This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention has announced a bold step to enhance public-health preparedness for diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks in the nation’s Southwest. With an $8 million grant from the CDC, UC Riverside and UC Davis researchers will launch the Pacific Southwest Regional Center of Excellence in...

Transposable elements — or transposons — are DNA sequences that move in the genome from one location to another. Discovered in the 1940s, for years they were thought to be unimportant and were called “junk DNA.” But now scientists recognize that these bits of DNA play vital roles in gene and genome evolution, and are...