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I Learned What Blockchain Is So You Won’t Have To

Blockchain is all the rage right now, but most people don’t know what it is. Sure, we get that it’s somehow revolutionary, but it’s mostly strange and confusing—much like watching a Lars Von Trier movie or eating a Japanese water cake.

Three Cal Scientists Shift Focus from Biofuels to Prebiotics

These days, it’s all about the gut. Not how it looks in a Speedo or bikini, though. More like, how it feels inside. Increasingly, gut health is correlated with general health; gastrointestinal status is widely thought to affect everything from the immune system to emotional stability. So what does a healthy gut want? Probiotics, apparently […]

Smelko and Chang on Sharktank, Still

Dietary Disruption: Startup Takes on Lucrative Supplement Market

The last time many people on the campus of UC Berkeley were paying attention to Will Smelko it was 2010. Then 22 years old, Smelko was the ASU president and he made news by vetoing a resolution urging the University to divest from companies supplying military-related equipment to Israel. Now, he and fellow Cal Class […]

“World’s Smartest Billionaire:” James Simons is Cal Alumnus of the Year for 2016

As a teenager in Newton, Massachusetts, James Simons had a short-lived job in the basement stockroom of a garden supply store. “I was terrible at it; couldn’t remember where anything went,” he told an audience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2013. He was quickly demoted to floor sweeper, “Which I loved: It was […]

Berkeleyside: The Nimble Hyperlocal News Site is Winning Awards and Attracting Eyeballs

Protesters gathered near the gates of Sproul Plaza on the Cal campus, carrying signs and chanting a phrase reverberating around the country: “Black lives matter.” The crowd swelled as it headed away from campus to downtown, where, by 6:30, demonstrators lay down and blocked the street. Ten minutes later, someone smashed windows at Trader Joe’s. […]

Confessions of an Online Journalist: How I Killed My Profession

In the fall of 1994, when I was a young reporter struggling to pay the rent, I wrote a cover story for the San Francisco Bay Guardian: “Plugging In: An Idiot’s Guide to the Internet.” I explained why a 14.4 baud modem was a great deal, and reported that the Internet was a fantastic resource […]

Why a New-Media Whiz Equates Journalism With a Tribe Wandering 40 Years in the Desert

Your journalism crowdfunding platform, Spot.Us, the first of its kind, was acquired by American Public Media in 2011 and has since been “retired.” What do you think went wrong, and what does it mean for the viability of crowdfunding for journalism in general? David Cohn: Much like startups, the majority of mergers and acquisitions don’t […]

Fun with Fungi: Food Business is Still Mushrooming for Two Berkeley Grads

It was already their final semester at UC Berkeley, but Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez had never met. Both were sitting in a business ethics class when something the professor said caught their interest: It might be possible to grow gourmet mushrooms from used coffee grounds. Just a few weeks later, the two were practically best friends, brought together by an idea.

The Ballad of John and Helen: Berkeley-Based Meyer Sound Are Global Audio Pioneers

Drop out. It’s such a leaden term. Yes, yes, Helen Brodsky dropped out of UC Berkeley in 1968, dashing the hopes and dreams of her Cal alumni-laden family. Before even declaring a major (she was leaning toward Russian Lit), she and her new boyfriend, John Meyer, an autodidact with a gift for tinkering and engineering, […]

Fear Factor: In Business and Life, It May Separate Smart Luck from Dumb Luck

Taking big risks might actually keep you from succeeding.  John Morgan is haunted by the prospect of failure. However, he tells his classroom of aspiring entrepreneurs, this fear might not be as unhealthy as your “clinical psychologist will tell you.” We may like to peg successful entrepreneurs as overconfident thrill seekers, but such thrill seekers […]

Silicon Valley’s Disruptive Influence: Researching Effect on Workers, Community

Silicon Valley companies have long been under fire for lacking diversity in their workforce—the stereotype being the nerdy white or Asian programmer. But there was little data to back up that contention, until recently. This summer, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter released the ethnic and gender breakdowns of their U.S. workforce. All five companies […]

Selling Sustainability: Delivering Cookstoves Is Easier than Convincing People to Use Them

David I. Levine is an unusual kind of salesman. The UC Berkeley Haas School of Business professor’s products are good: cost-effective, ecofriendly water filters and cookstoves. But Levine found that where his products were most needed—in Uganda, Bangladesh, and Kenya—people weren’t buying. “The biggest mystery is cookstoves,” says Levine. Traditional biomass cookstoves kill more than […]