This Injectable Hydrogel Mitigates Damage to the Right Ventricle of the Heart

An injectable hydrogel can mitigate damage to the right ventricle of the heart with chronic pressure overload, according to a new study published March 6 in Journals of the American College of Cardiology: Basic to Translational Science.  The study, by a research team from the University of California San Diego, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, was conducted in rodents.

Working Towards Toxic-Free AI

Unlike existing work, which relies on training data from social media examples, a new benchmark, named ToxicChat, is based on examples gathered from real-world interactions between users and an AI-powered chatbot. ToxicChat is able to weed out queries that use seemingly harmless language but are actually harmful, which would pass muster with most current models.

These Robots Helped Understand How Insects Evolved Two Distinct Strategies of Flight

Robots built by engineers at the University of California San Diego helped achieve a major breakthrough in understanding how insect flight evolved, described in the Oct. 4, 2023 issue of the journal Nature. The study is a result of a six-year long collaboration between roboticists at UC San Diego and biophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

New Technology Turns Smartphones into RFID Readers, Saving Costs and Reducing Waste

Imagine you can open your fridge, open an app on your phone and immediately know which items are expiring within a few days. This is one of the applications that a new technology developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego would enable.

This Groundbreaking Biomaterial Heals Tissues From the Inside Out

A new biomaterial that can be injected intravenously, reduces inflammation in tissue and promotes cell and tissue repair. The biomaterial was tested and proven effective in treating tissue damage caused by heart attacks in both rodent and large animal models. Researchers also provided proof of concept in a rodent model that the biomaterial could be beneficial to patients with traumatic brain injury and pulmonary arterial hypertension.

New Web Tracking Technique is Bypassing Privacy Protections

Two years ago, several browsers that prioritize user privacy — including Safari, Firefox, and Brave — began to block third-party cookies for all users by default. Advertisers have responded by pioneering a new method for tracking users across the Web, known as user ID (or UID) smuggling, which does not require third-party cookies. But no one knew exactly how often this method was used to track people on the Internet.

Innovative Self-Powered Ingestible Sensor Opens New Avenues for Gut Research

Engineers developed a battery-free, pill-shaped ingestible biosensing system that gives scientists the ability to monitor gut metabolites in real time, which wasn’t possible before. The work could lead to a new understanding of intestinal metabolite composition, which significantly impacts human health.

Nanoengineers Develop a Predictive Database for Materials

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering have developed an AI algorithm that predicts the structure and dynamic properties of any material—whether existing or new—almost instantaneously. Known as M3GNet, the algorithm was used to develop matterverse.ai, a database of more than 31 million yet-to-be-synthesized materials with properties predicted by machine learning algorithms. Matterverse.ai facilitates the discovery of new technological materials with exceptional properties.

The physics of walking is simpler than we thought

The physics of walking for multi-legged animals and robots is simpler than previously thought. That is the finding described by a team of roboticists, physicists and biologists in the Sept. 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper titled “Walking is like slithering: a unifying, data-driven view of locomotion.”

A new neuromorphic chip for AI on the edge, at a small fraction of the energy and size of today’s compute platforms

An international team of researchers has designed and built a chip that runs computations directly in memory and can run a wide variety of AI applications–all at a fraction of the energy consumed by computing platforms for general-purpose AI computing. The NeuRRAM neuromorphic chip brings AI a step closer to running on a broad range of edge devices, disconnected from the cloud, where they can perform sophisticated cognitive tasks anywhere and anytime without relying on a network connection to a centralized server.

New $10M NSF-Funded Institute Will Get to the CORE of Data Science

A new National Science Foundation initiative has created a $10 million dollar institute led by computer and data scientists at University of California San DIego that aims to transform the core fundamentals of the rapidly emerging field of Data Science.

UC San Diego Computer Scientist Plays Major Role in $25M Cancer Grand Challenges Project

University of California San Diego computer scientist Vineet Bafna is part of a team of world-class researchers that has been awarded a five-year, $25 million Cancer Grand Challenges grant to learn how the destructive genetic lesion extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) influences numerous cancers and to identify possible therapies.

A quarter of world’s Internet users rely on infrastructure at high risk of attack

About a quarter of the world’s Internet users live in countries that are more susceptible than previously thought to targeted attacks on their Internet infrastructure. Many of the at-risk countries are located in the Global South.

NSF makes $20 Million investment in Optimization-focused AI Research Institute led by UC San Diego

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today an investment of $220 million to establish 11 artificial intelligence (AI) institutes, each receiving $20 million over five years. One of these, The Institute for Learning-enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS), will be led by the University of California San Diego.

Nanoparticles Help Untangle Alzheimer’s Disease Amyloid Beta Plaques

ROCKVILLE, MD – Scientists are still a long way from being able to treat Alzheimer’s Disease, in part because the protein aggregates that can become brain plaques, a hallmark of the disease, are hard to study.

How SARS-CoV-2’s Sugar-Coated Shield Helps Activate the Virus

ROCKVILLE, MD – One thing that makes SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, elusive to the immune system is that it is covered in sugars called glycans.

New Study Finds That Parasites Can Drain Energy from Hosts Prior to Infection

A new study by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences has found that a species of brain-infecting parasite can disrupt the metabolism of its host—the California killifish—both before and after infection.

These flexible feet help robots walk faster

Roboticists at the University of California San Diego have developed flexible feet that can help robots walk up to 40 percent faster on uneven terrain such as pebbles and wood chips. The work has applications for search-and-rescue missions as well as space exploration.