Subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, The Cal Connection.
Centered over the reflective pool outside the Hearst Memorial Mining Building on the UC Berkeley campus, Bruce Beasley’s newest sculpture seems to skim the surface of the water, without quite touching it. The piece, an apparently spontaneous jumble of intersecting metal rings, has a surprisingly ethereal quality for a 1,500-pound tangle of stainless steel. “Like […]
Lick Observatory, an astronomical research facility on Mt. Hamilton for the University of California, has been in operation since 1888. This summer, the Friends of Lick Observatory—an association that provides fundraising and professional support—is introducing a new public outreach program. The Saturday Stars Program, running five Saturday nights beginning July 20, will provide an exclusive […]
A recent New York Times article by Richard Perez-Pena on shaky computer security at U.S. universities sounded familiar to us at California: We ran a piece in 2012 on the proliferation of email scams and cyber crimes. Pena-Perez’s piece got us wondering if university servers are indeed especially vulnerable to hackers and cyber attacks. More […]
For a brief period, it seemed like the UC Berkeley of popular imagination—protesters reviling a university appointment, with the incident escalating and ultimately culminating in the arrest of four students. Yesterday’s brouhaha at a special meeting of the University of California Regents confirming U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano as the next President of […]
It isn’t often that a university’s internal governance appointment is newsworthy. Yet Wednesday’s confirmation of Sadia Saifuddin to the otherwise uncontroversial (and outside most circles, little known) position of student representative to the University of California Board of Regents has received national media attention befitting a state gubernatorial race—as evidenced by the fact that a student […]
It’s been a mere five years since CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LCH) near Geneva pulverized its first atom, but it already needs an upgrade. Specifically, it needs better magnets—extremely large and powerful superconducting magnets. The LHC’s old magnets were pretty good but the physicists at CERN wanted something better, and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, in conjunction with […]
If the UC system is like the auto industry, will Janet Napolitano be its Taiichi Ohno or its Rick Wagoner? That’s the question Professor Michael O’Hare left hanging off the end of his open letter to the new UC President-designate yesterday. At over 1,500 words, the Goldman School prof’s long and severe overview of the state […]
UC Berkeley, of course, is one of the top engineering schools in the nation, an institution that needn’t take a backseat to any peer—including a certain private university nestled in the San Francisco Peninsula. But there’s one area where Cal’s engineers and entrepreneurs have admittedly played catch-up to private, heavily endowed universities: ramping up for […]
After this morning’s announcement that Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano will become the next president of the University of California, we asked some Berkeley professors what they thought about an academic outsider and Washington insider being chosen for the position. One of them, John Ellwood, Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, did email […]
With former President Mohammed Morsi out and the Egyptian Army at least temporarily in, speculation is rife that it was all a set up, that the army whipped up the Egyptian Street by arranging bogus shortages of food and fuel so the top brass could seize the reins from Morsi’s power base, the Muslim Brotherhood. […]
In a surprising turn of events today, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has been announced as the next president of the University of California. Though Napolitano has no previous experience in academic management, the former governor of Arizona has spent seven years supervising the 240,000 employees that make up the Department of Homeland […]
By now you probably know that the opening of the new Bay Bridge span to Oakland has been delayed until at least December. But you can still get a close look at it—even closer than if it were open, really—thanks to Joe Blum. As Frank Browning reported in our Summer issue, Blum is a photographer whose […]
With news that an iceberg the size of Chicago has peeled off from Antarctica, attention has focused once again—however briefly—on global warming and the primary driver behind the phenomenon: atmospheric carbon. In other words, emissions—mostly carbon dioxide—from cars, factories, power plants, landfills and cows. For some time, scientists have researched the possibility of using woodlands […]
Homeless kids have many strange and unpleasant experiences—not least the status change when they hit puberty. “They become criminalized,” says Colette Auerswald, M.S. ’89, a pediatrician and associate professor of community health and human development at Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “When kids develop pubic hair, they’re no longer considered vulnerable and charming children. They […]
These are hardly halcyon days for the nuclear power industry. The core failures and radiation releases at Japan’s Fukishima Daiichi complex caused by the 2011 earthquake and tsunamis have yet to be addressed. Following the catastrophe, Japan closed all but two of its nuclear power plants. New protocols implemented this month by the country’s Nuclear […]
In recent years Bay Area citizens have been very sympathetic towards workers’ rights. In 2006, for example, San Francisco began to force businesses with more than 20 workers to provide health insurance for their employees. At the beginning of this year it was discovered that restaurant owners had been adding surcharges to pay for the […]
Steve Jobs may have enforced his will on the future, but his vision was founded on the work of people who preceded him. One of them, Douglas Engelbart ’52, Ph.D. ’55, died today at the age of 88. Among other landmark inventions, he created the computer mouse. Like Jobs, Engelbart was visited by epiphanies that […]
Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years (1953-1966) is now on exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It was during those years that Diebenkorn temporarily moved away from abstraction, becoming part of the so-called Bay Area Figurative School that included local painters Elmer Bischoff and David Park. As writer Bob Schildgen […]
Most of California lies within the California Floristic Province, which is another way of saying it’s a biodiversity hotspot: It supports more than 2,000 unique native plants and animals, more than any other state. Which isn’t to say all is going swimmingly. At least 75 percent of the state’s wild habitat has been lost, and […]
