California is home to four of the eight active soda taxes in the United States, but are these policies successfully decreasing the consumption of sugary beverages in these cities? New research out of UC Davis suggests that, in most cases, these soda taxes did not reduce retail sales.

Bicycles whirr by, students rush to class, staff and faculty are grabbing lunch or coffee on the go — and sheep graze the grassy knolls among the traffic, bleating every now and then. The grazing is their job. 

The 25 wooly sheep who seasonally — for the past two years — leave their UC Davis barns to nibble on lawns at various central campus locations, are doing much more than mowing, fertilizing and improving the ecosystem. The sheep also are improving people’s mental health. 

From jaguars and ocelots to anteaters and capybara, most land-based mammals living in the Brazilian Amazon are threatened by climate change and the projected savannization of the region. That’s according to a study published in the journal Animal Conservation by the University of California, Davis.

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As Los Angeles prepares to celebrate the life of beloved mountain lion P-22 this weekend,  mountain lion mortality maps from the University of California, Davis, show that many cougars suffer similar fates along California’s roads and highways. 

Life turned remote during the COVID-19 pandemic. People worked, learned to cook, chatted with loved ones and completed countless other tasks via video.

Some cats even visited the virtual veterinarian as part of research out of University of California, Davis.

A team of researchers measured how cats reacted to in-clinic appointments versus those conducted by webcam to evaluate if telemedicine could increase access to care for an estimated 45.3 million feline-friendly households in the United States.

Laughter bounces off the tile floor in the Davis Senior Center as small groups of UC Davis students huddle with older adults around laptops. They are working together to price flights to visit family, write emails or buy medicine online.

“Let’s see what happens when I do this,” said Christine Adams, of Davis, as she pecks at a key on her laptop. “OK, now how do I pick an emoji using the keyboard?”

Consuming more tea, apples and berries daily may lead to better heart health, according to a team of global nutrition experts. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics issued a dietary recommendation for flavan-3-ols, a group of bioactive compounds that are good for your heart and found in many foods and drinks.

An ordinary bus stop in Vallejo has a fresh new look. The local site got a makeover designed by UC Davis students Ashley Gear and Katie Wong, both seniors majoring in landscape architecture.

Solano County Transit (SolTrans), which runs the bus service in Vallejo, recently unveiled its newly transformed bus stop located at Gary Circle and Magazine Street. SolTrans chose the students’ design, which Gear and Wong created last spring for the “Plants in the City” course led by Assistant Professor Haven Kiers.

Mules are stoic working animals. They can be sick or in pain and by the time signs of illness are obvious, it could be too late for owners and veterinarians to intervene.

But new research out of University of California, Davis, could unlock that mystery by decoding whether body posture and facial expressions such as flaring nostrils and ear movement can be clues to something more.  

A unique research collaboration involving animal science students, the UC Davis Intercollegiate Equestrian Team and more than 700 hours of video could help enrich the lives of stabled horses.

The subjects had names like Rogue, Sparky, Bella and Fargo and the research involved tools such as a Beethoven symphony, shatter-proof mirrors, slow feeding forage balls and giant rubber jolly balls.