2016 Winter Reality Bites Archives - Cal Alumni Association

Greening the Planet: The Fertilizer Effect of CO2 Slows Warming

A new study led by UC Berkeley Lab researcher Trevor Keenan suggests that increased plant growth is slowing the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a finding that could help explain the mystery of why the uptick in CO2 concentrations has leveled off since 2002, even as emissions have increased. “We believed one of […]

People Are Strange When You’re Sleep Deprived

Got a lousy night’s sleep? Feeling kinda grouchy? Turns out waking up on the wrong side of the bed won’t just make you cranky. It will make others seem that way, too. A 2015 study from the UC Berkeley Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory found that a single sleepless night can fundamentally alter the way we […]

Alumni Gazette: Rocket Science, Woman Power, and Updating The League

Ever hear that old cliché “This ain’t rocket science?” I wouldn’t use it around Ashley Chandler Karp because what she does is rocket science. A propulsion engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, she’s helping design the next generation of rockets, which will bring samples from Mars back to Earth for more extensive testing […]

Five Questions for Dr. Sheyna Gifford

Health and Safety Officer, NASA Mars Simulation This interview has been edited for clarity. 1. How would you describe the route that led you to a simulated Mars mission? Circuitous. I didn’t enroll at UC Berkeley when I first came up from Los Angeles. I was interested in journalism, so I walked into the Daily […]

Matter of Degrees: How Hot It Gets Still Depends on Us

Author’s prologue The interviews for this story were all conducted prior to the 2016 presidential election, at a time when the likely outcome appeared quite different. One of the sources was so certain about what would transpire on Election Day that he referred several times to “President Clinton’s energy plan.” The “other option,” he noted, […]

Vietnam Stories: Writing the “Disremembered” Histories of War

When telling a story, and it doesn’t matter if that story is long or short, fiction or nonfiction, the marginalized writer must be defiant. So says writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. Defiant is not the first descriptor that comes to mind for this particular writer, a Vietnamese refugee and UC Berkeley alumnus, who in fall 2016 […]

Keepin’ It Real with President Napolitano: The State of the State’s University

Janet Napolitano and I met in her office in downtown Oakland on the afternoon of November 4, 2016, just four days before Hillary Rodham Clinton was thwarted in her attempt to make history by becoming the first woman president of the United States of America. Some people thought that Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona […]

Black Hole: The Injustice of Wrongful Incarceration Doesn’t End When the Prison Doors Open

Danny Brown was in prison for almost two decades for a rape and murder he didn’t commit, and he has evidence to prove it: a host of eyewitness accounts validating his alibi, a polygraph test he took, and passed, at the prosecution’s request, and DNA from the crime scene matching that of another man who […]

Mind Tricks: Bishop Berkeley and the Idea of Everything

In Berkeley’s conception, it isn’t just the sound of the falling tree that requires a perceiver in order to be realized; without a perceiver, the tree itself does not exist. Nothing does.

Editor’s Note

Reflections on a surreal season. Every weekday, the dog and I head up a very steep hill for a compulsory early morning walk, an essential daily ritual for wearing out a highly energetic adolescent canine and fending off decrepitude in his older human companion. At the top of the hill, we turn right and get […]

Pierced in St. Petersburg

One of the best things about our deceptively drab, Soviet-style building on the western edge of Vasilievsky Ostrov was that it was filled with artists. There were at least seven floors of actors, puppeteers, set designers, acrobats, dancers, and musicians, and we were all training at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts in Saint […]

Paint by Numbers: Algorithms for the Artistically Challenged

As a 10-year-old growing up in Shanghai, Jun-Yan Zhu often avoided homework with furtive doodling. He’d sketch comics or movie characters in pencil, then erase the evidence before his mother saw it. Much as he loved drawing, however, he wasn’t very good at it. He dreamed of a world where everyone, even those who lacked […]

Deep Down: Geologists Discover New Feature of the Cascadia Subduction Zone

To understand what’s happening on the surface of things, you must look deep within. That might be the guiding mantra of a trio of UC Berkeley geologists who are looking a hundred miles below the earth’s surface in order to better understand the tectonic forces that shape our planet. Using a 3D imaging technique called […]