Earth’s magnetic field, a familiar directional indicator over long distances, is routinely probed in applications ranging from geology to archaeology. Now it has provided the basis for a technique which might, one day, be used to characterize the chemical composition of fluid mixtures in their native environments.
Everyone notices the academic superstars and failures, but what about the tens of millions of American teens straddling these two extremes? A new UC Berkeley study has spotlighted a high school subculture that has made an art of slacking – even with ample educational resources – and may be destined to perpetuate the nation’s struggling lower-middle class.
Since 2006, when NASA’s Stardust spacecraft delivered its aerogel and aluminum foil dust collectors back to Earth, a team of scientists has combed through the collectors in search of rare, microscopic particles of interstellar dust. The team reports they have found seven dust motes that probably came from outside our solar system.
A photo is worth a thousand words, but what if the image could also represent a thousands of other images? New software developed by UC Berkeley computer scientists seeks to tame the sea of visual data in the world by generating a single photo that can represent massive clusters of images.
A project begun some 13 years ago by Jay Keasling, the Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences at Berkeley Lab and the CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), was culminated with an announcement on August 12 from the partnership of Sanofi, the multinational pharmaceutical company, and PATH, the nonprofit global health organization.
A year-long project will focus on standardizing a subset of neuroscience data, making this research simpler for scientists to share. This is the first collaboration launched by “Neurodata Without Borders,” a broader initiative with the goal of standardizing neuroscience data on an international scale, making it more easily sharable by researchers worldwide.
Researchers at UC Berkeley are developing vision-correcting displays that can compensate for a viewer’s visual impairments to create sharp images without the need for glasses or contact lenses. The technology could potentially help those who currently need corrective lenses to use their smartphones, tablets and computers, and could one day aid people with more complex visual problems.
UC Berkeley’s Anthony Barnosky and his wife, Elizabeth Hadly, a palaeoecologist at Stanford University, are featured in Nature for their work on the 30-page statement, “Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century.”
A team of researchers at UC Berkeley have found a way to dramatically increase the sensitivity of a light-based plasmon sensor to detect incredibly minute concentrations of explosives. The sensor could potentially be used to sniff out a hard-to-detect explosive popular among terrorists.
