Mathematical & Physical Sciences

Roland Bürgmann, UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, has been awarded the 2026 Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship. This honor is bestowed upon a scientist for making lasting contributions to the study of physics of the Earth and whose lectures will provide solid, timely, and useful additions to the knowledge and literature in the field.

Bürgmann was recognized for developing important work that has transformed our understanding of how the lower crust and upper mantle respond to large stress changes from...

Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling statistic stands out. Even though nearly all stars are expected to have planets and most stars form in pairs, planets that orbit both stars in a pair are rare.

Of the more than 6,000 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, confirmed to date — most of them found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) — only 14 are observed to orbit binary stars. There should be hundreds. Where are all the planets with two suns, like Tatooine in Star Wars?

Astrophysicists at the...

At first glance, some scientific research can seem, well, impractical. When physicists began exploring the strange, subatomic world of quantum mechanics a century ago, they weren’t trying to build better medical tools or high-speed internet. They were simply curious about how the universe worked at its most fundamental level.

Yet without that “curiosity-driven” research — often called basic science — the modern world would look...

UC Berkeley’s SETI@home, one of the most popular crowd-sourced research projects ever, turned up some 12 billion signals of interest. A lengthy analysis found 100 worth another look.

For 21 years, between 1999 and 2020, millions of people worldwide loaned UC Berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations in our galaxy.

The project — called SETI@home, after the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) — generated a loyal following eager to participate in one of...