zones are under increasing duress from the barrage of severe winter storm surges and rising sea levels, scientists and policymakers alike have been considering ways to protect and preserve beloved stretches of shoreline like Santa Monica State Beach in Los Angeles. Since 2016, the city of Santa Monica and The Bay Foundation have collaborated on a three-acre dune restoration pilot project to improve beach resilience, despite the mechanical raking that the beach had undergone for more than 70 years before the project began.
Kyle Emery, an assistant researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, has been monitoring the project to help understand the potential for coastal dune ecosystems to prevent wave runup and beach erosion after a significant surge event. Emery’s team used transects, a restoration method that aims to quantify the change in species composition beneath a linear path, to measure vegetation cover and elevation change, as well as drone surveys to help them map change in dune ecosystems over time.
The researchers found that, in absence of the buffer created by coastal dunes, waves ran up the beach roughly 45 feet higher than stretches of beach with dunes. They concluded that the young dunes were not damaged despite the extreme wave conditions.
“This was one of the first efforts in Southern California to demonstrate that dune restoration efforts can provide resilience against storms and waves,” Emery said in a video by The Current. “We hope to continue this work moving forward and demonstrate that dune restoration as a nature-based solution can provide the need of resilience to pending sea-level rise and increasing storm wave damage.”
Topological quantum computing
By Rebecca Raymond
NATHAN VILLASEÑOR / DAILY NEXUS
Quantum computing is a rapidly advancing field and has captured the interest of leading tech giants such as Google and Amazon, with the commercial market for quantum computing steadily increasing. Quantum computers offer an exponential increase in processing speed by their use of quantum mechanical principles. They use superposition to evaluate multiple possible solutions to a problem simultaneously, while entanglement allows the qubits–fundamental units of quantum information analogous to the binary bit–to influence each other so that computations tend more quickly towards the correct solution.
In practice, however, a big challenge to building a stable quantum computer has been the fragile and unstable nature of qubits–small vibrations, electromagnetic noise and random fluctuations in the external environment can flip a qubit’s state, causing errors. A complex software system is required to perform error correction in a resource intensive manner.
UC Santa Barbara physicist Chetan Nayak, working with a Microsoft-led team, has successfully designed an eight-qubit chip that represents a major advance in building more resistant hardware. The team’s work details the chip that can host an exotic quantum state known as Majorana zero modes. Use of these particles are the first step toward a new area of quantum computing called topological quantum computation, where the quantum information is protected by the topology of the system, making it far more resistant to error and noise. In this way, the chip is able to incorporate fault tolerance techniques directly into the hardware of the processor, such that constant error checking software and fewer qubits are needed to keep the computer running.
The work of Nayak and collaborators marks a significant step toward building a more stable and robust quantum computer.
Raspberry Pi clusters
By Saanvi Tiwary
ZOE GONZALES / DAILY NEXUS
The world’s largest Raspberry Pi cluster, a super computer comprised of 1,050 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, has now found its new home at UC Santa Barbara’s computer science department.
The system was donated to UCSB by Oracle to demonstrate how low cost, low power computing can handle complex enterprise software. It was created as a bold tech showcase and sat unused for two years before being donated to UCSB.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized, affordable computer widely used for experimentation, education and the Internet of Things (IoT) projects. The donation was sparked by Ph.D. student Animesh Dangwal’s internship at Oracle. The company was so impressed with his work that his supervisor decided to visit UCSB, and after discovering the campus’s already existing pi cluster, he offered to send over some of Oracle’s unused devices, ultimately delivering over 1,000 Raspberry Pis.
Professors Chandra Krintz and Rich Wolski, who now oversee this project, have nicknamed it “Godzilla Pi” and are transforming it into a sustainable, student-accessible research platform. The system is being integrated with open-source tools and intelligent cooling and monitoring systems to adapt it for long-term use. It enables UCSB to train students on system scale computing in a way few universities match, offering a hands-on method for studying distributed systems, power efficiency and IoT infrastructure.
Deaf mosquito mating
By Yumiko Florando
ZOE GONZALES / DAILY NEXUS
Researchers in the Craig Montell Lab recently discovered that hearing is an integral part of male mosquitoes’ ability to mate. Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species used in this study, are known to spread yellow fever, dengue and zika virus. In fact, mosquitoes are currently the world’s deadliest animal. Thus, being able to better control and restrict reproduction of these insects could potentially have a beneficial impact on public health efforts to combat these deadly diseases.
Unlike many other insect species, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes mate in the air. Researchers predicted that mosquitoes needed to use the sensors at the bottom of their antennae for hearing to locate one another and mate. Using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to mutate the genes of these mosquitoes, researchers knocked out two different pathways that were known to be necessary for hearing in other similar species.
After confirming deafness through frequency tests, deaf females were released into chambers with unmutated, hearing males and deaf males into chambers with unmutated, hearing females. Researchers observed that deaf females were able to mate with males at roughly normal levels, although it took around an hour to reach these levels as opposed to five minutes. In contrast, the deaf males were unable to mate at all. To further test this, researchers played frequencies of sound through a speaker that corresponded with the frequency of female wingbeats. Males who could hear were attracted to the speaker, whereas the deaf males had no reaction.
Researchers concluded that due to the mechanisms of mating in the air, males being able to hear the females wingbeats was essential for mating to occur. While this discovery could contribute to helping to reduce mosquito vectors of disease, the researchers note that further work needs to be done to develop a method to effectively spread deafness in a population.
A version of this article appeared on p.11 of the May 29, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.
