Welcome to UC San Diego’s not-so-haunted house, where the frights are real, but they’re all backed by science.
This Halloween, take a walk through the shadowy corners of research and discovery: where viruses hunt bacteria, dragonfish hide their teeth, seabirds spiral through the skies and telescopes scan the dark for alien light.
The microscopic predator
They may look like something out of a sci-fi film, but these viruses could be key to fighting the global antibiotic resistance crisis. Bacteriophages — tiny, spider-like predators that outnumber every other organism on Earth — are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Researchers in the School of Biological Sciences have recently uncovered some of their eerier tricks: they can hide behind protective “cloaks” and even use so-called “freeloader” genes as weapons to sabotage rival viruses inside the same bacterial cell. Through the university’s Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, the first dedicated phage therapy center in North America, scientists are working to turn these microscopic hunters into powerful tools against antibiotic-resistant infections.
Hidden jaws of the deep
Lurking in the inky darkness of the deep sea, the dragonfish is a creature built for stealth. Its teeth — needle-sharp and almost completely transparent — make its jaws nearly invisible as it slips toward unsuspecting prey. In a 2019 study, researchers in the Jacobs School of Engineering uncovered the secrets behind this unsettling trick: the teeth are made of tiny structures that prevent light from scattering or reflecting, and they also lack certain structures that give the teeth of other animals their color. These features together create a natural cloaking effect.
Dragonfish spend much of their time lying in wait, jaws open in the dark, ready to snap shut on whatever drifts too close. It’s a simple but chilling strategy, made even more effective when your teeth can’t be seen. Despite its fearsome appearance, the dragonfish is only about 10 to 20 centimeters long, proving that some of the ocean’s creepiest hunters don’t need to be big to be terrifying.
Fear you can hear
Some of the scariest moments in film don’t come from what you see, but from what you hear. That idea is at the heart of “The Sound of Horror,” a course taught by Michelle Lou, associate professor in the Department of Music. The class explores how filmmakers use music, silence and sound design to heighten tension, blur reality and make audiences squirm. Students dive into works by horror legends — from the haunting silence of “A Quiet Place” and the iconic score of “Suspiria” (listen here) to the psychological unease of “The Shining” and the mind-bending worlds of filmmaker David Lynch and director Jordan Peele.
Lou, who fell in love with horror films as a kid (after some sleepless nights post-“The Exorcist”) says sound is what makes the genre so unforgettable.
“Horror movies really lean into sound and musical scoring,” she explains. “It activates your imagination. There’s so much art that goes into them to carefully craft fear and anxiety through sound design.”
A feathered frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic “The Birds” is widely believed to have taken its cue from an unsettling spectacle on the California coast in 1961: hundreds of seabirds spinning through the sky, crashing and circling in confusion. Decades later, scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography uncovered fresh evidence of what drove them into a frenzy: domoic acid, a powerful neurotoxin.
Produced during harmful algal blooms, domoic acid poisons the brain and can cause confusion, disorientation, scratching, seizures, coma and even death. At Scripps, researchers like marine ecologist Tammy Russell continue to study these blooms to understand and forecast their impact on marine wildlife. Russell explains that certain species of phytoplankton produce potent toxins that move up the food chain — from small fish to seabirds and marine mammals — causing neurological symptoms and, in severe cases, death. This summer, San Diegans may have seen the effects firsthand, as domoic acid poisoned California sea lions, brown pelicans and other marine life along local beaches.
Through coordinated monitoring networks and tissue analysis, scientists are uncovering just how far these events can reach — like the massive 2015 bloom that increased seabird mortality all along the West Coast for more than eight months.
The brain invader
Just seeing the words “brain-eating amoeba” in a headline is enough to make summer swimmers shudder. The organism behind those chilling stories, Naegleria fowleri, thrives in warm freshwater lakes and rivers. In rare cases, it enters the body through the nose, traveling up the olfactory nerve to the brain — where it begins to destroy brain tissue, causing a rapid and almost always fatal infection.
Anjan Debnath, a researcher at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, is leading efforts to change that. At the school’s Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases, a national leader in drug discovery for neglected tropical diseases, his lab screens thousands of natural and synthetic compounds to identify more potent, less toxic drug combinations that could improve patient outcomes. It’s high-stakes work: there have been only about 170 recorded cases in the U.S. over the last 60 years and the survival rate is less than 3%. The hope is that someday, headlines about brain-eating amoebas won’t be quite so terrifying.
Jars full of secrets
Lined with shelf after shelf of glass jars, Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Marine Vertebrate Collection is one of the most significant repositories of fish diversity in the U.S. — from the deep sea to the open ocean — and easily one of the eeriest spaces on campus. The collection houses roughly two million alcohol-preserved specimens representing more than 5,600 species, including more than 300,000 from one of the most abundant groups on the planet: Stomiiformes.
These deep-sea fishes, including hatchetfishes, bristlemouths and dragonfishes, are so alien-looking they’ve inspired centuries of fascination and research. A recent genomic study led by Scripps master’s student Solomon Chang, utilized samples from the collection to reshape the evolutionary tree of this group. His research, published this year, doubled the number of recognized families within Stomiiformes, offering new insights into how these mysterious creatures evolved in the darkness of the deep sea. It’s a discovery made possible by the rare and extensive specimens preserved in this time capsule of underwater history — a reminder that even jars of fishes on a shelf can help illuminate the grand story of life in the ocean.
Signals from the dark
When it comes to cosmic mysteries, few questions are bigger — or more unsettling — than whether we’re alone in the universe. That’s the driving force behind SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) which looks for signs of communications from other civilizations.
In the School of Physical Sciences, astrophysicist Shelley Wright is leading the search as part of PANOSETI, an ambitious collaboration across several universities. Panoramic SETI, or PANOSETI, is designed to detect visible light that could be used for interstellar communication. There’s no other telescope system like it: PANOSETI can capture images of the night sky at a blistering speed of one nanosecond — one-billionth of a second — fast enough to catch an ultra-brief flash of light that might otherwise be missed.
With its futuristic technology, PANOSETI brings a real-world edge to a classic sci-fi question: Is anyone out there?
