Research News

The federal government has given the University of California a New Year’s Eve gift — its 20th U.S. patent on CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technologies. The addition expands a broad patent portfolio that is already being used to improve human and animal health and crop breeding.

A nationwide alliance of national labs, universities, and industry launched today to advance the frontiers of quantum computing systems designed to solve urgent scientific challenges and maintain U.S. leadership in next-generation information technology.

More than a billion people worldwide lack access to electricity, and even a $15 solar lamp is beyond the financial reach for many of them. Yet businesses have found a way to reach this very-low-income market through rent-to-own programs that combine incremental payments with technology to monitor and lock out non-paying customers. A new paper by Asst. Prof. Jose Guajardo is the first to analyze how usage and payment behavior interact in rent-to-own business models and what works when serving customers in the developing world who have no savings and no credit history. The paper was recently published in Production and Operations Management.

Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s flagship startup incubator, will be sending to Sacramento seven of the startups it has graduated in a first-of-its-kind municipal partnership.

Sometimes, a blockbuster discovery is just too good to be true. UC Berkeley graduate student astronomer Kareem El-Badry knows that all too well — he just shot one down.

Scientists are getting better at modeling the complex tangle of physics properties at play in one of the most powerful events in the known universe: the merger of two neutron stars.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley convert diamonds’ atomic flaws into atomic sensors with front-row seats to a quantum world of materials under extreme pressure

The moment is solemn, and the potential ramifications historic, as the U.S. House of Representatives considers articles of impeachment this week against President Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. But for all its gravity, impeachment is likely to have little political impact, say experts from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS).

If you use a vacuum-insulated thermos to help keep your coffee hot, you may know it’s a good insulator because heat energy has a hard time moving through empty space. Vibrations of atoms or molecules, which carry thermal energy, simply can’t travel if there are no atoms or molecules around. But a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, shows how the weirdness of quantum mechanics can turn even this basic tenet of classical physics on its head.

In new research reported in Nature, an international team of chemical engineers have designed a material that can capture carbon dioxide from wet flue gasses better than current commercial materials. “Flue gas” refers to any gas coming out of type of pipe, exhaust, or chimney as a product of combustion in a fireplace, oven, furnace, boiler, or steam generator. But the term is more commonly used to describe the exhaust vapors exiting the flues of factories and powerplants. Iconic though they may be, these flue gases contain significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a major greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

Scientist Gerbrand Ceder evaluates some of the most promising battery technologies in development

A new study by University of California, Berkeley, microbial ecologists used experimental evolution to help identify the core microbiome of commercial tomatoes. They selected for those microbial taxa that best survived on the plants and then showed that these “domesticated” microbial communities are able to effectively fend off random microbes that land on the plants. In other words, these selected communities look like a stable, healthy plant microbiome, akin to what a robust tomato plant might pass to its offspring.

UC Berkeley engineers have developed a mineral-coated sand that can soak up toxic metals like lead and cadmium from water. Along with its ability to destroy organic pollutants like bisphenol A, this material could help cities tap into stormwater, an abundant but underused water source.

A year ago, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew closer to the sun than any satellite in history, collecting a spectacular trove of data from the very edge of the sun’s million-degree corona. Now, that data has allowed solar physicists to map the source of a major component of the solar wind that continually peppers Earth’s atmosphere, while revealing strange magnetic field reversals that could be accelerating these particles toward our planet.

Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow or even reverse the cognitive decline that comes with age. In a publication appearing today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, University of California, Berkeley, and Ben-Gurion University scientists report that senile mice given one such drug had fewer signs of brain inflammation and were better able to learn new tasks, becoming almost as adept as mice half their age.

Climate skeptics have long raised doubts about the accuracy of computer models that predict global warming, but it turns out that most of the early climate models were spot-on, according to a look-back by climate scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA.