News Archive

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a rule on January 9, 2014 requiring oil and gas companies using hydraulic fracturing off the coast of California to disclose the chemicals they discharge into the ocean. Oil and gas companies have been fracking offshore California for perhaps as long as two decades, but they largely flew under the radar until recently. An Associated Press story in August 2013 revealed that oil...

“The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is little known to the public, but it represents one of the most-challenging efforts in observational cosmology ever attempted. The most recent phase, SDSS-III, began in 2008 and includes the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), a part of SDSS-III aimed at mapping the cosmos. Its goal is to map the physical locations of all major galaxies back to seven billion years ago, and bright...

In a recent news piece on National Public Radio titled “There She Blew! Volcanic Evidence of the World’s First Map,” UCSB Geography Professor Keith Clarke was selected as the expert to render a final verdict regarding what may be the world’s oldest known map: “A new study of volcanic rocks suggests that an ancient mural may indeed depict an erupting volcano, adding new weight to a theory that this image...