Campus News

Among the more puzzling cosmic phenomena discovered over the past few decades are brief and very bright flashes of blue and ultraviolet light that gradually fade away, leaving behind faint X-ray and radio emissions. With slightly more than a dozen discovered so far, astronomers have debated whether they are produced by an unusual type of supernova or by interstellar gas falling into a black hole.

Analysis of the brightest such burst to date, discovered last year, shows that they’re neither.

Instead, a team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of California,...

This year's Nobel Prize winners were invited to officially accept their awards from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in a special ceremony this week. UC Berkeley faculty John Clarke and Omar Yaghi were among this year's Nobel laureates, in addition to UC Berkeley alumni Michel Devoret and John Martinis. Among other festivities, the weeklong celebration featured lectures delivered by the Nobelists. John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis were presented with the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric...

UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Alison Gopnik discussed what children’s development can teach us about artificial intelligence and what AI can teach us about being human during this year’s Berkeley Social Sciences Distinguished Faculty Lecture.

Gopnik challenged the commonly-accepted notion of a “general intelligence,” instead proposing that intelligence arises from many distinct capacities. Rather than viewing intelligence as a quantitative, measurable value, she outlined three interdependent kinds of intelligences: exploration, exploitation...

UC Berkeley physicist Shimon Kolkowitz explains atomic clocks in just 101 seconds.

Most of the atomic clocks in the world — fewer than 500 in total — are housed at standards institutes and used to keep time for the planet. But the one inside UC Berkeley’s...