Asking all commuters to cut back on rush-hour driving reduces traffic congestion somewhat, but asking specific groups of drivers to stay off the road may work even better.

Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see.

Leeches, despite the yuck factor, have captured the hearts of two University of California, Berkeley, scientists who are part of a team that this week is publishing the leech’s complete genome sequence.

Twenty-six young UC Berkeley scientists, many in the Berkeley Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP), will make a rare trip to present their research at an upcoming major international biology conference.

What if robots and humans, working together, were able to perform tasks in surgery and manufacturing that neither can do alone? That’s the question driving new research by UC Berkeley robotics experts Ken Goldberg and Pieter Abbeel and colleagues from four other universities, who were awarded a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Researchers at the UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have put the squeeze — literally — on malignant mammary cells to guide them back into a normal growth pattern.

Whether it involves Reagan and Thatcher, FDR and Churchill or the colonies and the crown, the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States is generally known – but not necessarily well-understood. That connection will be more deeply explored in a new Anglo-American studies program to be housed at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), thanks to a $1 million gift from the Anglo California Foundation.

The Department of Energy has awarded $4 million over three years to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop new ways to monitor the stability of electric power grids.

Tropical montane cloud forest trees use more than their roots to take up water. They also drink water from clouds directly through their leaves, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have discovered. While this is an essential survival strategy in foggy but otherwise dry areas, the scientists say that the clouds the trees depend on are now disappearing due to climate change.

Mexican American preschoolers fall behind their white counterparts in terms of early language and preliteracy skills, but the social competencies between the two groups are indistinguishable, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA.

When it comes to climate change, deforestation and toxic waste, the assumption has been that conservative views on these topics are intractable. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that such viewpoints can be changed after all.

Mechanical engineer Lindsay Miller, PhD 12, knew there was a market for her doctoral thesis project—a device the size of a stick of gum that harvests energy from machinery vibrations, generating enough electricity to run wireless sensors without ever having to change a battery.

A gene that helps the body convert that big plate of holiday cookies you just polished off into fat could provide a new target for potential treatments for fatty liver disease, diabetes and obesity. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are unlocking the molecular mechanisms of how our body converts dietary carbohydrates into fat.

A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the development of revolutionary technologies for BigBOSS, a project now in the proposal stage designed to study dark energy with unprecedented precision.

Four University of California, Berkeley, faculty members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the association announced today (Thursday, Nov. 29).

The primary source of light for more than a billion people in developing nations is also churning out black carbon at levels previously overlooked in climate warming estimates, according to a new study led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois.

A rotten-egg stench that fouled a swath of Southern California in September was traced to the Salton Sea — the latest episode in the environmental woes of California’s largest, but rapidly shrinking, inland lake. Now a new study has demonstrated a cost-effective method for using man-made wetlands to clean contaminants out of the freshwater rivers that flow into the sea.

The Hawaiian Islands are a unique and ongoing series of evolutionary and ecological experiments. As each volcano rises above the waves, it is colonized by life from neighboring volcanoes and develops its own flora and fauna.

Eating certain veggies not only supplies key nutrients, it may also influence hormone levels and behaviors such as aggression and sexual activity, says a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that could shed light on the role of diet in human evolution.

In recognition of National Prematurity Awareness Month, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health announced that it has received a $2.75M grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan to implement a three-year pilot initiative, Best Babies Zone (BBZ) aimed at improving birth outcomes for infants in four U.S. cities.

Prenatal and childhood exposure to flame retardant compounds are linked to poorer attention, fine motor coordination and IQ in school-aged children, a finding by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health that adds to growing health concerns over a chemical prevalent in U.S. households.

UC Berkeley’s leadership in developing innovative and practical solutions for global problems is being recognized in a $20 million cooperative agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

A long-abandoned fermentation process once used to turn starch into explosives can be used to produce renewable diesel fuel to replace the fossil fuels now used in transportation, UC Berkeley scientists have discovered.

UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center is providing an easy way to give thanks and, at the same time, contribute to a national research project on the power of gratitude

Lisa García Bedolla, a University of California, Berkeley, expert on voter mobilization, says Latinos are far from casting votes in numbers that truly reflect their growing population and potential political power.

The more time it takes for an earthquake fault to heal, the faster the shake it will produce when it finally ruptures, according to a new study by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Social animals usually congregate for protection or mating or to capture bigger prey, but a University of California, Berkeley, biologist has found that the terrestrial hermit crab has a more self-serving social agenda: to kick another crab out of its shell and move into a larger home.

With several of its namesake’s descendants on hand for the occasion, UC Berkeley’s Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study is celebrating its launch today (Thursday) with a two-day campus conference.

A new, comprehensive survey of day care centers by University of California, Berkeley, researchers found that, overall, the environmental quality in child care settings was similar to other indoor environments, but that levels of formaldehyde and several other contaminants exceeded state health guidelines.

A new report released today (Wednesday, Oct. 24), national Food Day 2012, says that a proposal pending in Congress to raise the minimum wage would increase retail food prices for American consumers by at most 10 cents a day, while helping nearly 8 million food workers and 21 million workers in other industries.

A new UC Berkeley study now suggests that bacteria may have helped kick off one of the key events in evolution: the leap from one-celled organisms to many-celled organisms, a development that eventually led to all animals, including humans.

Interested in the link between how cat color influences adoption rates, a University of California, Berkeley, researcher surveyed 189 people with experience of cats as pets and found that they were more likely to assign positive personality traits to orange cats and less favorable ones to white and tortoiseshell ones.

UC Berkeley researchers released a new study that says diesel exhaust contributes 15 times more than gas emissions per liter of fuel burned.

The planet Uranus, known since Voyager’s 1986 flyby as a bland, featureless blue-green orb, is beginning to show its face. By using a new technique with the telescopes of the Keck Observatory, astronomers have created the most richly detailed, highest-resolution images ever taken of the giant ice planet.

While many Latino children enter school hampered by weak preliteracy skills, a new program tied to Head Start successfully equips parents to close these gaps, according to findings out today from the University of California, Berkeley.

Thomas Laqueur studies the role of cemeteries in civilization.

Catalysts are substances that speed up the rates of chemical reactions without themselves being chemically changed. Industrial catalysts come in two main types – heterogeneous, in which the catalyst is in a different phase from the reactants; and homogeneous, in which catalyst and the reactants are in the same phase.

A team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab)’s Ashok Gadgil is the recipient of the 5th Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water. Gadgil, head of the Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division and a Professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the Creativity Prize on behalf of the team.

Synthetic biology is the latest and most advanced phase of genetic engineering, holding great promise for helping to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, including the sustainable production of energy fuels and critical medical drugs, and the safe removal of toxic and radioactive waste from the environment.

When Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. Secretary of State, she led high-level negotiations between mostly male foreign government leaders. In 2009, comedian Bill Maher asked Albright if she ever flirted on the job and she replied, “I did, I did.” Flirtatiousness, female friendliness, or the more diplomatic description “feminine charm” is an effective way for women to gain negotiating mileage.

Pescadero Estuary, located an hour south of San Francisco, is a coastal habitat under intense pressure from several interest groups, some human, others wild. And the estuary’s endangered fish species need specific seasonal water regimens and salinity levels to survive.

Two University of California, Berkeley, scientists have received research grants to explore areas of science that bleed into science fiction.

Bisphenol A (BPA), an estrogen-like compound that has drawn increased scrutiny in recent years, has been linked to changes in thyroid hormone levels in pregnant women and newborn boys, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are gathering evidence this fall that the feisty fox squirrels scampering around campus are not just mindlessly foraging for food, but engaging in a long-term savings strategy.

Voters in U.S. presidential races make choices based on a candidate’s performance rather than on his or her policy positions – even when those stances run counter to the voters’ own, according to a new book by a University of California, Berkeley, political scientist.

Asian Americans, who account for 10 percent of registered voters in California, support a tax measure proposed by Governor Jerry Brown, are closely divided on the death penalty ballot measure, overwhelmingly support affirmative action, and support tax increases, according to two new reports from the National Asian American Survey.

A tiny laser that could enable smaller and faster smart phones and tablets. A glucosamine-like supplement that targets the underlying cause of multiple sclerosis. These are among research projects getting a boost this year from a UC grants program.

UC Berkeley scientists have dug into the soil of a heavy metal contaminated site to analyze the genes of the underground microbial community in hopes of finding ways to help improve the microbes’ ability to remediate toxic metal contamination.

A team of UC Berkeley vision scientists has found that small fragments of keratin protein in the eye play a key role in warding off pathogens.

Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. An international team of scientists led by researchers with the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley has proposed the experimental design of a space-time crystal based on an electric-field ion trap and the Coulomb repulsion of particles that carry the same electrical charge.

Recently returned from their summer sojourns, 32 UC Berkeley undergraduates shared experiences interning on myriad sustainability projects around the world during the second annual Cal Energy Corps symposium at the David Brower Center Thursday.

Giesecke, 56, who most recently served as president of Anatolia College in Thessaloniki, Greece, is warming up as the fifth director of I-House. The residential community of some 600 undergraduate and graduate UC Berkeley students, currently from 65 countries, was launched in 1930 to break down cultural barriers between overseas and U.S. students.

The first detailed and complete picture of a protein complex that is tied to human birth defects as well as the progression of many forms of cancer has been obtained by an international team of researchers led by scientists with the Department of Energy, Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) is sponsoring an all-day conference on Sept. 21, to explore “California’s Fiscal Crisis: Prospects for Deficit Reduction and Pension Reform in the Golden State.”

The National Science Foundation fellowship is a crown jewel of graduate student awards and UC Berkeley students lead the nation in capturing these prestigious and highly competitive grants.

UC Berkeley professor's study shows nearly half of U.S. adolescents with autism spectrum disorder have been bullied at school.

One of the first scientific conferences to focus on how the health risks of sleep loss, obesity, and stress interact will be held next week at the University of California, Berkeley.

A second community meeting was held at the Richmond Memorial Auditorium and UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — the city’s partners in the joint campus — brought along some of the scientists themselves, who talked about their research and took questions from the audience.

The environmental law centers at UCLA and UC Berkeley Schools of Law today released a new report on industry actions and federal, state, and local policies needed to stimulate long-term, mass adoption of electric vehicles.

A new study by UC Berkeley economists analyzed restaurant ratings on Yelp.com and found that, on a scale of 1 to 5, a half-star rating increase translates into a 19 percent greater likelihood that an eatery’s seats will be full during peak dining times. The study, published this month in the Economic Journal, found that the increase is independent of changes in price or in food and service quality.

Extremely bright, active galaxies formed and fully illuminated the universe by the time it was 750 million years old, or about 13 billion years ago, according to Oliver Zahn, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP) at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the data analysis.

While chaos drives some to seek comfort in friends and family, others gravitate toward money and material possessions, new UC Berkeley study finds.

An international team of scientists led by Thornton Glover of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) the team was able to measure the optical manipulation of chemical bonds in the in a diamond sample, on the scale of individual atoms.

The Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry (BCGC) has been awarded a $3.4 million training grant by the National Science Foundation. The grant will train five to six Ph.D. students annually for five years in the principles of green chemistry and the design of clean energy technologies.

In the August 24 issue of Science, the multi-institutional Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) team presents the first-ever direct observations of a Type 1a supernova progenitor system.

Engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, have been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop flexible bioelectronics systems to advance medical care.

Intensive preparation for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) actually changes the microscopic structure of the brain, physically bolstering the connections between areas of the brain important for reasoning, according to neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

UC Berkeley Skydeck, a startup accelerator, is soaring to new heights with the appointment of a new full-time executive director,Jeff Burton, a member of the founding team of video game maker Electronic Arts.

A computer model that can identify the best molecular candidates for removing carbon dioxide, molecular nitrogen and other greenhouse gases from power plant flues has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of California (UC) Berkeley and the University of Minnesota.

California’s Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) has awarded $2.5 million in grants to two research and education centers affiliated with UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies to improve safety for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and drivers.

Two new studies by scientists at UC Berkeley provide a clearer picture of why some species move in response to climate change, and where they go.

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, using a unique optical trapping system that provides ensembles of ultracold atoms, have recorded the first direct observations of distinctly quantum optical effects – amplification and squeezing – in an optomechanical system.

“Like boys with ADHD, girls continue to have problems with academic achievement and relationships, and need special services as they enter early adulthood,” said Stephen Hinshaw, UC Berkeley professor of psychology and lead author of a study that reports after 10 years on the largest-ever sample of girls whose ADHD was first diagnosed in childhood.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the Los Angeles School District’s unprecedented school building program and found that thousands of children moving into new elementary schools over the 2002-2008 construction period enjoyed strong achievement gains that equaled up to 35 additional days of instruction, compared with the progress made by the average LA Unified student.

The lure of social status promotes overconfidence, explains Haas School Associate Professor Cameron Anderson. He co-authored a new study, “A Status-Enhancement Account of Overconfidence,” with Sebastien Brion, assistant professor of managing people in organizations, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Haas School colleagues Don Moore, associate professor of management, and Jessica A. Kennedy, now a post-doctoral fellow at the Wharton School of Business.

Perhaps no other material is generating as much excitement in the electronics world as graphene. For the vast potential of graphene to be fully realized, however, scientists must first learn more about what makes graphene so super. The latest step in this direction has been taken by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley.

Eleven tiny satellites called CubeSats will accompany a spy satellite into Earth orbit on Thursday, Aug. 2, inaugurating a new type of inexpensive, modular nanosatellite. One of the 11 will be CINEMA (CubeSat for Ions, Neutrals, Electrons, & MAgnetic fields), an 8-pound, shoebox-sized package which was built over three years by 45 students from the University of California, Berkeley, Kyung Hee University in Korea, Imperial College London, Inter-American University of Puerto Rico, and University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez.

The Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) has drafted a new report that describes how California allocates water and identifies changes that would help the current system adapt to climate change. Co-written by Dan Farber, Deborah Lambe ’95, and UC Berkeley economist Michael Hanemann, the report focuses on practical, politically feasible measures.

A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley.

A new analysis gives Californians good reason to be optimistic about the green credentials of the state’s proposed high-speed rail project, due to begin construction in 2013 thanks to funding recently approved by state legislators. Arpad Horvath at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mikhail Chester at Arizona State University compared the future sustainability of California high-speed rail with that of competing modes of transportation, namely automobile and air travel.

A team of University of California, Berkeley, scientists in collaboration with researchers at the University of Munich and University of Washington, in Seattle, has discovered a chemical that temporarily restores some vision to blind mice, and is working on an improved compound that may someday allow people with degenerative blindness to see again.

The Simons Foundation of New York initiated a new program of Simons Investigators this year, awarding 21 mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists $100,000 per year for 5-10 years, no strings attached. Theoretical astrophysicist Eliot Quataert was one of them.

UC Berkeley today has joined edX, a not-for-profit online learning initiative founded by Harvard University and MIT and launched last May. The campus will collaborate with edX to expand the number of universities that offer their courses on the edX platform. In a press release issued by edX, Chancellor Birgeneau said the campus is “committed to excellence in online education and the dual goals of distributing higher education more broadly and enriching the quality of campus-based education.”

The bird population on the Berkeley campus has remained surprisingly diverse over the past 100 years, showing that it’s possible to create a green wildlife haven within a dense urban area, researchers say.

In its first year, the initiative will give research innovations by six early-career UC Berkeley faculty members — including technologies to move prosthetic limbs with the power of thought and to control Argentine ants using their own pheromones — a significant boost from the lab to the market.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has released a new report that provides a roadmap for revitalizing the U.S. manufacturing industry, and thereby spur the creation of much-needed jobs. The PCAST report is a product of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) Steering Committee, whose membership includes leading manufacturing experts from industry and six universities, including UC Berkeley.

A July 13 lecture and panel discussion drew overflow crowds to hear about the newly discovered Higgs boson. Physicists Beate Heinemann and Lawrence Hall explained the theory and experiment behind this “third” kind of stuff, while three others explored the implications of the discovery.

A summer job for eight high school students from the East Bay means working in a state-of-the art microbiology research laboratory on the next-step in bioenergy. The iCLEM program is a paid summer internship for high school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who fall outside the typical curve of academic enrichment. It is sponsored by the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center.

Using super-resolution microscopy and continuous fluorescent imaging, UC Berkeley physicists have for the first time revealed the structure of bacterial biofilms, which are responsible for the tenacious nature of bacterial diseases such as cholera and chronic sinusitus. The picture provides new targets for the development of drugs that can tear down these structures.

A research team that includes engineers from UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created a way to quickly change the left-right orientation of molecules, or chirality, with a beam of light. The development could be applied across a wide range of fields, including reduced energy use for data-processing, homeland security and ultrahigh-speed communications.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and the City College of New York are using lasers to control the spin state of semiconductor materials, a development that could lead to the creation of even faster and smaller electronic devices. The researchers hope to see spintronics move beyond memory devices to the logic circuits that are the heart of modern computers.

New research finds that, when making choices, people consistently prefer the options that come first: first in line, first college to offer acceptance, first salad on the menu. A paper on these findings — coauthored by Dana Carney, assistant professor of management at the Haas School of Business — appears in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

An engineer working on a project to improve parks would do well to visit a nearby park to get “a fuller context of what visitors experience,” says mechanical engineering grad student Lora Oehlberg. Oehlberg instructs classes at Berkeley known as the human-centered design course thread, looking at incorporating the needs of the end user into the engineering of goods, products or services.

UC Berkeley physicists Beate Heinemann and Marjorie Shapiro, with their Berkeley Lab colleagues, are awaiting a July 4 announcement by their ATLAS experiment team at CERN as to whether the collaboration has detected the much-sought Higgs boson.

Using inexpensive detectors that can fit inside a shoebox, UC Berkeley chemists are installing carbon dioxide and other air pollution sensors in 40 sites around Oakland to explore how detailed, neighborhood-by-neighborhood information can help communities monitor greenhouse gas and other harmful emissions.

Iris Tien, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, headed to Sacramento this past spring to lobby for state support of higher education and impress legislators with the importance of the kind of work she does on identifying weaknesses in the state’s water and power infrastructures.

The promise of ultrafast quantum computing has moved a step closer to reality with a technique to create rewritable computer chips using a beam of light. College of Chemistry professor Jeffrey Reimer and researchers from The City College of New York used light to control the spin of an atom’s nucleus in order to encode information.

Through the website solarbeacon.org, anyone can now schedule Solar Beacon – heliostats mounted on the Golden Gate Bridge by UC Berkeley space scientists – to flash sunlight in their eyes, like the glint of the sun off a car’s mirror.

Best-selling author Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology, discusses her research and UC Berkeley’s long history of focusing on how children learn. She and colleagues recently formed the Center for Developmental Cognitive Science to model the next generation of artificial intelligence on principles gleaned from children’s ability to learn rapidly, explore and reason.

With moral and monetary support from UC Berkeley and UC’s Office of the President, two UC grads – Christine Ho and Brooks Kincaid – have formed a company to create ‘printable’ batteries that are efficient, environmentally friendly and could be made as small as a postage stamp. The start-up is a tribute to the campus’s entrepreneurial environment and its innovative students.

Climate change is widely expected to disrupt future fire patterns around the world — with some regions, such as the western U.S., seeing more frequent fires within the next 30 years, according to a new analysis led by UC Berkeley researchers in collaboration with an international team of scientists. The study used 16 different climate-change models to produce one of the most comprehensive projections to date of how climate change might affect global fire patterns.

Two new studies by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory unveil further evidence about the dangers of too little sleep.

UC Berkeley-led research is giving the green light to fighting fire with fire. An analysis of controlled burns and mechanical thinning nationwide did not find substantial ecological harm from fuel-reduction treatments used to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. And with a rise in wildfires predicted in many parts of the country, researchers say more treatments are needed to manage this risk.

Tight spaces have the counterintuitive effect of aiding the spread of tumor cells, according to a new study led by UC Berkeley bioengineers. The researchers developed a 3D model to study the biophysical environment factors influencing tumor invasion and found that narrow channels gave cells traction to help them move faster. The findings have implications for certain cancers, including malignant brain tumors, which tend to infiltrate most rapidly along tissue interfaces and confined spaces, such as blood vessels and nerve tracts.

NASA is scheduled to launch an orbiting X-ray satellite on Wednesday, June 13, that will open a new window on the universe, allowing scientists to probe the roiling edges of black holes, exploding stars and the smallest, most frequent flares on the sun. UC Berkeley scientists and engineers helped build the instruments, will operate the satellite, and will analyze the data from supernova explosions.

A group of students from UC Berkeley met with top energy policy makers in Washington DC to present their recommendations on developing a national clean energy plan. These recommendations were based on an extensive report that represented the culmination of a semester's worth of work in the class “Renewable Energy and Other Cleaner Fuels: Energy Policy to Save the Planet, the Country, and the Economy” co-taught by Jannifer Granholm and Steve Weissman in spring 2012.

Some 6.3 million Californians lack access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan, according to a new study released today by UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.

Vascular diseases are actually a type of stem cell disease, according to a new study by UC Berkeley scientists. The discovery challenges a long-standing belief that smooth muscle cells contribute to clogged blood vessels, and could revolutionize research into therapies for heart attacks and strokes, which account for one in three deaths in the United States.

Cockroaches, known for their stealth behavior, have a strategy up their sleeve only recently discovered by UC Berkeley biologists. They are able to quickly disappear under ledges by flinging themselves off at full speed, grabbing the edge with hook-like claws on their hind legs, and swinging like a pendulum to land upside-down underneath.

The new “top two” ballot used in California’s primary election today (Tuesday, June 5) appears to give moderate candidates in state races a 6-7 percent boost compared to the traditional, more restricted ballot, according to preliminary results of a new study by the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

A big step towards understanding the cellular basis for why women over the age of 50 are much more vulnerable to breast cancer has been taken by Berkeley Lab researchers. They determined that aging causes an increase in a type of adult stem cell believed to be at the root of many breast cancers, and a decrease in cells believed to serve as tumor suppressors.

Using ultrafast lasers, Berkeley Lab scientists have tackled the long-standing mystery of how Cooper pairs form in high-temperature superconductors. With pump and probe pulses spaced just trillionths of a second apart, the researchers used photoemission spectroscopy to map rapid changes in electronic states across the superconducting transition.

Cooking exhaust hoods designed for home kitchens vary widely in their ability to capture and vent away the air pollutants generated by the gas burners on cook stoves, according to a study by two Berkeley Lab scientists.

Reinforcing that the best things in life are free, a new UC Berkeley study shows that online freebie-exchange communities such as “Freecycle” and “Couchsurfing” foster greater team spirit among their members than do cash-for-goods websites.

Chemist Berend Smit and colleagues are working with the power industry to find the best materials to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.

China has more than half a billion Internet users, 136 million of whom live in rural areas. School of Information PhD student Elisa Oreglia, in an award-winning ethnographic study, looks at how older, less-educated villagers — many of whom claim to be Web illiterate — often become comfortable with computers by observing their younger family members.

Study at Berkeley Lab points the way to synthesizing new biomimetic materials and improved bioremediation.

For the past five years, volunteers from the City of Berkeley and surrounding areas have come to Berkeley Lab to participate in an ongoing study that’s changing what scientists know about Alzheimer’s disease. The goal of the Berkeley Aging Cohort Study is to reveal how our brains change as we age.

Advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. Ana Claudia Arias, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, hopes to take this innovation to the next level. Her goal: "wearable electronics."

A pipeline-monitoring system using MRI technology could warn of dangerous wear before explosions occur. The innovation was developed by Professor Emeritus Jerome Singer and two College of Engineering alums.

Scientists at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab have harnessed the electricity-generating capabilities of viruses, a development that could lead to pocket power plants for mobile devices.

Berkeley Lab researchers and their colleagues demonstrate unique new materials for innovative electronic and magnetic applications

A fleet of 100 floating robots took a trip down the Sacramento Riveron Wednesday in a field test organized by UC Berkeley engineers. The devices, equipped with GPS-enabled smartphones, demonstrated the next generation of water monitoring technology.

Berkeley Lab’s NDCX-II, the recently completed second generation Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment, is a compact accelerator whose dense ion beam will be able to deliver a powerful punch for producing warm dense matter – a step on the road to heavy-ion nuclear fusion.

The competition between farmers and fish for precious water in California is intensifying in wine country, suggests a new study by UC Berkeley biologists.

Berkeley Lab scientists create nanoparticle probes that may lead to a better understanding of diseases.

One of the oldest lakes in the world, Clear Lake has deep sediments that contain a record of the climate and local plants and animals going back perhaps 500,000 years. UC Berkeley scientists are drilling cores from the lake sediments to explore this history and fine-tune models for predicting the fate of today’s flora and fauna in the face of global warming and pressure from a burgeoning human populations.

Berkeley Lab scientists are exploring whether a common soil bacterium can be engineered to produce liquid transportation fuels much more efficiently than the ways in which advanced biofuels are made today.

The Lemelson-MIT Program has awarded Ashok Gadgil, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the 2012 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation. The award recognizes Gadgil, who is known for his work on affordable water disinfection systems and fuel-efficient cookstoves for developing nations, for “his steady pursuit to blend research, invention and humanitarianism for broad social impact.”

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working on a project that would modernize the grid and essentially bring it into the Internet age by using automated control software to manage demand in real time.

Establishing a new research institute at a top-tier university is a major undertaking that required a great deal of teamwork to pull off. In a recent interview, Richard Karp, founding director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, gave the inside story on how it all came together.

The Simons Foundation has awarded a landmark $60 million grant to UC Berkeley to establish a theory of computing institute that promises to catalyze new advances in broad disciplines that affect our everyday lives, from how we spend our money to how we fight disease.

Four University of California, Berkeley, faculty members – physicists John Clarke and Bernard Sadoulet, chemist John Hartwig and ecologist Mary Power – have been elected members or foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences, bringing UC Berkeley’s total NAS membership to 141.

Two types of naturally produced substances — one of them a bear bile acid — reduce the uptake of fat by the liver, opening the door to the development of new treatments for fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes, according to a new study by researchers at UC Berkeley.

Roboticists in Ghana and at UC Berkeley this week launched AFRON, the African Robotics Network, an initiative to enhance robotics education, research and industry in Africa. Co-founder is professor Ken Goldberg, a fellow with IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

Immunology grad student Patty Garcia chips away at the barriers that divide science and society, while puzzling out the molecular mechanics of cancer.

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from UC Berkeley suggests the devoutly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

This year's Bandelier Award for Public Service to Archaeology goes to UC Berkeley's Crawford Greenewalt, for his work at the ancient city of Sardis.

The State of California needs to consider the whopping return on investments for higher education as it tries to balance its budget, UC Berkeley researchers say in new study, "California's Economic Payoff: Investing in College Access and Completion."

Some 32 Berkeley undergraduates will spend up to 12 weeks working on sustainability projects in the Bay Area and across nine far-flung countries.

At the campus's 9th Sustainability Summit, progress in "greening" the Berkeley campus was everywhere evident — from the sheer number of student projects in the works to the metric tons of greenhouse gases not being emitted thanks to new institution-wide programs.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a technique for encapsulating liquids of nanocrystals between layers of graphene so that chemical reactions in the liquids can be imaged with an electron microscope.

UC Berkeley physicist Buford Price and eight students and post-docs are part of the IceCube collaboration conducting cosmic ray research at the South Pole.

When assessing the virulence of plant-borne diseases, knowing the pathogen's recent travel history may be just as important as identifying its particular strain, according to new research results by researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

A Berkeley Lab-University of Copenhagen collaboration found that luminal-like breast cancer cells with no detectable stem cell qualities can generate larger tumors than their basal-like counterparts. This contradicts prevailing beliefs and could impact future breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Four Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have been elected to the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society founded in 1780 to recognize leading “thinkers and doers.”

Four UC Berkeley faculty members – a pioneer in photonic crystals, a dark matter astrophysicist, a specialist in nanowires and an expert on molecular machines – are among 220 new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been selected to lead a new joint U.S.-India research center focusing on energy efficiency technologies for buildings.

Daniel Nomura, an assistant professor in nutritional sciences and toxicology, is one of 15 U.S. researchers in the chemical and biological sciences to be named a 2012 Searle Scholar.

Web-based startup Politify earned $20,000 for its first-place finish in the information technology category of the 2012 Big Ideas @ Berkeley innovation contest.

Text messaging often gets a bad rap for contributing to illiteracy and high-risk behavior such as reckless driving. But a Berkeley social-welfare professor has found an upside to texting, especially for people who feel stressed out, isolated and alone.

The Cool California Challenge brings together 10 cities in a yearlong community-based competition to cut carbon emissions — with the winner crowned California’s Coolest City.

The Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health has awarded $4 million to UC Berkeley to train and educate researchers, educators and professionals who can tackle global health challenges specific to slum dwellings. UPDATE: Project renewed for an additional 5 years. See the project website.

The blogging community is more racially diverse than one might think. Internet-connected African Americans are more likely to blog than their white and Hispanic counterparts, according to new research from UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley engineers, led by computer scientist Ras Bodik, will join the University of Pennsylvania and seven other research institutions in a project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive.

UC Berkeley, chemists have found that increased fertilizer use over the past 50 years is responsible for a dramatic rise in a major greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $25 million five-year initiative called the Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization that will be led by Arie Shoshani of Berkeley Lab Computational Research Division.

The quest to capture the massive amounts of data being produced in our world has gotten a $10 million boost, via a National Science Foundation award to UC Berkeley.

A new type of hybrid material developed at UC Berkeley could help oil and chemical companies save energy and money by eliminating an energy-intensive gas-separation process.

Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers have developed a dynamic system for regulating metabolic pathways

The new Bakar Fellows Program is designed to help early-career Berkeley faculty commercialize promising research discoveries.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a technique for lacing artificial membranes with billions of gold nanoantennas that can boost optical signals from a protein tens of thousands of times without the protein ever being touched.

A new assessment of wind energy in India by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that the potential for on-shore wind energy deployment is far higher than the official estimates.

At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, scientists have provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film.

Berkeley Lab scientists are helping enable the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California, to run its own microgrid, which will minimize costs and maximize reliability.

Berkeley Lab scientists at the Advanced Light Source and their colleagues investigating molecular components of RNA were surprised to find that protons can find ways to transfer even when hydrogen bonds are blocked.

Renewal spans four UC campuses, builds on success of 2009 agreement

According to a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these programs are not enough to induce the private sector to develop innovative technologies to address climate change.

Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) researchers have identified methyl ketones, chemical compounds known for their fragrance and flavor, as strong biofuel candidates. Methyl ketones produced from glucose by engineered E. coli yielded high cetane numbers.

A professor of biostatistics and statistics at the School of Public Health, Nicholas Jewell, has been chosen to receive Harvard University's 2012 Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science.

UC Berkeley scientists are tapping the cognitive smarts of babies, toddlers and preschoolers to program computers to think more like humans.

Incubator entrepreneurs launch 60 companies, generate 280 jobs, raise $226 million in follow-on funding

The joint China-U.S. Daya Bay experiment to explore the multiple personalities of neutrinos announced its first results, paving the way for further experiments on whether neutrinos and antineurtinos have similar split identities

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have played leading roles in designing and operating ALPHA, the CERN experiment that was the first to capture and hold atoms of antihydrogen, a single antiproton orbited by a single positron.

Berkeley Lab Researchers Developing Promising Treatment for Safely Decontaminating Humans Exposed to Radioactive Actinides

UC Berkeley psychology professors Silvia Bunge and Stephen Hinshaw are scanning the brains of kids to learn how they learn. The findings may help educators and revolutionize classrooms.

Carnegie Mellon University will award its 2011 Dickson Prize in Science to Berkeley physics professor Marvin L. Cohen, a senior scientist at the Berkeley lab and one of the most influential condensed-matter physicists in the world.

A new study shows how soot darkens snow and ice, which upsets earth’s radiation balance.

Neuroscientists have shown that the same brain processes used to learn new motor skills are also necessary to master abstract skills, or controlling a robotic arm using brain activity alone.

Skydeck forms the hub of Berkeley's efforts to foster a new generation of young entrepreneurs and forge a hotbed of collaborative innovation and enterprise in the East Bay.

LAMIS, a green chemistry laser spectroscopy technique from Berkeley Lab, is faster and less expensive than mass spectrometry and can be carried out from across vast distances.

In strange patterns of a gold-silicon alloy, Berkeley Lab scientists uncover unsuspected secrets and promising routes to nanoscale semiconductor processing

The upper class has a higher propensity for cheating, driving illegally and endorsing unethical behavior in the workplace , believing that “greed is good,” according to a new UC Berkeley study.

Berkeley Lab Researchers Resolve Controversy Over Gallium Manganese Arsenide that Could Boost Spintronic Performance

With the support of the gift from The Dow Chemical Company Foundation, the College of Chemistry will rebuild its undergraduate teaching labs and design a new curriculum.

Using the exceptionally bright and powerful x-ray beams of the Advanced Light Source, Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered a critical control element within chaperonin, the protein complex responsible for the correct folding of other proteins.

Next week's ARPA-E Summit will feature several Berkeley Lab-led projects, all aimed at dramatically improving how the U.S. produces and uses energy. Among them is an effort to produce transportation fuel from tobacco.

Four UC Berkeley scholars have been named to receive the 2012 Gates Cambridge Scholarship, a prestigious award that pays the full cost of a graduate degree in any field of study at Cambridge University.

Berkeley Lab researchers have found new evidence pointing the way to the design of safer, more effective next generation CETP inhibitors that could help prevent the development of heart disease.

Archaeologists working in eastern Jordan have announced its discovery of 20,000-year-old hut structures, the earliest yet found in that country.

Berkeley Lab mathematicians James Sethian and Robert Saye have won the 2011 Cozzarelli Prize for the best scientific paper in the category of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Global warming has forced alpine chipmunks in Yosemite to higher ground, prompting a startling decline in the species’ genetic diversity, according to a new study by researchers at Cal.

Rhonda Righter, professor of industrial engineering, is tackling a new assignment: serving as a volunteer role model to 35 middle-school girls.

Carlos Bustamante, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of physics and chemistry, has been awarded the 2012 Vilcek Prize

Scholar-activist Rebecca MacKinnon discusses how to protect civil liberties, privacy and even the character of democracy in a networked world where private interests control much of the digital real estate.

Alan Schoenfeld, a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, has received the 2011 Felix Klein Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction.

Beginning this fall, the new Energy Engineering major will admit up to eight new students each year.

A new study by UC Berkeley researchers state that replacing coal with renewable energy can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a least expensive way.

Engineering professor Scott Shenker joins the ranks of the National Academy of Engineering, bringing to 92 the total number of UC Berkeley faculty members given the prestigious honor.

UC Berkeley chemists Chris Chang, Jeff Long and Marcin Majda have redesigned catalysts in ways that could have a profound impact on the chemical industry as well as on the growing market for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

China scholar has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany

Berkeley physics professor to guide Kavli Institute research into cosmological questions such as how the universe began, how it will end, and what laws govern it

UC Berkeley graduate student Thomas Azwell teamed up with researchers in the Gulf of Mexico to develop marsh restoration technology that could impact remediation efforts nationwide.

To broaden and accelerate its efforts at poverty alleviation Berkeley Lab announces the launch of the LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies.

Throughout his tenure as UC Berkeley chancellor, Robert Birgeneau has sustained a research interest in new materials, maintaining labs both on campus and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

UC Berkeley hosted a two-day event, the 2012 California Diversity and Leadership Conference, in a push for multicultural equity and inclusion.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu joined UC and Lawrence Berkeley Lab leaders to break ground on the lab’s new Computational Research and Theory facility.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a relatively fast, easy and inexpensive technique for inducing nanorods to self-assemble into aligned and ordered macroscopic structures.

Berkeley researchers have demonstrated a way to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.

Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers

A new book by Nora Silver, adjunct professor of business, explores an increasingly important issue facing nonprofits: understanding, attracting and engaging ethnic volunteers.

Thanks to new molecular-genetic tools and intensive field research, scientists’ understanding of the native flora of the Golden State has grown exponentially in the 18 years since publication of The Jepson Manual.

Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered why a promising technique for making quantum dots and nanorods has so far been a disappointment. Better still, they’ve also discovered how to correct the problem.

Berkeley Lab scientist Rizia Bardham, who recently earned a spot on Forbes' list of 30 rising stars in science under 30, is helping develop new hydrogen storage materials at the Lab's Molecular Foundry.

UC Berkeley geologist Bill Dietrich and biologist Todd Dawson are two of many UC scientists placing remote sensors in natural reserves to map land, track animals and collect environmental data.

Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered a rotational motion that plays a critical role in the ability of breast cells to form the spherical structures in the mammary gland known as acini.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is aiming to solve how to store enough of hydrogen-powered fuel cells, in a safe and cost-effective manner, to power a vehicle for 300 miles by synthesizing novel materials with high hydrogen adsorption capacities.

Gang Ren and Lei Zhang are reporting the first 3-D images of an individual protein ever obtained with enough clarity to determine its structure.

A new UC Berkeley study cautions, however, that restored wetlands may not recover to the condition of a natural, undamaged wetland for hundreds of years, if ever.

People who have made mental engagement a lifelong habit have lower levels of a key protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study led by UC Berkeley neuroscientists. The findings could provide support for cognitive therapies to prevent the onset of a debilitating disease.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, bursting at the seams of its home next door to UC Berkeley, announced Monday that it has picked the University of California’s bayside Richmond Field Station as the site of its second campus.

The University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) on the UC Berkeley campus received a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and a matching amount from California’s Department of Transportation.

UC Berkeley political scientist Robert Powell has been awarded the National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Berkeley faculty, staff and alumni collaborate on a four-day, first-of-its-kind Native American Museum Studies Institute designed to give Indians the tools to "tell their own stories, and to tell the stories from their perspective."

A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress.

Ashok Gadgil, a scientist at Berkeley Lab, has won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the 2012 Zayed Future Energy Prize, a $3.5 million award that recognizes and rewards innovation, leadership and long-term vision in renewable energy and sustainability.

Paul Alivisatos, Berkeley Lab director and UC Berkeley professor, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012. Alivisatos is an internationally recognized authority on nanochemistry and a pioneer in the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots and multi-shaped artificial nanostructures.

Berkeley researchers have provided the most detailed look ever at the “regulatory particle” used by the proteasome - one of the most critical protein machines in living cells - to identify and degrade proteins marked for destruction.

Omar Yaghi, one of the world’s most cited chemists and leading authorities on nanoscience, is the new director of the Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy nanoscience center at Berkeley Lab.

Environmentalists and corporations don’t always see eye-to-eye on climate change. But the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative has shown that the two sides’ objectives can not only co-exist, but be mutually beneficial.

Chemists hope to understand precisely how electrical charges flow and different forms of energy move within molecules and across molecular boundaries. Berkeley Lab scientists are using powerful lasers to devise future light sources that can do the most demanding experiments

Undergraduate and graduate students teamed up with biologist Robert Full to study how lizards use their tails when leaping. What they found can help design robots that are more stable on uneven terrain and after unexpected falls, which is critical to successful search and rescue operations.

It takes more than luck to find a supernova. California magazine offers a behind-the-scenes look at the organized search for these astronomical objects, and the role played by scientists at Berkeley.

Between 1990 and 2009, New York City saw its crime rate drop by more than 80 percent. In his latest book, “The City that Became Safe,” Professor Frank Zimring explores how NYC’s experience, focusing on harm-reduction strategies, challenges assumptions driving U.S. policies on crime and drugs.