Research News

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.

From prosthetics and implants to dental crowns and hearing aids, 3D printers are being used to manufacture a whole host of customized medical devices for patients in need. So, why not organs, too?

The number of 18- to 26-year-old students who report suffering from anxiety disorder has doubled since 2008, perhaps as a result of rising financial stress and increased time spent on digital devices, according to preliminary findings released Thursday by a team of UC Berkeley researchers.

India could make a major dent in air pollution by curbing emissions from dirty household fuels such as wood, dung, coal and kerosene, shows a new analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the India Institute of Technology.

The Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, announced their newest fellows this week, among them four UC Berkeley faculty. The newest Berkeley fellows are U.K.-born developmental biologist Richard Harland and Australian-born chemist Martin Head-Gordon. They are joined by two new foreign members, climate scientist Inez Fung and plant biologist Brian Staskawicz. The four are among 51 new fellows, 10 new foreign members and one new honorary member.

Nine UC Berkeley faculty have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious nonpartisan research center that convenes scholars and leaders in academic, business and government sectors, drawing expertise across disciplines, to address the most complex challenges of our time. Here are this year’s honorees:

Five UC Berkeley professors are among this year’s 168 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows. The prestigious fellowships recognize scholars with impressive achievements who also show promise in fields ranging from the natural sciences to the creative arts.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have built a new photonic switch that can control the direction of light passing through optical fibers faster and more efficiently than ever. This optical “traffic cop” could one day revolutionize how information travels through data centers and high-performance supercomputers that are used for artificial intelligence and other data-intensive applications.

University of California scientists think they know why Earth’s generally warm and balmy climate over the past billion years has occasionally been interrupted by cold snaps that enshroud the poles with ice and occasionally turn the planet into a snowball. The key trigger, they say, is mountain formation in the tropics as continental land masses collide with volcanic island arcs, such as the Aleutian Islands chain in Alaska.

The New York metropolitan area has seen tremendous economic growth, but many residents in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods are struggling to afford living in the 31-county, tri-state region, University of California, Berkeley, researchers have found.

The Central Valley’s heavy wintertime tule fog – known for snarling traffic and closing schools — has been on the decline over the past 30 years, and falling levels of air pollution are the cause, says a new study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.