“It’s not a coincidence that returns have been exceptionally low during the drought,” says Drekmeier, a Cal undergraduate alumnus in political science and a former mayor of Palo Alto. “Low water levels correlate with poor salmon returns. Chinook salmon typically return to spawn on two year cycles. A couple years after the extremely wet winter of 1997-1998, when the rivers ran exceptionally high, 18 thousand fish returned to the Tuolumne. And two years after the 1982-1983 winter, which marked one of the wettest years on record, 40 thousand salmon returned.”
October 21, 2016
October 19, 2016
Physicist Marvin Cohen, a University Professor and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is the newly announced recipient of the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics.
Berkeley Library
Students working in the revamped fourth and fifth floors of Moffitt Library will find fresh inspiration in the original artwork adorning the walls. Some of the artists will be on hand at the Nov. 2 opening to talk with attendees about their work.
October 18, 2016
Four UC Berkeley scientists have been recognized as innovators in their fields through new research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
October 17, 2016
Four UC Berkeley research teams will share $1.7 million from the federal government’s BRAIN initiative, part of $70 million in new grants announced Thursday, Oct. 13, by the National Institutes of Health.
October 12, 2016
A team of physicians and laboratory scientists has taken a key step toward a cure for sickle cell disease, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to fix the mutated gene responsible for the disease in stem cells from the blood of affected patients.
October 11, 2016
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
With Nov. 8 just around the corner and some voters still straddling the fence about whether to even cast a ballot, a team of behavioral economists from UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Harvard University report some interesting findings about the much debated question of why people vote.
October 6, 2016
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Calcium, the main constituent of bone, turns out to play a major role in regulating the cells that orchestrate bone growth, a finding that could affect treatment for conditions caused by too much collagen deposition, such as fibrosis and excessive scarring, as well as diseases of too little bone growth. The finding by Michael Rape, the Dr. K. Peter Hirth Chair in Cancer Biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and his colleagues at UC Berkeley came from study of the signals that tell undifferentiated stem cells in the very early embryo to mature into bone cells.
October 3, 2016
A new study co-authored by UC Berkeley professor Michael Manga confirms that earthquakes in America’s oil country — including a 4.8 magnitude quake that rocked Texas in 2012 — are being triggered by significant injections of wastewater below the surface of the Earth.
A new dark matter detector, which will be at least 100 times more sensitive than its predecessor, has cleared another approval milestone and is on schedule to begin its deep-underground hunt for theoretical particles known as WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, in 2020. WIMPs are among the top prospects for explaining dark matter, the unseen stuff that scientists have observed only through gravitational effects.
October 2, 2016
California Magazine
The swarm of small temblors just off Bombay Beach in the Salton Sea on September 26 isn’t a sign that Palm Springs is about to become beachfront property, but it does point to the inevitability of the “Big One” hitting the South State, say seismologists.
“The southern portion of the San Andreas Fault hasn’t ruptured in more than 300 years, and it’s significantly overdue for a major event,” says Roland Bürgmann, a professor in the earth and planetary science department at UC Berkeley and a participating faculty member at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.
September 28, 2016
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eric Betzig and world-class biophysicist Na Ji will join the UC Berkeley faculty in the summer of 2017. Concurrent with their hire at UC Berkeley, Betzig and Ji will have joint appointments and research programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) as faculty scientists in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division of the Biosciences Area.
September 27, 2016
UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna, molecular biologist Robert Tijan and a team of researchers have expanded the role of the newly discovered CRISPR protein C2c2 that targets RNA instead of DNA.
September 26, 2016
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Josh Kun earned his Ph.D. in ethnic studies at Berkeley in 1999 and is a professor of communication at USC’s Annenberg School. As a cultural historian, he explores “the ways in which the arts and popular culture are conduits for cross-cultural exchange,” according to his MacArthur citation.
September 21, 2016
UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University will join forces in a new medical science research center funded by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.
September 20, 2016
Why does the arrow of time flow inexorably toward the future, constantly creating new “nows”?
That quest resulted in a book published today, NOW: The Physics of Time (W. W. Norton), which delves into the history of philosophers’ and scientists’ concepts of time, uncovers a tendency physicists have to be vague about time’s passage, demolishes the popular explanation for the arrow of time and proposes a totally new theory.
September 19, 2016
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
A new study shows that when you finish your spouse’s sentences or answer a fill-in-the-blank question, you’re engaging the brain’s relay station for memories, an area that until now was largely neglected by scientists studying language.
September 14, 2016
An experiment to explore the aftermath of cosmic dawn, when stars and galaxies first lit up the universe, has received nearly $10 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to expand its detector array in South Africa. Led by UC Berkeley, HERA will explore the billion-year period after hydrogen gas collapsed into the first stars, perhaps 100 million years after the Big Bang, through the ignition of stars and galaxies throughout the universe. T
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
UC Berkeley has kept its coveted ranking as the nation’s top public university byU.S. News & World Report, with UCLA and the University of Virginia tied in second place and the University of Michigan coming in fourth.
Elizabeth Colson, a trailblazing professor emerita in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, died Aug. 3 at the age of 99 at her home in Zambia, Africa. Since the 1940s, she studied social change related to forced displacement, migration, development, kinship and political anthropology that carried implications far beyond the African continent.