In urban planning, look to edges, not just the core

Catherine Brinkley is a professor of human and community development and human ecology at UC Davis. So it’s interesting that in a recent published paper, she advocates that cities should work more like coral reefs — supporting a diversity of niches and uses for sustained vigor and resilience. In ecology and medical sciences, the term for a physical form with such topographic complexity is rugosity.

Safety of birds, people, at stake, a UC Davis study suggests

Historically, keeping backyard chickens was a response to economic hardship — whether it was in the Depression or during wartime food rationing.

New research with prairie voles suggests stress promotes developmental plasticity

Prenatal stress might not be so bad for babies after all, depending on how they are raised.  

New research with prairie voles by child development experts at the University of California, Davis, suggests that prenatal stress promotes developmental plasticity in babies, making them especially likely to benefit from good parenting as well as suffer from negligent care.

UC Davis wheat geneticist Jorge Dubcovsky and his team have identified a gene that enables resistance to a new devastating strain of stem rust, a fungal disease that is hampering wheat production throughout Africa and Asia and threatening food security worldwide.

The novel research, funded by a $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, could improve the well-being of thousands of families in this growing yet underserved population.

UC Davis faculty are part of a multidisciplinary design team chosen to develop solutions to strengthen the San Francisco’s Bay Area’s resilience to the impact of climate change, such as sea-level rise, severe storms and flooding.

Problem-solving skills may improve, too

Editor’s note: As the school year begins, this story is one in a series on UC Davis’ role in researching K-12 education.

Early adolescents’ grades were higher when they socialized with peers from other ethnicities, according to the findings of a University of California, Davis, study that looked at the lunching habits of more than 800 sixth-graders in three states.

‘Putting Youth on the Map’ wins IT Sautter Award

An interactive website called “Putting Youth on the Map” has landed UC Davis on a different map, as a top winner in the UC system’s annual Larry L. Sautter Award Program for Innovation in Information Technology. 

UC Davis researchers find the connection

Research on depression in adolescents in recent years has focused on how the physical brain and social experiences interact. A new University of California, Davis, study, however, shows that adolescents with large hippocampal volume were more, or less, susceptible to feelings of depression depending on how unsafe — or conversely — protected they felt in their home and community environments.