In a study released this week a UC Irvine team found that if winter temperatures increase by 1 degree Celsius, it will lead to a 20 percent jump in the likelihood of below-average snow accumulation in the high country. "Warmer winter temperatures tend to decrease the amount of water stored as snow,” said the report's lead author, Laurie Huning with UC Irvine. She says less snow makes it more likely for drought conditions, and could make the wildfire season longer.

Some researchers agree with SoCalGas that substituting cleaner fuels for gas would be easier and cheaper than swapping out gas for electricity. They include Jack Brouwer, a UC Irvine engineering professor, who has led a project to inject small amounts of hydrogen into the university’s gas pipelines. “Our policy goals cannot be met without hydrogen, is my view,” Brouwer said in an interview last month.

Austin Russell, [founder and CEO of Luminar, which makes sensors for self-driving cars], the 26-year-old Orlando tech genius and billionaire, is plunging into the philanthropy sector with a personal donation of $70 million in stock to create a charitable fund in Central Florida …. He … attended classes at Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California, Irvine, as a high-school student. His goal, he said then, was to eradicate automobile accidents.

Some researchers agree with SoCalGas that substituting cleaner fuels for gas would be easier and cheaper than swapping out gas for electricity. They include Jack Brouwer, a UC Irvine engineering professor, who has led a project to inject small amounts of hydrogen into the university’s gas pipelines. “Our policy goals cannot be met without hydrogen, is my view,” Brouwer said in an interview last month. [Subscription required, you can request an electronic copy of the article by sending an email to communications@uci.edu.]

Jack Brouwer, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), noted that SoCalGas has worked with the university and others for nearly a decade to make the hydrogen economy a reality. Efforts included “helping us build the very first power-to-gas-to-power system in the country right here on the UCI campus,” Brouwer said. “The Angeles Link is a great example of what can be done when government, industry, and academia work together toward a common purpose,” he said.

Engineers at the University of California, Irvine have invented an end-to-end transmitter-receiver silicon chip that is capable of processing digital signals with significantly greater speed and energy efficiency because of its unique digital-analog architecture. The new wireless transceiver boosts radio frequencies into 100-gigahertz territory, quadruple the speed of the upcoming 5G, or fifth-generation, wireless communications standard.

When hydroelectric power isn’t reliable, people typically turn to fossil fuels, says Brian Tarroja, an energy researcher at the University of California, Irvine. “You do want to build new assets, more renewable energy, more storage, more flexibility and all that stuff,” he says. … That could mean plants that work with lower amounts of water. Even more crucial, he says, is making sure that other renewable energy sources are built up as well. Otherwise, shortcomings in hydropower will continue to mean sliding back into fossil fuel use.

Wetlands constructed along waterways are the most cost-effective way to reduce nitrate and sediment loads in large streams and rivers, according to scientists at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Kansas; the University of Minnesota and other institutions.