Unveiling our most visited stories of 2023

As The Current winds down coverage for this calendar year, we round up and revisit the five stories from 2023 that you visited most. Happy (re)reading!

WiFi can read through walls

Researchers in Professor Yasamin Mostofi’s lab proposed a new foundation that can enable high-quality imaging of still objects with only WiFi signals. The technique has also enabled, for the first time, imaging, or reading, the English alphabet through walls with WiFi, a task deemed too difficult for WiFi due to the complex details of the letters.

Alumni and former staff member establish fellowship for Iranian women

The campus’s tight-knit Iranian community founded the Mahsa Amini Graduate Fellowship for Iranian women studying non-STEM fields at UC Santa Barbara. The group decided to target non-stem majors, fields that are often inaccessible to Iranian students, particularly women.

From impact to academics to outcomes, UC Santa Barbara ranks among the nation’s top universities

In student outcomes and academics. In affordability and social mobility. For return on investment. For overall excellence. In multiple rankings across an array of metrics, UC Santa Barbara in 2023 continued to place in the upper echelons of higher education.

Study finds parents’ phone use in front of their kids can harm emotional intelligence

In a study of parents to look at how various forms of media use might impact their children’s emotional intelligence, communication professor Robin Nabi found that the emotional intelligence of kids can be adversely impacted by their parents’ smartphone use — that all-too-common scene of a caregiver engaging with a screen with their child nearby seeking attention.

Physicists discover an exotic material made of bosons

The research group of condensed matter physicist Chenhao Jin made a new material out of interacting bosons, marking the first time such a material has been created in a “real” (as opposed to synthetic) matter system. The unique material is a highly ordered crystal of bosonic particles called excitons.