A fleet of 100 floating robots took a trip down the Sacramento Riveron Wednesday in a field test organized by UC Berkeley engineers. The devices, equipped with GPS-enabled smartphones, demonstrated the next generation of water monitoring technology.

Berkeley Lab scientists create nanoparticle probes that may lead to a better understanding of diseases.

One of the oldest lakes in the world, Clear Lake has deep sediments that contain a record of the climate and local plants and animals going back perhaps 500,000 years. UC Berkeley scientists are drilling cores from the lake sediments to explore this history and fine-tune models for predicting the fate of today’s flora and fauna in the face of global warming and pressure from a burgeoning human populations.

The Lemelson-MIT Program has awarded Ashok Gadgil, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the 2012 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation. The award recognizes Gadgil, who is known for his work on affordable water disinfection systems and fuel-efficient cookstoves for developing nations, for “his steady pursuit to blend research, invention and humanitarianism for broad social impact.”

Establishing a new research institute at a top-tier university is a major undertaking that required a great deal of teamwork to pull off. In a recent interview, Richard Karp, founding director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, gave the inside story on how it all came together.

Four University of California, Berkeley, faculty members – physicists John Clarke and Bernard Sadoulet, chemist John Hartwig and ecologist Mary Power – have been elected members or foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences, bringing UC Berkeley’s total NAS membership to 141.

Roboticists in Ghana and at UC Berkeley this week launched AFRON, the African Robotics Network, an initiative to enhance robotics education, research and industry in Africa. Co-founder is professor Ken Goldberg, a fellow with IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from UC Berkeley suggests the devoutly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

Some 32 Berkeley undergraduates will spend up to 12 weeks working on sustainability projects in the Bay Area and across nine far-flung countries.

At the campus's 9th Sustainability Summit, progress in "greening" the Berkeley campus was everywhere evident — from the sheer number of student projects in the works to the metric tons of greenhouse gases not being emitted thanks to new institution-wide programs.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a technique for encapsulating liquids of nanocrystals between layers of graphene so that chemical reactions in the liquids can be imaged with an electron microscope.

When assessing the virulence of plant-borne diseases, knowing the pathogen's recent travel history may be just as important as identifying its particular strain, according to new research results by researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

Four Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have been elected to the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society founded in 1780 to recognize leading “thinkers and doers.”

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been selected to lead a new joint U.S.-India research center focusing on energy efficiency technologies for buildings.

City and regional-planning professor Teresa Caldeira is among 181 new Guggenheim Fellows, in the U.S. and Canada, announced April 12.

Text messaging often gets a bad rap for contributing to illiteracy and high-risk behavior such as reckless driving. But a Berkeley social-welfare professor has found an upside to texting, especially for people who feel stressed out, isolated and alone.

The blogging community is more racially diverse than one might think. Internet-connected African Americans are more likely to blog than their white and Hispanic counterparts, according to new research from UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley engineers, led by computer scientist Ras Bodik, will join the University of Pennsylvania and seven other research institutions in a project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive.

A new type of hybrid material developed at UC Berkeley could help oil and chemical companies save energy and money by eliminating an energy-intensive gas-separation process.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $25 million five-year initiative called the Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization that will be led by Arie Shoshani of Berkeley Lab Computational Research Division.

The new Bakar Fellows Program is designed to help early-career Berkeley faculty commercialize promising research discoveries.

A new assessment of wind energy in India by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that the potential for on-shore wind energy deployment is far higher than the official estimates.

At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, scientists have provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film.

Renewal spans four UC campuses, builds on success of 2009 agreement

Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) researchers have identified methyl ketones, chemical compounds known for their fragrance and flavor, as strong biofuel candidates. Methyl ketones produced from glucose by engineered E. coli yielded high cetane numbers.

UC Berkeley scientists are tapping the cognitive smarts of babies, toddlers and preschoolers to program computers to think more like humans.

The joint China-U.S. Daya Bay experiment to explore the multiple personalities of neutrinos announced its first results, paving the way for further experiments on whether neutrinos and antineurtinos have similar split identities

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have played leading roles in designing and operating ALPHA, the CERN experiment that was the first to capture and hold atoms of antihydrogen, a single antiproton orbited by a single positron.

Berkeley Lab Researchers Developing Promising Treatment for Safely Decontaminating Humans Exposed to Radioactive Actinides

Carnegie Mellon University will award its 2011 Dickson Prize in Science to Berkeley physics professor Marvin L. Cohen, a senior scientist at the Berkeley lab and one of the most influential condensed-matter physicists in the world.

Skydeck forms the hub of Berkeley's efforts to foster a new generation of young entrepreneurs and forge a hotbed of collaborative innovation and enterprise in the East Bay.

In strange patterns of a gold-silicon alloy, Berkeley Lab scientists uncover unsuspected secrets and promising routes to nanoscale semiconductor processing

The upper class has a higher propensity for cheating, driving illegally and endorsing unethical behavior in the workplace , believing that “greed is good,” according to a new UC Berkeley study.

Using the exceptionally bright and powerful x-ray beams of the Advanced Light Source, Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered a critical control element within chaperonin, the protein complex responsible for the correct folding of other proteins.

Next week's ARPA-E Summit will feature several Berkeley Lab-led projects, all aimed at dramatically improving how the U.S. produces and uses energy. Among them is an effort to produce transportation fuel from tobacco.

Archaeologists working in eastern Jordan have announced its discovery of 20,000-year-old hut structures, the earliest yet found in that country.

Berkeley Lab mathematicians James Sethian and Robert Saye have won the 2011 Cozzarelli Prize for the best scientific paper in the category of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Rhonda Righter, professor of industrial engineering, is tackling a new assignment: serving as a volunteer role model to 35 middle-school girls.

Scholar-activist Rebecca MacKinnon discusses how to protect civil liberties, privacy and even the character of democracy in a networked world where private interests control much of the digital real estate.

Alan Schoenfeld, a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, has received the 2011 Felix Klein Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction.

China scholar has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany

Engineering professor Scott Shenker joins the ranks of the National Academy of Engineering, bringing to 92 the total number of UC Berkeley faculty members given the prestigious honor.

To broaden and accelerate its efforts at poverty alleviation Berkeley Lab announces the launch of the LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies.

Berkeley physics professor to guide Kavli Institute research into cosmological questions such as how the universe began, how it will end, and what laws govern it

UC Berkeley hosted a two-day event, the 2012 California Diversity and Leadership Conference, in a push for multicultural equity and inclusion.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a relatively fast, easy and inexpensive technique for inducing nanorods to self-assemble into aligned and ordered macroscopic structures.

Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers

A new book by Nora Silver, adjunct professor of business, explores an increasingly important issue facing nonprofits: understanding, attracting and engaging ethnic volunteers.

UC Berkeley geologist Bill Dietrich and biologist Todd Dawson are two of many UC scientists placing remote sensors in natural reserves to map land, track animals and collect environmental data.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is aiming to solve how to store enough of hydrogen-powered fuel cells, in a safe and cost-effective manner, to power a vehicle for 300 miles by synthesizing novel materials with high hydrogen adsorption capacities.

A new UC Berkeley study cautions, however, that restored wetlands may not recover to the condition of a natural, undamaged wetland for hundreds of years, if ever.

People who have made mental engagement a lifelong habit have lower levels of a key protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study led by UC Berkeley neuroscientists. The findings could provide support for cognitive therapies to prevent the onset of a debilitating disease.

The University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) on the UC Berkeley campus received a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and a matching amount from California’s Department of Transportation.

Political scientist Paul Pierson of UC Berkeley and Jacob Hacker of Yale say the vast and growing gap between America's haves and have-nots didn't just happen, but was deliberately and politically "engineered." Coauthors of the recent book "Winner-Take-All Politics," the two appeared on the Jan. 13 episode of "Moyers & Company."

The University of California is saving $32 million a year on energy and remains the higher-education leader in adopting green-building standards. Those achievements and others are outlined in the "2011 UC Annual Report on Sustainable Practices."

Strict new emission standards for diesel trucks have reduced their emissions of unhealthy pollutants by half at the bustling Port of Oakland, says a team of researchers led by Rob Harley, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Paul Alivisatos, Berkeley Lab director and UC Berkeley professor, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012. Alivisatos is an internationally recognized authority on nanochemistry and a pioneer in the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots and multi-shaped artificial nanostructures.

Growing dedicated energy crops on lands that won’t support food crops is one of the promises of emerging cellulosic fuels.Bioenergy Connection looks at how much land is available, its energy-producing potential and which plants are the most promising alternatives.

Environmentalists and corporations don’t always see eye-to-eye on climate change. But the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative has shown that the two sides’ objectives can not only co-exist, but be mutually beneficial.

Undergraduate and graduate students teamed up with biologist Robert Full to study how lizards use their tails when leaping. What they found can help design robots that are more stable on uneven terrain and after unexpected falls, which is critical to successful search and rescue operations.

A team of neuroscientists led by Berkeley Professor Jack Gallant are beginning to figure out a way to reconstruct what we see, based on records of our brain activity. Jake Schoneker, a School of Journalism alum, reports on the PBS NewsHour.