Research News

Facebook, weathering an onslaught of bad press, is concerned enough to have announced this week it is making a $7.5 million investment in a partnership with three universities — UC Berkeley, Cornell and Maryland — to develop new methods to improve detection of fake content, fake news and misinformation campaigns.

Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way are studded with cold clouds of hydrogen gas and dust, like chocolate chips in a loaded Toll House cookie. Astronomers have long focused on these so-called molecular clouds, suspecting that they are hotspots for star formation. But are they?

If you think you know the farm animal most closely related to T-Rex, or the American president who inspired the creation of blueberry jelly beans — but aren’t quite sure — you’re more likely to bone up on the chicken-dinosaur connection or Ronald Reagan’s predilection for glazed, gel-filled candies.

The long-term effects of redlining, which for decades was used to justify discriminatory mortgage lending practices, may be impacting the current health of affected communities, suggests new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco.

Students and faculty at UC Berkeley have long conducted research at Point Reyes National Seashore, and now they have a home-away-from-home within the park to make overnight stays and field studies easier.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, first unveiled Salto’s high-flying capabilities in 2016. Now, they’ve equipped the robot with a slew of new skills, giving it the ability to bounce in place like a pogo stick and jump through obstacle courses like an agility dog. Salto can even take short jaunts around campus, powered by a radio controller.

Beaches around the Japanese city of Hiroshima are littered with minuscule glassy beads formed from debris melted by the atomic bomb blast that devastated the city nearly 75 years ago, according to a new study by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley scientists.

Locking away people who have committed assault, robbery and similar felonies may keep them off the streets for a period of time, but it does not affect whether they will commit violent crimes after their release, according to new research from UC Berkeley.

Love military strategy games like Risk and Diplomacy? Try SIGNAL, a new online game that lets you satisfy your appetite for virtual global domination while simultaneously helping researchers understand the risks of real-world nuclear conflict.

California regulators are overestimating the impact the state’s cap-and-trade system is having on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new policy brief from a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy, part of the Goldman School of Public Policy.

Today’s hipster creatives and entrepreneurs are hardly the first generation to partake of ayahuasca, according to archaeologists who have discovered traces of the powerfully hallucinogenic potion in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle buried in a cave in the Bolivian Andes.

Emi Nakamura, a UC Berkeley economist, is this year’s recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal , widely viewed as second only in prestige to the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The annual award, announced by the American Economic Association, is given to an American economist under age 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

In recognition of their outstanding achievements in original research, eight UC Berkeley faculty have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most distinguished scientific organizations in the country. The newly elected researchers include a neuroscientist, two physicists, two cellular biologists, a computer scientist, a chemist and an economist, and bring the total number of living UC Berkeley faculty who are members of the academy to 135.

Increasing the minimum wage and expanding a tax credit for low-wage workers may prevent more than 1,200 suicides each year, according to a new working paper by a team of UC Berkeley researchers.

When the Republican Party rammed through tax changes in 2017, it wasn’t a surprise that the rich got richer. But in a just-published paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach and seven co-authors have uncovered eye-opening results of that hurried blitz, namely: red state rich did better than blue state rich.

New soccer-ball-shaped robots, created by engineers at UC Berkeley and Squishy Robotics, have the remarkable ability to fall from a height of more than 600 feet and be no worse for wear. Built of a network of rods linked by contracting cables, they can also shapeshift in order to crawl from one point to another.