2014 Summer Apocalypse
Blind No More? Berkeley Neuroscientists’ Engineered Molecule Causes Mice to See Light
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a blind character wore a visor that helped him to see the world. With any luck, that won’t be science fiction for long. UC Berkeley Professor Richard Kramer and his colleagues, including graduate student Ivan Tochitsky, have engineered a molecule that, when injected into the eyes of blind mice, […]
Game of Allophones: Word Whiz Creates Languages for Shows Like Game of Thrones
David Peterson has never been interested in fantasy films or literature. The 33-year-old dismisses the genre as “fantastical people who do fantastical things.” So it may be surprising to learn that for the past five years, the 2003 Berkeley graduate has been creating languages for the fantastical worlds of TV shows like HBO’s Game of […]
Doomsday 1: An Asteroid Wiped Out the Dinosaurs—Will We Be Next?
Countdown to the Apocalypse: Direct Hit Editors’ Note: The Summer 2014 issue of California magazine is called “This is the End.” Every day this week: a different catastrophic scenario. It started with a flash. At a few minutes past 9:00, one crystalline morning last February, a burst of light brighter than 30 suns illuminated Chelyabinsk, […]
Apocalypse Later: The End is Always Near—and Here’s Hoping It Stays There
When considering The End—the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the Big Crunch, Kingdom Come, Ragnarök, the Big Freeze, the Big Rip, the Final Period, Alpha and Omega, rivers of blood, premium cable, whatever you want to call it—it’s worth bearing in mind the last time we had a real contender. The Black Death. Now there’s an apocalypse you […]
Radicals Revisited: Eyewitnesses to Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement Mark 50th Anniversary
Alumni Gazette How time flies! This fall will be the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, and FSM veterans will return to campus for a reunion that will feature the usual events, plus some others you might not have anticipated. For instance, are you ready for FSM: The Musical? Produced by Stagebridge in association […]
Doomsday 4: A Massive Quake Could Be Only the Beginning of the Bay Area’s Woes
Shake and Bake Update: UC Berkeley seismologists just published data proving that the Hayward Fault is essentially a branch of the Calaveras Fault—meaning that both could rupture together, generating a more devastating earthquake than the predicted “Big One.” And we thought we were envisioning the worst with this article from our apocalyptic Summer 2014 issue. It’s late […]
Doomsday 3: California May Oscillate Between Drastic Droughts and Deluges
Climate Shock Editors’ Note: The Summer 2014 issue of California magazine is called “This is the End.” Every day this week: a different catastrophic scenario. California’s climate, long known for having a sunny, likeable disposition, is poised to become a major bad actor. As anthropogenic climate change threatens the Sierra Nevada snowpack and brings even […]
Doomsday 2: No One Knows When the Next Plague Will Come, Only That It Will
The first confirmed victim was a Vietnamese butcher in Láo Cai. He collapsed suddenly while chopping up pork ribs in his outdoor stall, and died within hours. Family members said he had been feeling ill for several days,had been coughing constantly for two, but insisted on working. It was a point of pride with him, […]
Hitting the Big Leagues: My Daughter Now Knows She Can Play with the Big Boys
It was the summer of 2008 when my 7-year-old daughter asked me to run for president. We were shooting hoops behind our sublet in the Berkeley flats, where we’d come to escape the swampland heat of Washington, D.C. If I were elected, Sofia explained, I could make a law allowing women to play Major League […]
‘Greener’ Plants: Researchers Aim to Curb an Energy Glutton—Food Processing
At a laboratory on the side of Interstate 80 in Albany, Fatima Alleyne sits at a computer, trying to solve a major food dilemma. Food processing is the third largest energy user in California, the top agricultural state in the nation. Plants that process food, beverages, and tobacco emit more than 1.6 million metric tons […]
Enter Gotanda: Ground-breaking Playwright Becomes a Ground-breaking Professor
The Professor enters talking, students in tow, his short-brimmed straw hat at a tilt. Windows are thrown open and spring air floods the classroom. The atmosphere is so unstuffy you’d hardly guess the teacher is one of the most influential American playwrights of his generation. In a three-decade body of work, Philip Kan Gotanda has […]
Back with a Vengeance: Berkeley’s Head Epidemiologist On the Return of Pertussis
Professor Arthur Reingold is Head of Epidemiology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health California: Is whooping cough coming back? We certainly are having a resurgence of pertussis in the United States, although it’s never gone away. It is a threat to very young infants, particularly those too young to be vaccinated or who have […]
Shine On, You Crazy Diamond: Physicist’s Laser Work Paves Way for Magnetic Sensors
It might sound slightly science fictional or possibly James Bond-ian, but this is what Dmitry Budker actually does: He shoots green lasers at colored diamonds. Budker is a UC Berkeley physics professor and his specialty is atomic magnetometry. He and his colleagues are bouncing lasers off of diamonds to measure the magnetic properties of materials […]
Yes, It’s Rocket Science: Berkeley Scientists Launch Exploration Into the Northern Lights
Beyond the scintillating lights of the auroras borealis and australis is a complicated atomic phenomenon that Berkeley scientists are exploring by launching a rocket into the northern lights. In order to better understand the sun’s interaction with the Earth’s magnetosphere, researchers at the Southwest Research Institute teamed up with John Bonnell, a Berkeley assistant research […]
Blister On The Sun: A Near-Miss Raises Questions about Effects of Large Solar Storm
Dr. Janet Luhmann sort of wishes Earth had been hit by a giant gust of solar wind in the summer of 2012. Sure, the cloud of magnetically charged protons and electrons would’ve gotten tangled up in our planet’s own magnetic field, probably disabling global positioning and other communications satellites and overloading many of our electrical […]
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