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.

UC Berkeley physicists Beate Heinemann and Marjorie Shapiro, with their Berkeley Lab colleagues, are awaiting a July 4 announcement by their ATLAS experiment team at CERN as to whether the collaboration has detected the much-sought Higgs boson.

Using inexpensive detectors that can fit inside a shoebox, UC Berkeley chemists are installing carbon dioxide and other air pollution sensors in 40 sites around Oakland to explore how detailed, neighborhood-by-neighborhood information can help communities monitor greenhouse gas and other harmful emissions.

Iris Tien, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, headed to Sacramento this past spring to lobby for state support of higher education and impress legislators with the importance of the kind of work she does on identifying weaknesses in the state’s water and power infrastructures.

The promise of ultrafast quantum computing has moved a step closer to reality with a technique to create rewritable computer chips using a beam of light. College of Chemistry professor Jeffrey Reimer and researchers from The City College of New York used light to control the spin of an atom’s nucleus in order to encode information.

Through the website solarbeacon.org, anyone can now schedule Solar Beacon – heliostats mounted on the Golden Gate Bridge by UC Berkeley space scientists – to flash sunlight in their eyes, like the glint of the sun off a car’s mirror.

Best-selling author Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology, discusses her research and UC Berkeley’s long history of focusing on how children learn. She and colleagues recently formed the Center for Developmental Cognitive Science to model the next generation of artificial intelligence on principles gleaned from children’s ability to learn rapidly, explore and reason.

With moral and monetary support from UC Berkeley and UC’s Office of the President, two UC grads – Christine Ho and Brooks Kincaid – have formed a company to create ‘printable’ batteries that are efficient, environmentally friendly and could be made as small as a postage stamp. The start-up is a tribute to the campus’s entrepreneurial environment and its innovative students.