Bay Area scientists have captured the real-time electrical activity of a beating heart, using a sheet of graphene to record an optical image — almost like a video camera — of the faint electric fields generated by the rhythmic firing of the heart’s muscle cells.

Berkeley News spoke with Lee Riley, professor and chair of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley, about state reopening plans, the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines against variants, and how to address the dramatic health inequities that have been exposed by the pandemic.

While the insurrection posed an existential threat to American democracy, Berkeley political and legal scholars say the arcane workings of the filibuster pose a threat, too, because it increasingly is being used to block majority rule. Most often, Republicans are using it to freeze movement on popular issues related to economic fairness or racial justice.

In a May 2021 paper published in the journal AI & Society, clinical empathy expert and Berkeley Public Health bioethics professor Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD, posits that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot replace human empathy in the healthcare setting and that empathy is key to the successful treatment of patients.

The U.S. Department of Labor reported yesterday that the Consumer Price Index rose 5% in May, following a 4.2% jump in April. But at UC Berkeley, high-level economists are offering some calming advice: A measure of inflation is inevitable as the U.S. economy comes back online, but it will likely be modest. And it will almost certainly blow over as the economy stabilizes.

After last-minute bids that twice extended today’s auction on Foundation, the University of California, Berkeley’s NFT based on the Nobel Prize-winning research behind cancer immunotherapy finally went for about $54,360 — 22 ETH (Ether) — and netted the campus about $50,000.

Lanthanides are rare-earth heavy metals with useful magnetic properties and a knack for emitting light. Researchers had long assumed that lanthanides’ toxicity risk was low and therefore safe to implement in a number of high-tech breakthroughs we now take for granted: from OLEDs (organic light-emitting displays) to medical MRIs and even hybrid vehicles. In recent years, however, some scientists have questioned lanthanides’ safety. Now, a team of researchers led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has compiled the most complete library yet of lanthanides and their potential toxicity – by exposing baker’s yeast, aka Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to lanthanide metals. Their findings were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For reasons unknown, Earth’s solid-iron inner core is growing faster on one side than the other, and it has been ever since it started to freeze out from molten iron more than half a billion years ago, according to a new study by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex had a jaw force of about 5600 newtons, somewhere between the jaw forces exerted by a hyena and a crocodile, and about 10 times the force of a teenage human.

Global land-use changes are creating “hot spots” favorable for bats that carry coronaviruses and where conditions are ripe for the diseases to jump from bats to humans, finds an analysis published this week by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the Politecnico di Milano (Polytechnic University of Milan) and Massey University of New Zealand.

People caring around the clock for a parent, spouse or other loved one with dementia are at a high risk for clinical anxiety, depression, social isolation and even suicidal ideation, according to longitudinal research from UC Berkeley. But thanks to a blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and behavioral science, relief may be on the horizon.

Nearly 40 years ago, scientists first predicted the existence of helium rain inside planets composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, such as Jupiter and Saturn. But achieving the experimental conditions necessary to validate this hypothesis hasn’t been possible – until now.

The lifestyle of the horned passalus beetle, commonly known as the bessbug or betsy beetle, might seem downright disgusting to the average human: Not only does this shiny black beetle eat its own poop, known as frass, but it uses its feces to line the walls of its living space and to help build protective chambers around its developing young. Gross as it may seem, a new study suggests that this beetle’s frass habits are actually part of a clever strategy for protecting the insect’s health — and could help inform human medicine, too.

In March, UC Berkeley linguist Zachary O’Hagan called Florida Atlantic University anthropologist Gerald Weiss to ask about audio recordings that Weiss had made in the 1960s and ‘70s of Ashaninka people, the largest Indigenous group living in Peru’s Amazon rainforest.

Interfaces and surfaces are of central importance to many open scientific questions. For example, in order to design more energy-efficient all solid-state batteries to fuel next-generation electric cars, we need to better understand the charge transfer processes through the battery’s individual layers. Also, devising solutions for climate change requires an enhanced knowledge of pollutant uptake at the air-liquid interface of clouds. Scientific questions like these, that address the nature of chemical interfaces and surfaces, are notoriously challenging to address because of the difficulty in studying systems with boundary specificity. An international effort led by UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Chemistry Michael Zuerch has demonstrated a novel experimental method to address questions like these utilizing nonlinear optics as discussed in a recent article published today in Science Advances(link is external).

Despite ongoing controversy over COVID-19 vaccines, a clear majority of California voters say it’s appropriate for some businesses to require customers and employees to be vaccinated, according to a new poll from the UC Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies (IGS).

UC Berkeley's Charles Dove, a PhD student in electrical engineering, is among the 12 recipients of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship award for 2021. 

A University of California, Berkeley, researcher has now shown that microscopic diamond tracers can provide information via MRI and optical fluorescence simultaneously, potentially allowing scientists to get high-quality images up to a centimeter below the surface of tissue, 10 times deeper than light alone.

Despite having been driven nearly to extinction, the California condor has a high degree of genetic diversity that bodes well for its long-term survival, according to a new analysis by University of California researchers.

Markita Landry, Asst. Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been named a 2021 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. This award recognizes faculty within the first five years of their academic careers, who have created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education.

In the face of daunting global challenges, such as climate change and a catastrophic pandemic, it is evident that the world urgently needs science-based solutions to tackle society’s greatest problems. At the University of California, Berkeley, the next generation of emerging scholars and entrepreneurs will work to confront those challenges in the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), a new campus initiative that aims to launch the world-changing startups of today, while cultivating the innovative leaders of tomorrow.

Forests’ ability to survive and adapt to the disruptions wrought by climate change may depend, in part, on the eddies and swirls of global wind currents, suggests a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The findings are the first to show that wind may not only influence the spread of an individual tree or species’ genes, but can also help shape genetic diversity and direct the flow of gene variants across entire forests and landscapes.

Schools and businesses are reopening, diners are returning to restaurants, and fans are returning to sports stadiums, but a new crisis in the COVID-19 pandemic may be just weeks away: the possible eviction of millions of Americans who have fallen behind in their rent. When massive job losses and other pandemic-driven economic pressures left many renters unable to pay and accumulating debt to their landlords, the federal government and some states set moratoria that blocked evictions. Now the U.S. ban is set to expire on June 30, and UC Berkeley housing experts are warning of a potential surge of evictions and homelessness, along with damaging economic shock waves.

Michael Jordan, UC Berkeley’s Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and of Statistics, is among 10 foreign members elected today to the Royal Society, a prestigious honor accorded to researchers who have made “exceptional contributions to science.”

In a paper published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, former UC Berkeley doctoral student Elizabeth Niespolo and geochronologist and BGC and associate director Warren Sharp reported using uranium-thorium dating of ostrich eggshells to establish that a midden outside Cape Town, South Africa, was deposited between 119,900 and 113,100 years ago.

The European house mouse has invaded nearly every corner of the Americas since it was introduced by colonizers a few hundred years ago, and now lives practically everywhere humans store their food. Yet in that relatively short time span — 400 to 600 mouse generations — populations on the East and West Coasts have changed their body size and nest building behavior in nearly identical ways to adapt to similar environmental conditions, according to a new study by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gabriel Zucman, associate professor of economics at the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science, associate professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, has been selected as one of 26 recipients of the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship Award.

One of the first major studies into the impact of COVID-19 on birth outcomes has found that pregnant people who are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus face significantly higher risk of severe maternal and newborn complications compared to those without the virus.

Across the nation, unions and their leaders have strongly defended officers against accusations of excessive violence, often directed against people of color. Cities are dangerous places, they say, and that justifies a warrior-like approach to policing. But in a series of interviews, Berkeley scholars said police unions have successfully used a range of tools, from the fine print in labor contracts to millions of dollars in political donations, to shield officers from accountability and promote hardline policing practices. While discipline is often secret and officers rarely lose their jobs, they say, cities have paid tens of millions of dollars in settlements with recent victims.

They feast on dead, rotting animals, urinate on their own feet to keep cool, and projectile vomit in self-defense. But UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Mackenzie Kirchner-Smith is passionate about vultures, and in California that means the turkey vulture and the largest land bird in North America — the California condor.

With moderate heat, enzyme-laced films of the plastic disintegrated in standard compost or plain tap water within days to weeks, Ting Xu and her colleagues

Six UC Berkeley faculty members and top scholars have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), a 241-year-old organization honoring the country’s most accomplished artists, scholars, scientists and leaders who help solve the world’s most urgent challenges.

University of California, Berkeley, scientists have now invented a way to make these compostable plastics break down more easily, with just heat and water, within a few weeks, solving a problem that has flummoxed the plastics industry and environmentalists.

What is the cost of one ton of a greenhouse gas? When a climate-warming gas such as carbon dioxide or methane is emitted into the atmosphere, its impacts may be felt years and even decades into the future – in the form of rising sea levels, changes in agricultural productivity, or more extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and heat waves. Those impacts are quantified in a metric called the “social cost of carbon,” considered a vital tool for making sound and efficient climate policies. Now a new study by a team including researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley reports that the social cost of methane – a greenhouse gas that is 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat – varies by as much as an order of magnitude between industrialized and developing regions of the world.

Wildfire smoke can trigger a host of respiratory and cardiovascular symptoms, ranging from a runny nose and cough to a potentially life-threatening heart attack or stroke. A new study suggests that the dangers posed by wildfire smoke may also extend to the largest organ in the human body and our first line of defense against outside threat: the skin.

The UC Berkeley School of Public Health is very pleased to announce that Stephen Shortell, PhD, MPH, MBA, UC Berkeley School of Public Health Dean Emeritus and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Management Emeritus, has been named to Modern Healthcare’s Hall of Fame for his visionary leadership, relentless dedication to timely and relevant research, and extraordinary contributions to the healthcare field.

The College of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Evan Miller, (Ph.D. ’09, Chem) Associate Professor of Chemistry and Molecular & Cell Biology and of Biochemistry, Biophysics & Structural Biology, has been awarded the 2021 Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. 

In the United States, the rate of heart failure is expected to increase by 46 percent between 2012 and 2030, with Black patients disproportionately affected, experiencing higher rates of hospital readmissions and higher mortality rates. A new study from researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health assessed quality improvement initiatives that could potentially reduce hospital readmissions for Black patients with heart failure.

SCET Faculty Director & Chief Scientist, Prof. Ikhlaq Sidhu has been awarded the University of California, Berkeley’s Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award for demonstrating his commitment to students and excellence in teaching, even under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

The Schepartz lab(link is external) at UC Berkeley recently reported a way to efficiently deliver therapeutic proteins into live cells and animals.

How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period? That’s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.

University of California, Berkeley, chemists have discovered a way to simplify the removal of toxic metals, like mercury and boron, during desalination to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created a tiny wireless implant that can provide real-time measurements of tissue oxygen levels deep underneath the skin. The device, which is smaller than the average ladybug and powered by ultrasound waves, could help doctors monitor the health of transplanted organs or tissue and provide an early warning of potential transplant failure.

UC Berkeley-Stanford Collaborative Project “From Nation to Homeland: Religion, State and Belonging in South Asia” Receives $370,000 Grant from Henry Luce Foundation

Four UC Berkeley faculty are among this year’s 184 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows. The prestigious awards recognize scholars with impressive achievements in fields ranging from the natural sciences to the creative arts.

Dan Werthimer, a co-founder of the popular screen saver SETI@home and a UC Berkeley astronomer who developed ever-more-sensitive radio receivers to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence on other planets, will share the 2021 Drake Award, named after the father of SETI, astronomer Frank Drake.

A study led by researchers at the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), UC Berkeley and Vilnius University demonstrated new disease-detection capabilities of a hand-held device based on CRISPR gene editing technology, a development that could lead to faster, portable genetic testing for diagnostics and research.

Young children from low-income New York City families — many of them Black and Latinx — face continued disadvantages resulting from lower-quality preschools despite an ambitious program by Mayor Bill de Blasio to close racial disparities in early learning, says a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

A recent paper produced by The Liver Forums’ Pediatric Working Group and published in the journal Gastroenterology combs through the research to look for the best treatment— a “silver bullet”—to treat pediatric nonalcoholic diseases drug development.

The long-anticipated fourth edition of Electrochemical Systems by John Newman and Nitash P. Balsara is now available.

The BBVA Foundation has awarded the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category to Paul Alivisatos and Michael Grätzel for their fundamental contributions to the development of new nanomaterials that are already being applied both in solar energy production and in next-generation electronics.

In a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Hastings describe some of these long-term and often overlooked effects of wildfires, which can range from housing shortages and unemployment to mental health conditions that don’t surface until months or years after the final flames are extinguished.

BERKELEY, CA: Vermont, Alaska, and Maine were the three most effective states in responding to the coronavirus pandemic last year, a new analysis by UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute has found.

A study by researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health finds a link between exposure to formaldehyde and an increased risk of developing brain diseases such as brain cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The Biochemical Society has awarded Professor Emeritus Jeremy Thorner their 2022 Centenary Award!

Mobilizing colleagues in the then-new Innovative Genome Institute (IGI) — a joint research collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Francisco — they sought to repair the single mutation that makes red blood cells warp and clog arteries, causing excruciating pain and often death.

Heavy caseloads, job stress and biases can strain relations between parole and probation officers and their clients, upping offenders’ likelihood of landing back behind bars. On a more hopeful note, a new UC Berkeley study suggests that nonjudgmental empathy training helps court-appointed supervision officers feel more emotionally connected to their clients and, arguably, better able to deter them from criminal backsliding.

Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and the School of Public Health, has joined the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC).

Extending California’s stringent diesel emissions standards to the rest of the U.S. could dramatically improve the nation’s air quality and health, particularly in lower income communities of color, finds a new analysis published today in the journal Science.

California’s restrictions on vehicle emissions have been so effective that in at least one urban area, Los Angeles, the most concerning source of dangerous aerosol pollution may well be trees and other green plants, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, chemists.

Notwithstanding last month’s cold snap in Texas and Louisiana, climate change is leading to warmer winter weather throughout the southern U.S., creating a golden opportunity for many tropical plants and animals to move north, according to a new study appearing this week in the journal Global Change Biology.

Extensive research led by UC Berkeley economists and alumni has found that significant increases in the minimum wage have little, if any, impact on employers’ hiring decisions. In fact, the researchers say, a higher minimum wage can produce benefits not just for workers, but for their employers, their communities and the entire economy.

Advance Peace team members from Stockton, Sacramento and Richmond came to UC Berkeley’s campus recently to meet with professor Jason Corburn, sixth from the right, and discuss their work. (Photo courtesy of Advance Peace)

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg looms large in Berkeley Law Professor Amanda L. Tyler’s life as a boss, a mentor, a role model — and, now, a co-author.

In recognition of “contributions that advance science and deepen public understanding of human behavior and social dynamics,” Rucker Johnson, the Chancellor’s Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, has been named a fellow in the 2021 class of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS).

A year ago, just after Bay Area governments imposed a shelter-in-place order to check the spread of a mysterious new coronavirus, Cristina Banks worried about how she would work from home. She would miss her office at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She would miss interacting with colleagues and students. She would miss her books and her papers. Banks directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, a global research center at Berkeley, and even in the ¬surpassing strangeness of the past year, she has continued to observe and analyze how the pandemic is changing our work — and changing us.

Determining how rapidly the universe is expanding is key to understanding our cosmic fate, but with more precise data has come a conundrum: Estimates based on measurements within our local universe don’t agree with extrapolations from the era shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. A new estimate of the local expansion rate — the Hubble constant, or H0 (H-naught) — reinforces that discrepancy.

If playing the video game Assassin’s Creed Origins is as close as you’re likely to get to a pharaoh’s tomb — especially in this time of pandemic-thwarted travel — look no further than UC Berkeley for an expedition into an Egyptian burial chamber that won’t expose you to a mummy’s curse.

New research released today by the UC Berkeley California Policy Lab finds that, contrary to some news media reports suggesting a mass exodus from California, most moves in 2020 happened within the state. Exits from California in 2020 largely mirrored historical patterns, while the biggest change was a decrease in people moving into the state.  

More than 100 years after their discovery, 19 mummified crocodiles are part of the Egyptian collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. These mummies, along with a collection of papyri held by the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library, give us clues about how everyday ancient Egyptians lived and how far they went to appease crocodiles, hoping their devotion would win them some good will toward humankind.

Challenging the idea that older people with shorter life expectancies should rank lower in coronavirus immunization efforts, new UC Berkeley research shows that giving vaccine priority to those most at risk of dying from COVID-19 will save the maximum number of lives, and their potential or future years of life.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips.

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and UC Berkeley today announced a long-term research partnership with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, and its parent company, Roche Holding AG, to speed the development of new therapeutics for debilitating brain diseases and disorders of the central nervous system (CNS), such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, ALS and autism. UCSF and UC Berkeley will receive up to $53 million from Genentech over the course of the 10-year collaboration.

The small, furry ancestors of all primates — a group that includes humans and other apes — were already taking to the trees a mere 100,000 years after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other terrestrial animals, according to a new analysis of fossil teeth in the collections of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP).

Californians not only pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country, but they pay two-to-three-times more for power than it costs to provide, according to a new report by researchers at the Energy Institute at Haas and the non-profit think tank Next 10.

Voters of color in California — especially Latinx and Native American people — face disproportionate risks during the coronavirus pandemic and are far more worried than white voters about job and income loss and access to medical care, according to a new poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS).

The U.S. child care system is collapsing under the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, with tens of thousands of low-paid workers losing their jobs and hundreds of centers forced to close or scale back operations, according to new report from the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE).

The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 light years of Earth — 1.3 million of them.

The Biden administration is revising the social cost of carbon (SCC), a decade-old cost-benefit metric used to inform climate policy by placing a monetary value on the impact of climate change. In a newly published analysis in the journal Nature, a team of researchers lists a series of measures the administration should consider in recalculating the SCC.

As California struggles to bring the deadly COVID-19 pandemic under control, the state’s Republican voters are far less likely to seek a vaccine and express less support for small businesses, health care workers and other at-risk workers, according to a new poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS).

Five UC Berkeley assistant professors have been awarded 2021 Sloan Research Fellowships, which are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early career researchers.

A five-year, $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Science Administration (NNSA) will keep UC Berkeley at the helm of a multi-institution consortium dedicated to advancing research in nuclear science and security and training the next generation of nuclear scientists and engineers.

The threat of landslides is again in the news as torrential winter storms in California threaten to undermine fire-scarred hillsides and bring deadly debris flows crashing into homes and inundating roads.

For more than a century, cosmologists have noted mysterious anomalies in the swirls of stars and galaxies in our universe: The motions of these celestial objects, which should be governed solely by the gravity of the other objects around them, instead seem to be dictated by the gravitational pull of matter that simply isn’t there — or, at least, cannot yet be observed.

UC Berkeley announced a $10 million endowment gift from the Helen Diller Foundation that will ensure a lasting legacy for its Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. In recognition of this gift, the institute will now be known as the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley.

A massive field experiment by Berkeley Haas Prof. Steven Tadelis with the online ticket marketplace StubHub concluded that so-called “drip pricing”—whereby additional fees are only disclosed when customers are ready to confirm their purchases—resulted in people spending about 21% more. It’s a particularly effective strategy for online sales, which in the past two years has overtaken brick-and-mortar shopping.

The Emirates Mars Mission, the first interplanetary exploration undertaken by an Arab nation, is scheduled to reach Mars’ orbit this Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2021, at 7:41 a.m. PST. The Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the University of California, Berkeley, is a partner in the collaboration, having contributed science team members, mission systems engineering support, and the detector and associated electronics for one of the three scientific instruments on board: the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrograph (EMUS).

With a new fiscal year approaching, local governments around the country will begin having discussions and debates about how to allocate their budgets. For counties and municipalities seeking to achieve equity for their residents, questions about what programs to cut or fund cannot be answered thoroughly without identifying the real racial disparities present within their communities. A new study by the Othering and Belonging Institute looks at one county's embrace of the Institute's Targeted Universalism to approach their policies.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children, according to new research co-authored at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, only one antiviral drug, remdesivir, has been approved in the United States for treatment of COVID-19, but it barely works and is toxic to the liver. Researchers at UC Berkeley have found 20 compounds that, in combination with remdesivir, are much better than remdesivir alone in protecting human lung cells from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A more transmissible variant of the coronavirus, first detected in the United Kingdom, has shown up in two UC Berkeley students, as the state announced at least 133 new cases of the variant statewide. The appearance of the new variant, which appears to be about 50% more infectious than earlier variants, reinforces the need to take very seriously public health precautions to prevent spread: wear a mask when around other people, keep at least six feet apart and wash your hands frequently.

Kent Lightfoot trained in archaeology when backhoes and front-end loaders tore through Native American sites. At the time, it didn’t occur to him that the land could actually feel pain — not until Kashaya Pomo tribal elders at Northern California’s Fort Ross Historic State Park set him straight.

In the arid Mojave Desert, small burrowing mammals like the cactus mouse, the kangaroo rat and the white-tailed antelope squirrel are weathering the hotter, drier conditions triggered by climate change much better than their winged counterparts, finds a new study published today in Science.

Social media disinformation, climate change debates, foreign interference in elections — some of the defining themes of recent American politics seem only loosely connected. But underlying the headlines is a single, troubling theme: The nation’s political process is suffering a historic level of instability. A new initiative headed by Janet Napolitano will bring Berkeley faculty, researchers and students from across disciplines into the new Center for Security in Politics.

To support research that has the potential to forge new paths in the physical sciences, UC Berkeley launched the Heising-Simons Faculty Fellows program. Through a generous gift from the Heising-Simons Family Fund, early- and mid-career faculty members working in geology and geophysics, materials sciences and materials chemistry, astronomy and physics will have the opportunity to apply for five-year $1 million fellowships to pursue basic science research that could lead to paradigm-shifting discoveries.

Anyone who has tried and failed to meditate knows that our minds are rarely still. But where do they roam? New research led by UC Berkeley has come up with a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and signal whether our minds are focused, fixated or wandering.

Randy Katz, a computer scientist and Wi-Fi pioneer who served as the University of California, Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research for three years, during which time he shepherded the campus through a year-long phased reopening after a pandemic shutdown, will step down on June 30.

Most frogs emit a characteristic croak to attract the attention of a potential mate. But a few frog species add to their calls by visually showing off with the flap of a hand, a wave of a foot or a bob of the head. Conservation ecologist Rebecca Brunner has discovered that the glass frog Sachatamia orejuela can be added to the list of species that make use of visual cues in response to their acoustic environments. This is the first time a member of the glass frog family (Centrolenidae) has been observed using visual communication in this manner.

The Department of African American Studies is excited to announce that it has been selected as one of sixteen recipients of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures grant. This grant is a collaborative effort to address racial inequality through new humanities-based research & solutions.

Apart from black holes, magnetars may be the most extreme stars in the universe. With a diameter less than the length of Manhattan, they pack more mass than that of our sun, wield the largest magnetic field of any known object — more than 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet — and spin on their axes every few seconds.

Biologists used crystallography performed at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source to reveal the new virus’s unusual protein structure.

Each year, thousands of migratory mule deer and pronghorn antelope journey northwest from their winter homes to their summer homes in the mountainous landscape near Grand Teton National Park. But to reach their destination, these ungulates must successfully navigate the more than 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) of fencing that crisscrosses the region. That’s enough distance to span nearly twice the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Americans, and people across the world, watched in shock and alarm yesterday as hundreds of right-wing extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol while Congress was certifying the Electoral College votes that produced a victory for Democrat Joe Biden and a defeat for President Donald Trump. But no one should have been surprised, says Lawrence Rosenthal, head of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at UC Berkeley.

When Yellowstone National Park’s Steamboat Geyser reawakened in 2018 after three and a half years of dormancy, some speculated that it was a harbinger of possible explosive volcanic eruptions within the surrounding geyser basin. A new study by geoscientists who study geysers throws cold water on that idea, finding few indications of underground magma movement that would be a prerequisite to an eruption. The geysers sit just outside the nation’s largest and most dynamic volcanic caldera, but no major eruptions have occurred in the past 70,000 years.