Sudanese women living in refugee camps often walk six or more hours to gather fuel for cooking. En route, they often become victims of rape, sexual mutilation, and murder by roving gangs. To address this problem, physicist Ashok Gadgil and engineer Christie Galitsky of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have designed cheap, sturdy, fuel-efficient cooking stoves that cut down significantly on the number of fuel-gathering trips the women must make.

How did HIV—a disease initially associated with gay white men—spread so quickly throughout the straight black community in the ’80s and ’90s? A new study by Rucker C. Johnson and Steven Raphael at the Goldman School of Public Policy turned up an unsettling clue: prisons. After analyzing a federal database with personal information of about 850,000 men and women who contracted AIDS during those decades, the researchers found the rise in incarceration rates among black men was linked to the rise in black AIDS patients nationwide—particularly black women, who contracted the disease from black men after they were released from prison.

Among the Gold Rush’s lasting legacies is toxic sediment in San Francisco Bay. A new study by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shows mercury from the Gold Rush era is still finding its way into the bay through the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. The study, by Tom McKone, Matthew MacLeod, and Donald McKay of Canada’s Trent University, appears in Environmental Science and Technology. According to their calculations, it takes as long as 50 years after the pollutant arrives in the bay for mercury to begin to diminish.

Where does water go when it evaporates? A team of geologists, biologists, and chemists led by Inez Fung is hoping to track the life cycle of water at a new HydroWatch Center at the Berkeley Institute for the Environment. The project, funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation, will follow water as it travels from streams and oceans through soil, trees, and the atmosphere, using wireless sensors placed in watersheds, treetops, and underground.

Latina women and children in Salinas are exposed to and carry high levels of pesticides in their systems, according to a new study by Berkeley health researchers. About 28 percent of the women surveyed worked in the fields during pregnancy, and Salinas newborns were exposed to pesticides 26 to 50 times higher than other newborns—often through relatives who brought the chemicals home on clothing. The newborns were also found to be more sensitive to pesticides than was previously known. The study, co-led by environmental health professor Nina Holland, challenges current EPA protection levels for children living near high pesticide use.

The term “brainstorm” is not taken lightly by professor Andrew Szeri and Ph.D. student Mark Kramer. Szeri, a professor of mechanical engineering and applied science and technology, teamed up with Kramer and Dr. Heidi Kirsch at UCSF’s Epilepsy Center to create a mathematical model of the electrical storm that rages through the brain during a seizure. The equations used are similar to those that track fluctuations in the stock market, weather, and other systems affected by random events.