Sonia Fernandez

Dec 17, 2024 | noozhawk.com | Sonia Fernandez

Shifting our diets to be more sustainable can be a powerful way for each of us to address both climate change and global food insecurity, however making such adjustments at the large scales necessary to make a difference globally can be a delicate matter.

Nov 22, 2024 | noozhawk.com | Sonia Fernandez

UC Santa Barbara researchers and their colleagues estimate that without intervention, plastic pollution is on track to double by 2050. But in a study published in the journal Science, these same scientists report that this all can be avoided. Global leaders have the ability to nearly put an end to plastic pollution by 2050 through a United Nations (UN) international treaty set to be completed at a final meeting in Busan, Republic of Korea, taking place Nov. 25-Dec. 1.

Nov 22, 2024 | noozhawk.com | Sonia Fernandez

It’s well known that cargo vessels and whales don’t mix; whale-ship collisions are one of the leading causes of death for the majestic creatures. However, between high-profile accidents, careful observations by researchers in special areas, and reporting by federal agencies such as the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the global picture of whales versus ships has been somewhat unclear.

Oct 29, 2024 | noozhawk.com | Sonia Fernandez

There’s a set of childhood memories that UC Santa Barbara film and media studies professor Cristina Venegas returns to once in a while, recollections that stand out because of their peculiar nature. “I have memories of being a child in Montería, which is an interesting city, and it’s on the banks of the Sinú river,” she said of a municipality in her native northern Colombia. “I remember the town square facing the church where sometimes you could escape the  heat and humidity,” she said.

Oct 27, 2024 | noozhawk.com | Sonia Fernandez

For all its pervasiveness and the efforts to study it, cancer is still somewhat of a mystery. Why do some animals get it at a higher rate than others? This is the question at the heart of Peto’s paradox, the observation that large animals, by virtue of their number of cells, are statistically more likely than smaller animals to develop and accumulate genetic mutations that lead to cancer — yet they don’t.