Research News

When chemist Rebecca Abergel and her team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) successfully developed an anti-radiation-poisoning pill in 2014, they hoped it would never have to be used. Designed to remove radioactive contaminants from the body in the event of something horrible, like a nuclear reactor meltdown or, even worse, a nuclear attack, the pill may also double as an anti-gadolinium-toxicity pill for MRI patients injected with commonly used contrast dye.

In an underground vault enclosed by six-foot concrete walls and accessed by a rolling, 25-ton concrete-and-steel door, University of California, Berkeley, students are making neutrons dance to a new tune: one better suited to producing isotopes required for geological dating, police forensics, hospital diagnosis and treatment.

On Friday, Aug. 30, UC Berkeley held a symposium that marked the start of a yearlong initiative, “400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Oppression,” commemorating the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies with a daylong symposium.

Seven University of California, Berkeley, faculty scientists with novel ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit have been named to the 2019-20 cohort of Bakar Fellows, an honor that gives the fellows the money and time to translate their laboratory breakthroughs into technologies ready for the marketplace.

With water scarcity a growing problem worldwide, University of California, Berkeley, researchers are close to producing a microwave-sized water harvester that will allow you to pull all the water you need directly from the air — even in the hot, dry desert.

Organophosphates are among the most commonly used classes of pesticides in the United States, despite mounting evidence linking prenatal exposure to the chemicals to poorer cognition and behavior problems in children. A new study led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers is one of the first to use advanced brain imaging to reveal how exposure to these chemicals in the womb changes brain activity.

Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science, discusses hate speech research being conducted at UC Berkeley through the Social Sciences D-Lab, focusing on corporate responsibility and the importance of preserving free speech.

Storm clouds rooted deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere are affecting the planet’s white zones and colorful belts, creating disturbances in their flow and even changing their color. Thanks to coordinated observations of the planet in January 2017 by six ground-based optical and radio telescopes and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer and her colleagues have been able to track the effects of these storms — visible as bright plumes above the planet’s ammonia ice clouds — on the belts in which they appear.

In the summer of 2011, visitors to the University of California, Davis, Arboretum may have witnessed an unusual sight: small teams of students wielding large nets, leaping into the arboretum’s waterway to snag basking turtles. The students weren’t in search of new pets — quite the opposite, in fact. The teams were part of a massive project to remove hundreds of invasive red-eared slider turtles from the arboretum in an effort to observe how California’s native western pond turtles fare in the absence of competitors.

For hundreds of thousands of years, monkeys and apes have been plagued by simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which still devastates primate groups in Africa. Luckily, as humans evolved from these early primates, we picked up a mutation that made us immune from SIV — at least until the early 20th century, when the virus evolved to get around our defenses, giving rise to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and an AIDS pandemic that today affects an estimated 38 million people worldwide. University of California, Berkeley, researchers have now discovered how that long-ago human mutation interfered with SIV infection, a finding that could provide clues for the development of new therapies to thwart HIV and similar viral infections.

The University of California, the University of Vienna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received an 11th U.S. patent involving CRISPR-Cas9, further expanding the reach of UC’s patented technology relating to this revolutionary gene-editing tool.

Structural biologist and biochemist Jennifer Doudna has been honored with the 2019 Welfare Betterment Prize, a relatively new Hong Kong-based prize, for her pioneering discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. “Its potential applications for improving human welfare are vast, and Dr. Doudna’s work has already given hope to millions worldwide,” the board of the Lui Che Woo Prize — Prize for World Civilization said in an announcement.

Too busy or lazy to read Melville’s Moby Dick or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina? That’s OK. Whether you read the classics, or listen to them instead, the same cognitive and emotional parts of the brain are likely to be stimulated. And now, there’s a map to prove it. UC Berkeley neuroscientists have created interactive maps that can predict where different categories of words activate the brain. Their latest map is focused on what happens in the brain when you read stories.

Berkeley engineers have created the fastest silicon-based, programmable two-dimensional optical phased array, built on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). This chip could lead to cheaper and more efficient medical-imaging devices, optical communications and holographic televisions. It could also give rise to more robust light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors for self-driving cars.

Needle pricks not your thing? A team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, is developing wearable skin sensors that can detect what’s in your sweat. They hope that one day, monitoring perspiration could bypass the need for more invasive procedures like blood draws, and provide real-time updates on health problems such as dehydration or fatigue.