Research News

UC Berkeley’s campus community this week celebrated the grand opening of the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), the campus’s bold new home for research and innovation. After two years of seismic upgrades and renovations, BBH celebrated its opening this month. Bakar Labs, the facility’s flagship life sciences incubator, has been operational since mid-November, offering space to tenant companies.

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.

An apparent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down abortion rights could open broader threats to some types of contraception and to LGBTQ+ rights, including same-sex marriage, Berkeley legal scholars say.

On Thursday, a panel of leading scholars will join Daniel Aldana Cohen, UC Berkeley assistant professor of sociology and director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, to discuss how addressing the climate crisis requires tackling these long-standing racial and global inequalities and also dismantling the political and economic systems that created them.

Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.

Some states are seeking to ban school discussion and books that feature LGBTQ issues. Texas is targeting doctors and parents who provide gender-affirming medical care to transgender teenagers. Florida has gone to war against Disney World, after Disney publicly opposed the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Nine UC Berkeley faculty members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As climate change warms the planet, glaciers are melting faster, and scientists fear that many will collapse by the end of the century, drastically raising sea level and inundating coastal cities and island nations. A University of California, Berkeley, scientist has now created an improved model of glacial movement that could help pinpoint those glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic most likely to rapidly slide downhill and fall into the ocean.

The high efficiency, light weight and flexibility of the latest solar cell technology means photovoltaics could provide all the power needed for an extended mission to Mars, or even a permanent settlement there, according to a new analysis by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

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.

Rediet Abebe, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of computer science, will be a member of the 2022 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced April 26.

In episode 139 of Berkeley Talks, Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), gives the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group’s 28th Annual Lecture on Energy and Environment. In the March 31, 2022 talk, Ogunbiyi discusses how to drive a just, inclusive and equitable transition to affordable and sustainable energy for all, and how the Russia-Ukraine war is affecting energy markets around the world.

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.

Bakar Labs, the flagship life sciences incubator at UC Berkeley’s Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), has formed a partnership with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to provide free lab space and resources to startups that are focused on the application of gene therapy technologies that treat cystic fibrosis.

Powered by a $30 million challenge match grant from an anonymous alum, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering has raised more than $74 million in gifts to transform the engineering student center into a vibrant hub of learning and discovery, cross-disciplinary collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a new way to 3D-print glass microstructures that is faster and produces objects with higher optical quality, design flexibility and strength, according to a new study published in the April 15 issue of Science.