2007 January February 25 Brilliant California Ideas
Mines to Vines
Through her nonprofit, Berkeley alum Heidi Kühn is helping rid Asia, Africa, and the Balkans of landmines and planting crops in their places. Kuhn won a CAA Excellence in Achievement Award in 2002. Ana Paula gingerly crosses a field in southern Angola near her home in the central province of Huambo. She is starving, and across […]
Beyond The Silver Bullet
A new Congress wants health care reform. But for lower-cost, higher-quality care, Americans first must shed the myth of the one-shot solution. Four years ago, a 55-year-old catholic priest named Father John Corapi set off an FBI investigation that brought down Redding Medical Center’s chief cardiologist and cost Tenet Healthcare, the hospital’s corporate parent, hundreds of […]
Not Your Daddy’s NPR
Balancing dinner party decorum with spontaneous wit In a recent show, Peter Sagal, host of National Public Radio’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, opened with a salute to the enemy. “At the risk of alienating my colleagues in public radio, I want to praise a commercial TV program,” he said. Which one? “Dancing with the […]
The Kids Are All Right
From purifying water in Ecuador to open-sourcing stem-cell research, the Big Ideas project is matching Cal students’ innovations with the money and connections to make them happen. If you want to get something done, it’s worth getting to know Tom Kalil. He advised President Bill Clinton on technology and economics. He has friends like eBay creator […]
Tick-tock
Turns out men have a biological clock, too As I creep into my 30s, my mother keeps pestering me about when I intend to reproduce. As she constantly reminds me: I’m not getting any younger. The tick of the “biological clock” is more often something women worry about. But new research suggests men who delay fatherhood […]
Stretching Stem Cells
Kyle Kurpinski walks into his lab in the drab barracks of the Berkeley bioengineering field station in Richmond and opens the door to a stainless steel box about the size of a small refrigerator. Inside is a rectangular device with gears on one side that looks like a flat, miniature version of a torture rack. […]
What’s in A Name?
For someone like SangGue Son, labels can be a matter of life and death: If the government and medical experts classify Son as a Korean American, they will have a better chance of saving his life than if they think of him as an Asian Pacific Islander. When Son started smoking, he had no […]
Passing Cyber-Notes
Thirty years ago, passing notes in class could get you suspended. Today, students pass digital notes to one another by way of their laptops, trading class notes and jokes in a virtual chat room online. But rather than distracting students, the digital chatter might actually help learning, according to a research project by two graduate […]
Just The Towhee of Us
Early on a crisp november morning biologist Lauryn Benedict strolls through the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. Suddenly she stops, turns her ear uphill, and points vaguely to a tall pine. “There’s one. Hear that? A sort of ‘tink, tink.’ There it is again. That’s a call,” she says. Benedict is on the hunt for a […]
The Eighth Promise
When political rivalries, murder, and racism ensnare a Chinatown family, a mother reaches back to ancient traditions, and a promise she once made, to save her sons. Their marriage arranged in advance, my mother left China to meet my father in San Francisco in 1950. Before departing her ancestral village, she made eight promises to her […]
Uncommon Sense
IMPACT: Imagine if myspace really was a space. Get ready, because it’s coming, and wireless sensing technology will bring it to everyone, everywhere. Scientists, soldiers, and citizens alike will use networks of robotic devices working together and all equipped with an array of embedded sensors that not only detect, but correct. In the forest and […]
Connecting Dots And Dollars
Venture capital took root in Northern California thanks to one thing: connections. That web of connections has turned out to be the most powerful renewable resource that California has ever had, spawning a business phenomenon in the late 1980s that relied on private investment and merchant banks, that at its height in 2002 produced 7,812 […]
Closer to Home
IMPACT: Main Street USA has been revived, only now it’s called the New Urbanism, and it is shaping new neighborhoods around the world as a friendly, walkable alternative to suburban sprawl. Visionary California architect Peter Calthorpe and a core of Berkeley professors decided in 1988 to push urban planning forward by looking backward. Their deceptively […]
Play It Again, Tomorrow
IMPACT: In the late ’90s, Silicon Valley-based TiVo pioneered digital video recorders—TV devices that allow viewers to record programs on an internal hard disk. Because viewers can “pause” live TV, “rewind” just-viewed footage, and entirely skip over annoying commercials, the technology terrified the advertising industry when it was first introduced, creating a “death-of-the-30-second-spot” hysteria that […]
Cellular Shape Shifters
Three decades after UC researchers created the biotechnology industry, stem cell science is generating "the second revolution in biotechnology," according to Randy Schekman, director of Berkeley’s Stem Cell Center. This one, heavier in politics, morality, and heady talk of cures for dozens of diseases, is arguably more monumental than the first. "We all have family […]
D’oh Dynasty
IMPACT: First appearing on Fox’s The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, the Emmy and Peabody award-winning animated sitcom that stars the hilariously unadmirable Simpsons family not only skewers American life with a marvelously malign glee, it also spawned a billion-dollar business, cemented itself into popular culture, and transformed its own genre. “People talk a lot […]
Peeling The Onion
Like so many concepts, the idea of Internet search was born elsewhere but came of age here. Rightly so: Search’s holy grail of naming, sating, and sharing our every desire speaks to the core of life in California. Pursuing and cataloguing the world’s information have a rich past, from Aristotle’s categories to Denis Diderot’s Encylopédie, […]
High Five
IMPACT: In the 1990s, writer/director/actor Reiner took up early-years children’s health as an issue along with well-placed allies such as Koop, the former surgeon general, and Gore, wife of the then-vice president. Roos, a former state assemblyman, approached Reiner after hearing the actor speak at the National Governors Association in 1997, and they jointly introduced […]
The Power of Less
Early one November evening, 1973: Gasoline supplies have been cut by the month-old Arab Oil Embargo and people wait in long lines to buy gas. Inside Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, particle physicist Art Rosenfeld’s office is lit by 12 dazzling 60-watt fluorescent lights, which allows him to make a startling calculation. The light bulbs in […]
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