The political controversy surrounding the Electoral College — the institution whereby we elect the president of the United States — is as old as the republic. Associate Professor Eichanan Mossel, an expert in in probability theory, uses his tools to pit the Electoral College system against the simple majority-voting system. How prone to error is the Electoral College, and what are the odds that an election outcome will actually be flipped by random error?

Berkeley Lab’s Saul Perlmutter has won the Einstein Medal presented annually by the Albert Einstein Society of Bern, Switzerland, for his role in discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe by observing very distant supernovae.

Berkeley biophysicist Jan Liphardt, director of the new Bay Area Physical Sciences-Oncology Center, believes that a new, multidisciplinary approach to understanding fundamental aspects of cancer is key to making progress in the ongoing war against the disease.

Forestry scientists are working to understand how wildfire and other “disturbances” affect the health of some of the oldest trees on the plant — the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada.

The Western fence lizard’s reputation for helping to reduce the threat of Lyme disease is in jeopardy. A new study led by UC Berkeley researchers found that areas where the lizard had been removed saw a subsequent drop in the population of the ticks that transmit Lyme disease. The decline in tick numbers seems to suggest a decreased risk of human exposure to Lyme disease when the lizard is gone.

In the mid 1960s, landmark laws brought an official end to the system of legal segregation known as Jim Crow. Professor Elizabeth Abel explores the “visual politics” of a system that shaped experience and perception throughout the American South (and beyond) for nearly a century — in a book praised by historian Henry Louis Gates as giving “new focus to our national dialogue on race.”

Four UC Berkeley faculty members have been awarded prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships, given annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to scientists, mathematicians and economists at an early stage of their careers.