In its first year, the initiative will give research innovations by six early-career UC Berkeley faculty members — including technologies to move prosthetic limbs with the power of thought and to control Argentine ants using their own pheromones — a significant boost from the lab to the market.
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has released a new report that provides a roadmap for revitalizing the U.S. manufacturing industry, and thereby spur the creation of much-needed jobs. The PCAST report is a product of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) Steering Committee, whose membership includes leading manufacturing experts from industry and six universities, including UC Berkeley.
A July 13 lecture and panel discussion drew overflow crowds to hear about the newly discovered Higgs boson. Physicists Beate Heinemann and Lawrence Hall explained the theory and experiment behind this “third” kind of stuff, while three others explored the implications of the discovery.
A summer job for eight high school students from the East Bay means working in a state-of-the art microbiology research laboratory on the next-step in bioenergy. The iCLEM program is a paid summer internship for high school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who fall outside the typical curve of academic enrichment. It is sponsored by the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center.
Using super-resolution microscopy and continuous fluorescent imaging, UC Berkeley physicists have for the first time revealed the structure of bacterial biofilms, which are responsible for the tenacious nature of bacterial diseases such as cholera and chronic sinusitus. The picture provides new targets for the development of drugs that can tear down these structures.
A research team that includes engineers from UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created a way to quickly change the left-right orientation of molecules, or chirality, with a beam of light. The development could be applied across a wide range of fields, including reduced energy use for data-processing, homeland security and ultrahigh-speed communications.
Researchers at UC Berkeley and the City College of New York are using lasers to control the spin state of semiconductor materials, a development that could lead to the creation of even faster and smaller electronic devices. The researchers hope to see spintronics move beyond memory devices to the logic circuits that are the heart of modern computers.
New research finds that, when making choices, people consistently prefer the options that come first: first in line, first college to offer acceptance, first salad on the menu. A paper on these findings — coauthored by Dana Carney, assistant professor of management at the Haas School of Business — appears in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.
An engineer working on a project to improve parks would do well to visit a nearby park to get “a fuller context of what visitors experience,” says mechanical engineering grad student Lora Oehlberg. Oehlberg instructs classes at Berkeley known as the human-centered design course thread, looking at incorporating the needs of the end user into the engineering of goods, products or services.
