Thursday. Rahim Esfandyar-Pour, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, explores how creating a health monitoring wearable without a battery can help more people use them.

Irvine-based Aria Group … and a group including two doctors from University of California, Irvine have come up with a plan to turn household mixers into emergency ventilators during the coronavirus pandemic. … The call to action was put out by the Bridge Ventilator Consortium whose founders include Dr. Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist at UCI, and UCI surgeon Dr. Brian Wong. Meanwhile, Ranjan and UCI colleagues are working to validate the design with mannequin testing and secure necessary approvals from the FDA to deploy the solution in U.S.

We humans, generally speaking, are rather hardy creatures. We may not have the great bulk of the elephant, the tough skin of the crocodile, or the formidable exoskeleton of the diabolical ironclad beetle, but we're rather resilient as a species. Incidentally, the latter, according to UCI professor David Kisailus (via Phys.org), is "a terrestrial beetle ... a little tank ...

Scientists have come up with a new way to figure out how much winter rainfall is going to occur in California - simply check out what was happening near New Zealand over the previous seasons. They're calling it the New Zealand Index, and it's more accurate than the previous method of predicting rainfall …according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine.