News Archive

The following is from an August 2011 press release by Tim Stephens of the University of California, Santa Cruz: The mountainous region on the far side of the moon, known as the lunar farside highlands, may be the solid remains of a collision with a smaller companion moon, according to a new study by planetary scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The striking differences between the near and far sides of the moon...

David Malakoff, a staff writer for Science Magazine and a former science editor and correspondent for NPR, thinks outside the box in a Science article titled “Are More People Necessarily a Problem?” (29 July, 2011, Vol. 333). Malakoff cites the transition of Machaco, Kenya, from poverty to prosperity, despite or even because of a dramatic increase in population over the last 75 years and counters Malthusian pessimism with...

Dr. Chris Funk, a researcher in the Climate Hazard Group of UCSB’s Department of Geography who is affiliated with the U.S. Geological Survey, explains how his group last year forecast the drought in Somalia that is now turning into famine — and how that warning wasn’t enough. The following was posted on the Nature website on August 3 and was summarized by the New York Times the same day: Not since a million people...