UC Santa Barbara

09/10/2026

Gaucho families, save the date: 's Parents & Family Weekend takes place Nov. 6 and Nov. 7, 2026 🎉💙

The annual fall event includes opportunities to meet other Gaucho families and immerse yourself in the UC Santa Barbara lifestyle and academic community. Registration opens Sept. 24: https://ow.ly/QINr50ZLHvk

09/08/2026

Thousands of songs representing some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression would have likely been lost to landfills and faded from memory.

Fans and historians have long credited obsessive record collectors for preserving much of that music, and today they can thank a partnership between and the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation for making it available to the public for free.

UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections has been uploading music from the foundation’s trove of approximately 50,000 songs to the university’s Discography of American Historical Recordings (Discography of American Historical Recordings) database.

09/08/2026

Scientists including researchers from the UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management have joined forces to urge U.N. delegates to introduce a mandatory measurement and reporting component to the Global Plastics Treaty, similar to protocols for other internationally regulated pollutants.

Full story:

Scientists in the U.S. and China urge the UN to mandate global reporting in its upcoming plastics treaty. They system they propose will inform a workshop in Geneva, Switzerland in mid-September.

09/04/2026

Reducing climate change requires more than reducing emissions, it also means understanding how we remove and store carbon already in the atmosphere.

soil scientist Iris Holzer will serve as lead author on an upcoming IPCC methodology report, helping update international guidelines for tracking carbon capture, storage, and utilization.

Full story: https://ow.ly/RNqP50ZJz13

09/03/2026

Scientific excellence at : In the only assessment of its kind by a journalistic outlet, Washington Monthly ranked UC Santa Barbara No. 37 among top U.S. research universities, both public and private.

09/02/2026

DARPA has tasked scientists with developing a system that can receive instructions and synthesize a sequence of DNA or RNA without any chemical input, and the agency chose 's Max Wilson to lead the winning proposal.

His team, LUXCODE includes researchers at four universities, and DARPA has committed $1.7 million to launch the initiative over the first nine months, with potentially tens of millions more based on the team’s progress.

They aim to develop a nucleic acid compiler, or NAC, in a living cell: https://ow.ly/h7sl50ZIkti

09/01/2026

The war in Iran has strangled one of the world’s most important oil producing regions and gas prices have soared. ’s Paasha Mahdavi at the Bren School, argues that the conflict provides a unique opportunity to transition toward renewable energy.

"Most people don’t realize just how unbalanced the playing field is, and has been, for fossil fuels."

Full story: https://ow.ly/Xv2y50ZHL1y

08/31/2026

Scroll break ✋ Breathe in and enjoy the views around 🌊📚🚲

08/28/2026

An El Niño of historic proportion is taking shape in the tropical Pacific. As a result, water temperatures off Santa Barbara climbed into the low 70s Fahrenheit in August.

While 2026 promises exceptional conditions, a new study that includes researchers from found that El Niño events have become nearly 40% stronger in the last 40 years than they were in the pre-industrial era.

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A stronger El Niño will amplify this natural cycle's capacity for disruption and destruction.

08/27/2026

's Helen Morales—the first Dollyologist and author of "Pilgrimage to Dollywood"—on Dolly Parton’s radical empathy and the cultural power that let her hold contradictions and people together.

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UCSB classicist and “Dollyologist” Helen Morales explains Dolly Parton’s radical empathy, cultural reach and enduring appeal across divides.