A major donation from the Robert T. Matsui Foundation for Public Service will allow the Institute of Governmental Studies to renovate and expand its Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service.
People with tinnitus – a constant ringing or buzzing in the ears – can take heart from a new study by UC Berkeley neuroscientists that points to several new strategies for alleviating the problem.
UC Berkeley engineers have shown that by using ferroelectric materials, they can pump up the charge accumulated at a capacitor for a given voltage, a phenomenon called negative capacitance. The achievement could reduce the power draw of today’s electronics, and break the bottleneck that has stalled improvements in computer clock speed.
On the 100th anniversary of the making of the Yahi survivor’s historic “wood duck” recording, a daylong conference dedicated itself to correcting the record, and to remembering him as an educator, a pioneer and a man.
A specialized training program at UC Berkeley’s Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center this summer gave a group of displaced workers, all Laney College students, a potential new career. Already, two students have received job offers as a result.
UC scientists built and worked in towers — some as tall as 1,500 feet — as part of the largest single atmospheric research effort in the state. The data they’ve collected will guide policymakers dealing with air pollution.
UC Berkeley researchers have found evidence that leafflower trees and leafflower moths, two species that are mutually dependent upon each other, managed to colonize South Pacific islands separately, and then reconnect again. The findings contradict a long-standing belief in island biology that highly specialized organisms cannot establish themselves on remote islands.
Photos and observations posted to the website of the Global Amphibian BioBlitz now cover more than 700 species: 10 percent of the world’s frog, toad and salamander species that the social networking effort hopes to track. This success has now spawned a Reptile BioBlitz.
UC Berkeley’s Namwali Serpell, an assistant professor of English and a novelist, is one of six winners of the 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, which is given annually to women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.
