California Science News

Download the Full Report (PDF)   California Responds To The Pandemic       In late 2019, the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) quickly began to spread across the globe and by March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Since then, academic and research institutions across California and the world have leveraged […]

California, like most states, grapples annually with the rising cost of healthcare overall, particularly the cost of pharmaceuticals. The California budget for FY 2015-16 has $200 million marked for the new Hepatitis C drug alone. Consequently it’s not surprising that a variety of policy initiatives have been floated to try and stem the rise in […]

The discovery of antibiotics was one of the most significant advances in medical care in the 20th century. However, more than seven decades after penicillin was first used to treat infections, the use of these medications has become extremely and, according to some, unnecessarily widespread both in patient care and livestock management. A coordinated strategy […]

The importance of high-tech innovation to California’s economy has long been understood and appreciated. Despite this fact, the current and potential impact of maritime technology innovation has been little studied, and California should focus more on this dynamic growth sector in years to come, according to The Maritime Alliance. “The coastal and ocean economies already […]

  The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) has been named as the West Coast hub for a major public-private consortium dedicated to advancing research and manufacturing of integrated photonic technology. The announcement caps a distinguished history at UCSB of research in this potentially transformational technology. Photonics is the use of light to transmit large […]

A new institute for materials research at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is poised to become one of the leading such research centers in the state, offering significant opportunities to academic and industrial researchers in a wide range of disciplines in the Southern California area and beyond. “The research community in our area is […]

A state initiative jointly led by the University of California (UC) San Diego and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory called Cal-BRAIN has awarded over $1.9 million to seed projects around California designed to create new technologies capable of measuring brain activity in greater depth, breadth, and detail than is currently possible. Cal-BRAIN (the California Blueprint […]

California continues to work towards more sustainable water use, with the State exploring numerous strategies in the face of the most severe drought conditions in recorded history. For the first time in California history, the Governor directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory water reductions in cities and towns across California to […]

California’s economic woes of the past decade are well-known by now. The cost of doing business in the state remains high, according to Forbes, and the state’s business tax climate has been criticized by organizations such as the Tax Foundation. It was a surprise to some, as a result, when Bloomberg recently called California the “best state […]

California, one of the nation’s leading science and technology states, was one of the hardest hit states in the country during the recent economic recession. The state lost 1.3 million jobs and faced years of government deficits which forced difficult decisions on programs and infrastructure essential to its high-tech economy. But despite the challenges, California […]

Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was recently cited by Forbes as one of 2014’s top five “unsung and underappreciated” leaders, someone who makes a difference through “capability, reliability, and authenticity.” She is the only U.S. leader on the Forbes list. Prabhakar also knows well the value of connecting the world of […]

Imagine a future in which humanity builds outposts in space – on the surface of the moon, floating in the clouds above Venus, or on the dusty plains of Mars – capable of manufacturing parts built to digital order, rather than waiting months or years for replacement supplies from Earth. This kind of self-sufficiency is […]

California remains one of the top science and technology states in the country, but is not keeping pace in its high-tech workforce development, according to the most recent analysis by the Milken Institute. The State Technology and Science Index, produced by the Milken Institute’s California Center, tracks and examines important factors behind technology-based economic development in […]

The California DMV’s release last week of official testing rules for automated vehicles made headlines around the nation. On the one hand, it represents a significant step towards making vehicles with self-driving capabilities a reality on California roads, and presumably elsewhere. On the other hand, the rules demonstrate just how challenging it is to devise […]

A team of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla have succeeded in engineering a life form whose genetic material includes an added pair of DNA bases not found in nature. The specially designed bacterium has demonstrated the ability to replicate the artificial DNA bases normally, marking the first known departure from […]

A project which began 13 years ago as an idea conceived by scientists at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has led to the first direct evidence of gravitational waves from ‘cosmic inflation’ in the moments following the Big Bang. It is the strongest confirmation yet of theories describing the universe’s initial period of growth. […]

CCST Senior Fellow and former Board member Arthur Bienenstock, Stanford Professor of Applied Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Presidential Advisor, has signed on to work with enterprise start-up Morf Media Inc., a company specializing in mobile simulation training. “In many ways, the process of learning really hasn’t changed all that much since the days […]

Stanford University will be partnering with the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the creation of a new Center for Excellence in Stem Cell Genomics, thanks to a $40 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). The center will serve as a focus for collaborative efforts between multiple partner institutions, including UC […]

A collaborative high-tech business incubator in Fresno is opening the door for water and energy technology startups in the San Joaquin Valley, working to build a “Blue Tech” community of water-related companies with a national presence similar to Silicon Valley. The Water, Energy and Technology (WET) Center, located at Fresno State University, includes resources such […]

A large collection of NASA climate and Earth science satellite data are being made available through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud in a novel partnership designed to enhance research and educational opportunities nationwide. To date, several terabytes of data from three satellite and computer modeling datasets have been uploaded to the AWS platform: a […]

Four faculty members from California institutions have joined the ranks of Nobel Laureates in 2013, sharing prizes in Medicine and Chemistry. Randy W. Schekman (UC Berkeley) and Thomas Südhof (Stanford University) shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine with James E. Rothman of Yale University for their research on protein transport in cells, and how […]