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Today in newslets: dorm room physics debates, smiley faces and is the dismal science insufficiently dismal? What if antimatter is, like, anti-gravity? What if you dropped a ball of antimatter and it fell u/? It sounds like the kind of question usually investigated by sophomores with the aid of gravity bongs. Physics has generally presumed […]
Good news, humanity: The ant man is here! And he’s funded! No, not Ant-Man of comic-book fame. We’re talking about Neil Tsutsui, an expert in ant genetics and behavior and an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. As we reported back in the Spring 2010 issue, Tsutsui and his colleagues […]
Meet two possible visitors from another galaxy, Bert and Ernie. You might have missed their respective arrivals in August 2011 and January 2012, just as, right now you’re missing their friends and distant relations, even though billions of them are passing through every square centimeter of your body every second. That’s because Bert and Ernie […]
On Tuesday, our friends over at Cal Performances unveiled the schedule for their 2013-24 season. Since then, we’ve been pouring over the brochure, looking at pictures and trying to decide what we’re most excited about. There’s the hard-to-resist Brandenburg Concertos performed by Cleveland-based ensemble Apollo’s Fire, but then the Nederlands Dans Theater catches our eye. […]
The news came out of China this week that a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 has broken into the human population. It’s infected 82 people, of whom 17 have died — a mortality rate of 21 percent — and is suspected of human-to-human transmission. At that point you, like us, might be wondering […]
Today’s mini-news: ten faculty members become distinguished, space tea, and exciting pictures of agriculture. Welcome to the establishment: Ten Berkeley professors have been inducted as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a national honor society based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This brings the total number of Academy members in the Cal faculty to […]
Today’s mini-news: The latest advances in brain science and a few lectures of note. Your brain is not totally useless: Researchers using functional magnetic resonance images of the brain have discovered that when you are engaged in a task—say searching for a child in a crowd—you use multiple areas of your brain. If you’re looking […]
Today Frank Bruni, The New York Times’ former restaurant reviewer and now one its general-purpose pontificators, wrote a column calling on us all to eat invasive species. And so we should. There are many fine reasons to do so, as Bruni notes. Invasive species disrupt local ecology and they threaten the survival of native species. […]
In 2008, California ran a profile of Natali Batalha ’89, Kepler mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. So when NASA announced Thursday that it had discovered a slew of new worlds among the stars, including Kepler-62f, the most Earth-like planet yet, we called her up to fill us in on this latest development. [Image […]
Today at 12:30, a research scientist from Google, a man named Tom Dean, was on campus to talk about mapping the human brain. Why a guy from Google? Because that’s an awful lot of data. Bruno Olshausen of Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, said in an email, “I’ve known Tom for about the past five years […]
We all know that stress is bad for us. Stress kills, you’ll have a heart attack, you’ll have a breakdown. Here, squeeze a little foam ball, take a walk, practice mindfulness, pet a puppy, etc., etc. —just don’t stress out. It’s bad. Except it turns out that, maybe (so far, it’s true for lab rats), […]
The 2013 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. At least two of the winners—David Barboza and David Barstow of the New York Times—were in Berkeley over the weekend, participants in the Seventh Annual Logan Symposium, part of the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. A.k.a., the J-School. Barboza took the prize […]
When the filmmaker Werner Herzog ate his shoe onstage at the old UC Theater in Berkeley, circa 1978 or ’79, Les Blank was there to film it. (The day was April 11, so this is an anniversary of sorts.) The shoe–a chukka boot, to be precise: leather uppers, gum soles–was cooked at Chez Panisse for […]
Here’s a news flash to lighten your day: Berkeley University Librarian, Tom Leonard, has the winning caption in the New Yorker’s weekly Cartoon Caption Contest. Reached on the phone earlier today, Leonard said the fact that he and his wife have been babysitting their daughter’s cat probably helped inspire him. “I’ve had more cat time […]
In the not too distant future, hands could become obsolete. Well, at least for surfing the Web. You’ll just put on your Google Glass and log in by thinking your password. So says Professor John Chuang and his team at the Berkeley School of Information, who have been researching the feasibility of using brainwaves as […]
Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Louisa Lombard wrote a piece last month for Pacific Standard Magazine that got a lot of media attention—and it’s easy to see why. The title: “Missing Pieces: Africa’s genital-stealing crime wave hits the countryside.” Yes, genital stealing. Or “penis snatching,” as she also calls it. Now before you stop reading and go […]
We headlined our Q&A with Berkeley historian Paula Fass, “The Kids Are Alright.” Not surprisingly, we received an email from an alert reader informing us of the mispelling, …err, misspelling. To our correspondent’s credit, she got the allusion to The Who, she just wasn’t having it. “Alright is never all right,” she wrote. Which is, […]
Tonight at 7PM, at Evans Diamond, Cal baseball will take on USC in the Bears’ first-ever home game under the lights. California readers may recall that we wrote about the death of Cal baseball back in 2010, when it was announced that five varsity sports were being cut from the University’s athletics roster. A year […]
As Berkeley Law (Boalt) alum Theodore Olson stood before the United States Supreme Court yesterday challenging Proposition 8, the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, we were reminded that while California may have left gays and lesbians feeling jilted at the altar, the Bay Area’s commitment to marriage equality has not wavered. Berkeley was the first […]
