https://phys.org/ en-us Spotlight news from University of California - Santa Barbara Researchers in the UC Santa Barbara Materials Department have uncovered the elusive quantum mechanism by which energetic electrons break chemical bonds inside microelectronic devices—a detrimental process that slowly degrades performance over time. The discovery, published as an Editors' Suggestion in Physical Review B, explains decades-old experimental puzzles and moves scientists closer to engineering more reliable devices. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-quantum-electrons-silicon-chips.html Condensed Matter Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:00:02 EDT news695402653 Researchers at UC Santa Barbara are coming ever closer to uncovering the neural circuitry that translates stimulus to action, shining light on previously unseen neural connections and lesser-known functions of neurons that underlie behavior. Neuroscientists Durafshan Sakeena Syed, Primoz Ravbar and Julie H. Simpson have found that inhibitory neurons—nerve cells known to be responsible for suppressing movement—actively generate and coordinate the rhythmic limb movements required for grooming in fruit flies. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-newly-neural-fruit-flies-reveal.html Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:20:04 EDT news695401975 A new study offers some of the strongest evidence yet that viewing art doesn't just move us emotionally—it changes how we think. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara found that people who viewed artistic film shorts showed measurable increases in creative thinking compared with those who watched entertaining, "non-art," videos. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-art-boost-creative-viewers.html Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:00:06 EDT news695028297 Most people think of diamonds as high-end adornments. Not Ania Bleszynski Jayich. The UC Santa Barbara physicist sees diamonds, which she grows in the UC Quantum Foundry, as a potentially powerful foundation for quantum sensors. Sensors are currently much farther along in their development than other potential quantum applications. Diamond sensors are particularly promising because diamonds require relatively few quantum bits (qubits) to operate, whereas a quantum computer, for instance, requires more than 100,000, perhaps as many as a million, qubits to handle error correction, one of the main hurdles for quantum computing. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-mechanical-boost-diamond-quantum-sensor.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:30:01 EDT news694710121 Museum collections have underpinned scientific research for centuries. But physical specimens in boxes and drawers don't easily lend themselves to the research techniques of the new millennium. "How can we apply these techniques to natural history collections, especially when much of the intrinsic information a specimen has to offer is difficult to quantify?" asks Katja Seltmann, director of UC Santa Barbara's Cheadle Center for Biodiversity & Ecological Restoration. Enter the Big Bee Project: a pioneering initiative to bring natural history collections into the century of AI, big data and networked databases. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-big-bee-natural-history-21st.html Plants & Animals Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:40:02 EDT news693823035 Fortifying staple foods with essential vitamins and minerals is a cheap and effective way to ensure that people have access to nutrients that may be lacking in their normal diets. These efforts have countered debilitating deficiencies that lead to conditions like rickets and pellagra, and have increased health and well-being around the globe. A new study appearing in The Lancet Global Health provides the first comprehensive global analysis of the impact of current food fortification programs—both the health benefits and costs. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-food-fortification-billion-nutrient-gaps.html Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:30:01 EDT news693763501 For half the world's population, the water in their drinking glasses comes from below them. Groundwater also supplies 40% of global irrigation projects. Alarmingly, more than a third of the planet's aquifers, or groundwater basins, are dropping. Declining water tables leave entire regions vulnerable to drought, land subsidence or seawater intrusion while damaging ecosystems and reducing water access. Properly securing this resource is a matter of social, humanitarian and environmental security. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-regions-groundwater-depletion.html Earth Sciences Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:00:01 EDT news693230762 After a year and a half of remote work and learning, UC Santa Barbara undergraduate students Sophia Lecuona Manos, Gabrielle Plewe, Carson Gadler and doctoral student Zoe Zilz returned to campus in late 2021 eager for some on-campus, hands-on research, an opportunity that was lost when COVID shut down universities and other public institutions in early 2020. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-students-crab-egg-predator.html Plants & Animals Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:40:01 EDT news692955481 Quantum technologies are anticipated to transform computing, communication, and sensing by harnessing the unusual behavior of matter at the atomic scale. Translating quantum's promise into practical devices will require physical systems that have desirable quantum properties and can be easily manufactured. Silicon, the material behind today's computer chips, is highly attractive as a platform because it plays to the strengths of the trillion-dollar semiconductor industry that has already been built. Identifying quantum building blocks—qubits—in silicon is, therefore, an important frontier research area. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-robust-telecom-qubit-silicon.html Condensed Matter Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:00:03 EST news691244281 LEDs no wider than a human hair could soon take on work traditionally handled by lasers, from moving data inside server racks to powering next-generation displays. New research co-authored by UC Santa Barbara doctoral student Roark Chao points to a practical path forward. The study is published in the journal Optics Express. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-hair-width-eventually-lasers.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:40:05 EST news691080301 Ozempic has been making headlines for its remarkable success in treating obesity and diabetes. Yet it is just one in a rapidly growing class of drugs called peptide therapeutics that sits between small molecules (like aspirin) and biologics (like antibodies). A UC Santa Barbara research team has developed a technique for efficiently synthesizing non-natural amino acids and applying them to peptide construction. They hope that the methodology, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, will significantly advance peptide research, giving scientists greater access to amino acids beyond the 22 found in nature. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scientists-massive-palette-biomedical-natural.html Biochemistry Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:18:30 EST news690733081 When the sun goes down, solar panels stop working. This is the fundamental hurdle of renewable energy: how to save the sun's power for a rainy day—or a cold night. Chemists at UC Santa Barbara have developed a solution that doesn't require bulky batteries or electrical grids. In a paper published in the journal Science, Associate Professor Grace Han and her team detail a new material that captures sunlight, stores it within chemical bonds and releases it as heat on demand. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-molecule-solar-energy-years-demand.html Energy & Green Tech Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:40:01 EST news690204916 They're all around us: sensors and satellites, radars and drones. These tools form vast remote sensing networks that collect data on the climate, the ground, the air, and the water. This information is immensely useful for research, conservation, and disaster preparedness. But, according to an interdisciplinary group of Earth science researchers in a paper led by Casey O'Hara of UC Santa Barbara, we're only just scratching the surface of understanding just how beneficial Earth science information can be. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-money-true-earth-science.html Earth Sciences Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:22:31 EST news689941322 The origin of life from Earth's primordial chemistry has long fascinated and perplexed us. Generations of scientists have endeavored to understand how complex biochemistry developed from organic compounds. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have recently found that the conditions inside certain, naturally forming droplets promote reduction and oxidation (redox) reactions, which are crucial for life. The results support the idea that these droplets could have acted as proto-enzymes, enabling the formation of more complicated organic molecules. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-rna-droplets-prebiotic-earth-complex.html Biochemistry Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:10:27 EST news688929001 Research in the lab of UC Santa Barbara materials professor Stephen Wilson is focused on understanding the fundamental physics behind unusual states of matter and developing materials that can host the kinds of properties needed for quantum functionalities. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-magnetic-frustration-probe-quantum-possibilities.html Condensed Matter Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:34:40 EST news688235641 Human activity continues to expand ever further into wild areas, throwing ecology out of balance. But what begins as an environmental issue often evolves into a human problem. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-diseases-settlement-amazon-rainforest.html Ecology Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:25:33 EST news688220701 The dangers of heat and humidity are so well known it's become cliché to mention them. But the impacts can extend farther than even scientists and doctors realized. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-hot-humid-weather-pregnancy-poses.html Environment Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:27:05 EST news685513570 In the midst of the COVID pandemic, scientists embarked on an ambitious research expedition to the North Atlantic to investigate the inner workings of the ocean's carbon cycle. A series of storms hammered the three vessels, among the most advanced research ships in the world, while bureaucratic mayhem threatened to scrub the voyage entirely. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-storms-reveal-marine-carbon-deep.html Earth Sciences Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:10:05 EST news685116173 Shifting focus on a visual scene without moving our eyes—think driving, or reading a room for the reaction to your joke—is a behavior known as covert attention. We do it all the time, but little is known about its neurophysiological foundation. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-ai-covert-attention-uncovers-neuron.html Neuroscience Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:40:06 EST news685038771 Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have invented a display technology for on-screen graphics that are both visible and haptic, meaning that they can be felt via touch. https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-haptic-display-technology-3d-graphics.html Engineering Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:10:04 EST news684155293 In a step toward better understanding how the ocean sequesters carbon, new findings from UC Santa Barbara researchers and collaborators challenge the current view of how carbon dioxide is "fixed" in the sunless ocean depths. UCSB microbial oceanographer Alyson Santoro and colleagues, publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience, present results that help to reconcile discrepancies in accounting for nitrogen supply and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) fixation at depth. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-mystery-deep-ocean-carbon-fixers.html Earth Sciences Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:49:58 EST news683826567 Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) is a debilitating hereditary condition in which fluid-filled sacs form and proliferate in the kidneys. Over time, the painful, growing cysts rob the organs of their function, often leading to dialysis in advanced cases. There is currently no cure. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-11-magic-bullet-polycystic-kidney-disease.html Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes Wed, 19 Nov 2025 11:33:04 EST news682774381 The path toward realizing practical quantum technologies begins with understanding the fundamental physics that govern quantum behavior—and how those phenomena can be harnessed in real materials. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-dimension-qubits-diamond.html Condensed Matter Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:21:28 EDT news681038482 Even as coal power continues its steady decline in the United States, more than a hundred plants still have no retirement plans—a gap large enough to derail national climate goals. A new study led by UC Santa Barbara researchers offers a way forward, showing how targeted, data-driven approaches could help accelerate the transition. https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-framework-reveals-smarter-faster-coal.html Energy & Green Tech Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:15:05 EDT news680530501 Why move to a city? And why leave? Urban centers today see populations ebb and flow for a multitude of reasons—the economy, crowds, lifestyle considerations, air quality, the odd pandemic perhaps. As it turns out, it's sort of always been that way. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-classic-maya-cities-rose-fell.html Archaeology Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:37:03 EDT news679847821 The trade of totoaba has all the intrigue of a crime thriller. Dollars and drugs change hands as a criminal cartel vies against the government. Communities and endangered species are caught in the crosshairs of a lucrative illicit trade. It may then come as a surprise that the totoaba is a fish. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-farmed-totoaba-curb-poaching.html Ecology Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:48:05 EDT news679153681 In 2020, right when Jane Baude was starting her Ph.D. research at UC Santa Barbara, she learned that a critical component of her experiment—the gel needed to grow and test mammary epithelial cells—wouldn't be available for nearly a year because of pandemic-related production issues. So, she and her advisor, professor Ryan Stowers, decided to pivot: Baude would engineer her own gel to study cells. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-10-algae-based-gel-tool-breast.html Oncology & Cancer Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:36:04 EDT news678641761 Determining the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest puzzles in physics. New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), have narrowed down the possibilities for one of the leading dark matter candidates: weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). https://phys.org/news/2025-09-world-sensitive-detector-tightens-net.html General Physics Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:20:05 EDT news678370116 With CO2 emissions continuing unabated, an increasing number of policymakers, scientists and environmentalists are considering geoengineering to avert a climate catastrophe. Such interventions could influence everything from rainfall to global food supplies, making the stakes enormous. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-hard-geoengineering-reveals-global.html Earth Sciences Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:56:04 EDT news677318161 Editorial Note (Retraction Notice) https://phys.org/news/2025-09-evidence-cosmic-impact-classic-clovis.html Archaeology Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:28:54 EDT news677233728