Bioengineers from the UC Berkeley and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix and match these "DNA parts" in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.
The Lawrence Hall of Science is hosting a 50th-anniversary exhibit on the laser, Jan. 23-25, highlighted by a free public talk on Jan. 25 by Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, who conceived the idea of a laser in the 1950s.
Marcia Linn, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of education known for exploring the teaching and learning of science and their connection to gender, is offering proof once again that girls' math abilities are just as good as boys'.
Once trees expand their range into the Arctic, their higher transpiration rate could well pump enough extra water into the atmosphere to warm the climate over the entire Arctic region, with positive feedback speeding the melting of sea ice.
To keep up with global warming, the average ecosystem will need to shift about a quarter mile each year, says a new study by scientists at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Many biologists warn that the planet's plants and animals are headed toward a mass extinction as a result of human-caused environmental damage, including global warming. A UC Berkeley/Penn State team has now analyzed the status of North American mammals, estimating that they may be one-fifth to one-half the way toward a mass extinction event like the "Big Five" the Earth has seen in the last 450 million years.
Six international studies published this week in the British journel The Lancet show that cutting greenhouse gases, in particular ozone and black carbon, can save millions of lives worldwide in addition to slowing climate change.
Climate change could increase the likelihood of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa by over 50 percent within the next two decades, according to a new study led by a team of researchers at University of California, Berkeley, and published in the online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
