At Eagle Elementary School, located in a suburban district in New York’s Capital Region, 12 fourth and fifth-graders are inventing. Two students are trying to work the bugs out of a miniature electronic sliding door. Another team is setting up the tiny equivalent of a washing machine drum. Still others are building a robotic fan.
Posted on February 23, 2018 - 1:12pm
The news cycle is spinning with such ferocity that it may be hard to remember that it was only a couple of weeks ago that infrastructure was Topic A, with the Trump administration announcing a new initiative to fix America’s potholed roads, repair its spavined bridges, and spiff up its energy delivery systems. But even while the general focus has shifted, Berkeley engineers and public policy analysts are thinking about possible remedies to our infrastructure woes.
Posted on February 22, 2018 - 1:13pm
Earlier this month, the New York Times published its first feature story with augmented reality, or AR, depicting 360 degree models of Olympians suspended in action: a figure skater frozen in the middle of his quadruple jump, a speed skater paused during the sharp angling of a turn.
Posted on February 20, 2018 - 12:55pm
The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive exhibition Way Bay is a love letter to the Bay Area. Showcasing works created by local artists, or else inspired by the bay and the artist’s journey through, it runs until June 3, 2018, with several community participation events along the way. Works will be switched out during the summer and the exhibition will continue until September 2.
Posted on February 14, 2018 - 12:37pm
California’s Lost Coast isn’t that hard to find—just drive south on a narrow, twisting road from the Humboldt County town of Ferndale. The landscape is extreme in its beauty, wending across ridge top meadows that plunge eastward to forested gorges and roll to the cobalt blue Pacific to the west. The route skirts miles of deserted beach where the only sound is the lapping of gentle surf and the cries of seabirds, and finally tracks through Petrolia, a tiny settlement on the Mattole River.
Posted on February 13, 2018 - 5:26pm
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in April 2006. Last week, John Perry Barlow—poet, Internet phlilosopher and activist, known for an eclectic resume and zest for life— died in his sleep after a period of ill health. California is reposting this story in light of that news .
We accept that what goes up must comes down. What we don’t always understand is why. Like countless financial shakeups throughout history, this week’s stock market plunge has sparked widespread debate as to its causes. While there are no hard-and-fast answers, there are educated insights.
Posted on February 9, 2018 - 4:30pm
The Citizen, a not-so-well-known publication from South Africa, tells us that 2018 might be the time for us to rethink monogamy. An accompanying photograph shows marchers in Toronto promoting consensual non-monogamy, or CNM.
A lifestyle on the fringe?
Posted on February 8, 2018 - 2:33pm
Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided 77 Northern California businesses, in what’s being called the largest localized ICE sweep since Trump was elected. So far, no one has been arrested.
Posted on February 7, 2018 - 4:53pm
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Cultivating some dynamite weed, that is. In 2015, UC Berkeley grad, former Daily Cal photographer, and superstar digital engineer Mike Lovas purchased a 70-acre farm near Brandon, Oregon, with his wife, Donna, and his stepson, Nick. Their goal: sustainable and, they hoped, profitable agriculture. The first part was relatively easy, they say.
Posted on February 5, 2018 - 2:09pm
Posted on February 2, 2018 - 11:54am
What to fix, and what to replace? That’s the big question for Orville Dam. It has been almost a year since water brimmed to the top of Oroville reservoir and the tallest dam in the United States suddenly showed signs of possible, even imminent failure. Emergency releases eroded both the primary and secondary spillways with horrifying rapidity, and evacuations were ordered for 200 thousand downstream residents.
Posted on January 31, 2018 - 4:13pm
Posted on January 27, 2018 - 1:12pm
Daniel Ziblatt has spent a career studying why democracies develop and how they die. Along with his co-author and fellow UC Berkeley alumnus, Steven Levitsky, he has done so from a perch at Harvard, and his focus has always been different places and times: Ziblatt is an expert on democracy in modern Europe, including the age of Hitler and Mussolini, and Levitsky specializes in Latin America.
Posted on January 25, 2018 - 2:10pm
On a tour of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s exhibit Jewish Folktales Retold: The Artist as Maggid, running through January 28, participants passed around a silicone squash representing Michael Arcega’s sculpture The Enchanted Island. The piece is inspired by a story about a shipwrecked rabbi going into a mansion and finding two objects on a table: a cornucopia and a ram’s horn to summon people to prayer. What does he choose? He’s hungry, so it’s the food.
Posted on January 24, 2018 - 2:54pm
