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Letters and Science

Four adults in farmers clothes, their faces lit, look up at a foreboding figure in a mask
Photo Credit
Jeff Liang
The allegory that is 'Animal Farm' examines the perils of unchecked power and privilege, the use of words as a political weapon, and revolutions that erode into regimes not unlike those they overthrew.

UCSB theater students take on Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm,’ a fable that still bites

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Nine early-career faculty members receive 2023-24 Hellman Fellowships
Maps and cityscapes on a grid.
Photo Credit
Alice Kitterman/U.S. National Science Foundation

Mapping science: How GIS transformed our view of the world
Painting of a friend by Lyra Purugganan

Take a friend to an artist’s studio
Book cover image of The Computer Music Tutorial

Core textbook on computer music distills ‘vast information space’ in a definitive tutorial
The surface of Lake Superior from the back of a research vessel.
Photo Credit
Alexandra Phillips
The sulfate poor waters of Lake Superior could provide insights on the biochemistry of Earth's early ocean.

Research in Lake Superior reveals how sulfur might have cycled in Earth’s ancient oceans
Two pianists play facing each other on a darkened stage
Photo Credit
Courtesy photo
Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay have been playing together for about a decade.

Two pianists speaking the language of our time
A roadcut slices through the Great Unconformity.
Photo Credit
Adrian Tasistro-Hart
Cambrian Sawatch sandstone from the Sauk Transgression caps 1 billion-year-old Pikes Peak granite (pink) marking the Great Unconformity in a roadcut in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

Geologists link continental flooding to subduction, with consequences for geologic gaps and the rise of complex life
A large pile of small blue plastic objects rises from a relief map of Manhattan
Photo Credit
Courtesy Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory
This image of a blue plastic pile represents the cumulative amount of plastic waste that would be generated between 2010 and 2050 — enough to cover the entire island of Manhattan, and ten times the height of the Empire State Building — under a business-as-usual scenario where no aggressive policy actions are taken.

A ‘Paris Agreement for plastic’ could slash plastic pollution to almost zero
image of multiple heads

Social-behavioral findings can be highly replicable, six-year study by four labs suggests
Two actors in 1920s attire sitting on a couch, laughing, in a black and white image
Photo Credit
Jeff Liang
“Hay Fever” will run from Nov. 14-19 in the Performing Arts Theater on campus.

Noel Coward’s comedy of bad manners
two blue-green mitochondria against a lighter blue-green background

Zen and the art of mitochondrial maintenance: The machinery of death makes a healthier life
abstracted blue green amine molecules

Chemistry professor Yang Yang receives a 2023 Packard Fellowship
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