The current Ebola outbreak shows how quickly diseases can spread with global jet travel. Yet knowing how to predict the spread of these epidemics is still uncertain, because the complicated models used are not fully understood.

In an underground laboratory in Italy, an international team of scientists has created the coldest cubic meter in the universe. The cooled chamber—roughly the size of a vending machine—was chilled to 6 milliKelvin or -273.144 degrees Celsius in preparation for a forthcoming experiment that will study neutrinos, ghostlike particles that could hold the key to the existence of matter around us.

One typically does not hear talk of the health benefits of arsenic, but a new study by researchers from UC Berkeley and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile has linked arsenic to a 50 percent drop in breast cancer deaths.

Ferroelectric materials – commonly used in transit cards, gas grill igniters, video game memory and more – could become strong candidates for use in next-generation computers, thanks to new research led by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Berkeley Lab researchers have recorded the first observations of the molecular structure of liquid water at a gold electrode under different battery charging conditions.

The POLARBEAR experiment, directed by UC Berkeley physicist Adrian Lee, is studying the B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. He hopes to determine the structure of matter in the universe, the masses of neutrinos and the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

The trend of hospitals consolidating medical groups and physician practices in an effort to improve the coordination of patient care is backfiring and increasing the cost of patient care, according to a new study led by a UC Berkeley health-policy expert.

A surprise discovery that overturns decades of thinking about how the body fixes proteins that come unraveled greatly expands opportunities for therapies to prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which have been linked to the accumulation of improperly folded proteins in the brain.

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft settled into its planned orbit around Mars on Sept. 21 and is already sending back data about the upper atmosphere, according to University of California, Berkeley, space scientist Davin Larson.

UC Berkeley scientists have taken proteins from nerve cells and used them to create a “smart” material that is extremely sensitive to its environment. This marriage of materials science and biology could give birth to a flexible, sensitive coating that is easy and cheap to manufacture in large quantities.