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Self-Driving Technology Trucks Along Equipped with special antennae and cabin hardware, three self-driving big rigs recently completed a 12-mile test run along Interstate 110. The “truck platoon” was the result of collaboration between Volvo and researchers from UC Berkeley’s Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology. Though self-driving cars still have a ways to travel before they […]
Avowed Second Amendment enthusiast Donald Trump drew plenty of scorn and outrage recently when he signed a bill overturning an Obama era restriction on handgun sales to certain mentally disturbed citizens. But the action was significant more as a political statement than functional policy, says UC Berkeley Law Professor and Center for Studies in Criminal […]
After graduating from the UC Berkeley’s Journalism School in 2000, Sara Maamouri has dedicated her career to working on documentaries about social justice. Frustrated by the portrayals of Arabs in the American media, the Tunisian-American alum decided to start focusing on Arabic films five years ago. One of her latest projects, We Are Not Princesses, […]
The Sad Last Days of the Woolly Mammoth Hoping to shed light on the woolly mammoth’s decline, UC Berkeley bioinformatics researcher Montgomery Slatkin and a colleague compared the genomes of two of the hairy giants and found that they were mutational hot messes in their last days, with trouble finding where to pee and translucent satin coats that may have looked cool at parties but […]
Last week Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, author of the children’s novels A Series of Unfortunate Events, now a Netflix series that was largely written in Handler’s San Francisco dining room, lead an eclectic assortment of guests—singer/songwriter Thao Nguyen, record producer John Vanderslice, perfumer Yosh Han, poet Matthew Zapruder, and, in a powerful […]
While progressives are scandalized by Breitbart’s nativist tone, it’s deeply appealing to millions of disenfranchised and largely white citizens. Indeed, it helped energize them to the point that they actually got out and voted in numbers sufficient to elect Donald Trump, much to the horror of the droves of Democrats who couldn’t be bothered going […]
The latest trendy theory among progressives is that emotions, not facts, are most effective in convincing conservative Americans to change their minds for the good of the country. In a Slate piece called “It’s Time to Give Up on Facts,” journalist Jess Zimmerman says emotional appeal is the only real way to persuade members of […]
The deadline on Wednesday for activists protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to leave their encampment on the banks of the Missouri river follows months of contentiousness. Journalists covering the Standing Rock resistance—which at one point drew around 14,000 people—have faced myriad challenges. Many of them are independent and freelance journalists, and at […]
The title of UC Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring’s book, When Police Kill, released by Harvard University Press this week, is as stark as its mission is simple: to conduct a comprehensive study of police use of lethal force in the United States. It’s a worthy task, given how little was known about police violence when it became […]
How’s this for a modern take on the venerable office vending machine? You swipe your credit or debit card, open a fridge-like glass door, and choose from an array of fresh entrees and snacks. If you want a receipt, the machine will email it to you, and it keeps track of your preferences: next time […]
The news from Oroville Dam on Tuesday is nominally better. Water isn’t flowing over the top of wall at the auxiliary spillway, and erosion has stopped. Water releases are ahead of inflows, and the reservoir’s level is falling. Perhaps most encouraging for the close to 200,000 displaced locals downstream of the dam, the evacuation alert […]
Writer Ayelet Waldman was teaching a class on drug policy reform at UC Berkeley when she and her husband, the popular novelist Michael Chabon, decided that MDMA, the illegal party drug fueling those all-night raves, might also be a medicine that could save their marriage. They got the idea after Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, the psychedelic chemist […]
For Tom Dalzell, a small scratch on the elbow in 2011 prompted a whirlwind of events, one that would take him on a sinuous journey through nearly every street of Berkeley. The author and labor law activist found his life teetering in the balance after a minor wound became mortally septic. Days later, Dalzell exited […]
Hackenberg Booksellers sits a couple block from El Cerrito del Norte BART stop. It has that nice old-book smell from the works that line the shelves. Proprietor Michael Hackenberg, whose received a masters in library science from UC Berkeley in 1973, and his Ph.D. in 1984, excitedly shows some rare items stored in glass cases: […]
Is it a simple free speech issue or something far darker and conspiratorial? In either case, Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos is surfing the wave of his notoriety like Laird Hamilton carving down a fifty-foot face at Jaws in Maui. It all came to a head, of course, when the far-right pundit was scheduled to speak […]
The rapid fire train wreck-a-day strategy of the Trump administration has left some people breathless and others queasy. Flogging a travel ban designed to exclude Muslims, provoking China, insulting Australia, staring down Iran, comparing Russia to the United States, and locally, floating a question of pulling federal funding from Cal due to inadequate “free speech […]
A fantastical, visually inventive coming of age story, Zoey and the Wind-Up Boy is a 27-minute film that unfolds deep in the imagination of an isolated young woman. Directed and written by Marica Petrey, who also stars as the titular Zoey, the steampunk fairytale is part of an evolving creative realm that manifests on stage, screen and bandstand at […]
Those gathered at UC Berkeley on a recent Thursday night for a panel on fake news were primarily concerned with debating the scope and responsibility of Silicon Valley’s tech giants for disseminating false information leading up to the presidential election. No one on the panel could have predicted the unprecedented shift the conversation would take […]
On August 28, 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison from Paris about the French revolutionaries, relaying an important piece of strategic information: “Mirabeau is their chief.” Except, what he really wrote was “589.510.491.1341.1006.1354.581.738.” Jefferson was writing in code, and not just about the French Revolution. The letter also contained changes to the language of […]
