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2020 Summer

A (Virtual) Day in the Life of A Berkeley Student

Welcome to the social distance lifestyle Under shelter-in-place our lives have gone digital: distance learning, virtual conferences, online cocktail hours, and more. As Internet usage is up, bandwidth has been strained. According to BroadbandNow, which provides comparison data about Internet service providers, average download speeds in Berkeley dropped 15 percent between February and March. At […]

Image source: Detail of photo by Prapon Homvech

“Liquid Gold”: Meet the Alchemists of Berkeley

Campus lab scientists respond to the demand for COVID-19 essentials. Researchers Investigate How to Decontaminate Masks for Reuse Before the COVID-19 pandemic, N95 respirators, the closely fitted masks used by medical personnel to filter airborne pathogens, were meant for one-time use only. Now, however, the N95 masks are in short supply and healthcare workers, desperate […]

Image source: Illustration by Jacqui Langeland

Eddie Hart Almost Became the World’s Fastest Man

I found out very early on that I could run fast.

Image source: 2016 UC Regents

Chancellor’s Letter: How Berkeley Is Responding to COVID-19

Finding strength, creativity, and resilience and in the face of the unknown The last literary essay I wrote was about dystopian fiction. At the time, in 2016, I had been struck by the publication, within the space of a few months, of a large number of novels offering visions of the future in which some […]

Image source: Marcus Manschen

Editor’s Note: Adjust Your Eyes.

A word of advice to Berkeley’s graduating class of 2020 Let me begin with heartfelt congratulations to the 2020 graduates of Berkeley who, like their peers across the country, were deprived of their commencement ceremonies by the coronavirus and the need for social distancing. They deserved better. And yet, this ending to their undergraduate experience […]