A weekly round-up of local science-related research/news/issues, offered up for discussion. Feel free to comment, or let us know what else you’ve been reading about this week.

California scientists are noticing a rebound in sea life. They say that a current from Canada and strong winds have dramatically lowered water temperatures, bringing more krill to the California coast, and in turn more fish, birds, and whales that feed on them. But why the temperature change? And is it permanent?

The San Diego Natural History Museum is leading an expedition to explore the deep sea environment off the coast of Baja California Sur this week. They hope to identify new species and help protect local fisheries, particularly around underwater volcanoes known as seamounts. The team, which also includes scientists from SIO and Mexico, was put together after a local underwater photographer lent his submarine to the museum. The San Diego Supercomputer center, at UCSD, is also taking part with its Seamounts Online database.

Online in Nature this week, researchers from all over So Cal show that pluripotent cells share a protein–protein network, which they call PluriNet. The authors, from TSRI, Burnham, UCSD, UC Irvine, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and several other places around the world, found that truly pluripotent cells, those that can differentiate into just about any type of cell and usually originate from embryonic sources, clustered together in a gene expression profile. In contrast, adult stem cell profiles varied widely, indicating that not all so-called stem cells are the same.