Smarter sand replenishment: Local lawmakers have fought for years to get the millions of dollars needed to start sand replenishment projects to help reverse erosion of Southern California beaches caused by development, rising seas and other impacts of climate change. But Laylan Connelly reports that UC Irvine researchers are recommending new data and methods that could allow leaders to make smarter decisions about where sand infusions can do the most good. Read More

"The floods certainly helped and increased the water levels," says Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine who has studied the lake. "However, one or a series of floods won't have a long-term impact. The main issue in the basin is that the water demand is much higher than the renewable water in the basin. ... If the water demand in the basin is not managed, after a while the lake will continue to dry out."

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 ...

Microorganisms living in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile – one of the driest locations on Earth – have developed a unique method of extracting life-sustaining water from their environment. … "When they were put under stressed conditions, the microbes had no alternative but to extract water from the gypsum, inducing this phase transformation in the material,” said study author David Kisailus, University of California, Irvine professor, in a statement.