The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of its ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic abroad centers. The system is the state's land-grant university. Major publications generally rank most UC campuses as being among the best universities in the world. In 1900, UC was one of the founders of the Association of American Universities and since the 1970s seven of its campuses, in addition to Berkeley, have been admitted to the association. Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego are considered Public Ivies, making California the state with the most universities in the nation to hold the title. UC campuses have large numbers of distinguished faculty in almost every academic discipline, with UC faculty and researchers having won 71 Nobel Prizes as of 2021.
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the main campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2022, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,500 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students. Satellite facilities in other Santa Cruz locations include the Coastal Science Campus and the Westside Research Park and the Silicon Valley Center in Santa Clara.
Santa Cruz is the largest city and the county seat of Santa Cruz County, in Northern California. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 62,956. Situated on the northern edge of Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz is a popular tourist destination, owing to its beaches, surf culture, and historic landmarks.
The Oregon Vortex is a roadside attraction that opened to tourists in 1930, located on Sardine Creek in Gold Hill, Oregon, in the United States. It consists of a number of interesting effects, which are gravity hill optical illusions, but which the attraction's proprietors propose are the result of paranormal properties of the area.
A gravity hill, also known as a magnetic hill, mystery hill, mystery spot, gravity road, or anti-gravity hill, is a place where the layout of the surrounding land produces an optical illusion, making a slight downhill slope appear to be an uphill slope. Thus, a car left out of gear will appear to be rolling uphill against gravity.
A roadside attraction is a feature along the side of a road meant to attract tourists. In general, these are places one might stop on the way to somewhere, rather than being a destination. They are frequently advertised with billboards. The modern tourist-oriented highway attraction originated as a U.S. and Canadian phenomenon in the 1940s to 1960s, and subsequently caught on in Australia.
The Santa Cruz, Big Trees and Pacific Railway is operated as a seasonal tourist attraction in Northern California, also referred to as the "Beach Train". Its partner line, the Roaring Camp & Big Trees Narrow Gauge Railroad, is a heritage railroad.
George R. Blumenthal is an American astrophysicist, astronomer, and academic administrator. He was the tenth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Axel Erlandson was a Swedish American farmer who shaped trees as a hobby, and opened a horticultural attraction in 1947 called "The Tree Circus", advertised with the slogan "See the World's Strangest Trees Here".
Dean E. McHenry was an American professor of political science, and the founding chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Carl Eugene Walsh, is an American economist. He has been an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) since 1987, and retired in 2020 as Distinguished Professor of Economics. He twice served as chair of the Economics Department at the university as well as Vice Provost for Silicon Valley Initiatives (2005-2007) and Associate Vice Chancellor for Planning and Programs (1995-1995) at UCSC. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Kansas City (1982-1983), Philadelphia (1984-1985) and San Francisco (1987-2000).
The UCSC Silicon Valley Initiatives are a series of educational and research activities which together increase the presence of the University of California in Silicon Valley. To that end, UC Santa Cruz has set up a 90,000 square-foot satellite campus called the University of Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus (SVC), currently located on Bowers street in Santa Clara, California, where it has been since April 2016 The Initiatives, still in the early stages of their development, have had ambitious hopes attached to them by UCSC, among them the possibility of a home for the University's long-planned graduate school of management and the Bio|Info|Nano R&D Institute. It currently houses professional the SVLink incubator-accelerator program, programs and a distance education site for the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering, the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, the Office of Industry Alliances and Technology Commercialization leadership, and the University of California's online learning program, UC Scout.
The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is a nonprofit research and technology commercialization institute affiliated with three University of California campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area: Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. QB3's domain is the quantitative biosciences: areas of biology in which advances are chiefly made by scientists applying techniques from physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science.
The Wonder Spot was a tourist attraction located off US Route 12 in Lake Delton, Wisconsin from 1949 to 2006. A popular side trip for visitors to nearby Wisconsin Dells, the Wonder Spot was advertised as a place "where the laws of natural gravity seem to be repealed." Visitors walked down a ravine into a cabin, where seemingly no one could stand up straight, water flowed backwards, and chairs could be balanced on two legs. Guides attributed the effects to igneous rock formations, but in truth, the cabin was built perpendicular to a hillside, and the purported gravitational anomalies were merely optical illusions.
Arthur Paul Shimamura was a professor of psychology and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focused on the neural basis of human memory and cognition. He received his BA in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Larry Squire, where he studied amnesic patients. In 1989, Shimamura began his professorship at UC Berkeley. He has published over 100 scientific articles and chapters, was a founding member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and has been science advisor for the San Francisco Exploratorium science museum.
Confusion Hill is a roadside attraction in Piercy, California. The attraction, which opened in 1949, includes what is dubbed as a "gravity house", a structure built to give the interior visitors tilt-induced optical illusions, similar to the perspective on a gravity hill. Occupants experience the need to stand upright when they actually already are. Also included in the attraction is the Mountain Train Ride a 1+1⁄2-mile (2.4 km) 20 in narrow gauge built in a switchback layout along the side of a steep hill.
The Saturn Cafe is a vegetarian diner in Oakland, California, with former locations in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Santa Cruz. Its original Santa Cruz location was established in 1979 and closed in 2021; the Los Angeles restaurant opened in 2020. The Santa Cruz location has been variously owned by Don Lane, a husband and wife team, and former employees of the diner. The Berkeley location of Saturn Cafe was open from 2009 to 2018.
The 2020 Santa Cruz graduate students' strike was a wildcat strike launched against the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Marge Frantz was an American activist and among the first generation of academics who taught women's study courses in United States. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, from a young age she became involved in progressive causes. She worked as a labor organizer, agitated for civil rights, and participated in the women's poll tax repeal movement. After working as a union organizer for the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union in 1944, she was employed full time at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Nashville, as a secretary and as the editor of the organization's press organ, Southern Patriot. By the late 1940s, she was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and in 1950, she and her husband moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.
