A tiny species known only from fossils is found alive in the tidepools of Santa Barbara.

Researchers investigate how microbes that can both eat and photosynthesize might evolve in a changing environment.

The UC’s Native American Opportunity Plan covers in-state tuition and fees for members of Native American Indian and Alaska Native tribes.

The abandoned tests highlight the difficulties in balancing the costs of robots against their usefulness, said Matt Beane, an assistant professor in the technology management program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Robots are still prone to messing up basic tasks and often require supervision in fluid environments like shop floors or sidewalks, Prof. Beane said. Their success in public settings has been largely limited to high-margin businesses in contained, predictable spaces—delivering room service at luxury hotels or mixing cocktails in bars, for example—where robots are often novelties for which companies can charge extra, he said.

Another experiment led by Yangying Zhu, assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, seeks to find a new method to actively control bubbles and droplets by exploiting liquids whose surface tension can be changed with light. This research has the potential for a wide range of terrestrial applications, including improving the efficiency of power plants that produce most of the electricity in the U.S., heating and cooling of buildings, desalination and distillation.