News

Caitlin Rosenthal, an assistant professor of history, has published a new book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, which examines how slaveowners in the West Indies and the American South were early innovators of many business practices and terms we use today. “It is an attempt to write slavery back into the history of American business,” Rosenthal said of her book.

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is counting on Americans being captivated by her push for additional taxes on the richest people in the country. For the numbers behind her plan, she’s turned to two UC Berkeley economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The two coauthored a paper on wealth inequality for the National Bureau of Economic Research which says the current high level of wealth inequality “is almost entirely due to the rise of the top 0.1 percent wealth share.”

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a notice of allowance for a University of California patent application covering systems and methods for using single molecule guide RNAs that, when combined with the Cas9 protein, create more efficient and effective ways for scientists to target and edit genes. U.S.

UC Berkeley researchers, both faculty and students, are jumping in to interpret new images of the planet Uranus and Neptune recently released by NASA. The images reveal clues to the planets' weather, including massive year-long storms.

Ignacio Navarrete, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, was one of two faculty members honored with UC Berkeley’s prestigious 2019 Berkeley Faculty Service Award. The award recognizes “outstanding and dedicated service to the campus . . . {that has} significantly enhanced the quality of the campus as an educational institution and community of scholars.”"

How does one take a kid from Compton on a life journey and academic career path to Professor in Neurobiology at UC San Diego by way of UC Berkeley (B.A.), Harvard University (Ph.D.), and postdoctoral studies at California Institute of Technology?

Researchers exploring the effects of a long-standing treatment for cystic fibrosis have discovered a potential new target for drugs to treat the disease, which has no cure and typically cuts decades off the lives of patients. The research, a collaboration between the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and UC Berkeley, is based on a unique method to measure fluid secretion in the lungs.

A new study of mouse models of autism challenges the most common assumption about what goes wrong in brain circuits to cause disease symptoms. UC Berkeley neuroscientists demonstrated that while inhibition does decrease in the brains of these mice, altering the balance between excitation and inhibition, the changed balance does not affect spiking at all. Instead, this altered balance seems to be a compensatory mechanism that stabilizes brain activity in response to the disorder.

Kate Scott, Mass Communications ’05 is familiar with taking the road less traveled, from being Cal’s first female “mic man” to the first woman to call football on Pac-12 Networks. The Cal Alumni Association sat down with Scott to find out more about her journey, and to get tips for recent graduates facing the unpaved road ahead.

Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature, has completed a new translation of the Hebrew Bible after two and a half decades of work. In a new interview, Alter talks about what he hoped to achieve with his new translation - such as evoking the "beautifully expressive" Hebrew of the original text.

Ariel Bloch, who used his career at UC Berkeley as a way to fuse Arab and Hebrew culture, died in Richmond on Dec. 14 at the age of 85 after a lengthy illness. A professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Bloch specialized in Arabic linguistics, but he took on Hebrew and Aramaic as subspecialties and did what he could to encourage a multilingual balance of both of the languages and the cultures.

Daniel Weisz, an assistant professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, was honored at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society for his early-career research on relatively nearby “dwarf” galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope.