Astronomers tallying up all the normal matter — stars, galaxies and gas — in the universe today have come up embarrassingly short of the total matter produced in the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. In fact, more than half of normal matter — half of the 15% of the universe’s matter that is not dark matter — cannot be accounted for in the glowing stars and gas we see.
New measurements, however, seem to have found this missing matter in the form of very diffuse and invisible ionized hydrogen gas, which forms a halo around galaxies and is more puffed out and extensive than astronomers...
UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025 L&S Faculty Awards. This distinguished award recognizes each awardee's exceptional scholarship, service to the College and community, and transformational teaching. These extraordinary individuals not only embody the excellence of the College of Letters & Science, but they also serve as an inspiration to the entire campus community. The recipients will be honored at a private ceremony on Wednesday, May 14....
Deans maintain heavy workloads and busy calendars, so colleges tend to excuse them from teaching.
At UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science, however, two deans increased their course load this year. Steven Kahn, head of the Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, is currently teaching a cosmology course following a fall Freshman Seminar on big science experiments. Dean Richard Harland of the Division...
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members from a broad range of fields are among the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.
The outstanding faculty in the Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences are pushing the boundaries in the fields of astronomy, earth & planetary science, mathematics, and physics. Read below to learn more about their groundbreaking work.
Permafrost is a major actor in the slow-motion disaster movie that we are all trapped inside. It contains vast amounts of carbon. As our planet warms permafrost thaws, releasing greenhouse gases that enter a feedback loop which accelerates climate change. How bad is that? Literally—quantify the danger so we can decide how to respond. We need to dig into the character of permafrost and learn its desires and habits and upbringing, understand what causes it to turn to the dark side. As the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Consider the guitar leaning against the wall over there—you got it because you wanted to look cool, sure, but notice that it is unlike a piano (where you press one key and you get one note) and also unlike a violin (where you can press anywhere, and you look less cool). The guitar is somewhere in between because its frets are positioned where they are for a reason, not arbitrarily, but you can still make tiny changes to notes, as tiny as you like. It’s kinda digital at the same time it’s kinda analog.
On Wednesday, October 9, the College of Letters & Science Administrative Advisory Committee (AAC) hosted its inaugural L&S Brown Bag Lunch and Learn. One of several new initiatives by the recently revamped AAC, the Lunch and Learn provides L&S staff members an opportunity to connect with their colleagues and...
In Dec. 2024, Prof. Alex Filippenko was interviewed by Dr. Brian Greene for the World Science Festival. They discussed the accelerating expansion of the Universe, dark energy, and especially the current "Hubble tension" -- the discrepancy between the measured and predicted current expansion rate. The episode (2 hours long) is now available at https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/...
Mars today is a cold, dry, dusty planet with its only obvious water locked up in frozen polar ice caps. But billions of years ago, it appears to have had sandy beaches lapped by waves along the shoreline of a vast ocean.
The evidence for beaches on Mars comes from a Chinese rover, called Zhurong, that landed on the planet in 2021. During its short life it detected evidence of underground beach deposits in an area thought to have once been the site of an ancient sea, bolstering the idea that the planet long ago had large bodies of water.
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members from a broad range of fields are among the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.
