News

For millennia, humans have cultivated deep relationships with psychoactive plants. David Presti, who teaches neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, gave this talk March 21 for the opening of the Lounge Lecture Series at the Phoebe A.

A UC Berkeley study of fossilized barnacles is helping scientists reconstruct the migrations of whale populations millions of years in the past. The study, authored by integrative biology professor Seth Finnegan and doctoral student Larry Taylor, will help scientists understand how migration patterns may have affected the evolution of whales over the past 3 to 5 million years, how these patterns changed with changing climate and may help predict how modern whales will adapt to the rapid climate change happening today.

Still depending on your kids to figure out why your smartphone’s acting weird? As a rule, children are wired to explore, experiment and get results through trial and error – usually more quickly than grownups. But why?

That and similar questions will be covered Tuesday, March 19, by UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, who is presenting one of the two talks at this year’s Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lectures, a 106-year-old campus tradition.

The pre-Columbian city of Cahokia was once among the most populous and bustling settlements north of Mexico. But by 1400 A.D., Cahokia’s population had dwindled to virtually nothing. While theories abound about what happened, AJ White, a Ph.D. student in anthropology at UC Berkeley, has studied ancient poop samples to connect the city’s 13th century population plunge – at least in part – to climate change.

The world premiere of composer Jimmy López’s oratorio “Dreamers” — a work informed by interviews with undocumented students at UC Berkeley — will be performed at Zellerbach Hall on Sunday, March 17. López, 40, received his Ph.D. in music from Berkeley in 2012, and recently talked with Berkeley News about becoming a composer, his time on campus, and how he created this large-scale composition for orchestra and voices.

Malika Imhotep grew up in West Atlanta, rooted in a community that she calls an “Afrocentric bubble,” in a family of artisans, entrepreneurs and community organizers. Now, as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, she’s studying how black women and femmes make sense of themselves in a society designed, in many ways, to keep them out.

A wide-ranging survey on campus climate starts today, and students, staff and faculty are encouraged to weigh in about Berkeley’s current efforts in pursuit of equity, inclusion and community building. The My Experience survey, the first Berkeley campus climate survey since 2013, is designed to uncover opinions on ways to improve the campus experience. It can be accessed here.

The following statement from UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof reaffirms the Universy's commitment to protecting free speech after an altercation involving two unaffiliated persons.

Dogs are thousands of times better than humans at picking up scents, which is why they’re often the heroes of search-and-rescue missions. UC Berkeley neuroscientist Lucia Jacobs has long been studying animals’ smell-navigation skills and is a key member of a National Science Foundation brain initiative known as the Odor Navigation Project.

Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system have been linked to the close approach of another star in our system’s infancy that flung things helter-skelter. UC Berkeley and Stanford University astronomers think they have now found a smoking gun that points to how this happened.

A new study by UC Berkeley psychologists shows visual context — as in background and action — is just as important as facial expressions and body language in interpreting a person's state of mind. The findings, presented by David Whitney, a professor of psychology, and doctoral student Zhimin Chen, challenge decades of research positing that emotional intelligence and recognition are based largely on the ability to read micro-expressions.

Six years in the making, UC Berkeley’s new Basic Needs Center, a one-stop shop for students with food, housing and financial insecurity, opens Monday, Feb. 25, on the lower level of the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. The novel, nearly 3,000-square-foot facility is considered the first of its kind in the UC system and nationwide.

A new study authored by Paul Renne, a professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science, indicates that an asteroid or comet impact 66 million years ago reignited massive volcanic eruptions half a world away from the impact site in the Caribbean Sea. But it leaves unclear to what degree the two catastrophes contributed to the near-simultaneous mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs and many other forms of life.

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.”