Campus News

Are groovy brains more efficient?

May 27, 2025

an artistic rendering of the folds of the human brain, colored blue and bright yellow and redMany grooves and dimples on the surface of the brain are unique to humans, but they’re often dismissed as an uninteresting consequence of packing an unusually large brain into a too-small skull.

But neuroscientists are finding that these folds are not mere artifacts, like the puffy folds you get when forcing a sleeping bag into a stuff...

Six UC Berkeley alumni named 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners

May 12, 2025

This week, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners announced by Columbia University included six UC Berkeley alumni, and additional members of the campus community were finalists for the prestigious award.

Announced each May, the prizes are considered the country’s most sought-after awards in journalism, arts and letters and have been awarded since 1917. Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who died in 1911, left money to Columbia University to launch a journalism school and establish the Pulitzer Prize. An...

Flamingos create water tornados to trap their prey

May 21, 2025

painting of a bright pink flamingo against a deep blue background, standing in water and creating little tornadosFlamingos standing serenely in a shallow alkaline lake with heads submerged may seem to be placidly feeding, but there’s a lot going on under the surface.

Through studies of Chilean flamingos in the Nashville Zoo and analysis of 3D printed models of their feet and L-shaped bills, researchers have documented how the...

The world’s top spelling bee is coming up. This Berkeley Ph.D. student built the word list.

May 20, 2025

Frank Cahill smiles and holds up his hands as colorful confetti is all around him, showing the fun, playful spirit of the spelling bee and the people who run itThere’s a word UC Berkeley comparative literature Ph.D. student Frank Cahill will never forget. He misspelled it as an eighth grader in the second round of the live televised Scripps National Spelling Bee finals.

Porwigle. Yes, you read that correctly. The word was p-...

The race to perfect the quantum computer is on, and UC is helping America hold its lead

May 16, 2025

Three people in white lab coats peer into a very large, delicate, gold-colored machine.Even if you’ve never set foot inside a physics classroom, you probably have a pretty solid grasp of the laws governing how objects move and behave.

Throw a basketball against a wall and it bounces off. If a coin flipped in San Francisco comes up heads, that won’t cause a coin flipped in Los Angeles to come up tails. If you’re...

In turbulent times, 2025 University Medal finalists excelled through idealism, hard work

May 12, 2025

One is a rising star in space research. One is a structural engineer, inspired by the experience of a devastating earthquake. One is a musician and opera composer, and another already has worked at the highest levels of U.S. politics. All share a common commitment: idealism and uncompromising hard work to make a positive impact in the world.

These traits unite the 2025 finalists for the University Medal — Corina Dunn, Owen Klein, Carlos Quezada and Miya Rosenthal — along with this year’s...

Not one, but two massive black holes are eating away at this galaxy

May 14, 2025

Astronomers have discovered nearly 100 examples of massive black holes shredding and devouring stars, almost all of them where you’d expect to find massive black holes: in the star-dense cores of massive galaxies.

University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have now discovered the first instance of a massive black hole tearing apart a star thousands of light years from the galaxy’s core, which itself contains a massive black hole.

The off-center black hole, which has a mass about 1 million times that of the sun, was hiding in the outer regions of the galaxy’s central...

Federal appeals court sends CRISPR-Cas9 patent case back to patent office for reconsideration

May 14, 2025

In a decision released today (May 12), the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., ordered the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to reconsider its 2022 interference decision that scientists at the Broad Institute in Boston invented CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in plant, animal and fungal cells.

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing is a revolutionary technique for manipulating DNA invented by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley; Emmanuelle Charpentier, who was then at Umeå University in Sweden; and their...

The key to success for this year’s University Medalist? Curiosity and collaboration

May 12, 2025

From using smartphone data to predict mental health relapses to leading French Club, Asher Cohen found community — and opportunities to serve others — in a myriad of corners of campus.

In the room that Asher Cohen will soon pack up, there’s a corkboard with mementos from his senior year at UC Berkeley: birthday cards, show programs for Carmen and Hamilton and an “I Voted” sticker. In the cabinet next to it is a math calendar a professor gifted him, tiny notebooks with Eiffel Towers that French Club distributed at Cal Day, a medical Spanish textbook, a...

Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion

April 21, 2025

On Sundays, I used to stand in front of my Mormon congregation and declare that it all was true.

I’d climb the stairs to the pulpit and smooth my long skirt. I’d smile and share my “testimony,” as the church calls it. I’d say I knew God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, prayer, spirits and miracles were all real. I’d express gratitude for my family and for my ancestors who had left lives in Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway to pull wagons across America and build a Zion on the plains. When I had finished, I’d bask in the affirmation of the congregation’s “amen.”

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