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A Yellen-Led Fed
Next to headlines on the ongoing government shutdown, the prospect of a default on the national debt, and the spike in the price of short-term federal IOUs which, according to one wonk “ should terrify you,” the news that Berkeley’s own Janet Yellen was tapped to chair the Federal Reserve might have been the least […]
“Fund Me:” Researchers who can’t get corporate funding forced to get creative
With government funding more scarce, corporations have stepped in to underwrite an increasing amount of research in academia—as we’ve reported, industry now accounts for about 10 percent of funding for research at UC Berkeley, double the percentage it was two decades ago. But what about the iconoclastic researchers—the ones whose work is either irrelevant to, […]
Lockup Lowdown: The Case Against our Huge—and Increasingly Private—System
Incarceration remains a growing trend in the Land of the Free. The United States, with only 5 percent of the global population, accounts for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And as a recent New Yorker article reveals, a trend toward the privatization of criminal justice has only […]
The Science of Holiday Happiness: Why Gratitude Really is Good for You
Yea, verily, there is much to inspire gratitude on this holiday centered on a gallinaceous bird with alarmingly hypertrophied breasts. At no time in the course of human history have so many had so much, and our overextended credit accounts prove it. Seriously, though: The great majority of us have enough to eat, roofs over […]
Before the Tide Rushes in the New Year: Our Top 20 News Stories of 2015
From the peculiar to the passionate, the alarming to the inspiring, 2015 never left us at a loss for words, or story ideas. It was a year in which questions of race and justice crackled like electric charges through the national atmosphere, in which experts expressed qualms about the potential hazards of creating artificial intelligence […]
Righto: UC’s Trigger Warnings and Microaggression Labels Outrage Conservatives
UC Berkeley has been a burr under the Right’s saddle ever since Mario Savio declaimed freely on free speech in Sproul Plaza back in 1964. Cal, in fact, remains the default example for conservatives fulminating about the deficiencies of American higher education. Most recently, they’ve railed against Cal policies on microaggression and trigger warnings. Those […]
Bones of Contention: Cal Paleo Expert Doubts Homo Naledi Is New Species
The popular science press went bonkers last month with news that fossilized bones of a previously unknown hominid had been discovered in a cave system in South Africa. Dubbed Homo naledi by lead researcher and University of the Witwatersrand paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, these proto-humans appeared to have lived somewhere between 1 to 3 million years […]
The Forlorn Off-Year Election: Who Really Benefits from Low Voter Turnout?
Off-cycle elections—such as the one we mostly didn’t vote in on Tuesday—are the steamed peas of the American political process. They are tolerated, but they draw minimal interest, attracting far fewer voters than quadrennial presidential elections and biennial congressional races. And the conventional wisdom is that this redounds to the benefit of Republicans, who tend […]
The Real Email Scandal: Clunky Federal IT Systems
The public, the press and many politicians (at least on the right) can’t stop fulminating over Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server to conduct government business when she was Secretary of State. Little attention has been paid, however, to the IT systems that are supposed to guide, support and monitor functionaries with security […]
Fresh Blood: What Theranos Leaves In Its Wake
The big question is why the scam wasn’t detected earlier. Theranos promised the moon—or at least a full battery of blood tests from a minim of blood—but it never came close to delivering. And yet, investors and the press alike gave wunderkind founder Elizabeth Holmes pass after pass, perhaps mesmerized by her inspiring backstory and […]
This Land is Their Land
By Hayden RoysterTo Phenocia Bauerle, the words “land-grant college” carry a particular weight. A member of the Apsáalooke tribe, she grew up in Montana, a state where, as she puts it, “it’s understood what a land-grant institution means: It means Native land was taken.”
Berkeley Loses the CRISPR War
By Meher BhatiaIn February, Berkeley was dealt a major legal blow over one of the most promising technologies to come out of the university. The tribunal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled that the rights for CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing in human and plant cells belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, not to Berkeley, potentially ending a years-long battle between the academic institutions.
