Subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, The Cal Connection.
Ah stress: It can be a blessing and a burden. Its bursts can spur us to make decisions under pressure, giving us an energizing jolt as the body responds with quickened breath and the mind moves at a rapid-fire pace.But it can also be overwhelming—whether it results from caring for an elderly parent, working for […]
Does this bacteria make me look fat? I ask because in the latest search for causes of the obesity epidemic, the one victim of sausage-like finger pointing is the community of microbes residing in the human gut. And according to the surprising recent work by UC Berkeley grad student Taichi Suzuki, it seems that where […]
More than 1,200 runners, walkers, strollers and joggers are expected to gather March 16th for the fifth annual Jog For Jill, a 5-K course around UC Berkeley’s campus in honor of Jill Costello—a political economy major who died from lung cancer just a few weeks after graduating from Cal in 2010. She has left an indelible […]
The First World War was an early preoccupation of Cal Performances’ director Matias Tarnopolsky, who lately rediscovered a book of poems he treasured as a child in England. At age 11, he had written his name inside. “I was profoundly impacted by the British war poets—Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon,” he said, speaking in […]
A move to pare a modest $1.8 million from UC’s operations budget has blown up into a public relations storm, with the fury directed at the Office of the President. That’s because the savings would result from halting funding for Mount Hamilton’s Lick Observatory, the world’s first permanent mountain summit observatory and a facility still […]
Throughout academia, key fields remain decidedly male and monochromatic—particularly math, engineering, and the physical and computer sciences. And despite the pride it takes in being progressive, UC Berkeley is no exception. That’s why this week the university announced it is forming an alliance with Caltech, UCLA, and Stanford to encourage more underrepresented minority Ph.D. candidates […]
The recent rains aside, the drought bedeviling California still is expected to be the worst in 500 years and will change the way Californians live and work—but not just the people. It’s going to be pretty hard cheese, as Evelyn Waugh might have said, on the critters as well. The state’s wild lands aren’t just […]
Ann Kwong could not see the ball hurtling toward her, but she knew who had thrown it—a member of UC Berkeley’s rugby team easily twice her size. Lying on the gym floor, she could hear its insistent rattle and sense the speed. She tensed for the impact as the ball hit her thighs with a […]
Sarah Palin recently posted one of Martin Luther King’s most famous quotes on her Facebook wall: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” And then she topped […]
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you—or that the New Yorker won’t make you the subject of an 8,000 word profile. This week the magazine offers the latest, and certainly the most high-profile, account of academic science’s most remarkable David and Goliath battle. And now Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes, the […]
Somebody hacked a refrigerator recently, and it could mark a tipping point for civilization. It’s no joke (although it is pretty funny). The target was a “smart” refrigerator: a software-enhanced appliance capable of linking to the internet and sending and receiving information. Why would your refrigerator need to be smart? Well, it has to do […]
For many years, Sochi was renowned among gay men as a summer cruising mecca—the Fire Island Pines of the former Soviet Union.
I stared out at a mass of vibrating middle school students awaiting their campus tour. Before unleashing them on me, someone thought it would be a great idea to let them get energy drinks and coffees. Before me, 7th grade girls chugged Rockstars and one boy complained that his mocha needed more sugar. I wanted […]
There’s no way into the animal mind, you say? No plumbing of a beast’s true feelings? Not so. Simply observe any footage of a bear rubbing its back against a tree, or even your own mutt vigorously scratching behind the ear with a hind paw. Observe the slack-jawed, stuporous expressions of relief and satisfaction. Yeah. […]
As flocks of wild turkeys and geese look on, about 50 members of the UC Berkeley Solar Vehicle Team—aka CalSol—are laboring from dawn to dusk every day at the Richmond Field Station, a 152-acre lot six miles northwest of campus. Their goal: the construction of “Zephyr,” a solar-powered car that can cruise along at 55 […]
There is raw, if cloaked, combat going on at UC Berkeley over the core of the campus: the University Library. The turmoil is over the biggest change in information systems since the invention of movable type some 500 years ago. On one side of the battle line are the steely advocates for embracing what they […]
Berkeley paleoclimatologist Lynn Ingram has been getting a lot of ink and bandwidth in recent days, and rightly so. Her analyses of the drought now bedeviling California conclude the current “rainy” season could be the driest of the past 500 years. Further, Ingram’s research (focused on sediments, archaeological sites, and tree rings) indicates we ain’t […]
Imagine a gentler Internet. Imagine a world wide web where comment sections aren’t the lowest common denominator rhetorical melees we know them to be but forums for reasoned debate and thoughtful discussion. Imagine your life online in which social media sites serve as a breeding grounds for empathy, introspection, and compassion, rather than for bullying, […]
When Vernard Lewis first joined UC Berkeley’s resident faculty of pest researchers in 1990, he says he was “lucky” to receive one bedbug complaint per year. By that same measure of good fortune (which, even coming from an entomologist, is a weird one), these days, Lewis is positively blessed. “Now I get them every week,” […]
