Biological Sciences

This shy California shrew avoided the camera and the limelight — until now

March 4, 2025

Screenshot of video with two students looking at a shrew

UC Berkeley students have photographed California’s most elusive mammal alive for the first time.

A small, cute and elusive mammal native to sub-alpine regions of the Sierra Nevadahas been captured alive on camera for the first time by a team of UC Berkeley students.

The Mount...

No robot can match a squirrel’s ability to leap from limb to limb — until now

March 27, 2025

Screenshot from video

Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches.

University of California, Berkeley, biologists and engineers are...

Scientists discover why obesity takes away the pleasure of eating

March 27, 2025

An outline of the human brain as seen from the side, filled with images of high-fat foods

The pleasure we get from eating junk food — the dopamine rush from crunching down on salty, greasy French fries and a luscious burger — is often blamed as the cause of overeating and rising obesity rates in our society.

But a new study by scientists at the...

Seven faculty members named fellows of American Association for the Advancement of Science

March 27, 2025

Seven headshots of AAAS winners in circles against a blue backgroundSeven 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 471 new AAAS fellows...

L&S Shines Bright in Big Give 2025

March 17, 2025

Blue graphic with yellow stars, copy says Big Thanks! BigGive.berkeley.edu #CalBigGive

Thanks to the boundless generosity of our community, Berkeley Letters & Science raised $1,855,851 from 2,089 donors during this year's Big Give fundraiser! We are deeply grateful to everyone who participated and cheered us on along the way. Your...

How an infectious disease researcher stays grounded during uncertain times

March 7, 2025

Russell Vance is an immunology professor, infectious disease researcher, and the director of UC Berkeley’s Cancer Research Laboratory. By studying the immune system’s response to bacteria that cause tuberculosis and dysentery, Vance hopes to apply those insights into other areas affecting public health, such as cancer.

Vance spoke with UC Berkeley writer Alexander Rony as the federal government was freezing and...

Six young faculty members named Sloan Fellows

February 18, 2025

Six headshots of UC Berkeley faculty named Sloan Fellows in 2025

Six young early career researchers at UC Berkeley have been awarded a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, granted annually to “honor exceptional researchers at U.S. and Canadian educational institutions whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” according to an...

Watch a professor explain the evolutionary war that gave us caffeine

February 6, 2025

Screenshot of 101 of Coevolution video with Noah Whiteman and a monarch butterfly in the corner

Few of us think much about how our kitchens came to be full of so many thrilling tastes and aromas, like the warmth of cinnamon or the punchy bite of pepper. But when Noah Whiteman opens a cabinet, he sees not just ingredients for a...

Life cycles of some insects adapt well to a changing climate. Others, not so much.

January 31, 2025

Closeup of a grasshopper outside on the ground

Photo: Thomas Naef, 2022

As insect populations decrease worldwide in what some have called an “insect apocalypse,” biologists are desperate to determine how the six-legged creatures are responding to a warming world and to predict the long-term winners and losers.

A new study of Colorado grasshoppers shows that, while the answers are complicated, biologists...

Professor Andrew Dillin: a comeback story at Genes & Development

January 23, 2025

We regret to inform you that your manuscript has not been selected for publication.

That’s how Andrew Dillin’s relationship with Genes & Development (G&D) begins. The scientific journal, published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Press, fields hundreds of article submissions each year. It’s considered one of the top publications in all of developmental and molecular biology. In 1997, Andrew Dillin, then a graduate student, submits a paper on transcriptional silencing to...