UC scientists built and worked in towers — some as tall as 1,500 feet — as part of the largest single atmospheric research effort in the state. The data they’ve collected will guide policymakers dealing with air pollution.
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.
A team led by Berkeley Lab scientists hopes to become the first in the world to produce electricity from the Earth’s heat using CO2. They also want to permanently store some of the CO2 underground. The technology could lead to a new source of clean, domestic energy and a new way to fight climate change.
The Permian extinction 250 million years ago was the largest mass extinction on record, and among the losers were conifers that originally blanketed the supercontinent of Pangaea. Now researchers say that climate change led to the proliferation of tree-killing soil fungi that helped destroy the forests – something that could happen as a consequence of global warming today.
The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future has released a draft report that recommends significant changes to the U.S. strategy for managing the country’s growing stockpile of high-level nuclear waste. Per Peterson, UC Berkeley professor and chair of nuclear engineering, is one of 15 members of the commission, which was formed in 2010 after plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain were halted.
With rising temperatures around the globe, California’s native grasses will likely suffer at the hands of exotic invasive grasses, which are more equipped to deal with warmer weather.
In a remarkable outdoor laboratory in the Sierra, UC Merced and UC Berkeley researchers are using sensors to gather a mother lode of data to greatly improve ecological measurement and hydrologic forecasting.
Like a giant, life-size set of building blocks, the new User Test Bed Facility will allow researchers and manufacturers to test buildings systems and components under “real-world” conditions by swapping out systems and changing configurations and then allow rigorous monitoring of performance of every key building element that impacts energy consumption.
A new paper reviewing the impact of the loss of large predators and herbivores high in the food chain confirms that their decline has had cascading effects in marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems throughout the world. The study, co-authored by UC Berkeley researchers, highlights the impact “apex consumers” have on the dynamics of fire, disease, vegetation growth, and soil and water quality.
Scientists looking for unusual cellulose-digesting enzymes, called cellulases, have found one that works at a higher temperature, 109 degrees Celsius, than any others found to date. The cellulase comes from an Archaea found in a Nevada hot spring.
Berkeley Lab researchers created tetrapod molecules of semiconductor nanocrystals and watched them break a fundamental principle of photoluminescence known as “Kasha’s rule.” The discovery holds promise for multi-color light emission technologies, including LEDs.
Information theory dictates that a logical operation in a computer must consume a minimum amount of energy. Today’s computers consume a million times more energy per operation than this limit, but magnetic computers with no moving electrons could theoretically operate at the minimum energy, called the Landauer limit, according to UC Berkeley electrical engineers.
UC researchers are optimistic that improved driving techniques can cut fuel use by 10 to 20 percent. And the time may be right to sell the public on these methods, they say.
Officials from DOE’s National Nuclear Nonproliferation Agency joined UC Berkeley nuclear experts to kick off a multiuniversity effort to fill the need for nuclear science and security experts at the national laboratories.
Extensive climate change research being conducted at California universities and research centers is now openly available through a public website, Cal-Adapt.org, developed at UC Berkeley and sponsored by the California Energy Commission and the California Natural Resources Agency.
Cal EPA chief takes ESPM audience behind the scenes of the state's historic emissions bill.
