Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, raged last winter, contributing to a “tripledemic” where cases of flu, COVID-19 and RSV all flooded the nation’s hospitals at once. UC Santa Cruz professor Rebecca DuBois is deep into vaccine research even as a CDC committee recommended a pair of immunizations this week. DuBois works at the molecular scale, and her research is action-packed and futuristic-sounding.
Elise Overgaard
Posted inEducation
She studies slug sex by the seashore: UCSC researcher works to unlock secrets of banana slug sex
Banana slugs are embedded in Santa Cruz culture, but few know about the creatures’ secretive, sultry sex lives — or the local banana slug “rancher” documenting what slugs do under cover of night. Janet Leonard, an ethologist at UCSC, has built a career on understanding the mysterious sexual world of hermaphrodites, with a 20-year focus on West Coast banana slugs. She’s part of a long line of puzzled slug researchers. As Henry Pilsbry and E.G. Vanatta wrote in 1896, “he who attempts the identification of a West Coast slug to-day is not only a bold man but also one probably doomed to a miserable failure.”
Posted inLookout PM Archive
Lookout PM: Studying banana slug sex, Watsonville hospital nurses raise concerns, and SC’s punk historian
Banana slugs are embedded in Santa Cruz culture, but few know about the creatures’ secretive, sultry sex lives — or the…