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News

July 20, 2016

Cal swimmer Rachael Acker added to her long list of accomplishments Wednesday when she was named the Pac-12's 2015-16 Woman of the Year, becoming the first Golden Bear to receive the honor in the 11-year history of the award. As a result, Acker is the conference's candidate for NCAA Woman of the Year. An accomplished student-athlete in the pool, in the classroom and in the community, Acker graduated this past May with her degree in French.

July 12, 2016

The video simulation covers 700,000 years, and is based on computer code created by UC Berkeley astrophysicist Richard Klein to capture the effects of radiation, magnetic fields, gravity and other physical phenomena and paint a realistic portrait of star formation.

UC Berkeley paleontologists have identified distinctive features of primate teeth that allow them to track the evolution of our ape and monkey ancestors, shedding light on a mysterious increase in monkey species that occurred during a period of climate change 8 million years ago.

July 7, 2016

Octopuses, squid and other cephalopods are colorblind – their eyes see only black and white – but their weirdly shaped pupils may allow them to detect color and mimic the colors of their background, according to a father/son team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University.

June 30, 2016

“This is a key step toward the goal of a public earthquake early-warning system for the entire state,” said Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory at UC Berkeley and one of the lead researchers on the project. “This funding will enable us to add more sensors to the seismic networks, making the warnings faster and enabling the system to reach more users.”

Hundreds of researchers, medical professionals and industry leaders gathered together in Washington, D.C. Wednesday for a summit on the “cancer moonshot,” a program spearheaded by Vice President Joe Biden with ties to critical innovations happening at UC Berkeley.

June 29, 2016

After 52 years at UC Berkeley, Paul Licht is retiring as director of the UC Botanical Garden — but it remains to be seen whether he is gone for good. It’s not the first time he’s retired from an appointment at Berkeley. In 2002, Licht ended his term as chair of deans in the College of Letters and Science, an oversight role similar in some capacities to what the campus provost now does. His plan was to volunteer at the Botanical Garden. Instead, something else was in store for him.

June 28, 2016

Diane Shaver Clemens, professor emerita of history at University of California, Berkeley, passed on May 18, 2016. Born in Cincinnati in 1936, she received an M.A. at the University of Cincinnati in 1960 and her Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966.

June 27, 2016

New images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope confirm the presence of a “dark vortex” in the atmosphere of Neptune, a rare type of feature that can persist for years. This vortex, the first to be observed on Neptune in the 21st century, was first seen in September 2015 by the HST.

June 21, 2016

A simulation of the powerful jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centers of the largest galaxies explains why some burst forth as bright beacons visible across the universe, while others fall apart and never pierce the halo of the galaxy.

June 20, 2016

Taiwan’s top science award, the Tang Prize, has gone to two UC Berkeley scientists well-known in the fields of biochemistry and physics: Jennifer Doudna, for her invention of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, and Arthur Rosenfeld, often called the “godfather of energy efficiency.”

June 15, 2016

For insights about how individuals can stay safe, or at least safer, UC Berkeley Public Affairs turned to Bruce O. Newsome. A lecturer with the campus’s International and Area Studies program, Newsome teaches courses on global security risks, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, intelligence and counterintelligence and international conflict.

June 13, 2016

University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have now clarified the critical role that copper plays in nutrition: It helps move fat out of fat cells – called adipocytes – and into the blood stream for use as energy.

June 7, 2016

UC Berkeley leadership announced yesterday the appointment of Cathryn Carson, Associate Professor in the Department of History, to the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science. Carson will be the inaugural holder of the chair, created by the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation to “recognize and support scholarly and research activities of an outstanding [Berkeley] faculty member in the History of Science.”