December 19, 2002   —   A team of scientists from the University of Maryland and the University of California campuses at San Diego and Los Angeles has discovered that diamonds can be natural time capsules, preserving information about the cycling of sulfur between the Earth's crust, atmosphere, and mantle some three billion years ago.

November 12, 2002   —   The University of California, San Diego was ranked 4th in the nation in a recent report examining the impact of research at the country's top research universities. The report, conducted by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), examined the citation impact of research papers produced at the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities from 1997-2001.

October 28, 2002   —   Until now, astronomers haven't been able to offer a full explanation for why the Milky Way and other galaxies produce new stars at a relative snail's pace. While they have known for decades that high turbulence keeps huge clouds of hydrogen gas from condensing into stars, they haven't identified all the causes of the galactic perturbations.

September 25, 2002   —   A consortium of research institutions in La Jolla, Calif., has been awarded $10.5-million over the next five years from the National Science Foundation to establish the world's leading center in the emerging field of theoretical biological physics.

September 5, 2002   —   Martin Kamen, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego and co-discoverer of carbon-14, an isotope he used and developed as a tracer atom in one of the most powerful and frequently used tools of modern science, died August 31 in Santa Barbara. He was 89.

September 2, 2002   —   Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed dust-sized chips of silicon that allow them to rapidly and remotely detect a variety of biological and chemical agents, including substances that a terrorist might dissolve in drinking water or spray into the atmosphere.

June 12, 2002   —   An unusual collaboration between physicists at the University of California, San Diego and psychologists at Vanderbilt University has revealed how the brains of higher animals and probably humans integrate sensory information and motor control signals in way that allows us to heighten our senses to smell a faint odor, visualize an individual in a crowd, or even discern the sounds of a single instrument in an orchestra.

May 20, 2002   —   Two scientists have found evidence that galaxies are surrounded by halos containing hundreds of invisible dwarf galaxies. Their discovery, described in a paper in the June 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, provides strong support for the theory that most of the matter in the universe is in the form of some undetected type of slowly moving particles called cold dark matter.

May 8, 2002   —   Five professors at the University of California, San Diego have been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Class of 2002. They are Mark H. Thiemens, Nicholas Canaday Spitzer, Jerold M. Olefsky, Theodore Groves, and Mark J. Machina.

April 19, 2002   —   Oreste Piccioni, a pioneer in the field of elementary particle physics and an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, died on April 13 at his home in nearby Rancho Santa Fe. He was 86.

April 15, 2002   —   Roger Y. Tsien, a professor of pharmacology and of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, has won this year's Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics.

April 5, 2002   —   In the latest survey of graduate programs released today by U.S. News & World Report, the ranking of the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering and the UCSD School of Medicine continued to rise. Many of the university's programs in the sciences were also ranked among the nation's best. (The Arts, Humanities and Social sciences were not newly ranked in this survey).

January 9, 2002   —   Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that silicon wafers, the raw starting material for computer chips, can be easily made into tiny explosives that might be used one day to chemically analyze samples in the field or serve as power sources for tiny electronic sensors the size of a speck of dust.

January 8, 2002   —   A team of astronomers from the University of California, San Diego and two other institutions has made the first discovery of a planet orbiting a giant star, a find of special interest to astronomers because it provides insight into the fate of planets during the late life cycles of stars.