2017 Fall Bugged Archives - Cal Alumni Association

For Love of Roaches: Confessions from an Entomophile

I live with my boyfriend, Chris, in a rent controlled, one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. It’s cozy, old, and definitely not big enough to fit both my extensive rock/bone/shell collection and his growing assemblage of street art—but overall, it feels clean. Or at least it did. Until about a year ago, when we found our […]

Parasites in Peril

Out of all the organisms on Earth, parasites might have the worst reputation of all. But a team of researchers in the lab of Wayne Getz, a professor of wildlife ecology in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, wants to improve the parasite’s standing in the world. Parasites are as vulnerable to climate […]

Dust in the Machine

Hear the letters BMI and the first thing you probably think of is “body mass index.” Keep your eyes peeled because “brain-machine interfaces” could soon hijack more than just the acronym. Jose Carmena was in a mid-Ph.D. crisis studying robotics at the University of Edinburgh when Miguel Nicolelis, John Chapin, and colleagues from Duke University […]

Debugging the Novel

When Vikram Chandra started writing his best-selling novel, Sacred Games (2006), he knew it was going to be a big book. And he was right: All told, the novel is 947 pages, includes over 100 characters, and spans a 60-year timeline. To make the writing process smoother, Chandra set out to find a software program […]

Five Questions for National Geographic Photographer Anand Varma

1 Some people would say you have the best job in the world, shooting photographs for National Geographic. How did you get from Cal to where you are now? Cal actually played a big role in getting me my job. I took a course called “Natural History of the Vertebrates” (IB 104) during my sophomore year. […]

The Bug Collection: A Brief Tour of the Essig Museum of Entomology

Pete Oboyski worries about bugs eating his bugs. Scratch that. The collections manager at the Essig Museum of Entomology, Oboyski worries about insects eating his insects—specifically, a family of beetles known as dermestids, which, should they make their way in, could reduce the museum’s 6-million-plus specimens to powdery ruin. As any self-respecting entomologist will tell […]

Knotty Circumstance: How That Shoelace Study Went Viral

The study that would become a media sensation started innocently enough. It was about ten years ago, when a 4-year-old naively asked her father, “Why do shoelaces come untied?” and said father, who happens to be Oliver M. O’Reilly, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, couldn’t come up with a good explanation, even […]

Bugged About Privacy

Our lives have been so augmented—or subsumed—by interconnected cybernetic devices that it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate what we’ve gained. And lost. We can now communicate cheaply and easily, and on a variety of media, with almost anyone anywhere in the world. We can find whatever fact we want, buy any item, monitor our homes, our […]

Five Questions for Joyce Carol Oates

1 There may be one thing that you and Donald Trump agree on: Both of you seem to love Twitter. Since October 5, 2012, you have tweeted nearly 58,000 times and have a staggering 180,000 followers. Why do you find Twitter such a compelling medium for self-expression? Oates: My publisher Ecco established an account for me, […]

In Flew Enza

Remembering the Plague Year in Berkeley.

Zen and the Art of Bug Repair

If you ever owned an old air-cooled Volkswagen, chances are you also owned a copy of the “Idiot’s Guide,” or at least knew about it. Its real title was How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot “with complete spelled wrong on the cover,” one joker put it, “so […]

Physics Monopole-y: A Key to a Unified Theory of Everything?

Eighty-six years ago, physicist Paul Dirac theorized the existence of magnetic monopoles; that is, magnet poles that exist independent of each other. Not north and south together. North. And south. Separately. Nearly a century later, Felix Flicker, a Berkeley theoretical physicist and post-doctoral researcher in the lab of Norman Yao, is working to help prove […]

An Entomological Etymology

Over the centuries, bug has become an astonishingly versatile little word, with roughly six common meanings and 170 slang uses. But why? Where did the word come from and how did it manage to so infest the English language? The question was buggin’ me, so I called up Geoffrey Nunberg, renowned linguist and professor at […]

Opening a New Chapter

On a late morning in July, 17 days after formally beginning work as Berkeley’s 11th chancellor, Carol Tecla Christ sat in her sunlit office in California Hall, reflecting on the meaning of her new job title. “It’s essentially a representational role,” she said. “As the chancellor, you’re the storyteller-in-chief.” One of academia’s most respected scholars […]

What I Hope to Achieve: A Letter from Chancellor Christ

In my first months as chancellor, I’ve been thinking a lot about journeys. I remember vividly the first one I made to California to take up my faculty position here. I was a young, freshly minted Ph.D.; I drove across the country with a friend, and it was the first time I had been west […]