Radiation damages metal and other materials, which can be a problem in nuclear power plants. UC Berkeley/LBNL materials scientist Andrew Minor and colleagues have developed a way to test nano-sized samples to determine how well they withstand the effects of radiation.
San Joaquin Valley communities with large Latino populations are exposed to disproportionately high levels of the agricultural chemical nitrate through their drinking water, according to a UC Berkeley study. When ingested via drinking water, nitrate can lead to numerous health problems, particularly among women and young children.
Two new leaders have been named to head up the CITRIS healthcare initiative ‘Delivering Quality Healthcare Everywhere for Californians.’ Thomas Nesbitt of UC Davis will serve as faculty director, Edmund Seto of UC Berkeley as associate director. The project’s mission is to improve access and reduce healthcare disparities by creating a trusted network for patients, providers, healthcare officials and educators.
The new California Language Archive (CLA) website at UC Berkeley – the largest indigenous language archive at a U.S. university – is now accessible free of charge to anyone with Internet access.
Wild, free-living bees help California agriculture reap $937 million to $2.4 billion a year in economic value and provide an estimated one-third or more of all pollination “services” to the state’s crops, according to a new UC Berkeley study.
A bright gamma-ray flare observed in March 2011 by the Swift satellite was not your typical gamma-ray burst, according to UC Berkeley astronomers and their colleagues. Its long duration and location at the center of a distant galaxy suggests that the flare was emitted as a star was ripped apart by a massive black hole.
UC researchers are optimistic that improved driving techniques can cut fuel use by 10 to 20 percent. And the time may be right to sell the public on these methods, they say.
Krishna Niyogi, professor of plant and microbial biology and an expert on photosynthesis, has been named an investigator with an ambitious plant science program sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He is one of only 15 scientists nationwide to be chosen for this honor.
UC Berkeley’s Daniela Kaufer and colleagues have discovered one way by which emotions such as fear affect memory. The brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, induces the hippocampus, a relay hub for memory, to generate new neurons. In a fearful situation, these newborn neurons are activated by the amygdala, providing a “blank slate” for the new fearful memory.
In a recent Pioneers in Engineering competition, local high school engineers scrambled to design and assemble robots destined to pile pillows in a goal. For the Berkeley Engineering honors students behind the contest, it’s a chance to build and teach.
