2008 November December Stars of Berkeley
The Cosmos Beat
Veteran science reporter David Perlman, the man who brought the Universe to the morning paper. I sit down with the San Francisco Chronicle‘s David Perlman at a divey café in an alley just around the corner from the newsroom downtown. He says the food is terrible (he’s right), though he eats there most afternoons. He orders […]
Count Down
Electronic voting systems have been regarded with suspicion by the public in the wake of accusations that the machines have lost or miscounted votes. The manufacturers involved have improved their equipment in an attempt to regain voters’ trust, but even now Berkeley cryptologist David Wagner finds that not enough has changed: The systems are still […]
Please Don’t Say ‘Don’t’
If you’ve ever participated in a brainstorming session, you were probably told that you shouldn’t criticize other people’s ideas. The longstanding belief is that civility creates an atmosphere that encourages the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that brainstorming is supposed to produce. However, a new study by Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth and graduate student Matthew […]
Lucky Star
Thanks to serendipity, Maryam Modjaz got a ringside seat at one of the universe’s biggest events. The first indication that something big was happening arrived in Maryam Modjaz’s inbox on January 10. The “circular” came from Princeton scientists who noticed a burst of X-rays while reviewing data from a NASA satellite. The event was labeled XRT […]
From Particles to Dust
Berkeley’s Bevatron, the world’s first supercollider, is headed for the scrap heap. Only a shell of cement and corrugated metal remains of what was once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Stripped of the magnetic coils and generators that sent protons whizzing around at 4 million turns in less than two seconds, the Bevatron awaits its […]
Hearing Aids
The ear has a range that no other sense can match, whether biological or electrically engineered. The ear can hear sounds as soft as a whisper and as loud as an explosion, a sensory range spanning six orders of magnitude. While this ability continues to baffle scientists, Manfred Auer of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory […]
Hear Today Gone Tomorrow
It’s that all-important third date, the one where she’s ready to tell you everything, even that embarrassing story about her ex. Just as she begins to talk, the group of advertising executives at the table to your right gets animated, while the waiter on your left begins a lengthy recitation of the daily specials. You […]
Yes He Can!
Merce Cunningham has a long history of creating works for places that don’t fit most people’s definition of a “stage.” This predilection goes back to the “happenings” he, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and others created in the 1950s. Indeed, on the Merce Cunningham Dance Company website, scheduled upcoming performances are still called “events.” This summer, […]
A Winning Relationship
Jake Heggie and Frederica von Stade discuss their musical and personal collaboration. Outside of Zellerbach Hall, the oak trees lining Strawberry Creek sway in a gentle late-summer breeze. But the dazzling weather outside can’t compete with the glow suffusing Zellerbach’s rehearsal room, where Frederica von Stade and Jake Heggie take turns describing how their lives and […]
Brussels or Bust
This is a story of Sputnik, Tivoli Gardens, Richard Nixon, and the famous 1950s TV game show, Truth or Consequences. It begins in January 1958, when the State Department invited the Cal Band to perform at the World’s Fair in Brussels, but offered no funding for the estimated $100,000 trip. A Night and Day (literally) […]
Getting at the ‘Why?’
David Simon laments the fate of newspaper journalism. David Simon, creator, producer, and writer of the critically acclaimed television drama, The Wire, was on campus in September as writer-in-residence at the graduate school of journalism. A former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Simon took a buyout offer from the paper in 1995. By that time, he […]
Blame it on Milton Nascimento
Milton Nascimento first heard João Gilberto’s 1958 recording of “Chega De Saudade” (known in English as the jazz standard “No More Blues”) as a stargazing teenager in Três Pontas, Brazil. The classic tune introduced his generation to an uncharted galaxy of musical possibilities. “It was very new,” Nascimento writes in an email. “And it opened […]
The Stars Her Destination
A business major’s epiphany leads her to become a NASA scientist. Natalie Batalha’s worst enemy is the clock. Installed around the corner from her office at NASA Ames Research Center, a looming LED display is counting the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the launch of the Kepler Mission: NASA’s first attempt to find habitable Earth-like […]
Life on Mars?
A Berkeley chemist’s long-ago prediction turns out to be accurate, but for the wrong reasons. In June, U.S. space scientists announced “with great pride and a lot of joy,” that they had spotted frozen water—ice—in robotic images from the surface of Mars. The discovery confirmed a scientific prediction by a Berkeley chemist nearly 40 years ago. […]
Deus Ex Machina
Walter Wagner says the Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world. Physicists say fat chance. But is even that a chance we want to take? The switch was officially thrown on September 10. Had everything gone as planned, proton beams would right now be traveling at nearly the speed of light around a 17-mile-long looped tunnel […]
Prospecting for Education
America’s academic towers were never all that ivory, but how much private funding should the nation’s top public university have to rely on? For most Americans, California evokes images of beaches and palm trees, the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge. People don’t hear “California” and automatically think, “The Higher-Education Capital of the World.” Yet […]
Back to Nature
The latest inventions are inspired by the world around us. Professor Robert Full is used to fielding bizarre calls: It might be the Department of Defense on the line inquiring about swimming robots, or Pixar animators wondering precisely how their cartoon critters should move. Recently a fashion design house phoned, interested in crafting haute couture fabric […]
Blown Apart
The discovery is Nobel-worthy—the universe is expanding faster and faster, driven by a mysterious force called dark energy. But who deserves the credit? “Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you’re fooling yourself,” Saul Perlmutter declares. The famed astrophysicist is sitting in the cafeteria at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, eating a falafel. Normally […]
Access and Excellence at Berkeley
Since July 1, 2006, I’ve had the best job in academia: executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley. The position, both endlessly challenging and exhilarating, is the culmination of a 37-year career as faculty and allows me to give back to the university in ways that stretch beyond research and teaching. […]
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