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Cover of the latest California Magazine issue.
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2024 Fall/Winter

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2006 May June What's Happened to the Animals of Yosemite

Image source: Illustration by Craig LaRotonda / Revelation Studios

What’s for Dinner?

In his recently released book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, journalism professor Michael Pollan, the best-selling author of The Botany of Desire, explores the food and marketing chain, link by link, leading to the modern American table. He finds that the ecology of our farms, stores, and kitchens has reper­cus­sions, not […]
Image source: Getty Images

California’s Cultural Tectonics

The magnitude of immigration since 1980 has radically changed the complexion of the state, creating new opportunities and dangers. And while traditional ways of describing race don’t fit, we as yet have little language for the changes. No one will ever know what particular event did it—maybe the birth of a Latino boy, or a Korean girl, […]
Image source: Photograph by Marcus Hanschen

Disturbing Yosemite

A century ago, biologist Joseph Grinnell began tracking the animals of Yosemite. Using his work and new surveys, his successors have uncovered massive and permanent changes in the park. The regiments of small mammals at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology roll out smoothly, on long wooden trays, from the steel cabinets of their museum cases. Deer mice, […]

True Colors

Do people who speak different languages see the world differently? Two Berkeley linguists found that they do, at least when it comes to seeing colors. The study by professors Paul Kay, Rich Ivry, grad student Aubrey Gilbert, and University of Chicago professor Terry Regier furthers a hotly debated linguistics theory called the Whorf hypothesis: that […]

Lights Off

Charlie Huizenga can’t walk into a building without noticing wasted energy. “Just look down the hall here in Wurster,” he says, pointing down an empty but fully lit hallway in exasperation. “There’s a whole string of lights on that don’t need to be on.” This bothers Huizenga, a researcher at the Center for the Built […]

eBuyer Beware

When Haas professor John Morgan used eBay to buy a Pittsburgh Steelers “terrible towel” (a bright yellow cloth waved by fans to show their enthusiasm) for his four-year-old son, he was happy to pay $9.95 for a set of two, and $3.95 for shipping charges. But Morgan noticed that on some eBay listings the shipping […]

Eye of the Fly

As I peer into a microscope, thousands of tiny lenses, each the size of a pinprick, stare back at me—a perfect replica of an insect’s multifaceted eye. Luke Lee hovers nearby, excitedly adjusting the thin spectacles on his nose. “Insect eyes have many tiny, tiny lenses. Each lens is looking at a different angle—back side, […]

Wonder Fish

They’re tiny, transparent, and often the last surviving fish left swimming in your aquarium. And they’re quickly taking over laboratories around the world as the most popular test animal. Goodbye lab rat, hello zebrafish. It wasn’t until the early ’70s that scientists placed the common zebrafish under the microscope and discovered their transparent skin allowed […]
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