Solomon Hsiang's research provides a “ground–level” view of climate’s current and likely future role in such social stresses as child mortality, crime and social upheaval.

Ben Recht was recently honored by the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, recognizing some of the most promising young researchers.

Astronomers for the first time have peered into the heart of an exploding star in the final minutes of its existence. The feat is one of the primary goals of NASA’s NuSTAR mission.

A throng turned out for Thursday’s high-spirited launch of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. Designed to help researchers across the disciplines harness data in order to spur discoveries and create knowledge, the center for data-related teaching and collaboration will be housed in Doe Library.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope, now crippled and its four-year mission at an end, nevertheless provided enough data to answer its main research question: How many of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets?

Although California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill last week to create a statewide earthquake early warning system, the United States is still behind the curve in embracing technology that has proven to save lives, lessen damage and speed recovery after a major quake.

Android smartphone users will soon have a chance to participate in important scientific research every time they charge their phones.

Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist at the Berkeley Lab and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, is profiled in The Guardian's "Rational Hero" series.

Berkeley Lab scientists create atomic-scale structure of ribosome attached to a molecule that controls its motion

Like bugs? Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at natural history museums? Interested in helping scientists understand our changing environment? These are just some of the reasons why people should join a project led by UC Berkeley’s Essig Museum of Entomology.

Thomas Immel and his team at the Space Sciences Lab will design, build and operate two instruments and oversee development of two others to be loaded on a solar-powered satellite for a two-year science mission tentatively set to launch in 2017.

Any way you count it, the fastest-growing major at UC Berkeley by far is one that long slumbered in obscurity: statistics.

UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, is featured in The Atlantic for his recent work, Bloom - “an Internet-based earthwork”.

Population and car numbers continue to increase, which means more frustrating hours spent in gridlock, more money lost on wasted energy, and more air pollution.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported on the work of Richard M. Allen, Director of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, for helping to develop an early warning system that flashes imminent danger when a damaging earthquake is about to strike.

A tiny laser that could enable smaller and faster smart phones and tablets. A glucosamine-like supplement that targets the underlying cause of multiple sclerosis. These are among research projects getting a boost this year from a UC grants program.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and the City College of New York are using lasers to control the spin state of semiconductor materials, a development that could lead to the creation of even faster and smaller electronic devices. The researchers hope to see spintronics move beyond memory devices to the logic circuits that are the heart of modern computers.

Using ultrafast lasers, Berkeley Lab scientists have tackled the long-standing mystery of how Cooper pairs form in high-temperature superconductors. With pump and probe pulses spaced just trillionths of a second apart, the researchers used photoemission spectroscopy to map rapid changes in electronic states across the superconducting transition.

Chemist Berend Smit and colleagues are working with the power industry to find the best materials to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.

Advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. Ana Claudia Arias, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, hopes to take this innovation to the next level. Her goal: "wearable electronics."

Berkeley Lab researchers and their colleagues demonstrate unique new materials for innovative electronic and magnetic applications

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.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working on a project that would modernize the grid and essentially bring it into the Internet age by using automated control software to manage demand in real time.

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.

The Simons Foundation has awarded a landmark $60 million grant to UC Berkeley to establish a theory of computing institute that promises to catalyze new advances in broad disciplines that affect our everyday lives, from how we spend our money to how we fight disease.

Web-based startup Politify earned $20,000 for its first-place finish in the information technology category of the 2012 Big Ideas @ Berkeley innovation contest.

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.

The quest to capture the massive amounts of data being produced in our world has gotten a $10 million boost, via a National Science Foundation award to UC Berkeley.

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.

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

Neuroscientists have shown that the same brain processes used to learn new motor skills are also necessary to master abstract skills, or controlling a robotic arm using brain activity alone.

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.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu joined UC and Lawrence Berkeley Lab leaders to break ground on the lab’s new Computational Research and Theory facility.

UC Berkeley astronomer Chung-Pei Ma, graduate student Nicholas McConnell and colleagues have discovered the largest black holes to date ‑- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, UC Berkeley scientists are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

UC Berkeley engineers have shown that by using ferroelectric materials, they can pump up the charge accumulated at a capacitor for a given voltage, a phenomenon called negative capacitance. The achievement could reduce the power draw of today’s electronics, and break the bottleneck that has stalled improvements in computer clock speed.

Photos and observations posted to the website of the Global Amphibian BioBlitz now cover more than 700 species: 10 percent of the world’s frog, toad and salamander species that the social networking effort hopes to track. This success has now spawned a Reptile BioBlitz.

Skywatchers should get their binoculars and telescopes ready. Scientists at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab caught a supernova soon after its explosion. The supernova, located in the Big Dipper constellation, is appearing brighter than any other supernova of its type in the last 30 years. Earthlings might even be able to see it with good binoculars in 10 days’ time.

UC Berkeley is leading an effort to take information on the vertebrate collections in museums around the world and store it in the cloud for easy use by researchers and citizen scientists alike.

Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley, professor known for his novel work in the field of machine learning in robotics – including robots that can fold laundry – has been named to a prestigious list of 35 of the world’s top young innovators by Technology Review magazine.