Media Watch
UC Irvine-Led Team Reveals Battery-Like Functions Of Mitochondria In Groundbreaking Discovery
India Education Diary -
“When we first started studying isolated mitochondria, we knew they behaved like a battery based on some work from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and UCLA, but we could not control them very well inside the cell to probe them,” said co-author Peter Burke, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “Now we can control each individual electrical component and cause it to charge and discharge.” Read More
UCI Celebrates Innovation Excellence: Two Researchers Named Fellows By The National Academy Of Inventors
India Education Diary -
The National Academy of Inventors has named two University of California, Irvine researchers as fellows. Guann-Pyng (G.P.) Li, a pioneer in the development of microelectronics for advanced health and sustainable energy applications, and David Reinkensmeyer, who combines robotics and neuroscience to create devices to help people with movement rehabilitation after neurological injury, are among 162 academic inventors made fellows by the NAI this year. Read More
‘Thousand-year storm’ floods part of San Diego, is SoCal prepared for more?
KCRW – Press Play with Madeleine Brand -
San Diego residents are still reeling from a heavy and rapid downpour that started on Monday morning. Is Southern California built to withstand storms like this? Guest: Brett Sanders - professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine, runs UCI’s Flood Lab. Read More
Uber driver alarmed he has to spend all day charging electric car in cold weather
Futurism -
"It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions," University of California, Irvine professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the Clean Energy Institute Jack Brouwer told the NYT. "You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around." Read More
UC Irvine students, grads fight back after hackers post gruesome images in cyberattack
KNBC -
A group of current and former University of California, Irvine students managed to fight back a group of hackers after they were targeted in a vicious and gruesome cyberattack, according to one graduate involved. … Alina Kim, a UCI computer science and engineering graduate, put her computer science and software engineering degrees to good use as she teamed together with other users to stop the hack. "If we banned an account in one server, it would ban them universally on all of our servers," said Kim. "That way we could keep each other safe, even if we weren't personally online to manage the attacks." Watch More
Internet trolls flooded UC Irvine chat groups with gore. Then students mounted a counterattack
Los Angeles Times -
Because Discord is a public-facing, non-university platform, there was very little user verification prior to the attacks, [said] Alina Kim, an independent manager for UC Irvine’s student-run communities on Discord. … Biomedical engineering student Vietbao Tran then went on the offensive, creating a Discord bot that automatically banned those IDs before channel moderators could. The bot eventually was used to protect the 98 largest servers, according to Kim. “It was an incredible response because he worked through the course of 24 hours and it was so incredibly helpful,” Kim said. Read More
Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather
The New York Times -
The challenge for electric vehicles is the two sides of the battery — the anode and the cathode — have chemical reactions that are slowed during extremely cold temperatures. That affects both the charging and the discharging of the battery, said Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine. “It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions,” Mr. Brouwer said. “You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around.” Read More
UCI scientists help track the sand in Dana Point
Spectrum News -
This summer, the first nourishment project in decades began at Capistrano Beach Park in Dana Point. Scientist from UC Irvine’s Flood Lab will help the City of Dana Point figure out how effective the sand replenishment project is. A team, including Research Specialist Jo Schubert, will do monthly sand surveys using a drone that takes hundreds of pictures across stretches of sand from Doheny State Beach to Poche Creek through April 2024. Read More
Bacteria stitch exotic building blocks into novel proteins
Science -
Researchers report they’ve developed an efficient way to coax bacteria to add structurally unusual amino acids into proteins. So far they’ve succeeded with just four exotic building blocks, but their approach could lead to medicines that persist longer in the body and better catalysts for industry. “It’s a big accomplishment to get these new categories of amino acids into proteins,” says Chang Liu, a biomedical engineer at the University of California, Irvine who was not part of the study, which was published this week in Nature. Read More
World Nears Dangerous Climate Tipping Point With Snow in Short Supply
Bloomberg -
“That’s how sensitive the system is to snow — one single degree of temperature change,” said Amir AghaKouchak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine. “The implications are huge, both for ecosystems that don’t get a lot of attention and also drinking water.” AghaKouchak and Laurie Huning, an assistant professor of civil engineering at California State University, Long Beach, published the first global analysis of snow drought in 2020. They found that several mountain regions saw an uptick in snow drought intensity, length and frequency in the first 18 years of this century compared to the 19 years preceding it. Read More