Welcome home, Tracy! NASA Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, honorary AirUCI team member and alumna, landed on September 23rd in Kazakhstan after a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station – a trip of 78 million miles and three space walks. Her research included experiments with fire in space, robotics, and 3D printing of cardiovascular tissue samples in microgravity to potentially create 3D-printed organs for transplant patients. We hope Tracy will visit AirUCI sometime soon for a public lecture. View NASA coverage (2 hours)
News
Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
2024
Thursday, September 19, 2024
AirUCI faculty Sarah Finkeldei was named the 2024 Dean’s Honoree for Teaching Excellence, an award that recognizes instructors nominated by the dean of each school. Physical Sciences Dean James Bullock recognized Sarah’s accomplishments in undergraduate teaching. “I’m honored by this recognition and very grateful for the enthusiasm and curiosity of our students, which makes teaching a truly rewarding experience,” she said. Read the article (written by AirUCI grad student Sukriti Kapur in the Shiraiwa research group, also a writer for UC Irvine Physical Sciences Communications)
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
AirUCI faculty Annmarie Carlton has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, a huge honor. She joins six other AirUCI faculty as AGU fellows. Congratulations, Annmarie!
Thursday, September 5, 2024
AirUCI faculty Jane Baldwin is quoted in a September 5th Los Angeles Times article on record high temperatures and across the west. Temperatures as high as 124 degrees in some areas and more than 100 consecutive days of 100 degree heat in Phoenix have made this the hottest summer on record in several states. While California’s climate has always had year-to-year and month-to-month variability, the heat the state has experienced recently is consistent with climate change. “These are levels of heat that are extreme and are what we generally expect to see more of as the climate system warms,” Jane said, adding that more analysis is needed to determine whether this is going to be the new normal for California. Read the article
Friday, August 30, 2024
Now Live and Going Strong... the AirUCI ZotFunder Project!
We've had many requests through the years from regular folks for opportunities to provide support for AirUCI's research, outreach, and mission. And now, that opportunity is at hand! On August 30th, 2024 we launched a new ZotFunder project that makes it easy to contribute as little or as much as you like. The funds will be directed toward specific projects, and the first one is the modernization of the AirUCI conference room. Visit our ZotFunder page at https://zotfunder.give.uci.edu/airuci
Thursday, August 29, 2024
AirUCI faculty Jun Wu and AirUCI grad students Anqi Jiao and Mengyi Li are among the co-authors on a new study that highlights the compounded effects of frequent wildfires and smoke exposure on physical and mental health, local economies, and community resilience in the eastern Coachella Valley. Their findings are among the few to contribute to the literature about how low-income, marginalized communities can respond to and protect themselves from wildfire threats. Read the article
Friday, August 23, 2024
AirUCI faculty Mike Kleinman is quoted in an August 23rd article on Undark about a new UC Riverside study of air quality at the Salton Sea. The new recommendation is that anyone visiting the lake wear an N95 mask. Something in the environment — in the water, the land, the air, or all three — appears to be making people in the region sick with a respiratory disease that presents like asthma. Mike says that the study may provide a glimpse of the future, as climate change begins to produce new and unexpected health challenges. “We are going to see novel things happening,” he said. “They may have just been the canary in the coal mine on this one.” Read the article
Thursday, August 8, 2024
The Finlayson-Pitts research group will have three undergraduate students — Katelyn Pacaud, Ellie Wingen, and Maryam Parvinian — presenting posters at the SoCal Undergraduate Research Symposium, which will be held on Thursday, August 8, 2024 from 9:30 to 2:30 in the ISEB lobby/atrium area. AirUCI team members can register to attend for free.
Monday, August 5, 2024
AirUCI faculty Jane Baldwin is quoted in an August 4th article in Science that discusses the debate among physiologists and epidemiologists over the effects of humidity vs. temperature on human health and the death rate in times extreme heat. Jane is a renowned expert on this topic and maintains that humidity matters: at a given temperature, more humidity makes it harder for the body to maintain a safe core temperature and ward off heat stroke. Other epidemiology studies have found little to no correlation. “No one had directly said: ‘Look, these two fields are going along in parallel with entirely different conclusions,’” says Jane, who highlighted the conundrum at a Columbia University workshop on extreme heat in July. “And if this continues, this could be a real problem for projecting impacts of climate change.” Read the article
Monday, August 5, 2024
In an August 5th Mercury News article about people who start wildfires, a 2022 study published by AirUCI faculty Jim Randerson et al is cited which found that human-started fires, whether careless or intentional, expand more explosively than those started by lightning. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, 19 out of 20 wildfires in California are started by humans, and there is no one profile for these arsonists who range from a country singer to a college professor, even to firefighters. Read the article
