Many 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...
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 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...
There’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-...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.”
Many 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.
Flamingos 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.
There’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. 
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.