Subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, The Cal Connection.
“I email my students all the time—that isn’t unusual,” Alexander Coward tells us. “What is very unusual is for one of those emails to go viral.” The UC Berkeley’s math lecturer’s surprise is understandable. Among the torrent of listicles, kitty gifs, and youtube clips depicting moderate-to-severe injury that seize the imagination of the Internet daily, […]
It now appears that some primates other than Homo sapiens were truly sapient. That, at least, is the takeaway from a paper published in the journal PLos One, which determined that spear tips or arrowheads recovered at a mid-Pleistocene era obsidian quarry in Ethiopia were hewn by representatives of Homo heidelbergensis, a hominid that hunted and gathered in […]
The Cal Band is an indubitably upbeat bunch, its can-do spirit personified in longtime band director Robert Calonico. Which is why—despite being significantly underfunded and forced to foot many of their own expenses in support of the University—the band’s director and musicians prefer to stress how grateful they are for what they do receive. But […]
If they were winning, the news might not seem so bad. But they’re not. And it is. Cal football is currently 1-10 on the season and has the worst-ranked defense in the country. As of the latest available statistics, they also have the lowest graduation rates of any BCS school—that is, of any major college […]
Typhoon Haiyan was not an anomaly. Researchers confirm that we should expect more such tropical “super storms” as the planet warms inexorably from human activity. And the grim fact is that a good percentage of these massive cyclones will slam into the Philippines. “The Philippines is situated in a unique—and unfortunate—spot on the planet,” says […]
A group of UC researchers has created a small motion-detecting control device for consumer electronics that uses bat-like ultrasonic echolocation, which means… Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na… BATPHONE! Or possibly Batwatch, or BatGPS, or Batslideshow-controller, or Batscreen with gestural interface. Really, the possibilities are […]
If there is a food desert in Berkeley, it is not the blocks surrounding campus. Walk in any direction at lunchtime and you see a rush of students headed out for pizza, burgers, noodles, organic salads and caramel lattes. What you might not see are the students who can’t afford lunch. While it could be […]
Frederick Wiseman’s documentary opus “At Berkeley,” which makes its television debut on PBS Jan. 13, has racked up impressive reviews: Its cumulative critics’ rating on rottentomatoes.com is 86 percent positive, and it was a New York Times’ “Critics Pick.” Such a reception is noteworthy given the film’s observational style (the legendary director hates the label […]
Their faces concealed under paper-bag masks, three protesters chant “Down with Emergency! Free India Now!”—an anachronistic reference to a 19-month period in the 1970s when India was essentially a police state. But this Berkeley demonstration is not being staged by a band of confused time travelers. It is instead a recreation of a real event […]
Are We Born Racist? When that question became the provocative title of a 2012 book by psychology professor Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and his team at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the science seemed to answer that question in the affirmative. Children as young as five months show a preference for people the same race as […]
This week’s space-shattering announcement by Berkeley scientists that the Milky Way is chock full of “Earth-like” planets capable of sustaining water—and thus possibly life—provoked a virtual meteor shower of coverage coast-to-coast. Cal’s team, led by graduate student Erik Petigura, based its discovery on a three-year analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, and it seems clear […]
The definition of failure is lack of success, but for most people it means much more: Failure destroys hope, it crushes goals, it steals energy, and it strips us bare of our resources. But not everyone sees it that way. “I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. […]
Three UC Berkeley computer science researchers walk into a bar. A facial-recognition camera scans each of their faces individually, and they soon hear their favorite music blasting (or wafting) from the bar’s speakers. If this seems like a poor setup for a joke, that’s because it isn’t one. It’s one possible application for the Smart […]
New UC President Janet Napolitano’s announcement of a $5 million aid package for undocumented immigrant students appears to have done little—well, make that nothing—to assuage those most fiercely opposed to her appointment. If anything, it has sharpened the attacks. Characterizing the aid as an insincere response meant to deflect criticism, they continue to demand she […]
J.J. is the breadwinner of the house. Of all the weekly chores that are divvied up among members of the south Berkeley cooperative, his is the most enviable. While others get stuck scrubbing pots, pans, and bathroom walls to pay their dues, J.J. is to bike over to a nearby bakery under cover of darkness, […]
Imagine nuclear power, only without the prospect of meltdowns, dirty bombs, and millennia after millennia of nuclear waste. That’s the carbon-free energy of harnessed fission, but free from the specters of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. Oh, and the nuclear reactors are special too—they run on a material nearly as abundant as lead. For […]
Here’s a haunting observation: almost one in five Americans claims to have been in the presence of a ghost. And that number isn’t falling—to the contrary, it represents a steep increase over just a couple of decades ago. Exactly who are these people who claimed to have communed with the Caspers of the netherworld? They […]
Cal and its surge of foreign freshmen struggle to adjust to one another
Before Edith Head became Edith Head—the legendary costume designer who was the subject of a recent Google Doodle on what would have been her 116th Birthday—she was just another Berkeley graduate with a French degree. Head, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1919, went on to get a master’s from Stanford in romance languages, and […]
