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2016 Summer Welcome to There

Whooshing into the Future: Aiming to Make Speed-of-Sound Commutes a Reality

Remember pneumatic tubes, those compressed-air pipelines that whisked plastic canisters from basement mailrooms to penthouse boardrooms? Imagine being in one, traveling at more than 700 mph. You could make the round-trip from San Francisco to LA in a little over an hour. That may sound like science fiction, but it could one day be a […]

Changing Minds about Changing Minds: How Results Once Faked Could Actually Be True

It may be time to change our minds about the impossibility of changing people’s minds. Again. Besides your puny life experiences and all of literature and history, there’s mountains of evidence from the social sciences to suggest that it’s nearly impossible to change someone’s mind. It almost doesn’t matter what the subject is—whether you’re trying […]

That’s So Metal: You Won’t Believe How These Bacteria Get Around

When we say “internal compass,” we’re usually referring to something metaphorical, a person’s innate sense of right and wrong. But for UC Berkeley microbiologists Arash Komeili and David Hershey, the term is literal: The two study magnetotactic bacteria, which navigate using tiny magnetic iron crystals called magnetosomes. Such bacteria are ubiquitous in lakes, where their […]

5 Questions For: Malcom Potts, UC Berkeley Professor of Public Health

1. You’ve been at the forefront of family planning debates for many years and are now working to bring to market an over-the-counter birth control pill for the first time in the United States. What are the public health benefits of readily available contraception? Having worked all over the world to make family planning and […]