The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded UC Berkeley $21.6 million over four years to create a window into the brain through which researchers — and eventually physicians — can monitor and activate thousands to millions of individual neurons using light.
July 14, 2017
July 12, 2017
Research now shows that the countermeasure viruses came up with — inhibitory proteins referred to as anti-CRISPRs — can be used to improve CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene-therapy tool, decreasing off-target gene editing that could cause unwanted side effects.
July 6, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
University of California, Berkeley officials have offered freshman admission to more than 15,500 high school students for the 2017-18 school year. And more offers were made to first-generation college students and underrepresented minority students than in 2016-17.
The LA Times
New findings suggest that the odor of what we eat may play an important role in how the body deals with calories. If you can’t smell your food, you may burn it rather than store it.
July 5, 2017
A new study by Chinese and American biologists shows that if the calamity had not wiped the planet clean of most terrestrial life 66 million years ago, 88 percent of today’s frog species wouldn’t be here. Nearly nine out of 10 species of frog today have descended from just three lineages that survived the mass extinction.
As NASA’s Juno spacecraft loops around Jupiter, the Earth-bound Gemini North telescope is providing high-resolution images to help guide its exploration of the giant planet.
June 27, 2017
Mice, unlike cats and dogs, are able to move their whiskers to map out their surroundings, much as humans use their fingers to build a 3D picture of a darkened room. UC Berkeley researchers have for the first time reconstructed the whisker map a mouse creates of its surroundings in order to navigate its world, catch insects and avoid cats.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
New UC Berkeley research suggests that Siri and other digital helpers could someday learn the algorithms that humans have used for centuries to create and understand metaphorical language.
June 26, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Patients with dementia may actually die sooner if their family caregivers are mentally stressed, according to a new UC Berkeley study.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Scientists at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside have demonstrated a way to edit the genome of disease-carrying mosquitoes that brings us closer to suppressing them on a continental scale.
June 23, 2017
Two young UC Berkeley biomedical scientists received awards last week from the Pew Charitable Trusts to support their research on the brain.
LA Times
The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is working to unravel why bird eggs come in different shapes.
June 20, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Eric Schickler, a leading scholar of American politics and chair of UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science, is receiving four awards from the American Political Science Association for two books he wrote about U.S. politics that were published in 2016.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Richard Taruskin, a UC Berkeley emeritus professor of music, has won a 2017 Kyoto Prize for his contributions to the study, performance and critical discourse of early music, modern Russian music and Western music history.
June 19, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Experts made their way to the second balcony of the Campanile today to band two peregrine falcon chicks, whose family made a home on the 307-foot bell tower last month. The chicks are believed to have hatched on May 22.
Quanta Magazine
A decades-old method called the “bootstrap” is enabling new discoveries about the geometry underlying all quantum theories.
June 15, 2017
California’s winter rains and snow depress the Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges, which then rebound during the summer, changing the stress on the state’s earthquake faults and causing seasonal upticks in small quakes, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley seismologists.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
When Vijay Iyer came to UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, he didn’t know he would go on to become what the New Yorker referred to as “the most lauded piano player in jazz.” Iyer was 21, and a doctoral student in physics. But after a couple years, he knew he had to follow a new path. He went on to receive an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in the cognitive science of music in 1998.
June 14, 2017
Did our sun have a twin when it was born 4.5 billion years ago?
Almost certainly yes — though not an identical twin. And so did every other sunlike star in the universe, according to a new analysis by a theoretical physicist from UC Berkeley and a radio astronomer from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard University.
June 13, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Haute couture can be credited for enhancing more than catwalks and red carpets. New research from UC Berkeley suggests that the 3D or “stereoscopic” vision of dressmakers is as sharp as their needles.