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Innovation

Pauline Ang (left) and Olivia Chen (right)

We’re not an Asian Brand. We’re not an American Brand. We’re an Asian-American Brand.

By Margie Cullen

Olivia Chen and Pauline Ang have been friends for 20 years. During the pandemic, they decided to start their own canned milk tea company, Twrl.

Soil engineering: Dr. Jill Banfield and crew analyzing microbes in California rice fields. (Andy Murdock, Innovative Genomics Institute)

What If We “Supercharged” Plants to Stop Climate Change?

By Margie Cullen

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has cited carbon dioxide removal as essential to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the Paris Agreement’s climate target. 

Photo by Margie Cullen

She Thought She Would Change Her Community as a Lawyer. Instead, She Did it with Mac and Cheese.

By Margie Cullen

Erin Wade got a law degree from Berkeley in 2008, but quickly realized that she hated being a lawyer. Instead, she turned to her childhood love: mac and cheese.

Courtesy of the artist

What Began as Family Trauma Becomes Celebrated Art

By Emily Wilson

A few years ago, artist Cynthia Brannvall spent the summer experimenting with creating a floor to ceiling cyclone of clothes, trying to push her textile work to sculpture. She didn’t really like the results—she had meant to convey female power with the cyclone, but instead it looked ghostly and fragile — and she worried she’d wasted the summer. 

Spotlight

By Anabel Sosa

Blind thinkers, scientists, and artists showing us the way.

Running Start for Perlmutter

By Hayden Royster

Named after Cal’s Nobel-winning cosmologist Saul Perlmutter, Ph.D. ’86, Berkeley’s newest supercomputer was launched in May 2021 by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and hailed as one of the fastest ever. The next month, it ranked fifth on the coveted TOP500 list, the biannual record of the world’s most powerful commercially available supercomputers. 

Out with a Bang

By Margie Cullen

If a star dies in the universe and no one is around to see it, does it make an explosion? Scientists can now confirm that it does. 

The Edge Episode 15: I’m in Love With a Robot

It’s not easy coming up with the perfect opening line on Tinder. Artificial intelligence is already helping us compose emails and complete sentences, so why stop there? Laura and Leah talk to the founder of Keys about the possibilities—and dangers—of letting robots do the talking for us. 

The land donated by Stuart Woolf to build a high school in Huron, Calif.

The San Joaquin Valley Has a Salinity Problem

By Glen Martin

After decades of salt accumulation, Berkeley scientists look for new solutions.

This Woman is Reshaping Our Understanding of the Living World

By Hope Henderson

Rocking the tree of life.

Stuart Woolf’s farm in Huron Calif. on Oct 19.

As Water Runs Low, San Joaquin Valley Adapts to a Drier Future

By Glen Martin

In the heart of the valley

UCSF Prof. David Julius, right (Photo by Noah Berger)

Berkeley Claims Two More Nobels This Year

By Margie Cullen

David Card and David Julius won for economics and medicine, respectively.