New research suggests that competition over love and real estate drives two extreme behaviors in green-rumped parrotlets.

Berkeley researchers suggest saber-toothed cats held onto their baby teeth to stabilize their sabers.

Berkeley professor works to identify potential solutions that can eventually mitigate the effects of cumulative exposure to chemicals and psycho-social stressors.

Berkeley Professor sheds light on the historic red market trade of human skeletons from India and the ethics of using them for educational purposes.

Berkeley researcher points out that the way most government agencies calculate the heat index is inaccurate when dealing with the temperature and humidity extremes we're seeing today.

By the end of the century, drought may reshape California's mountain waterways and the ecosystems that depend on them.

A six-year project, called openVertebrate (oVert), offered researchers a glimpse of how the data might be used to ask new scientific questions and spur the development of innovative technology.

Seven engineers from the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory helicoptered into the Farallon Islands on an eight-day mission to upgrade one of the lab’s most critical seismic stations.

Using a novel series of metrics, researchers found that these communities were exposed to about 1.7 times as much wildfire smoke as would be expected based on their statewide populations.

Precision-targeted gene editing on specific subsets of cells while still in the body is a step toward a delivery method that would eliminate the need to obliterate patients' bone marrow and immune system before giving them edited blood cells.

Genetic analysis of bone fragments from German archaeological site proves that modern humans reached northern Europe not long after they emerged from Africa.

New research published by a team at the UC Berkeley used machine learning to more accurately predict which waterways are protected by the Clean Water Act.

UC Berkeley researchers find that increased interbreeding due to loss of tidal marsh habitat caused saltwater-adapted Savannah sparrows to lose their genetic distinctiveness.

Aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, UC Berkeley researchers compared five methodologies for evaluating the emission reductions of cookstoves in developing countries.

UC Berkeley researchers discovers evidence for huge underwater eruption 500,000 years ago, part of a still-active volcanic arc in the Aegean.

A new UC Berkeley study shows that kelp flourished off the Northwest Coast more than 32 million years ago, long before the appearance of modern groups of marine mammals, sea urchins, birds and bivalves that today call the forests home.

UC Berkeley comparative psychologist have found that great apes and chimpanzees can recognize groupmates they haven't seen in over two decades.

An experiment in the Sierra Nevada confirms that different forest management techniques are effective at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California.

Formaldehyde is used by the body to regulate epigenetic change, and it may suppress the body's attempts to prevent the expression or overexpression of certain genes.

Viruses of coral symbionts offers clues about deadly disease across coral reef communities.

New study analyzes the coexistence of humans and coyotes in San Francisco.

When it comes to the water side of 30x30, most programs focus primarily on conservation of oceans, but a new study by researchers argues that freshwater ecosystems must not be neglected.

Wildfires are an increasing threat to people's lives, property and livelihoods, especially in rural California communities. Cannabis, one of California's newer and more lucrative commercial crops, may be at a higher risk of loss from wildfire because it is mostly confined to being grown in rural areas, according to new research by scientists in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at UC Berkeley.

Researchers in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology (PMB) have uncovered the intricate molecular processes that precede reproduction in flowering plants. Published July 6 in Nature, the findings document a previously unknown molecular process that serves as a method of communication during fertilization. According to Professor Sheng Luan, chair of the PMB department and the paper’s senior author, the exact mechanism for signaling has previously eluded researchers.

At the University of California, Berkeley, a real and more down-to-earth mission to decode an unknown form of communication is underway. Linguist Gasper Begus and computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser are part of an international team of researchers attempting interspecies communication with sperm whales by deciphering their deafening, 200-plus decibel clicking sounds, or codas.

Human populations have waxed and waned over the millennia, with some cultures exploding and migrating to new areas or new continents, others dropping to such low numbers that their genetic diversity plummeted. In some small populations, inbreeding causes once rare genetic diseases to become common, despite their deleterious effects. A new analysis of more than 4,000 ancient and contemporary human genomes shows how common such “founder events” were in our history.

Salamanders that live their entire lives in the crowns of the world’s tallest trees, California’s coast redwoods, have evolved a behavior well-adapted to the dangers of falling from high places: the ability to parachute, glide and maneuver in mid-air.

Research conducted at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory (CSSL) is providing a much-needed tool for state water managers that could help them prepare for potential flooding during rain-on-snow events in the Sierra Nevada.

Of the hundred or so known species of hyena — living and extinct — that stalked the earth, all have been meat eaters or omnivores except one, the aardwolf, which, mysteriously, eats termites. What happened in the history of fearsome hyenas that led one group to give up raw meat and turn to insects? Two fossil skulls of a 12- to 15-million-year-old hyena that once lived in the Gansu province of China may shed light on that mystery.

Researchers at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the University of Washington, have developed a new way to measure properties of salty water that may help us better understand whether the icy moons in the far reaches of our solar system can support life.

Nature is vitally important to the U.S. economy but we tend to take it for granted, doing little to measure the nation’s wealth of natural resources or their economic impact. But at a high-level White House meeting Thursday, Berkeley scholar Solomon Hsiang said that advanced technology is creating powerful new tools for measuring nature’s resources and their economic value.

In a new paper appearing in the current issue of the journal Acta Palaeontologia Polonica, Padian floats a new hypothesis: The T. rex’s arms shrank in length to prevent accidental or intentional amputation when a pack of T. rexes descended on a carcass with their massive heads and bone-crushing teeth.

In a new study published today in the Journal of Biogeography, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, provide the first detailed description of the stunning array of fungi that make their home on the Polynesian island of Mo’orea. The collection includes more than 200 species of macrofungi — that is, fungi producing visible, fruiting bodies — many of which may be new to science.

For 25 years, UC Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley has been intrigued by humans’ love of alcohol. In 2014, he wrote a book proposing that our attraction to booze arose millions of years ago, when our ape and monkey ancestors discovered that the scent of alcohol led them to ripe, fermenting and nutritious fruit. A new study now supports this idea, which Dudley calls the “drunken monkey” hypothesis.

The discovery highlight the region’s “cryptic diversity” while simultaneously underscoring the importance of conservation in a global hotspot for biodiversity.

Many of today’s marine invertebrates, including sponges and jellyfish, have chromosomes with the same ancient structure they inherited from their primitive ancestors more than 600 million years ago, according to a new study.

While frog and salamander declines worldwide have made scientists outspoken about the need to preserve amphibian genetic diversity, two University of California, Berkeley, biologists emphasize another important reason for conserving these animals: their poisons.

A new study by biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Missouri State University in Springfield, however, documents songs in East African sunbirds that have remained nearly unchanged for more than 500,000 years, and perhaps for as long as 1 million years, making the songs nearly indistinguishable from those of relatives from which they’ve long been separated.

Look around any wetland today and you’re likely to see 3-foot-tall egrets or 4-foot-tall herons wading in the shallows in stealthy search of fish, insects or crustaceans. But 70 million years ago, along the Rio Grande River in Texas, a more impressive and scarier creature stalked the marshes: the 12-foot-tall pterosaur known as Quetzalcoatlus. With a 37- to 40-foot wingspan, it was the largest flying animal that ever lived on Earth.

What if Indigenous diets could save our politically and ecologically strained planet? UC Berkeley archaeologists reconstructed the diets of ancient Andeans living around Lake Titicaca, which straddles Bolivia and Peru 12,500 feet above sea level. They found that quinoa, potatoes and llama meat helped fuel the Tiwanaku civilization through 2,500 years of political and climate upheaval.

In a study appearing this week in the journal Current Biology, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC Riverside report monarch-like genetic mutations in the genomes of four organisms that are known to eat monarchs: the black-headed grosbeak, a migratory bird that snacks on the butterflies at their overwintering home in Mexico; the eastern deer mouse, a close relative of the Mexican black-eared deer mouse that feeds on butterflies that fall to the ground; a tiny wasp that parasitizes monarch eggs; and a nematode that parasitizes insect larvae that feed on milkweed.

Berkeley News spoke with Harrower, now a first-year master’s student in the Department of Art Practice, about the power of art and science to spur social change and why she started a dating site for Joshua trees.

In a study appearing this week in the journal Science, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, compare the genomes of nearly two-thirds of the known species of rockfish that inhabit coastal waters around the Pacific Ocean and uncover some of the genetic differences that underlie their widely varying lifespans.

Former UC Berkeley postdoctoral scholar Max Lambert is part of a team of wildlife experts who spent much of the pandemic checking in on the health of the Bay Area’s Western pond turtles, including a population living right next door in Tilden Regional Park.

A new study led by researchers at University of California, Berkeley, and Washington University explored the function of one component of this junk DNA, transposons, which are selfish DNA sequences able to invade their host genome. The study shows that at least one family of transposons — ancient viruses that have invaded our genome by the millions — plays a critical role in viability in the mouse, and perhaps in all mammals.

There’s a new garden at UC Berkeley, but for Adina Lewis and other Indigenous people in the campus community, it’s much more than flora and fauna. The Indigenous Community Learning Garden is a place where both they and native plants can connect and thrive.

A gecko’s tail is a wondrous and versatile thing.

Researchers at Blue Oak Ranch Reserve east of San Jose, and Sedgwick Reserve in the Santa Ynez Valley, are using science to evaluate how best to remove fire fuels from the land. What they find promises to make the foothills both safer for people and improve conditions for native wildlife.

When driving up to a busy intersection, you probably pay more attention to where you will be in the near future than where you are at that moment. After all, knowing when you will arrive at the intersection — and whether you need to stop or slow down to avoid a collision with a passing car, pedestrian or cyclist — is usually much more important than knowing your current location. This ability to focus on where we will be in the near future — rather than where we are in the present — may be a key characteristic of the mammalian brain’s built-in navigation system, suggests a new study appearing online Thursday, July 8, in the journal Science.

What happens when you dump an ocean fish into a freshwater lake? That experiment has been performed naturally tens of thousands of times over millions of years as sea-faring threespine sticklebacks — which, like salmon, travel up rivers to spawn — have gotten stranded in lakes and had to evolve as permanent denizens of fresh water. Michael Bell, currently a research associate in the University of California Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley, stumbled across one such natural experiment in 1990 in Alaska, and ever since has been studying the physical changes these fish undergo as they evolve and the genetic basis for these changes.