How do you house equipment so sensitive to external factors that a building’s windows and elevators affect its results? For Shimon Kolkowitz, the Roger Herst Professor of Physics, you spend a year and a half overseeing a state-of-the-art lab renovation that will enable some of the world’s most precise measurements.
Hitoshi Murayama, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), has been awarded the 2025 Particle Physics Medal by the...
Permafrost is a major actor in the slow-motion disaster movie of pollution, climate change, and environmental degradation. It contains vast amounts of carbon. As our planet warms permafrost thaws, releasing greenhouse gases that enter a feedback loop which accelerates climate change. How bad is this feedback? We still don’t know. We still need to understand the different character and history of permafrost that makes it vulnerable to rapid thaw and erosion.
Geomorphology is the area within Earth Sciences that studies what is happening at or...
The University of California, Berkeley, a world leader in theoretical physics since J. Robert Oppenheimer planted the seed nearly 100 years ago, will share with four other institutions the largest gift ever to the field — $90 million.
The gift from the Leinweber Foundation in Michigan will establish four Leinweber Institutes for Theoretical Physics at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley, and the Leinweber Forum for Theoretical and Quantum...
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...
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...
This year's campuswide spring ceremony took place on May 11, 2024, at the California Memorial Stadium. Cynthia "Cynt" Marshall, UC Berkeley alumna and CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, delivered this year's commencement address. Despite the backdrop of chants and protests from graduates opposing the war in Gaza, the ceremony largely proceeded as planned. Within the College of Letters & Science, many departments hosted smaller, more...
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.