Research News

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has picked long-time UC Berkeley neuroscientist John Ngai to head its BRAIN Initiative, a multibillion-dollar federal research push to develop new tools that will help scientists understand how the brain works and lead to new treatments for brain dysfunction.

Giant-scale physics experiments are increasingly reliant on big data and complex algorithms fed into powerful computers, and managing this multiplying mass of data presents its own unique challenges.

Five weeks before the California Democratic primary election, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has emerged as the clear front-runner in the race, according to a new poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.

A UC Berkeley archaeologist has dug up ancient human feces, among other demographic clues, to challenge the narrative around the legendary demise of Cahokia, North America’s most iconic pre-Columbian metropolis.

University of California, Berkeley, scientists have created a blue light-emitting diode (LED) from a trendy new semiconductor material, halide perovskite, overcoming a major barrier to employing these cheap, easy-to-make materials in electronic devices.

An epidemic of murders in Oakland, California, has claimed hundreds of lives in the past decade, and the victims’ families often face discriminatory treatment by police, devastating financial burdens and psychological trauma with inadequate government support, says a report from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Berkeley Law).

Christina Maslach, a UC Berkeley psychology professor emerita, has been honored with this year’s National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing for her pioneering research on job burnout and worker wellbeing.

By combining electron microscopy (EM) with the latest super-resolution microscopy (SR), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and UC Berkeley scientists have obtained exquisitely detailed views of the complex innards of cells, all in 3D.

Prof. Annette Vissing-Jørgensen has been honored by the Swiss Finance Institute with its Outstanding Paper Award 2019 for “The Impact of Pensions and Insurance on Global Yield Curves”.

As a neurologist, Robert Knight has seen what happens when the brain crashes around violently inside the skull. And he’s aware of the often tragic consequences. So, Knight invented a better helmet — one with more effective padding to dampen the effects of a direct hit, but more importantly, an innovative outer shell that rotates to absorb twisting forces that today’s helmets don’t protect against.

Jennifer Doudna has won the 2020 Wolf Prize in Medicine, a prestigious international prize awarded in Israel for unique contributions to humanity.

New data yield one of the most sensitive probes to date of processes that may have seeded the matter vs. antimatter imbalance in the universe

In a new study published in the journal Nature, engineers at UC Berkeley and their collaborators describe the first lab-made versions of gatekeeper proteins that filter good from bad just as well as the real thing.

UC Berkeley scientists have surveyed more than 2,500 people in the United States and China about their emotional responses to thousands of other songs from genres including rock, folk, jazz, classical, marching band, experimental and heavy metal. The upshot? The subjective experience of music across cultures can be mapped within at least 13 overarching feelings: Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up.

It can take years to diagnose children with psychiatric or attention deficit disorders, forcing them to endure a lot of frustration and suffering. But a new study has found evidence that brain scans, if conducted early, can predict whether a youngster is susceptible to mental health or attention problems down the road.

Throughout his life, American writer and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, formed friendships with many notable figures in history that shaped his work and the way he saw the world. A new multimedia project published by the UC Berkeley Library, “Six degrees of Mark Twain,” has pulled from a vast collection of the library’s Mark Twain Papers and Project — the largest collection of Twain’s private writings and manuscripts — to explore how Twain’s life intersected with six people: P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, Helen Keller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ulysses S. Grant