Dry conditions can also make warming worse, said Amir AghaKouchak, [professor of civil & environmental engineering], who studies climate-related and other water resource issues at the University of California, Irvine. Warming causes soil to lose moisture through evaporation … “During droughts, moisture levels become very low, so evaporation doesn’t happen,” Dr. AghaKouchak said. “The skin of the earth warms up, and that warms the atmosphere.” [Subscription required, campus-wide access provided by UCI Libraries.

Earlier this year, three researchers shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering a process called directed evolution … The process was considered painstaking and laborious; however, scientists at the University of California, Irvine have now streamlined the process. … Arjun Ravikumar, a recent recipient of a biomedical engineering Ph.D. at UCI [said] "Our work has reduced evolution to be an extremely rapid, straightforward and scalable process."

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have been motivated to consider new ways that microbes can assist humans in colonising the Moon and Mars by studying the biochemical process by which cyanobacteria absorb nutrients from rocks in Chile's Atacama Desert. … Corresponding author David Kisailus, UCI professor of materials science and engineering [said], "Could humans use a similar biochemical approach to obtain and manipulate the minerals that we find valuable?

When UCI biomedical engineers went to work on creating a sensor for the device, they decided to use Shrinky Drinks. "The current standard of care in respiration monitoring is a pulmonary function test that's often difficult to perform and limited in terms of the snapshot it provides of a patient's respiratory health—meaning problems can sometimes be missed," said Michael Chu, UCI graduate student researcher in biomedical engineering and lead author of a paper on the innovation published today in npj Digital Medicine.

Amir AghaKouchak, UC Irvine hydrologist, engineer and climatologist, is an expert in such matters. He says it's too soon to tell. But he does admit that the signs so far are pointing in the direction of a strong El Niño winter and spring.