January 20, 2022

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VOLUME 140, ISSUE 13 | THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2022

SLOW POPULATION GROWTH IN DAVIS IS SYMPTOMATIC OF LOW DEVELOPMENT RATES, RISING COST OF HOUSING The state-wide housing crisis is heavily impacting Davis

BY LEVI GOLDSTEIN city@theaggie.org

The Green Apartments at West Village in Davis, CA. (Aggie File)

Davis is traditionally a slow population growth city, according to Barbara Archer, the communications & customer service manager of the City of Davis. In June 1986, an advisory measure was approved, calling for Davis to grow as slowly as legally possible, according to Section IV Chapter 1 page 45 of the city’s General Plan.

This measure influences city council decisions still today. According to an article published in The Sacramento Bee, the 2020 Census revealed that population growth in Davis was only 2% in the last decade. However, council members and Davis citizens are concerned that the slow growth rate may be under less city control today than in the 20th century.

Housing development is a major factor in

population growth rates, which is not the city’s responsibility, according to Sherri Metzker, the principal planner of the City of Davis.

“We are not in the business to build housing,” Metzker said. “That’s what developers do. […]

We are charged by the state of California with providing enough available land that is zoned for housing. […] It doesn’t necessarily guarantee the construction of housing. […] The rest is left up to the market.”

Rising building costs mean that developers are finding it increasingly difficult to make housing development projects economically viable, according to Metzker, meaning fewer projects are being brought to city council for approval.

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UC DAVIS’ SUBSTANCE USE NAVIGATOR PROGRAM IS UC DAVIS LIBRARY, FIRST OF MANY TO NORMALIZE SUBSTANCE ABUSE AS A CALIFORNIA VINTAGE TREATABLE MEDICAL ILLNESS WINE SOCIETY TO CREATE Stigma surrounding drug overdose is a serious issue, and the ARCHIVAL COLLECTION pandemic has only led to further relapse due to inaccessible health care for addicts

BY BRANDON NGUYEN science@theaggie.org

KATHERINE FRANKS / AGGIE Over 100,000 deaths were attributed to drug overdoses, largely due to the opioid epidemic, during a yearlong period that ended in April 2021, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This was a 28.5% increase in deaths compared to the year prior during the same time frame.

Dr. Aimee Moulin, a professor of emergency medicine and the director of behavioral health at the UC Davis Medical Center, puts into perspective what it means to be a victim of substance abuse.

“Usually people with addiction experience a lot of barriers in terms of getting addiction treatment: long intakes, long waits, paperwork and insurance,” Moulin said. “So we need to treat addiction as an emergency.”

Starting treatment as early as possible will help victims land back on their feet more quickly and will reduce the high overdose rates from fentanyl and opioid use disorder. With the Substance Use Navigator Program under the Department of Emergency Medicine at UC Davis Health, substance abuse-addicted patients are quickly identified and are offered support and treatment 24/7 from both clinicians and counselors.

Patients are placed on medications such as buprenorphine, morphine or methadone, which are effective at reducing withdrawal

symptoms. Then, they are connected with patient navigators, who are certified drug and alcohol counselors who help connect patients with rehabilitation programs and can customize treatment plans.

Tommie Trevino, a former substance abuse-addicted patient and now a patient navigator at UC Davis Health for over five years since the program’s establishment, described how his experiences resonate with the patients and how his motivational counseling has helped many of his patients turn their lives around.

“Learning recovery takes time and does not happen in a day,” Trevino said. “When I talk to people now, it’s like, ‘Hey, you’re not going to get straight today; you’re not going to stop using drugs today.’ You’ve developed a lot of bad habits-addiction as a disease.

It’s like a trigger bag, because once you have it, it’s with you for the rest of your life so you have to learn how to manage it, and I‘ve had great success teaching not only patients how to manage it, but also the families and everyone around them.”

Both Moulin and Trevino recognize addiction as a “disease” and emergency that needs to be normalized and emphasize the need to eliminate the stigma associated with substance abuse.

“Substance abuse is a treatable medical illness, and it’s lifethreatening,” Moulin said. “So we just need to kind of normalize treatments so that people can feel safe to come in and disclose that they’re suffering, and we can offer help. There’s this myth that it’s a moral failing, which is demonstrably not true, and there’s this bias that we have in our society, and then compounded on that is the fact that it’s really the only medical disease that is also a crime.”

In efforts to spread and normalize addiction as a medical illness, UC Davis Medical Center is collaborating with CA Bridge, a nonprofit organization with operations built around the Substance Use Navigation Program to provide support and treatment to all substance abuse patients.

“Most medical providers do not view addiction treatment as part of their job, so people who use drugs are often stigmatized, sometimes treated for other conditions and sent on their way with a list of often inaccessible specialty addiction clinics,” according to the CA Bridge website. “Our goal is to transform addiction treatment by ensuring that every hospital in California provides 24/7 access to evidence-based care.”

SACRAMENTO CITY COLLEGE DAVIS CENTER OFFERING MORE CLASSES IN PERSON FOR SPRING SEMESTER Center classes are adopting a hybrid format as in-person teaching slowly returns

BY RACHEL SHEY city@theaggie.org The Davis Center, a Sacramento City College facility located in the UC Davis West Village and the only California community college to be situated on a university campus, has taken a slower approach to returning to in-person teaching, according to Dean Andrea Gaytan.

“Fall semester, we allowed faculty to decide whether they were comfortable coming back on ground,” Gaytan said. “For some programs, it was essential that our classes returned based on instructional practices, like our biology labs needed to be on ground so that students actually had hands-on experience working with microscopes, for example, and other things like dissections that really we wanted to have students complete those courses with that hands-on experience.”

The hybrid setup has allowed the Davis Center to offer more courses without packing the campus with people.

“It’s not like the hallways are crowded, and we can spread out,” Gaytan said. “We’ve definitely had a lot of silver linings. The idea of having lectures online and labs in-person has been one of those. A lot of faculty and students were reluctant in the past to try a hybrid course, but now they see the benefits of that and a lot more people have accepted that an online education can be really thorough and comprehensive and you’re not losing out on a lot.”

The Davis Center also offers FAA-approved aviation courses, which train students to become air traffic controllers. They don’t involve actually flying planes, but these courses require in-person instruction and use of equipment, so they are among the classes that are in person.

“We also had courses like aviation at the Davis Center that, per FAA regulations, need to have face-to-face time with instructors and equipment that we have on site,” Gaytan said. “So we couldn’t get around that and we were really impacted by mandates we had previously.”

However, some of the aviation lecture courses are fully online.

Sacramento City College is unique in offering these aviation courses, being the only community college in Northern California which has this sort of program.

Sacramento City College Davis Campus located by West Village Square. (Isabella Smithsuvan / Aggie) “There are flight simulators and air traffic control screens that mirror what a professional would have in the industry,” Gaytan said. “We have a lot of training materials that are very handson in terms of understanding runway patterns. We also have flight technology courses that are all lectures; we don’t actually put students in airplanes. It’s the ground school portion of pilot training, for private pilots, not commercial pilots yet, but we’re looking at and exploring programs for professional pilots as well.”

Gaytan was surprised to find that students have not been signing up for the in-person courses as quickly as anticipated. It seemed like students may be a tad reluctant to return to classes already.

“This semester, we have scheduled a larger proportion of classes to be on ground, but we’re seeing that students aren’t enrolling in the on-ground sections as much,” Gaytan said. “We’re trying to provide the opportunity for students to come back, particularly students who have felt isolated being online for so long and want the opportunity to interact in-person, but we are not really seeing a high turnout in students enrolling in those classes as much as we anticipated.”

The collection will detail the history of the California Vintage Wine Society, a social club for people who appreciate great Californian wine

BY JENNIFER MA campus@theaggie.org

A scrapbook page showing showing photos of luminaries from the Northern California wine industry including Ernest Gallo, Louis and Liz Martini at an event on May 26, 1985. (Courtesy / UC Davis Library.

The UC Davis Library and the California Vintage Wine Society are currently working together to compile an archival collection that will consist of letters, photographs and menus that date back to the 1960s. These memorabilia will ultimately contribute to a commemorative book that details the history of the society for their 60th anniversary next year.

Although the library is involved in supporting the university’s viticulture and enology department and claims to be the greatest wine library in the world, this collaboration came to fruition through multiple coincidences.

“One afternoon in January of 2017, while returning to my office near the Maynard Amerine Room on the third floor of Shields Library, I saw a pair of legs extended from behind a bookshelf,” Axel Borg, the UC Davis Library’s distinguished librarian emeritus for food and wine, said. “Not knowing what to expect, I rounded the corner and happened upon a man, lying on his back on the floor, reading a book. When I identified myself, the man jumped to his feet and began to pepper me with questions.”

Borg said he discovered that the man, Ned MacDonald, who was the president of the Northern California Chapter of the California Vintage Wine Society at the time, was looking to use the grape and wine collection in the Amerine Room to teach members of the society about different wines.

While this chance encounter led to a friendship and partnership between the UC Davis Library and the California Vintage Wine Society, it took another coincidental discovery for this archival collection to come about.

The components of the archival collection were originally three scrapbooks from Mike Henry’s closet found by Paul Tuttle, the chairman of the Wine Committee for the California Vintage Wine Society. Henry’s father, Warner Henry, was a founding member of the society, and the scrapbooks include prominent names and faces in the wine industry.

“I ended up having a visit scheduled with UC Davis to go come up for the tour of the library, meet the whole group that’s involved in [the wine] library,” Tuttle said. “I brought those [scrapbooks] with me to the lunch. We were trying to figure out how to get them digitized, mainly for the benefit of members.”

The idea of digitizing the scrapbooks then transformed into the idea of a commemorative book to mark the 60th anniversary of the society.

“To build on the history presented by the scrapbooks, the library engaged society members in a ‘scavenger hunt’ contest to see which members could hunt out the most interesting event programs, menus, notes, photographs, etc. from their closets and attics,” Kevin Miller, the UC Davis Library’s head of archives and special collections, said. “We’re also planning to augment this material record with new oral history interviews with long-time California Vintage Wine Society members to further preserve the stories and history of the society and its activities.”

Although the UC Davis Library already has 30,000 books in more than 50 languages and materials in every medium regarding wine, having an archival collection like this is still important, according to Tuttle.

“There’s a saying that [...] says ‘who knows only his own generation remains always a child,’ so it’s very important for us to understand where we came from,” Tuttle said. “It helps guide us in the future.”

Miller echoed Tuttle’s sentiments on the importance of an archival collection like this.

“We want our collections to tell the complete story of wine in California,” Miller said. “The California Vintage Wine Society’s collection fills in another gap here. Ultimately, the better our collections, the closer we come to meeting our mission to serve the research and education needs of UC Davis students, faculty and the interested public.”

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THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

DISCORD HELPS STUDENTS CONNECT DURING PERIODS OF VIRTUAL INSTRUCTION Students explain how Discord’s unique platform allows clubs and classes to form communities online

BY ANNE SALTEL features@theaggie.org

CHRISTINA LIU / AGGIE Campus has been quiet this January due to the extension of remote learning; however, online, students are buzzing with connection. As people have relied more heavily on various social media sites to connect with friends and peers during the pandemic, students explain what makes Discord especially useful for fostering community.

Discord is a social media platform that houses invite-only servers, often based around a specific topic, which include chat rooms and voice call channels for members. Invites to specific servers can be very inclusive, such as the UC Davis server hub which students can access by searching the university’s name, or more exclusive, like servers for friends or study groups. Because anyone with a Discord account can create a server in just a few clicks, these groups are popular for forming online communities at Davis.

Because there are so many servers unofficially associated with the school, fifth-year applied physics major Sammuel Pertruescu created the “UCD Club/Server Directory” to help students navigate the various channels. The directory houses hundreds of UC Davis Discord channels, including servers for social conversations, official and unofficial clubs, university announcements and classes or majors. By accessing the server directory, users can join these servers to find community members interested in the same topics as them.

Pertuescu shared why he believes Discord has become many students’ go-to social platform for collaboration and connection online.

“I think Discord works well because there are other softwares out there, but they’re not conducive to having a lot of servers,” Pertuescu said. “Any beginner can pick up Discord really

quickly and learn how to use it. It’s just easier to see and easier to organize [than other platforms].”

Pertuescu created this server in the fall of 2020 when instruction was remote. Since then, it has amassed over 11,000 members and inspired the Discord application to create a similar “hub” feature.

Many clubs created Discord channels during the 2020-2021 academic year because most campus events were limited to virtual gatherings, and are now returning to their online servers during the COVID-19 surge fuelled by the Omicron variant.

Maggie Chen, a second-year biochemistry and molecular biology major, said that the Aggie Baking Club has been using Discord to connect with their members during periods of remote instruction.

“We definitely struggled with COVID-19

making everything online,” Chen said. “What we’ve been doing is planning online events. I feel like it’s easier for people to join from the comfort of their own homes so that maybe inclines people to join our meetings more.”

Chen is the social media director of the Aggie Baking Club, and she explained that most social media sites don’t foster conversation between members as well as Discord does. Outside of being a forum for hosting meetings, club members are able to text via the Discord channel to stay connected with each other. The site allows club officers to push important announcements but also lets members bring up conversations in the same space.

“We have a recipe trading channel [and] we have a channel where people can post pictures of their baked items,” Chen said. “We [also] have private channels for just the club officers to communicate on where we can deal with behind the scenes things. It’s all in one place, so I really like how it’s organized like that.”

Discord is also being used to form academic communities, especially within classes or majors.

Class discords can be used for distributing resources, creating study groups and allowing students to ask their peers questions about the course. Other academic channels are more broad, like the Political Science Discord, created by firstyear political science major Grey Crawford.

“My political science Discord has course specific channels so [users] can send a message into those channels to meet other people who are taking their course,” Crawford said. “Now they have connections that they can take with them in future courses or just in general. [...] We’ll also drop some opportunities there, like internships or opportunities to submit your work.”

Crawford has found most Discord channels to have a tone of connection and camaraderie between people connecting both professionally and socially. He explained that recently he had to drop a course, and was able to ask older students on the political science channel for help deciding what course to take instead.

“That was really cool, because [...] they could lend their knowledge to me, and then I can then lend my knowledge to them too,” Crawford said. “It’s just turned into a really nice place with hundreds of other political science students who can help you.”

Crawford said that these online communities have been helping students — especially those whose first and second years of college have been interrupted by the pandemic — form strong connections, even when far apart.

FIVE STUDENTS SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCES FORMING COLLEGE FRIENDSHIPS Students talk about the unexpected ways they met their best friends on campus and offer tips for others

BY JALAN TEHRANIFAR features@theaggie.org Making friends in college can be intimidating when first arriving on campus, especially since most students are living alone and moving away from home for the first time.

Parents’ advice to their kids going off to college is often to keep their dorm room doors open and meet people on their floor at the beginning of the year, but Natalie DiMeglio, a second-year cinema and digital media and communication major, chose a different method. She found her best friend in the laundry room.

“I was doing laundry when this girl walked in and — without introducing herself — goes on a rant about Tide Pods and how people don’t know how to use them,” DiMeglio said. “After [that], she introduced herself and invited me to go to the farmers’ market with her all in one sentence. I agreed, and the rest is history.”

Now, DeMeglio and her laundry buddy are housemates and best friends.

Alyssa Contreras, a second-year sustainable environmental design major, said she also met her best friend in an unexpected way. Contreras explained that the first time she met her now best friend, they didn’t get off on the best foot.

“She was driving me to one of the locations for our project, [and] one of my favorite songs came on, and I regrettably reached for the volume button and blasted the music,” Contreras said. “She was shocked and froze for a second until she quickly reached for the volume button and turned the volume down. She told me she had sensitive ears, so I apologized and lucky enough we were both able to laugh it off.”

Contreras had been working for the girl at the time, and though they started off not liking each other much, they ended up becoming close.

“Honestly, I think having such a bumpy start to things allowed us to be really unfiltered around each other without being afraid of what the other would think,” Contreras said. “Thankfully, we both gave each other a second chance because nearly a year has passed by, and I can’t say I have a friend better than her.”

Unlike Contreras’ experience with her best friend, others find friends that they click with from the very start. Farah Mustafa, a first-year animal biology major, shared that she and her on-campus best friend met through their orientation group and clicked immediately.

“We spent a lot of time together the first few days before the first quarter and we got along really well,” Mustafa said. “After orientation was over, we decided to meet up for dinner one night and we’ve just gotten closer since then.”

With the help of social media, some students have even been able to make college friends before stepping on campus for their first quarter. Rachel Guaer, a first-year communication major, shared that she made most of her campus friends online.

“I used Instagram a lot over the summer to connect with other freshmen coming to Davis,” Guaer said. “I talked to a lot of people

CHRISTINA LIU / AGGIE and was able to meet up with them right when I got here, which was super helpful because it gave me a sense of ‘knowing’ my new friends before I came here. A good majority of the people I am friends with now are people I talked to over social media before arriving.”

Some friendships take a bit longer to develop than others, so don’t fret if you and your acquaintances don’t immediately become best friends. Angela Kim, a third-year cinema and digital media major, met her best friend in middle school, but they weren’t necessarily close friends up until recently.

Kim explained that though she and her best friend met at a young age, they didn’t become friends until senior year of high school.

“I got the surprise of getting to be reacquainted with her in our yearbook class,” Kim said. “[And] after graduating high school, we got closer after finding out we were both accepted and committed to going to UC Davis. Since we were both pretty anxious about

not knowing anyone in our freshmen year, my friend and I talked more through that experience.”

Though Kim explained that COVID-19 prevented them from hanging out last school year, this fall, they were both back on campus and ended up getting really close.

“This year, returning to in-person classes, we found out we live super close,” Kim said. “[We] hung out almost every week in downtown and finally got the chance to talk about everything. I got to meet her cats, and we even decided to house together next school year.”

Friendship takes time, consistency and effort, but if you don’t put yourself out there, you might miss out on making lifelong friends. It might feel scary to approach someone and ask to hang out, but the worst that’ll happen is that they’ll say no and you’ll never see them again. Eventually, you’ll find someone who says yes and, who knows, you might find that they’re the person you’ll want to be stuck in a senior home with for many years from now.

THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

SCIENCE AND TECH

THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2022 | 3

IS YOUR SPINACH SAFE TO EAT? MOST BIRDS DO NOT POSE FOOD SAFETY THREATS FOR PRODUCE, NEW STUDY FINDS The study found that wild birds living near livestock pose the greatest risk in transmitting pathogens to crops

BY MARGO ROSENBAUM science@theaggie.org

Olivia Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, holds a California quail captured from a mist-net on a California farm. Her team collected a fecal sample from this bird, along with thousands of others, to test for the foodborne pathogens for their study.

From dinosaurs to sea otters, animals have always interested Daniel Karp, but in the third grade, Karp finally settled on birds as his primary passion. In the time he spent outdoors as a young avid birdwatcher, he watched the natural spaces and species he loved disappear, swallowed up by residential and commercial developments, ultimately leading him to the world of conservation biology.

As a young scientist, Karp learned he could have a career that combined his love of birds with his other interests: research, teaching and conservation. Now an assistant professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology at UC Davis, he studies connections between wildlife and agriculture in his attempt to save the wildlife species he has loved since he was a kid.

Ever since the 2006 E. coli outbreak among bagged spinach in the California Central Coast, Karp has been particularly passionate about studying wildlife and their potential conflicts with food safety. The originating strain of that outbreak was found in the feces of wild pigs, increasing pressure for growers to keep wildlife away from their farms.

Like Karp, Elissa Olimpi has been absorbed in the world of wildlife ever since she was young, and grew up catching salamanders and watching insects — well before she ever knew she could do it as a career. In her previous role as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis, Olimpi studied birds alongside Karp and the threats they pose to food safety. And now, she is a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech studying the impacts of birds on

agriculture.

Olivia Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, had a similar conservation origin story as Olimpi and Karp.

Today, Smith also studies ways to sustainably manage agricultural systems to understand “the good and the bad of birds,” as Smith puts it, and “how to tip the scale” to minimize harm to birds and maximize the benefits they provide.

To contribute to the ever-growing body of work searching for ways that wildlife and farming can coexist, Olimpi and Karp partnered up with Smith, who was at the University of Georgia at the time, to understand the food safety risks specific bird species pose to crops along the West Coast.

“If you don’t really know which birds are risky, it’s hard to provide advice and identify efficient management strategies for growers,” Olimpi said.

Their resulting study, published in the journal Ecological Applications, found that most birds pose little risk of pathogenic spread to crops, Smith said.

The researchers collected 11,000 different tests of pathogenic E. coli, salmonella and Campylobacter. Among the top two pathogens — E. coli and Salmonella — less than 5% of birds in the study tested positive. Campylobacter presented a slightly greater concern: about 8% of birds tested positive.

“The good news was for the Salmonella and the E. coli, we find they’re really, really rare in wild birds,” Karp said.

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UC DAVIS IMMUNOLOGY RESEARCHERS ENGINEER A BONE MARROW TO RESEARCH EARLY OSTEOSARCOMA Through macrophages and bone cancer cells, researchers hope that the new 3D model will help them better understand osteosarcoma growth

BY MONICA MANMADKAR science@theaggie.org

KATHERINE FRANKS/ AGGIE

UC Davis researchers employ tissue engineering to study the interaction of macrophages, a special type of immune cell involved in the detection of foreign bacteria and tumors. There have been many studies that linked macrophages to osteosarcoma progression. In this study, researchers delved into how studying these macrophages could be a potential opportunity to develop immunotherapies.

Given this understanding, the Leach Laboratory at the UC Davis Department of Orthopaedic Surgery created an artificial bone marrow model that could help them better understand osteosarcoma, a common type of bone cancer in children.

Osteosarcoma begins to develop in the bone marrow but can spread to other bones around the body, especially around the knees and upper parts of the arms. With its treatment barely

making progress, less than 25% of people with this cancer survive five years post-diagnosis.

This cancer grows in a complex bone marrow environment, making it harder to study. Current models do not account for its key features and 3D structure. Hence, the researchers at the Leach Lab created an engineered bone marrow (eBM) to mirror the native bone marrow and study the tumor’s progression.

“The eBM provides a 3D environment as opposed to 2D, which can greatly affect cell behavior, and since it can be maintained in vitro, it gives us a culturable way to control microenvironmental factors like oxygen tension,” Katherine Griffin, a dual doctoral of veterinary medicine and immunology candidate and a researcher at the Leach Lab, said. “There aren’t many models out there that are capable of this.

It’s very novel to approach a cancer immunology question with a tissue engineering approach.”

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NEW RESEARCH UNCOVERS EVIDENCE OF SHARED EARTHQUAKES BETWEEN SAN ANDREAS, SAN JACINTO FAULTS The study, done by geologists at UC Davis and San Diego State University, could improve future earthquake predictions

BY SONORA SLATER science@theaggie.org The year is 1812, and a 7.5 magnitude earthquake has just devastated Spanish missions across southern California. The San Andreas fault is to blame — but, based on new research from geologists at UC Davis and San Diego State University, it might not have been the only one.

According to the study, the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults have ruptured simultaneously at least three times in the past 2,000 years, most recently in 1812. This joint rupture could be the cause of stronger earth shaking from the combined events, which changes our understanding of the past as well as playing into modeling predictions for future earthquakes.

Tom Rockwell, a professor of geology at San Diego State University and the paleoseismic expert on the study, described how the project came about. As a paleoseismologist, Rockwell analyzes sediment along faults for evidence of historical earthquakes.

“I was involved in paleoseismic studies in the northern San Jacinto Fault, and we were coming up with earthquake ages that were very similar to those on the San Andreas Fault,” Rockwell said. “So there was a question of whether perhaps the San Jacinto and San Andreas had ruptured together.”

He went on to explain that Mike Oskin, a professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences

Department at UC Davis, reached out to him about a joint rupture research project. The project involved the smaller Lytle Creek Ridge Fault, located between the San Andreas and San Jacinto. Rockwell agreed to collaborate on the research, and the two wrote a proposal to receive funding.

Rockwell then elaborated that while there has been speculation of joint rupturing at several different faults across the state, Lytle Creek Ridge lent itself particularly well to uncovering the “paleoseismic record of past slip events.”

According to Rockwell, this paleoseismic record is contained in layers of sediment. In order to reveal them, paleoseismologists use a method called trenching.

“We excavate trenches across the fault, and we look for fault strands that break up to a certain level and then are buried,” Rockwell said.

Oskin elaborated on what this looks like, explaining that when an earthquake occurs, it “cuts up to the surface and offsets the surface.”

This means that when trenching is done many years later, paleoseismologists can observe the uneven layers of sediment and know that an earthquake had occurred.

Rockwell explained that once they found evidence of an earthquake in the trench, they could infer that the top layer of the offset sediment “was the ground surface at the time of that particular earthquake.” Therefore, if the team could date the sediment, they would know

Mike Oskin (UC Davis) and Tom Rockwell (San Diego State) work in a trench dug into the Lytle Creek Ridge Fault, looking for evidence of past earthquakes. when the earthquake had happened.

One way to date sediment is through radiocarbon dating — after finding evidence of multiple earthquakes in the trenches of the fault, the researchers collected samples of charcoal from the sediment to use in determining the age of the sediment layer.

“Basically, charcoal has carbon that decays after the sample burns,” Alba Rodríguez Padilla, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis and first author on the paper, said.

EARTHQUAKE on 7

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THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

OPINION INFORMATION ABOUT GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS NEEDS TO BE ACCURATE, EASILY AVAILABLE

THE

C ALIFORNIA A GGIE

EDITO RIA L B OA RD ANJINI VENUGOPAL Editor-in-Chief MARGO ROSENBAUM Managing Editor SOPHIE DEWEES Campus News Editor MADELEINE PAYNE City News Editor EDEN WINNIFORD Opinion Editor KATIE DEBENEDETTI Features Editor

Academic advisors are doing their best but clearly need additional support

ALLIE BAILEY Arts & Culture Editor OMAR NAVARRO Sports Editor

It’s not uncommon to hear students complain in the time leading up to or following academic advising appointments.

Undertaking a college degree can be tedious and difficult; and while we are grateful just to have academic support through advising offices, it can be frustrating to enter and leave these meetings feeling the same way and knowing the same things.

Whether an appointment is scheduled to remove a registration hold or to get clarification about a major requirement, seemingly simple questions are often left unanswered. This is exemplified for appointments pertaining to the four groups of graduation requirements: university, general education, college and major. If students have questions about requirements in multiple groups, advisors often refer students elsewhere for answers to the questions that aren’t directly related to their department.

It would be helpful for major advisors to be comfortable discussing all graduation requirements and not refer students to other advisors for basic questions. Even with the new advising appointment system, which allows all appointments to be made from one site, it is notoriously difficult to find advising appointments during times students most want them, such as course registration.

Furthermore, information that doesn’t need to come from an advisor should be easily available online. Taking a 15-minute advising slot to ask why a course advertised to match a specific requirement is not showing up on My Degree is not a good use of either advisors’ or students’ time. Much of the information that students schedule advising appointments for could easily be consolidated onto one website — there is no reason for information on My Degree to contradict requirements detailed on a department’s website.

In fact, members of the Editorial Board have even been

explicitly told at advising appointments that My Degree is inaccurate and not updated. Students trying to plan courses generally rely on information on major websites, the Online Advising Student Information System (OASIS) or My Degree, often finding information that doesn’t match up. At that point, an advising appointment would be helpful, but it may not be possible to get one. What should you trust more? The major’s website? My Degree? A friend who graduated with the same major?

In many advising appointments, advisors use the degree certification tool on OASIS to confirm that students have met graduation requirements; this should be a feature students can access too. We can request a degree audit for our most accurate degree status, but this should be available at all times.

To relieve some of the burden on advisors, we strongly encourage that the registrar consolidates information and takes the time to set some policies for how majors and departments must update their websites.

We understand that advisors may be overworked and certainly need more help to be able to more effectively support more students. While having an advising service at all has been linked to decreased freshman attrition, higher quality advising was found to be most effective at decreasing attrition.

This means that regardless of the quality, it is a service to UC Davis students that we have so many advisors. The next step is making sure that the advising they provide is high quality. Students should be able to go to advisors for simple questions if they want, but they shouldn’t need to. By cutting out the need for advisors to handle simple questions about requirements, students would need to make fewer advising appointments, could bring deeper questions to appointments and would benefit from advising even more.

MICHELLE WONG Science & Tech Editor

KATHLEEN QUINN New Media Manager BENJAMIN CHENG Photo Director KATHERINE FRANKS Design Director JOELLE TAHTA Layout Director ANNE THISELTON-DYER Copy Chief SABINE LLOYD Copy Chief KESHAV AGRAWAL Website Manager ANTHONY NGUYEN Social Media Manager JOSHUA GAZZANIGA Distribution Manager JENNA HEATH Marketing Manager JELENA LAPUZ Outreach Director LAURIE PEDERSON Business Development Manager

WRITTEN BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD

HUMOR

STAYING HOME

BY SEANNE JAVIER sajavier@ucdavis.edu

COLLECTIVE GROAN FROM UC DAVIS’ ONLINE EXTENSION KNOCKS OVER COWS, WREAKS HAVOC The power of students’ voices has gone too far

BY ANNABEL MARSHALL almarshall@ucdavis.edu

CHRISTINA LIU/ AGGIE

Disclaimer: (This cartoon is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional.

The story and names of “sources” are fictionalized.)

On the announced day of the online continuation, the entire student body simultaneously let out a groan of combined disappointment, relief and frustration so deafening it physically disturbed the surrounding area. Food trucks rumbled, Unitrans buses toppled and squirrels fell from the trees like rodent angels. Even engineering majors would have been disturbed if they ever went outside.

All this chaos from the collective lament of UC Davis, our pitiful excuse for the UCLA midnight yell.

At least, this is what the Yolo County authorities want you to believe. It’s a ridiculous conspiracy that’s foiled too many students.

Here’s the truth. COVID-19, Tercero methane fumes and a rogue chem lab have combined to create Davis’ first official supervillain. His name is Peter Waterman, a third-year biology major living in North Davis.

He’s the man who’s really behind Davis’ recent supernatural event. A natural baritone, upon hearing the news, Peter let out a howl so powerful

it caused a power outage in the surrounding apartments. It upset the air pressure. It caused a local species of beetle to go extinct. Don’t worry so much about that; we have a lot of beetle species. But the guy is generally a menace.

“Nice guy. Blew up my car with his laser eyes,” says Jim, Peter’s roommate.

And the cows that got knocked over? Peter didn’t even use his superpowers for that one. He just knocked them over. I barely tolerate biology majors to begin with, but that’s crossing the line.

Plus, he absolutely wrecked the curve in physics. I could’ve had an A. What am I supposed to tell my mother, Peter?

We haven’t even considered the environmental ramifications of Peter’s continued existence on campus.

Surely, his toxic blood is having some effect on the water supply. And I have it on good authority that Peter rarely recycles. Which is, like, obviously, not good either. So. Davis faculty and administration

have been protecting him for the same reason so many horrible people get protected: He’s good at lacrosse. Pretty sure using your Superman strength to vault over other players with the lacrosse stick is a violation of gameplay rules, but I’m not an expert. Lacrosse is a lawless land.

Regardless, this has gone on too long. Just listen to what his UC Davis peers have to say: “Nice guy. One time I knocked over his empty coffee mug and he threatened to sell my family on the Martian black market,” says Jim, Peter’s roommate. I couldn’t find a lot of people to interview.

It’s time for a new petition. A petition to designate Hart Hall a containment area and lock Peter in there forever. Or at least until we can find a radioactive spider to bite Gary May. Disclaimer: (This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional.

The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)

ARTS & CULTURE THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2022 | 5

WHAT MADE BETTY WHITE, ‘THE GOLDEN GIRLS’ THE ICONS THEY ARE TODAY The late actress and comedian was loved by millions, as was the hit TV show, for their openmindedness and wholesome humor

BY ANGIE CUMMINGS arts@theaggie.org

Main cast of the series Golden Girls(from left): Estelle Getty as Sophia, Rue McClanahan as Blanche, Betty White as Rose, and Beatrice Arthur as Dorothy. (Courtesy / Touchstone Television) Betty White was well known as the “First Lady of TV” for almost 70 years — playing witty characters across iconic sitcoms and movies, and bringing her own vibrant personality to late-night show appearances, game shows and award shows. White passed away on Dec. 31, 2021 at the age of 99, and her legacy of laughs lives on. Despite her extensive filmography, her most memorable role remains as Rose Nylund on “The Golden Girls” (1985-92). While it is possible that many people under the age of 45 have never seen a full episode of the show, it’s cultural impact is undeniable both in the world of sitcoms and general pop culture.

A show about five women (at least) over the age of 50 living together might not sound like the premise of a hit (and fairly progressive) TV show, but after watching just a few minutes, it’s clear that these women are some incredibly quick-witted and intelligent comedians. The simple fact that there was a show centered around the friendship of older women post-marriage running for almost a decade goes against most of what Hollywood was built on (young women and a dependency on men).

The show tackled important issues with immense care, including an episode revolving around Maude’s (one of the five main characters) abortion, and an episode where Rose had to take an HIV test, illustrating to viewers how this disease could infect anyone, and it was not restricted to the LGBTQ+ community as most media would have audiences believe. Both instances led to backlash from many network affiliates, but ended up boosting ratings in the long-run. Their sharp wit and willingness to

discuss real issues like these are parts of why the show and the women behind it were instantly embraced by the LGBTQ+ community, and cemented it as an integral part of the culture.

In response, White and the other four actresses didn’t shy away from their status as icons, but rather, understood the positive impact their show had on so many.

White’s character on the show, Rose, comes off first as an elderly former “bimbo,” but under that sweet smile is a sassy and smart comedian.

Rose is known to throw a perfectly pointed dig at a friend with her typical smile on her face; a form of humor many are familiar with as “throwing shade,” but at the time was not exactly the norm for older women on TV. This is perhaps what we all know White best for: being America’s grandma with no filter, in addition to her legendary 2010 Snickers Superbowl ad in which we watched her play a muddy game of football.

Illustrated in “Golden Girls,” and throughout the latter half of White’s long career, we see an older woman uninhibited by the expectations put on her about her age, especially the concept that older women should no longer be sexual beings. This is something many praise the show for immensely, as up to that point women over 40 were typically only depicted as mothers, nurses, teachers, or as a punchline, a single and lonely cat lady. Only one of the five women ended up married at the end of the show, but between them, there were over 200 men who came through the show as dates (not many lasting more than a few episodes). This show proved what many already knew: Old ladies are really good at having fun (and pretty good at throwing shade).

White had a long and illustrious career in what can often be seen as a very harsh industry, but up until her very last appearance at the 2018 Emmy Awards she was cracking jokes and radiating positivity. Besides being a top-tier comedian since the 1950s, White always had a heart of gold, known for her kindness, humility and acceptance of everyone. Back in 1954, White had Arthur Duncan, a Black singer and tap dancer on her variety show, “The Betty White Show,” which led many networks (predominantly in the South) to threaten to not air her show, but nevertheless she fought to keep Duncan on her show.

White perfectly disproves the idea that ignorance is a generational side effect, but rather a choice. She possessed the simple things like empathy, decency and just a general moral backbone, only bolstering her generationspanning icon status.

BY CLARA FISCHER arts@theaggie.org Movie: “Black Swan” dir. by Darren Aronofsky (2010) This film is not for the light of heart. Labeled as a psychological thriller, Aronofsky’s depiction of what the pursuit of perfection can do to someone’s mental state teems with graphic themes and intense imagery, but is brilliant in its artistic expression. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Nina Sayers, the demure, driven ballerina whose sheltered state and desperate desire to be the best may end up being the qualities that lead to her downfall. The tone throughout the entire film matches the darkness of the thematic points, and compels viewers to the edge of their seats.

Though it isn’t exactly a cheerful choice to reduce stress, watching Nina lose herself and fully embody the character of the black swan makes this movie worth the watch, even if just to take it as a sign that there is nothing worth completely losing your mind over.

TV Show: “Euphoria” Having just come out with a second season after making fans wait over two years, “Euphoria” is experiencing a rampant resurgence in popularity.

The show centers around teenage characters, though it’s not exactly your average teenage drama. Leaning heavily into themes of addiction, mental health, abuse and search for personal identity, the show elevates typical coming-of-age themes onto a more serious playing field while still, at its heart, focusing on the challenges of growing out of your youth. Combine this with a trippy aesthetic teeming with glitter eye makeup, killer fashion and an EDM soundtrack, and you have “Euphoria”: a love-letter to young adults everywhere who are going through it.

Album: “Circles” by Mac Miller (2020) Released in 2020, this album by the late Mac Miller is one that really stuns with its lyricism. Miller was a true artist, and explored many different genres and styles in his career, but “Circles” is one of my personal favorites from his discography. The more mellow sound and contemplative lyrics make for a pleasant listening experience, and provide a comfortable space to escape from the stress and bustle of everyday life. Standout tracks include “Good News,” “Woods,” “Hand Me Downs” and “Surf.” Perfect for destressing, this album is one I recommend to everyone, even those who may not be so much into Miller’s usual work.

Book: “Emma” by Jane Austen (1815) I was inspired to read “Emma” equally as much by my love of the classics as it being the primary source material for the iconic 1995 chick flick “Clueless.” Austen has countless famed novels, with one of the most notable being “Pride and Prejudice.” Her shining quality as a writer is the ability to craft beauty out of the mundane: Ordinary sentences spoken by ordinary characters gain new value because of the way she crafts them. “Emma” is also often heralded as a feminist novel of the time, as the main character and namesake of the book espouses female strength in a way that was not conventionally accepted at the time. What I will say is that much of the action unfolds in the form of dialogue between characters, which means that “Emma” requires a slow, careful read in order to properly digest its themes — something I personally welcome, as it forces me to slow down and not speed through the pages.

THE IRONY OF NICOTINE ADDICTION IN GENERATION Z UC Davis students disclose their views and experiences with vaping and smoking cigarettes

BY SIERRA JIMENEZ arts@theaggie.org Rings of cigarette smoke circle the suave gangster or the seductive flapper in classic film noir, eliciting a cool aesthetic to the cancerinducing tobacco stick. At this point, most people agree that smoking cigarettes is not at all conducive to our health, yet people still step outside on their lunch breaks to inhale sweet, addictive smoke into their lungs.

“They have some sort of sexual appeal to them… they’re just so cool. Like in Pulp Fiction or old French New Wave films, they’re always smoking cigarettes, and it’s just so sexy and cool,” said one third-year UC Davis student. “[But] I’m embarrassed to smoke them because I know how bad it is.”

Over the years, despite their known negative health effects, cigarettes have been romanticized in the media as aesthetically pleasing, classy and sexy. From its origins in the 1920’s, the strategy of cigarette advertisement and other smokerelated products such as ashtrays and matches was to sell a sophisticated lifestyle.

Initially advertised for women in the twentieth century, women in cigarette advertisements were “always young and attractive… often exuding sexuality,” a Yale University online exhibit said.

Women were not the only ones targeted. Men were also advertised as attractive and successful businessmen or as the rugged macho cowboy, a character who became known as the “Marlboro Man” by 1962.

The origins of the cigarette sexual appeal are still prevelant despite international antismoking efforts of fairly recent years. The thirdyear student smokes cigarettes even with her mother’s voice discouraging her growing up: “It’s just a nasty habit.” Even she, who grew up in a household with a religious smoker and found it worrisome for their health, was swayed by the

AMY YU / AGGIE cigarette allure down the line.

“When I got to college and started drinking more, and seeing more vapes and cigarettes, I started vaping… I loved those things, I was so addicted, they tasted so good,” she said. “Then I switched to cigarettes just because I started smoking those at parties, and I thought they looked cooler.”

Sooner or later, she realized that smoking had become an act of habit. “My brain would tell me it’s time to smoke a cigarette, but it [started to not] give me anything but really make me feel lethargic and lazy.”

Now, she’s gone from smoking cigarettes for aesthetic reasons to thinking “it can look kind of gross and not attractive,” so she is trying to quit, but after a few drinks, it’s easy to justify smoking

with “it’s just one night,” she said.

That is the cigarette conundrum. “There is always going to be a part of you that rationalizes [smoking cigarettes],” she said. Whether it be smoking a “stogie” at a party on the weekends or just when you’re stressed, “the reason why you do it is because it feels good.”

The third-year student was adamant that she would stop by 25 at the latest and that it’s just a “youthful destructive behavior” driving the habit. “If it’s not a cigarette that’s gonna kill me, it’s the hundreds of thousands of pollutants in our air or the asbestos in our houses.”

This student is not alone in her rationale.

Mary Rose, a third-year psychology major, finds that she validates her addiction through her “uneducated opinion” and the voice in the back

of her head giving her the green light.

Rose, like many other students, began vaping or smoking cigarettes in a party environment, “hitting it” off of other party-goers with their own vape device or cigarette in hand. However, with the addictive properties of nicotine, many times this “I’m only going to smoke at parties” mentality, sometimes referred to as social smoking, becomes a daily habit.

“If you’re hitting a vape all day, and let’s say you wake up at seven, and you start hitting your vape a ton until 11 o’clock at night, then it’s probably worse for you than smoking one cigarette per day, per se,” Rose said.

Since then, Rose is “able to recognize that the reasoning [she] had for thinking one was better than the other was really just trying to validate [her] unhealthy habits,” yet she is still trying to wean her way off her addiction, slowly but surely.

And here is the irony of it all: Vapes and e-cigarettes that were designed to help adults quit smoking, are now highly addictive to teens and young adults who can’t stop the “vape life.”

With the sleek designs and the variety of flavors in vapes, it is said that 85% of youth e-cigarette users infuze sweet or menthol flavors into their products.

The switch of trends from cigarette smoking to vaping has caused a lot of debate in whether one is better (or worse) for you than the other.

Where smoking cigarettes takes a calculated time and place to smoke, vaping is easily accessible and under the radar. Anna Fox, a fourth-year global disease biology major, said that she has seen individuals vaping as young as middle school hitting a quick puff in the confines of their shirt collar even while in class.

CIGARETTES on 7

THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

6 | THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2022

SUDOKU Enter digits from 1 to 9 into the blank spaces. Every row, column and 3x3 square must contain each digit. Each Sudoku has a unique solution that can be reached logically without guessing.

Answer to previous puzzle 1/13/2022

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EARTHQUAKE

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“The cost of land has gone up a lot,” Metzker said. “The cost of building materials has gone up considerably, and we don’t have the labor pool we used to have either. All those things in combination have driven the price of housing up. […] If the price gets too exorbitant where people just can’t afford to buy it, [the developer] won’t build it. In the end, it is an economic transaction.”

Bill Pride, the executive director of Davis Community Meals and Housing, has also observed a decrease in development due to economic difficulty.

“I think the cost of housing is extremely high, unfortunately, to actually build housing in most every place,” Pride said. “Finding that money to actually build the housing to house folks is really difficult.”

The state of the housing market has a large impact on low-income and homeless people.

Pride is concerned particularly with the lack of housing in general.

“There’s just not enough housing that’s kept up with the demand,” Pride said. “That’s not just for affordable housing, that’s for housing everywhere.”

Davis Community Meals and Housing was founded in 1991 as a soup kitchen. Today, it has expanded to include programs such as a drop-in resource center, part-time employment assistance, transitional housing and street outreach. The organization is focused on reducing homelessness and helping people support themselves financially long-term.

Davis Community Meals and Housing regularly conducts a homeless count in Yolo County, and data shows that there has been a major increase in the homeless population in the last 4 years, according to Pride. This may be the result of increasing buying and renting prices.

“The developer is just going to pass [the building] cost on in the sales price,” Metzker said. “The number one reason developers build housing is because they can make money. They’re not very altruistic in the sense that they do it for the benefit of the public good.”

Having resided in Davis for a long time, Pride has seen the effects of rising prices first-hand.

“It’s a very difficult housing market for anybody to get into,” Pride said. “One of the more common complaints I’ve heard from folks in town in the last few years is that a lot of the folks who’ve been here for many years, who raised their families here and their kids went to school here, they suddenly find that their own kids can’t afford to move back in.”

The existence of affordable price-controlled housing is also highly important for low-income and homeless people.

“The vast majority of folks who are homeless can’t afford market rate housing unless a miracle happened, frankly,” Pride said.

Changes in state policy have greatly affected the extent to which the city can interfere in the market to ensure affordable housing exists, according to Metzker.

“Before 2012, there was a program where we got an extra portion of sales tax revenues, and

that money went towards a pot that was used for the construction of affordable housing,” Metzker said. “When we were right in the middle of the recession, the state of California decided that they didn’t have enough money to balance their budget, and so they took redevelopment away.

They have not replaced that money. And so now the city does not have the ability to contribute financially in the manner that it used to have.”

The City of Davis is continuously working to cultivate a more secure housing market.

On Tuesday, Jan. 11, the council approved a development of 30 attached single-family homes on East Pole Line Road. The compact design saves a lot of acre space, a revolutionary arrangement that may prove to be an effective solution to the lack of vacant residences in Davis.

The project also includes 3 affordable units, in compliance with the city’s inclusionary housing ordinance (Municipal Code 18.05).

According to Metzker, however, the only reason the developer was able to afford including low-income housing is because the plot already has infrastructure installed from the previous building that existed there.

“The inclusionary housing ordinance does say that you have to have a certain amount of affordable housing in any residential project,” Metzker said. “The problem is that most developers, once they factor all that in, the project doesn’t pencil anymore. And then they don’t build it.”

The rising building costs and buying prices, the lack of development and the political tension surrounding the crisis are not just issues in Davis. The state of the housing market reflects a larger pattern that both Metzker and Pride have recognized throughout the state.

“Davis is unfortunately probably [among] the worst,” Pride said. “And that’s odd, considering that Davis probably has been one of the more proactive jurisdictions building affordable housing.”

Thus, Pride believes that while efforts from the city may mitigate the problem, permanent change needs to come from state policy.

“I think one of the real impediments has to do with very political reasons,” Pride said.

“Somehow affordable housing has to be taken out of the things that the government obligates public dollars being spent on.”

The solution may even have to be at a global economic level.

“If anything, we need to make the housing much cheaper, a way to build it so it’s not so expensive,” Pride said. “With the homeless population rising as fast as it is, we need to be building thousands of homes every year, if not more. And that’s just not happening because the cost is just too high.”

The slow population growth in Davis is a symptom of a larger housing crisis. Outside of the city, the population size is growing rapidly, and housing development cannot keep up with the demand. Moreover, rising prices are causing the state’s houselessness problem to increase in severity. Davis is just one example of how cities across California may be impacted by a statewide problem.

BIRDRISK CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3 In addition to the tests for bacteria, the researchers conducted about 1,500 bird surveys across 350 fresh produce fields along the West Coast, and collected more than 1,200 fecal samples from fields. By modeling the prevalence of pathogens in feces and the likelihood of bird species to defecate on crops, the researchers constructed a “risk gradient” of bird species’ impact on these products, Smith said.

Starlings, blackbirds and other birds that flock in large numbers and forage on the ground near cattle feedlots present the highest threats for transmission of foodborne pathogens to crops. Insect-eating birds, such as swallows and bluebirds, are less of a risk; they spend most of their time in the tree canopy and away from livestock.

The pathogens are spread to the produce through bird feces. The study focused on leafy greens that are eaten uncooked. The best way to keep yourself safe? Wash your vegetables, Karp said.

The only foodborne disease outbreak that has ever been conclusively attributed to birds was a Campylobacter outbreak in 2008. The outbreak in Alaska was spread from sandhill cranes to raw peas, according to Karp.

Because the study shows that many birds pose little risk of pathogenic spread to crops, the findings have significant management implications for both growers and conservationists, Smith said.

Farms surrounded by natural habitats tend to have a greater diversity of birds, and will oftentimes promote beneficial insect-eating species to live in the area, Smith said. Farms surrounded by natural habitat were at a lower risk of being infected by pathogens from birds in comparison to those near feedlots.

“By providing other high quality habitat around farms and in agricultural landscapes, that’s one of the most powerful strategies for reducing food safety risks from this,” Olimpi said.

As a result, bird management practices differ depending on the farm’s location.

“If you’re a farmer and you’re right next to a feedlot, you probably want to try to keep the birds out,” Smith said. “But if you’re a farmer and you’re in a pretty forested area, the birds are probably on the safer side.”

Growers can encourage insect-eating birds on farms as a natural insecticide, providing free pest control services and necessitating fewer toxic pesticides. Relying on more sustainable farming practices can be beneficial to both the environment and growers, as these practices can result in higher returns for growers and lower levels of toxic substances.

“You can manage the farm to try to promote the insectivorous birds that can help farmers and then try to keep away these species that are highly associated with feedlots,” Smith said.

Nest boxes are one method of promoting certain bird species to farms. Specifically sized holes on the boxes allows for insect-eating birds to inhabit them, while keeping the unwanted species out, according to Olimpi.

To keep riskier birds away from farms, growers can use a number of methods that range in cost and effectiveness, such as fencing or netting off produce, using sound cannons or setting up streamers and scarecrows. But, keeping birds away from farmland is almost impossible and comes at a high cost. The best way to prevent certain species from coming on farms is to stop removing natural habitat around farms, Olimpi said.

While removing habitat has been a method of keeping wildlife away from farms in the past, growers often are not the ones that want to remove the habitat — it is the buyers, Karp said.

Buyers want the food they purchase to be as safe as possible, for liability reasons.

“The growers are sort of caught in the middle,” Karp said. “They often will totally buy into the kinds of research that we’re doing, but at the same time, they’re sort of powerless to do anything else because of the pressure that they’re feeling.”

Karp said he sympathizes with the growers, who are in a “really tight spot” and “should never be painted as the bad guys” in these situations.

Many growers are wonderful land stewards, he said.

“They’re just caught in this really impossible situation right now,” Karp said.

Through further study, researchers like Smith, Olimpi and Karp hope to provide improved bird management strategies for farmers. While this field of study may seem most relevant to growers and conservationists, Olimpi said that everyone who eats produce grown on farms should have a vested interest in this work: “at least as a consumer, right?”

Additionally, people place a lot of cultural value on birds, such as the bald eagle and seahawk.

Agricultural intensification is one reason why certain bird species are declining, Smith said.

Without good management practices, future generations may not have the chance to see the same species that Smith, Olimpi and Karp loved — the wildlife that drew them to the field of conservation biology.

“We want to figure out how to manage these farms to produce food that’s safe for people to eat, but healthy and preserving biodiversity,” Smith said.

“So, things start decaying the moment something burns, and then you can look at the amount of the decayed product in the charcoal and figure out when that originally burned. And then that can give you a sense of when the plant grew.”

However, according to Rockwell, there are challenges with using radiocarbon dating to obtain specific dates within the past 350 years.

“We put so much dead carbon into the atmosphere from the industrial revolution forward that the calibration curve is almost flat,” Rockwell said. “Whenever we try to calibrate young radiocarbon dates, we get multiple intercepts, multiple potential time windows.

What we want to know is more specifically, was this related to 1812? […] So we needed to use pollen.”

Rodríguez Padilla explained how Irina Delusina, a palynologist — or pollen scientist — at UC Davis was able to use the pollen in the sediment samples collected in the trenches to date the earthquakes.

“We know when certain pollen species were introduced into California by Spanish colonizers,” Rodríguez Padilla said. “So, if you look at your layer of dirt and you find the sample of that pollen species, you can figure out that that layer had to be deposited following the introduction of that sample to California.”

This method of identifying the pollen of plants like tumbleweed and spanish broom combined with the time intervals that the radiocarbon dating provided, was able to definitively confirm that the sediment samples were from the 1812 earthquake.

According to Rodríguez Padilla, after the dates and chronology of the earthquake were put together, she began using the field data in collaboration with numerical modeling to learn more about what the 1812 earthquake might have looked like.

“Someone had previously speculated that the San Jacinto fault was also involved in the 1812 earthquake, and he had done this through

modeling,” Rodríguez Padilla said. “So we took his models, and we put our little fault in the middle, and we tested different possibilities based on his original models that would allow for our small fault to have the amount of motion we found inside our trench. [...] Based on that, we were able to learn something about what earthquakes that involve both faults look like.”

Oskin explained how this modeling, especially if the same method is used to look at other potential joint rupture faults in the future, could contribute to a better understanding of what determines earthquake intensity.

“If we can identify patterns, we can start to say more definitively what determines size and intensity,” Oskin said. “By understanding how faults can link together, and how likely that is, we’d have a much better idea of the size range of what’s possible.”

According to Oskin, “the earthquake problem has a lot of broad societal impacts.”

Rodríguez Padilla agreed, and talked about how the modeling done for this research could have a real impact on the lives of Californians.

“Something I really like about this project is that it has direct applicability,” Rodríguez Padilla said. “[This research is] built into models that look at the frequency of when earthquakes will happen in California over thousands of years, and it is those models that get used to set earthquake insurance rates in California. So we are producing a data point that will directly inform what someone’s house gets insured at.”

Rockwell added some final thoughts about what he believes the significance of the research to be.

“This helped clarify what could happen, because it did happen,” Rockwell said. “I think that’s the important thing — you can speculate about joint rupture, but if you don’t have any direct evidence for it, it’s just speculation. So this study helped illuminate that aspect that it looks like joint ruptures are not only possible but they happen, and they’ve happened recently.”

CIGARETTES CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5 Fox, interested in the ways in which vaping affects the immune system, has been working with a immunology PhD candidate, Morgan Poindexter, since Oct. 2020 under Dr. Ken Pinkerton at the Center for Health and the Environment at UC Davis researching mice exposed to vape to model the human respiratory system and its effects on fighting infection.

Where there are various studies and concrete facts on the long-term consequences of smoking cigarettes, “vaping is still relatively new, so we don’t have data on the long-term risks,” Dr. Melamed, a pulmonology doctor at UCLA said.

“It took decades before we fully understood the effects of cigarettes… it could be that the risk and long-term outcomes of e-cigarettes will be different from those of traditional cigarettes, but it’s too early to know.”

Bradley Klevin, a fifth-year geology major who is adamantly against smoking cigarettes and vaping, said, “I never really wanted to get into it too much because now I see friends who have gotten devices or have moved on to cigarettes now, and sometimes wake up three, four times in the morning just to rip the ‘nic-stick’ just because they have to.”

Klevin remembers his grandmother, who passed away at an early age from her habit: “that was kind of my childhood growing up… she was always smoking cigarettes, whatever she did.” His mom warned him, “if you smoke cigarettes, this is what’s going to happen to you.” This parental

warning has stayed branded in his mind, and to this day, he has stayed away from nicotine.

Thanks to precautionary measures for his own health, Klevin has been growing more and more disgusted by and dissuaded from smoking cigarettes and vaping altogether. With the financial commitment of an addiction and the health downsides, “I just think it’s not really worth it,” he said. “My alcohol bill is already high enough.”

Where some may be attracted to the aesthetic of smoking, others like Klevin admit that his aversion to smoking has gotten to a point of finding it unattractive for others and himself.

“When [people] are always attached to their devices or who have to wake up and take 15 t-bowls a day, that’s not a person I’m looking for,” he said.

The common mentality that “it’s not going to be me,” drives many addicts back to their nicotine device even with these facts from experts and criticisms from others in mind. Even if you find crafty ways to limit the habit for special occasions, the addiction of nicotine is real, known and scientifically proven.

“Young, wild, and free,” they say. “It’s not going to be me,” they say. These excuses for reaching for a vape or cigarette seem rampant among young smokers, yet many students end up reliant on them for the crisp headrush of nicotine inhalation. Whether smoking cigarettes or vaping, it’s an ironic epidemic of the youth.

BONEMARROW CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3 The lab will use the eBM to study osteosarcoma cells with and without macrophages added.

Macrophages are extremely important in creating the tumor’s environment and their addition can be related to disease development. Using dyes, the researchers will record the movement of the cells over time.

“We are combining immune cells which would be commonly interacting with the tissues and adding macrophages that have different characteristics,” Dr. Kent Leach, a professor of orthopedic surgery and biomedical engineering at UC Davis, said. “Adding these different types of immune cells may be contributing to tumor growth, which is a new area in the fight against cancer.”

Leach hopes to create a combination of cancer biology, tissue engineering, immunology and patient care through his laboratory’s research

and future work.

Bringing immunology knowledge to the table, Griffin works as the main graduate student on the project although this is a combined effort between the faculty collaborators, Dr. Kent Leach, Dr. Steven Thorpe, Dr. Lor Randall and Dr. William Culp.

Osteosarcoma is rare enough that clinical trials and other more common methods for cancer research are less effective at efficiently figuring out its biology.

“The current model is only for mouse cancer cells hence [we] would like the eBM to translate to human and canine samples so we can really capture those natural populations and better understand patterns in osteosarcoma tumor progression,” Griffin said about their future research goals.

Scan this QR code to access The California Aggie’s EIC application for 2022-2023.

8 | THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2022

THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

SPORTS COVID-19 RESURGENCE AFFECTS WOMEN’S BASKETBALL SCHEDULE Four games have been called off so far with the season hanging in the balance

BY MARLON ROLON sports@ucdavis.edu

UC Davis Aggies Women’s Basketball celebrating as they face Sacramento Hornets at Golden 1 Arena in Sacramento (Benjamin Cheng / Aggie) In 2020, 13 games were canceled for the women’s basketball program at UC Davis. Due to the pandemic, the season was shortened to 10 Big West Conference games as the women’s team from UC Davis lifted the conference championship.

Fast forward to 2022 and history seems to be repeating itself with the recent uptick of COVID-19. So far, only four games have been canceled as of late with the team posting a 6-6 record.

“Unfortunately, we’re feeling a little like we’re back to last year where we got shut down for quite a bit,” head coach Jennifer Gross said. “It’s challenging, you not finding out a day or two before the game that it’s canceled.”

The long layoffs have had an effect on the team’s overall performance. After a historic win against Gonzaga on Dec. 19, 2021, the program’s first win ever over the Bulldogs, Davis has not won a game since. However, Davis has had eight days off due to the holiday break.

“I think our approach is just trying to stay ready and stay flexible knowing that a lot of stuff is out of our control, but we always try to focus on what we can control, which is just still coming to practice and getting better and understanding

that we still have a long season ahead of us, and we want to be as prepared as possible and just continue to get better,” Gross said.

They were supposed to play against UC Riverside on Dec. 28, 2021 and against Hawaii on Jan. 1, but those games never came to fruition as they were canceled. The team then dropped two games in a row against conference foes in UC Irvine on Jan. 6 and UC San Diego on Jan. 8.

“I think the holidays were challenging, having a bit of a longer break than we normally would and going so long without team practices,” Gross said. “That was a bit challenging. We’re kind of trying to work our way back from that in terms of getting back into game shape and things like that.”

Games against CSU Bakersfield and Cal Poly scheduled for Jan. 13 and Jan. 15 have also been called off due to COVID-19 health and safety protocols within their respective programs.

Playing in between games and games being called off can affect the team’s rhythm. This season had its ups and downs, from snapping a 44 homegame streak to beating the then ranked No. 18 Oregon Ducks on the road. That was the first ranked opponent UC Davis has beaten since

moving to Division 1.

UC Davis continued making history when they rallied from a 17-point deficit to defeat Gonzaga at home. UC Davis has shown flashes of what they’re capable of. However, the pandemic has slowed down their progress.

“I think the key is to not let it weigh on us,” Gross said. “It’s easy to focus on the negatives of, ‘Oh, we don’t get to play, and everything is getting canceled.’ If you let that weigh you down, it becomes exhausting. The motivation for us is we get to play basketball; we have an awesome team. The team enjoys playing around each other and playing together and so we’re trying to get creative and mix up the practices and do things a little bit differently so it doesn’t get monotonous.”

Adjustments are being made to fix their current issues with Gross implying that they’ve intensified their scrimmages during practices to have the team ready. This UC Davis team holds three seniors and three juniors who have experience winning championships as they look to win their sixth straight conference title.

Their chemistry and rhythm will be fundamental down the stretch if they hope to lift the trophy again with 14 games remaining on the schedule — still plenty of games left to

prove why they’re one of the best, if not the best, team in the Big West. Whether or not fans will be allowed back in attendance remains to be seen.

“You do have to understand that when there is no crowd energy, that energy has to come from somewhere so we have to create our own energy in those situations. That can be an adjustment,” Gross said.

The Davis fans’ turnout has been great this year as the University Credit Union Center has been a tough place for visiting teams to come in and play. The building has been loud all year long. The upside about this team is that it’s led by Cierra Hall who is having an outstanding season, Sage Stobbart who has been tremendous in the paint defensively, and Evan Turner’s offense.

Whether or not fans are allowed back, Davis has the leaders and experience on this team to produce.

Gross remains hopeful. “When we have the crowd support behind us, there’s nothing like it and that definitely helped fuel our comeback win in the Gonzaga game and I hope that people feel safe and continue coming out to support us,” Gross said.

COVID-19 IS IMPACTING THE SPORTS WORLD ONCE AGAIN COVID-19 has already caused many changes to professional and college sports this year

BY GABRIEL CARABALLO sports@theaggie.org It’s been almost two years since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, the sports world has been greatly impacted by the pandemic just when they thought it was over. With safety as their number one priority, many leagues implemented protocols in response to the COVID-19 variants’ drastic effect on the sports world.

The first sports league to be greatly impacted

by COVID-19 this year was the NBA. Although the NBA has taken many precautions against COVID-19 — a prime example being the NBA Bubble in 2020 — the NBA has loosened regulations for vaccinated players since then.

Combined with the rise of COVID-19 variants, there has been a surge of cases in the NBA resulting in a couple distinct consequences.

Because of the fallout and recent surge, the NBA has seen a record number of signed players this season. Totaling at 541 players as of late December, this number sets a single season record. Players who were seemingly out of the league have returned on 10-day contracts, such as Greg Monroe and Lance Stephenson who are lacing up and eager to play.

Even with the record number of players ready to help clubs succeed, there is another obstacle in the way. Already, the NBA has postponed 11 games due to teams not having enough personnel to play. Fortunately, none of the games were canceled, but some may be left to wonder if canceling is the best option to avoid a compact second half of the schedule.

“No plans right now to pause the season,” said NBA commissioner Adam Silver regarding the situation. “We’ve, of course, looked at all the options, but frankly we’re having trouble coming up with what the logic would be behind pausing right now.”

However, the NBA wasn’t the only league to

have postponed games. The NFL has taken drastic measures in response to the surge of cases as well.

In week 15 of the NFL season, it was announced that three games were to be postponed. It was a decision made by commissioner Roger Goodell.

Goodell said, “The emergence of the Omicron variant is precisely the kind of change that warrants a flexible response.” Quickly addressing the concern was indeed a “flexible response.”

Surprisingly, another similarity between the NFL and NBA’s COVID-19 consequences exists. The NFL team the Tennessee Titans have set a new single season record, not for points scored or even wins in a season but for how many players have taken the field for them. They set a record 91 players used this season, just showing how impactful the variants can be on a single team and how rotating players was necessary this NFL season.

However, the NFL has also taken another precaution, in the form of a mandation. The NFL has “strongly encouraged” that all vaccinated persons obtain a booster shot. This includes staff, coaches and players among many more, all in hope that they will maintain a safe environment as they approach the postseason.

Like the NFL and NBA, the NHL has also been hit hard by the rise in COVID-19 cases. As of late December, the NHL needed to postpone nine more games, bringing the total number of postponed games up to 90. They also needed to pause their season until after Christmas because of the rise in COVID-19 cases. For a league with 82 regular season games, the rescheduling will be difficult.

Even more mind-boggling is how collegiate sports have been affected. College basketball has been halted due to these variants. With around

Empty stadium seating. (City Clock / Creative Commons) 140 Division 1 teams forced to pause their season and 200 games impacted, it seems bleak that a season will commence anytime soon for some programs, while others have taken precautions like playing with no fans in attendance.

With the rise of COVID-19 cases once again, the NBA, the NFL, the NHL and college sports have been hit. Each has administered precautions like encouraging booster shots, postponing games, adding new players and even pausing the season as a whole. These contemporary protective measures have done some good, but the leagues still have been greatly impacted by this disease.

Going forward, many think these leagues should learn from their responses and compare them to things like the NBA Bubble in order to grow and further protect the people who make sports great. While many think this is what should happen, business and contracts may not allow it to happen and the leagues may have to get creative with how they maneuver this situation.