Multiple Causes of Woolly Mammoth Extinction

A study by Glen MacDonald, director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) along with Robert Wayne and Blaire Van Valkenburgh, also EEB professors, found that woolly mammoths succumbed to a lethal combination of climate warming, encroaching humans and habitat change between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago.

UCLA life scientists view biodiversity through a whole new dimension

Van Savage, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Assistant Professor, Samraat Pawar, a post-doctoral scholar in Savage’s group, and their collaborators have demonstrated for the first time that the relationship between animals’ body size and their feeding rate — the overall amount of food they consume per unit of time — is largely determined by the properties of the space in which they search for their food.

Hacking Code of Leaf Vein Architecture Solves Mysteries, Allows Predictions of Past Climate

Lawren Sack, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, along with graduate student Christine Scoffoni, three UCLA undergraduate researchers, and colleagues have discovered new laws that determine the construction of leaf vein systems as leaves grow and evolve. The research, has a range of fundamental implications for global ecology and allows researchers to estimate original leaf sizes from just a fragment of a leaf. W improve scientists’ prediction and interpretation of climate in the deep past from leaf fossils.

How Fructose Affects Learning, Memory

Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine, and a professor of Integrative Biology and Physiology, was co-author of a recent study showing that a steady high-fructose diet can slow the brain and hamper memory and learning in rats — and how omega-3 fatty acids can minimize the damage.

UCLA Life Sciences undergraduate receives 2012 Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award

Kendra Knudson, a UCLA undergraduate majoring in psychobiology, was awarded the 2012 Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award for developing the Creative Minds Project at Step Up on Second, a nonprofit organization in Santa Monica that serves people with mental illness. The project utilizes creative art therapies to foster change and progress toward recovery, stability and reintegration into society.