Media Watch

A group gathered at the UC Irvine one recent day to discuss the “Business of Beaches,” drawing politicians, planners, educators and economic experts to brainstorm ideas to tackle a problem — the shrinking supply of sand that makes up much of the region’s beaches — that could have a domino of disastrous impacts. … While there’s much talk about climate change and the role sea level rise will have in threatening the coastline, the problem is rooted in poor infrastructure design dating back decades — and it can be fixed, according to Brett Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering, urban planning and public policy at UC Irvine. Read More

Large-scale turbulence is causing new headaches for anxious aviators in a warming atmosphere, but it’s small-scale turbulence that has always made physicists scratch their heads. The cascading process that transfers energy from the biggest eddies down to the tiniest ones causes a turbulent flow at the small scale to retain no memory of the large-scale flow structure. Because of this memory loss, researchers often assume that small-scale turbulence is isotropic. Subharthi Chowdhuri and Tirtha Banerjee of the University of California, Irvine, now introduce a framework for investigating turbulent flows and show that anisotropy persists even at the small scale. Read More

Pramod P. Khargonekar, ERVA Co-Principal Investigator; UCI Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Vice Chancellor for Research writes, “The power of artificial intelligence to transform industry is often taken as a given. However, there is a gap between expectations and implementation that many industry leaders are not addressing. One essential element in the AI transformation equation is the need to proactively bridge two crucial fields: AI and engineering.” Read More

Science may offer some help guiding the best way to manage the beaches, including a study out of UC Irvine that looks at how the beaches have been growing or shrinking and in which direction the sand is moving. Graduate student and UCI Flood Lab researcher Daniel Kahl, lead author of the study, speaks about some of his findings. Professor Brett Sanders, the study's co-author, discusses shrinking beaches and their potential effects and how the study could offer a cost-benefit analysis of some beach erosion mitigation methods. Read More