Some students plant trees. Some hug them. This summer, eight Cal State Fullerton students sampled trees. Really, the students were listening to what trees had to say about the droughts and fires they had lived through. Specifically, the students extracted cores from trees in the Sierra Nevada – including some in Yosemite that had burned a few years ago – and are now examining the cores back on campus. A new laboratory, the Cal-Dendro Tree Ring Laboratory, has been set up to conduct research on the cores, which are expected to reveal valuable data going back 500 to 1,000 years.