College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

Groundwater is essential for growing crops, but new research shows climate change is making it harder for soil to absorb rainfall.  While the idea that soil particles rearrange themselves in response to environmental conditions is not new, scientists once thought these shifts in the ground happened slowly. Not anymore. 

They say love is blind, but if you’re a queen honeybee it could mean true loss of sight.  New research finds male honeybees inject toxins during sex that cause temporary blindness. All sexual activity occurs during a brief early period in a honeybee’s life, during which males die and queens can live for many years without ever mating again. 

A new species of gigantic tumbleweed once predicted to go extinct is not only here to stay — it’s likely to expand its territory.  The species, Salsola ryanii, is significantly larger than either of its parent plants, which can grow up to 6 feet tall. A new study from UC Riverside supports the theory that the new tumbleweed grows more vigorously because it is a hybrid with doubled pairs of its parents’ chromosomes. 

Abhijit Ghosh, UCR associate professor of geophysics, is racing to understand everything he can about the fault that was unknown until it produced a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on July 5. Ghosh's work could help officials prepare for the next big shake.

A UC Riverside study points to lysosomal storage observed in all brains afflicted with the disease; finding could open up new avenues for treatment and prevention

Brittany Seto ’16, who studied computer science at UC Riverside, interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where a record number of UCR undergraduates are spending the summer

A physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has received a grant of about $523,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to study the possible emergent behavior of “strongly interacting systems,” an important area of focus in solid-state physics.  Specifically, when the repulsive Coulomb force between electrons in a solid becomes strong, new behaviors — not easily understood from knowledge of the microscopic laws of nature — are possible. 

NASA’s newest planet-hunting satellite has discovered a type of planet missing from our own solar system.  Launched in 2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has found three new worlds around a neighboring star. Stephen Kane, a UC Riverside associate professor of planetary astrophysics, says the new star system, called TESS Object of Interest, or TOI-270, is exactly what the satellite was designed to find.