In selecting “The Work of the Dead,” a book by UC Berkeley history professor Thomas W. Laqueur, to receive the 2018 Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, the jury praised its examination of how and why the living have cared for the dead in western Europe since the 18th century as a monumental achievement.
January 16, 2018
January 11, 2018
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
In Alice Wu's honors thesis, written when she was a UC Berkeley undergraduate, she found and detailed rampant gender stereotyping and misogyny on the popular and anonymous online Economics Jobs Market Rumors (EJMR) forum. Last Friday, she appeared on an all-female panel at the American Economic Associaton's conference that publicly examined gender issues in economics.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
The 2012 eruption of the Havre volcano took place three-quarters of a mile under the surface, on the ocean floor 600 miles north northeast of the North Island of New Zealand, and offered researchers a rare opportunity to study submarine eruptions. Michael Manga, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary sciences, is a co-author of a paper about the aftermath of the eruption published online today in the journal Science Advances.
January 10, 2018
After 28 years as a professor of Earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, Mark Richards will be leaving Berkeley in June to become the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Washington.
January 9, 2018
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
UC Berkeley’s Center for Buddhist Studies is part of a new international network of universities that is receiving $4.9 million to advance the study of Buddhism and East Asian cultures.
January 4, 2018
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Although August’s total solar eclipse was over in minutes, analysis of the 50,000 photos uploaded to the Eclipse Megamovie website is a time-consuming job, so team leaders are asking citizen scientists for help.
January 2, 2018
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Chocolate is forever, right? UC Berkeley scientists, using the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR, are working to make it so, as climate change threatens the cacao plant’s favorite growing sites.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Skyler Wang, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley, has been tracking cultural trends in online dating. He refers to the practice as “relationshopping.”
December 19, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Can art penetrate the walls that divide us and make us kinder? A Minneapolis museum, inspired by UC Berkeley psychology research, plans to find out.
December 17, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
When Carol Christ’s staff asked her how she wanted to be sworn in as UC Berkeley’s 11th chancellor, she immediately knew the answer: with 600 new graduates and their families.
Christ, who is the first woman to lead the university in its 149-year history, was formally inaugurated on Sunday, just minutes before presenting Ph.D., master’s and bachelor’s degrees to the winter graduating class.
December 14, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Jelena McWilliams, a Yugoslavian immigrant with degrees from UC Berkeley, has been nominated to lead the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which regulates the nation’s banking system.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Like swinging a tennis racket during a ball toss to serve an ace, slow and speedy brainwaves during deep sleep must sync up at exactly the right moment to hit the save button on new memories, according to new UC Berkeley research.
While these brain rhythms, occurring hundreds of times a night, move in perfect lockstep in young adults, findings published today in the journal Neuron show that, in old age, slow waves during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep fail to make timely contact with speedy electrical bursts known as “spindles.”
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
UC Berkeley has received more than 89,000 applications from high school students seeking admission to the 2018-19 freshman class, and an additional 19,000 from students seeking admission as transfer students. The numbers set yet another record year in freshman applications submitted.
December 13, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Robert Full wants to tap the diverse experiences of UC Berkeley undergraduates to teach them the fun of discovering biology’s secrets and the innovations that can spring from hacking them.
Maybe he’ll spark a few entrepreneurs in the process.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
It’s easy to know what you think, but it’s much harder to know why you think it.
That’s the credo that guides Berkeley Law lecturer Alan Pomerantz when he teaches his undergraduate seminar, Current Political and Moral Conflicts and the U.S. Constitution. It’s a course designed to push students to their limits, challenging them to think critically about controversial topics, from abortion rights to the First Amendment.
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
The National Endowment for the Humanities today announced $12.8 million in financial support for humanities research across the country, including funding for College of Letters & Science projects that deal with the works of Herman Melville, the rise of the Chinese meritocracy, the preservation of rare musical instruments, slave conspiracies, the relationship of Mexican women to the Catholic church and politics and the Nazi-era theft of music.
December 11, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Christopher Richardson has been playing the piano since he was 8 years old. He’s a sophomore at UC Berkeley, and intends to triple major in music, economics and molecular and cell biology. He’s on the pre-med track and is considering going into oncology.
December 8, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
UC Berkeley undergraduates Kelly Richeson and Gina Niceforo are proud to be Bears. But the 56-year-old retired Ventura County firefighter and the 37-year-old former South Lake Tahoe waitress are equally glad to be OWLs.
They’re members of Older Wiser Learners (OWLs), a support group on campus that’s gaining popularity with Berkeley’s 1,660-plus undergraduate re-entry students, who are defined as age 25 and older and having had at least a five-year absence from college.
December 4, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
As part of the De-Stress Week before finals, which start next week, UC Berkeley’s student government spent $400 to bring four llamas to Memorial Glade for three hours Monday afternoon. The glade is right next to the 24-hour library during so-called dead week, when a crushing load of term papers and unread lecture notes can cause blood pressure to skyrocket.
December 1, 2017
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Neha Zahid, a junior double major in public health and molecular biology at UC Berkeley, traveled to Nepal in the winter of 2016 to teach proper nutrition and oral hygiene, provide basic preventive dental care and emergency treatment, and measure indicators of oral health and nutrition in the local children and families. Hands-on research experiences like these have become a hallmark of the Berkeley undergraduate education, where students are participating in discovery experiences that are the very essence of research.