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While the boons of electricity are obvious to anyone who has watched a 49ers game on a 70-inch ultra HDTV or whipped up a frozen margarita in a blender, it also has its downsides—most of them environmental. Coal and natural gas power plants belch planet-warming CO2 into the atmosphere, while nuclear plants produce highly lethal […]
With its looming turrets and Gothic arches, Bowles Hall looks like something out of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or maybe Grimm’s Fairy Tales. These days, that seems appropriate: A fairytale ending is in the works for the long-neglected 86-year-old landmark on the slopes of UC Berkeley’s Strawberry Canyon. A tenacious and […]
Ronald Reagan was (in)famously unmoved by ancient forests, claiming that “when you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” But most of us still feel a frisson when we stroll among old-growth trees, particularly when they’re the biggest dang trees on the planet: Sequoiadendron giganteum, otherwise known as giant sequoias. (That’s biggest by volume, by […]
Do the majestic vistas of Yosemite National Park make you swoon? Are you besotted with the equally splendid landscapes of Yellowstone, Zion, the Smokey Mountains, the North Cascades and Rocky Mountain National Parks? Thank UC Berkeley. “Cal alumni had a major influence on both launching and maintaining the National Park system,” says Steven Beissinger, professor […]
On University Avenue in downtown Berkeley, they’ve erected a shiny new marquee—black, blue and gold, with white lettering that almost seems too clean for the boarded-up building and the street beneath it. Dodge the construction workers and step inside, through a modest lobby and hallway coated in old grime and fresh sawdust, until a door […]
Wave energy. A portable spirometer for kids with asthma. Tools to lower the carbon footprint. A robot-building kit. These are just a few examples of what UC Berkeley startups are developing at the Foundry, Cal’s technology incubator. But Liz Klinger and James Wang are working on something else entirely: a smart vibrator. “It makes women […]
In the ultimate game-changer for some biogenetic dreamers, death disappears and we live forever. Count on the artists to barge in and complicate everything. Portugese writer José Saramago’s cunning and incisive 2005 novel Death with Interruptions opens as the citizens of an unnamed country suddenly stop dying. What first seems a kind of divine deliverance […]
Buried in the garages of suburbia are boxes of stuffed animals, worn-out sneakers, and abstract crayon drawings—the detritus of ordinary childhoods. The items in a new exhibit at Oakland’s Warehouse 416, “Lost Childhoods,” are a little different: a makeshift menstrual pad constructed from wads of toilet paper stapled together. Underpants from juvenile hall. A tattered […]
Perhaps you remember the day when printers, requiring only lowly paper and toner, simply produced documents. Now we’re well on our way into the Jetsonian age: today 3D printers, supplied with a sophisticated cement, can produce a house. That, in fact, is precisely what’s happening at UC Berkeley today as a team headed by associate […]
When did going to college get so stressful? Nationwide, more students than ever say they feel anxious and depressed—at some point last year, almost a third were so depressed that they said they found it hard to function, according to the American College Health Association. The problem is particularly acute at top tier schools: About […]
We may aspire to La Traviata, but at a certain point, our inner groundling is going to opt for the sludge monster. Space opera, in other words, will always win out over—well, opera—in the hearts of the masses. The American masses, anyway. So a performance Friday at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall may be ample cause […]
Initially the story seemed like something straight out of A Clockwork Orange: Sasha Fleischman, who as an agender youth doesn’t identify as either male or female, was dozing on a municipal Oakland bus. Nearby, three adolescent boys had been laughing mockingly, and then one touched a lighter to Sasha’s skirt. The garment exploded in flame, […]
Jeffrey Milstein grew up imagining what it would be like to fly—as a child he would take photographs of airplanes soaring overhead and fantasize about what it would be like to always be thousands of feet in the air, peering down on life below. Now, at age 70, the UC Berkeley-trained architect-turned-photographer is making quite […]
For everyone who cares about saving the University of California’s cash-strapped Lick Observatory, news that Google is donating $1 million is a boon in more ways than one. Not only will the contribution—a full third of Lick’s current barebones operating budget—support the observatory’s day-to-day activities, but it’s already inspiring other donors to chip in. “The […]
Contrary to popular belief, “Big Ben” isn’t the iconic clock on the tower atop Britain’s Houses of Parliament; it’s the mammoth, 13.8-ton bell behind the clock, tolling the hours in a low E-natural. Big Ben’s counterpart at UC Berkeley is the “Great Bear Bell” in the Jane K. Sather Tower—aka the Campanile—which is home to […]
Part of the challenge and much of the fun of performing contemporary music is navigating relationships with living composers—as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players have discovered as they are halfway through their grandly ambitious Project TenFourteen. Project TenFourteen, an unprecedented season-long collaboration between SFCMP and Cal Performances featuring 10 newly commissioned works premiering over the […]
It’s hardly news that money has a corrosive effect on the political process. Well, maybe it’s news of the dog-bites-man variety: Your jaw isn’t likely to drop to your clavicle in shock, total shock, when you hear that Senator So-and-So voted to deregulate the highly-polluting widget industry shortly after receiving a hefty campaign contribution from […]
Managing an archive is like herding cats: You think everything is moving in the right direction, and suddenly you’re out wandering around the suburbs, looking for a lost tabby—or in the case of the archivist, the dusty stacks in search of some elusive source material. In short, both endeavors take time, dedication, and a tolerance […]
It’s no secret that women have been underrepresented in the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics—but music composition, philosophy and even classical studies? Although the later subjects appear to be as a disparate from the STEM disciplines as Mozart and Thales, they have one thing in common, says a new study released by […]
