Rivers are Earth’s arteries. Water, sediment and nutrients self-organize into diverse, dynamic channels as they journey from the mountains to the sea. Some rivers carve out a single pathway, while ...

Even a toddler knows that plants need water. It’s perhaps the first thing we learn about these green lifeforms. But how plants budget this resource varies considerably. The kapok trees of the Amazon ...

UC Santa Barbara researchers are working to move cold atom quantum experiments and applications from the laboratory tabletop to chip-based systems, opening new possibilities for sensing, precision ...

In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday has released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, with ...

Community-led research from UCSB’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory spans three years, four continents and eight countries to reveal the scale of river plastic waste and offer solutions to stop it at ...

Groundwater is rapidly declining across the globe, often at accelerating rates. Writing in the journal Nature, UC Santa Barbara researchers present the largest assessment of groundwater levels around ...

The seas have long sustained human life, but a new UC Santa Barbara study shows that rising climate and human pressures are pushing the oceans toward a dangerous threshold. Vast and powerful, the ...

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. In this case, the “job” is the breakdown of lignin, the structural biopolymer that gives stems, bark and branches their signature woodiness. One of the ...

Touchdown airbursts — a type of cosmic impact that may be more common than the crater-forming, dinosaur-killing kind — remain somewhat less understood. UC Santa Barbara Earth Science Emeritus ...

Sometimes simple solutions are better. It all depends on the nature of the problem. For humpback whales, the problem is the rope connecting a crab trap on the seafloor to the buoy on the surface. And ...

UC Santa Barbara physicists John Martinis and Michel Devoret have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. Selected for the honor alongside UC Berkeley physicist and former advisor John Clarke, ...

Humans have engineered climate change by manipulating the environment. There’s a hope that we may also be able to mitigate this, predominantly through reducing emissions, but in some cases by ...