Science

On a summer Friday in Santa Cruz, a trio of surfers descended the sea stairs to the beach with waxed-up longboards under their arms. Stepping through seaweed on their way to the waves, they bantered about the benefits the sea greens might offer their industry. The surfers — Cole Quinlan, Hudson Soelter and Amanda Vasconselos — are engineers at Cruz Foam, a startup that has developed biodegradable packing and shipping materials out of green pea starch. As the state grapples with how to implement a landmark plastic pollution act signed into law in 2022, the company is producing cost-competitive biofoam at a scale it hopes will eventually rid the Earth of single-use plastics. Cruz Foam biomaterial engineer Cole Quinlan pours pea starch granules into the Extruder machine to make biofoam at their Cruz Foam laboratory in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)  Actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher are investors and advisors. Customers r...

By Liam Knox, John Gittelsohn and Maxwell Adler, Bloomberg As the University of California at Los Angeles works to follow other schools in reaching a deal with the White House to restore federal funding , it faces a unique complication: Governor Gavin Newsom ’s crusade against the Trump administration . Leaders at the sprawling University of California system have discussed how to insulate their talks with administration officials from political backlash to the governor, according to a person familiar with the matter. And after Newsom vowed to fight the administration on the funding freeze, some researchers at UCLA expressed worries that the approach could backfire. RELATED:  House Republicans expand antisemitism investigation to UCSF, UCLA Newsom’s posture is already having an impact. This month, the UC system shelved a planned $1.5 billion sale of municipal bonds. If Newsom were to successfully push for a lawsuit over the funding, that would make its risk disclosures to inves...

By JULIE WATSON, Associated Press THE SANTA ROSA PLATEAU ECOLOGICAL RESERVE — The scientist traipses to a pond wearing rubber boots but he doesn’t enter the water. Instead, Brad Hollingsworth squats next to its swampy edge and retrieves a recording device the size of a deck of cards. He then opens it up and removes a tiny memory card containing 18 hours of sound. Related Articles Berkeley Humane breaks ground on new modern facility for animal care Landfill that closed in 1978 continues to leak trash into Pacific Ocean What you need to know about the flesh-eating screwworm in the U.S. What might attract wandering bobcat to San Jose neighborhood? Here’s what to know if you encounter a snake in the Bay Area Back at his office at the San Diego Natural History Museum, the herpetologist — an expert in reptiles and amphibians — uses artificial intelligence to analyze the data on the card. Within three minutes, he knows a host of animals visit the pond — where native red-legged fro...

As Congress debates NASA’s 2026 budget, two small but mighty satellites hang in limbo: the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, specifically OCO-2 and OCO-3. Tasked with tracking carbon dioxide and plant growth globally, they are now at risk of decommissioning due to demands from the White House. Shutting these down would jeopardize information needed for agriculture, earth science and nascent work to rapidly reduce carbon dioxide levels and restore a safe climate for our children. The value of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions is enormous. Related Articles NASA’s Webb telescope finds a new tiny moon around Uranus Here’s a guide to stargazing during the dog days of summer James Lovell dies at 97; Apollo 13 moon mission leader turned ‘potential tragedy into a success’ Amid NASA cuts, popular social accounts for Mars rovers, Voyager going dark New map shows Bay Area locations with highest risk of ember-driven wildfires These satellites do what ground stations cannot: supply...

Faced with new cost overruns , the board of Santa Clara County’s largest water agency on Tuesday voted to kill a plan to build a huge new reservoir in the southern part of the county near Pacheco Pass after eight years of studies and $100 million in public spending. The board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District voted 6-0 to halt planning and engineering studies, and to withdraw the agency’s application for state bond funds for the Pacheco Reservoir project. The reservoir — for which the agency has already spent $100 million on planning, environmental studies, engineering work, legal bills and other costs — would have been the largest new reservoir built anywhere in the Bay Area since 1998 when Los Vaqueros Reservoir was constructed in eastern Contra Costa County. But soaring costs, the inability of the water district to find any other water agencies to help pay construction costs and share the water, and a decision last month by the federal Bureau of Reclamation not to allow wa...

This illustration provided by W.M. Keck Observatory depicts the insides of an exploding star. (Adam Makarenko/W. M. Keck Observatory via AP)  By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN, AP Science Writer NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists for the first time have spotted the insides of a dying star as it exploded, offering a rare peek into stellar evolution. Stars can live for millions to trillions of years until they run out of fuel. The most massive ones go out with a bang in an explosion called a supernova . Using telescopes that peer deep into space, researchers have observed many such explosions . The cosmic outbursts tend to jumble up a dying star’s layers, making it hard for scientists to observe the inner structure. But that wasn’t the case for the new discovery, a supernova called 2021yfj located in our Milky Way galaxy. The collapsing star’s outermost layers of hydrogen and helium had peeled away long ago, which wasn’t surprising. But the star’s dense, innermost layers of silicon and sulfur ...

Chris Pratt appears to be losing some fans for going on Bill Maher’s podcast Monday and saying he loves his cousin-in-law Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and has a great time with him at family dinners, so people should stop criticizing the infamous vaccine skeptic as a charlatan who is endangering public health. The problem with Pratt’s remarks on Maher’s Club Random podcast is that his relative is a known purveyor of medical misinformation and, as Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, has worked to reduce the public’s access to vaccines and to undermine trust i n his own employees, who include some of America’s top scientists. “If you support RFK Jr., I can’t support you,” one self-described “mommy” wrote on Pratt’s latest Instagram post, promoting his new Amazon Prime series, “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf.” Someone else wrote, “I will never watch anything that you’re in or associated with. Never!” Many more such comments filled Pratt’s Instagram feed: “Peter Quill would...

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer NEW YORK (AP) — For the first time in 30 years, the American Academy of Pediatrics is substantially diverging from U.S. government vaccine recommendations. The group’s new COVID-19 recommendations — released Tuesday — come amid a tumultuous year for public health, as vaccine skeptics have come into power in the new Trump administration and government guidance has become increasingly confusing. This isn’t going to help, acknowledged Dr. James Campbell, vice chair of the AAP infectious diseases committee. “It is going to be somewhat confusing. But our opinion is we need to make the right choices for children to protect them,” he added. The AAP is strongly recommending COVID-19 shots for children ages 6 months to 2 years. Shots also are advised for older children if parents want their kids vaccinated, the AAP said. That differs from guidance established under U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which doesn’t recommend the shots for healthy ...

A paper by a scientist at UC San Diego in La Jolla is challenging a “one-size-fits-all” approach to health by introducing apparent paradoxes in patient needs. And its author has become the namesake of this phenomenon of apparent contradictions. The paper, written by Raphael Cuomo, an associate professor in the UCSD School of Medicine’s Department of Anesthesiology, is based on his evaluation of overall scientific literature on the influence of nutritional factors on disease prevention and mortality. RELATED:  New Stanford study could help doctors address diabetes, prediabetes He posits that factors commonly viewed as harmful to health can paradoxically predict better survival in people who later develop cancer or cardiovascular disease. Related Articles Lawrence Livermore National Lab enters a different kind of space race with a telescope deal Perseid meteor shower: How and when to watch Study of Bay Area Vietnamese refugees probes war impacts on aging brains Hubble Space...