University officials in Irvine announced earlier this month that researchers have received a $675,000 grant from NASA that will be divided between both universities. Approximately $350,000 will go to the Irvine campus for what is expected to be a three-year project to support graduate students, researchers and the cost of some of the equipment used in the study. UCI professor of civil and environmental engineering Brett Sanders said the project aims to use satellites to examine the distribution — height, width and volume — of sand on local beaches.

Scott Jordan, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Irvine and former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission [said], A search engine that didn’t try to bring the best, most relevant results to the top would be basically worthless. “If you mean nondiscriminatory in a much narrower sense, like does Google’s algorithm include whether the webpage has a conservative or a liberal tint, or is based on anything else—gender, race, what have you—then, yeah, Google might say that they’re nondiscriminatory in these narrower senses.

Now, researchers have opened the floodgates to doing much more. They report today that a broad rewrite of a bacterium’s genome lets them add numerous novel amino acids to one protein. The work could open new ways to synthesize antibiotics and antitumor drugs. “I am very impressed by this paper,” says Chang Liu, [biomedical engineering associate professor] at the University of California, Irvine.