Research & Innovation

UC Berkeley scientists uncover neural mechanisms behind long-term memory

July 11, 2025

Every day, our brain takes countless fleeting experiences — from walks on the beach to presentations at work — and transforms them into long-term memories. How exactly this works remains a mystery, but neuroscientists believe that it involves a phenomenon called neural replay, in which neurons rapidly recreate the same activation sequences that occurred during the original experience. Surprisingly, neural replays can happen both before and after an experience, suggesting they help in both memory storage and also future planning.

In...

When warnings never cease, can we still trust our instincts?

July 7, 2025

UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells first watched the 1990 movie Arachnophobia as a kid. Her mom warned her not to see it: The horror-comedy, about a California town terrorized by a deadly species of spider accidentally imported from a Venezuelan jungle, was PG-13, and Landau-Wells was a lot younger than 13. But some of her friends were going to the theater to see it — at least one of their parents thought it was fine — so she went.

“I now have this deep-seated conviction that all spiders are at least 8 inches in...

The Exam-Free Experiment: What Happened When One University Bet on Group Projects

July 3, 2025

To promote deeper learning and fairer outcomes, many education systems have moved away from traditional in-class exams toward lower-stakes, more flexible forms of assessment. Yet despite the growing popularity of this shift, we still know little about its long-term consequences. What began as a single in-class exam has evolved into a mix of midterms, finals, take-home tests, re-takes, problem sets, and participation-based grading. In some cases, assessments now depend more on whether students complete their work than how well they perform. This trend has extended beyond the classroom: many...

A T. rex with feathers? Scientists say dinosaurs were likely different from what most of us picture

June 26, 2025

Man stands at a railing to look over at a full size cast of a T.rex skeleton

For a long time, paleontologists thought that the famous, long-extinct apex predator, the Tyrannosaurus rex, may have chased its prey at high speeds. Children’s books and movies often showed the dinosaur sprinting at a terrifying pace; you might remember scenes from the 1993 film Jurassic Park in which a massive T. rex chases...

CIQC’s Impact in Action: Building Quantum Careers in Mathematics

June 24, 2025

Behind the scenes of NSF’s CIQC is a powerful story of workforce development: mathematicians without any prior exposure to quantum science are emerging as leaders in a rapidly expanding field, thanks to a training model that’s both rigorous and deeply interdisciplinary.

Headshot of Lin Lin, wearing glasses and a black shirt in front of an ivy leaf background“I had never worked on quantum computation before 2019,” says Lin Lin,...

New research says framing protests as fights for civil rights ‘backfires.’ So what might work?

June 23, 2025

Millions of people took to the streets last weekend in solidarity against President Donald Trump. Protest signs and public speeches decried his administration’s attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups. Many protesters deemed current policies an affront to civil rights.

But framing modern...

Meet Cathy: L&S SURF Student Spotlight

June 20, 2025

This interview originally appeared on the OURS website.

Headshot of Cathy Kenderski, young woman with blond wavy hair, smiling at camera OURS Student Spotlight: Cathy Kenderski (Fall ’25) | Molecular and Cell Biology

Cathy (she/her) is a 2025 SURF L&S researcher majoring in Molecular and...

Ahmad Nabhan: Bringing an Industry Perspective

May 21, 2025

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 MCB Transcript newsletter.

Headshot of Ahmad Nabhan wearing a blue t-shirt and glassesAssistant Professor Ahmad Nabhan, who joined MCB’s faculty in January 2025, brings some...

With lasers and magnets, Shimon Kolkowitz pushes time to new boundaries

May 22, 2025

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.

Linguistics professor explores the social consequences of biases in AI linguistics

May 29, 2025

Have you ever wondered why Siri can understand one’s voice over another’s?

Linguistics Professor Nicole Holliday has an answer. She explores how biases develop in speech AI — used in Siri and other applications — and its real world consequences.

Lack of representation in training data causes biases in speech AI, making the system work less for underrepresented groups such as the elderly, Black people and people who speak English as a second language, according to Holliday.

Her...