Innovation
Quenching Thirst and Generating Power Along California’s Irrigation Canals
Covering 4,000 miles of irrigation canals with solar panels could help solve the state’s water crisis. According to a team of scientists from UC Merced, California’s 4,000 miles of irrigation canals lose 63 billion gallons of water each year to evaporation—a problem that could be solved by shading them with solar panels. In their feasibility […]
Dexterous Robots Will Do the Work That Once Required Human Touch
How deep-machine learning is being used to meet the growing demand for package handling and product shipments. Asked to choose a superpower, few people would think “suction.” But it turns out that robots with suction hands can achieve superhuman sorting performance, a capability that could soon revolutionize e-commerce warehouses. In March, Ambi Robotics, a company […]
CRISPR/Cas9 Sets Its Sights on Sickle Cell
Genetic engineering gets the green light to treat the disease. When the gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 was discovered in 2012 by Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, it changed genetics forever. “We’ve been able to read and write DNA for a long time. We have machines to sequence it (read); and to synthesize it […]
Will AI Write the Next Great American Novel?
A writer explores what happens to art when our muses become mechanical, when inspiration is not divine but digital. IN SEPTEMBER OF LAST YEAR, a startling headline appeared on the Guardian’s website: “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” The accompanying piece was written by GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, […]
Meet Cal’s New Changemaker in Chief
RICH LYONS SPENT TEN YEARS (2008–2018) as dean of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he himself studied as an undergraduate, before being appointed the University’s first-ever chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer in January 2020. A year later, California Editor in Chief Pat Joseph caught up with Lyons on a video call to talk about […]
Researchers are Using Big Data to Combat Extreme Poverty in Togo
RESEARCHERS AT BERKELEY’S DATA-INTENSIVE development lab are using big data to deliver aid to the world’s chronically hungry—a group that has doubled in size from 135 million to more than a quarter billion during the pandemic. Lab director and associate professor Joshua Blumenstock has spent much of the past six months developing an algorithm to […]
Plant-based Creations from the Newest Crop of Food Entrepreneurs
Students trained in Berkeley’s Alt: Meat Lab are serving up meat substitutes and more.
The Edge Episode 9: You Say Couch Potato, I Say Athlete
How did video gaming, or esports, make it from your parents’ basement to the big leagues? Laura and Leah discuss with student esport “athletes,” an administrator, and a team owner.
CRISPR Will Change the World. Here’s What’s Already In the Works
From diagnostics to warfare, a sampling of how gene-editing is being used to rewrite the world’s DNA. In October, UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-slicing tool that can be programmed to make precise edits to DNA. Since its discovery, CRISPR has captured the […]
The Edge Episode 8: Control-Alt-Meat
After an unsettling encounter with a turkey, Laura resolves to eat less meat and takes Leah on a journey through the alternative meat industry. Will real, flesh and blood meat be obsolete in 15 years, as one industry leader suggests?
The Search for Unisex Contraceptive Drugs Gets a Major Boost
A MacArthur “genius” awardee says women and men deserve better options. When Polina Lishko received a call in September informing her that she had won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, she almost hung up. The physiologist had had so many grant applications turned down in recent years that several mentees had switched fields out of […]
New Research Suggests Sleep Is Good Medicine for the Aging Brain
Scientists explain how sleeping better can prevent Alzheimer’s. Sleep is good medicine. As UC Berkeley neuroscientist Matthew Walker wrote in his 2017 book, Why We Sleep, “There does not seem to be one major organ within the body, or process within the brain, that isn’t optimally enhanced by sleep (and detrimentally impaired when we don’t get […]
