2008 September October Sustainable Blueprint
…And They Lived Happily Ever after
Romeo and Juliet, as Prokofiev intended. Berkeley audiences have come to expect surprises from Mark Morris, the endlessly inventive American choreographer who set Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker in a boozy 1960s cocktail party (The Hard Nut) and transformed a musty British “semi-opera” (Purcell’s King Arthur) into an exuberant contemporary delight. With his latest work, though, Morris delivers something […]
The Spirit of Pappy
Coach Waldorf had a special affection for the vets on the postwar football teams—and they are still returning it This fall, surviving members of the first of Pappy Waldorf’s three consecutive Rose Bowl teams will observe with customary vigor the 60th anniversary of that extraordinary season. So, for that matter, should the rest of us, for […]
Iconoplasty
Sather Gate is falling down. But not for long Jim Horner walks into a conference room near his office, and with a heavy clank, plunks down a chunk of ornamented bronze on the table. “That was literally hanging by a thread,” he says. “If that had come off, it could have killed somebody.” The piece on […]
Señoras on The Verge
A new report by a Berkeley public health professor is the largest of its kind to refute the longstanding assumption that greater income leads to better health. In her study, Professor Lia Fernald, MBA ’00, and her UC San Francisco colleague examined the relationship between systolic blood pressure—a leading health indicator—and various measures of socio-economic […]
The Connected Metabolism
Diabetics may one day use their cell phones to keep track of their blood glucose tests, insulin levels, and diet. Mechanical engineer Chris Hannemann, M.S. ’08, who has type 1 diabetes, came up with the idea when, switching insulin therapies, he struggled to compile accurate information for his doctor and ended up with a lot […]
Hydrogen. What’s Not to Like?
Q & A with chemistry professor Kristie Boering The prospects for alternative energy are rising along with the price of gas, and any discussion of future fuel sources is bound to include hydrogen. Hydrogen-powered cars wouldn’t produce noxious emissions or carbon dioxide—just water. Sounds great, but stratospheric chemist Kristie Boering worries that a “hydrogen economy” might […]
Big Brother at The Bird Feeder
Ornithologists enlist Web surfers to track species via remote camera Bird enthusiasts worldwide have helped scientists confirm the range expansion of the green jay as well as other sub-tropical species such as the white-tipped dove. The project, co-directed by Berkeley Professor and Director of Center for New Media Ken Goldberg, features a remote-viewing Web application with […]
Drilling Down
On May 29, 2006, residents in the Porong subdistrict of Sidoarjo, East Java, awoke to a strange rumbling and emerged from their homes to find a geyser of mud shooting 26 feet in the air. In the days that followed, more cavities opened in the ground, and the bowels of the earth came spilling out. […]
Cal’s Queen of Green
As Berkeley’s director of sustainability, Lisa McNeilly will first need to figure out what, exactly, she’s supposed to do. Tasked by Vice Chancellor Nathan Brostrom with “fostering a culture of sustainability and adding accountability to our climate commitment,” McNeilly recognizes that such language explains little of how to get where we’re going. Since assuming the […]
A Loaf of Bread, A Jug of Wine and A Geothermal Heat Sink
Turning Sonoma County into a laboratory to test new strategies for cooling the globe. Plus: Sonoma: Beyond cap-and-trade It looks like any other business park construction site: mounds of dirt pushed around by graders belching diesel smoke, concrete structures in various stages of completion, surveyors adjusting the tripods of their transits while simultaneously poring over blueprints. […]
Cradle and All
Anthropologist Shannon May set out to study village life in rural China. She wound up getting an education in the pitfalls of green development When Shannon May was putting together her doctoral research project, she had a specific field setting in mind. May, an anthropology student at Berkeley, wanted to learn about life for the majority […]
GO: A Sauna on Spitsbergen
The captain of the MS Langøysund is a silent, balding man. Slowly, he steers towards the Nordenskjöld glacier, which stretches blue and still before us. Occasionally he stops the vessel, lets it drift for a while, then glides toward the glacier again at a snail’s pace. Northern fulmars bob along on islands of ice; puffins, […]
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