Plants called cycads flourished during the dinosaur era, but unlike the dinosaurs, they survived into the present and have been collected and treasured as “living fossils.” A new study by UC Berkeley biologists demolishes that idea. Living cycads are not “fossils” – they evolved only within the past 12 million years.
The Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences was dedicated on Friday, and international philanthropist and business leader Li Ka-shing, who made the lead gift of $40 million in 2005, was given the Berkeley Medal, the campus’s highest honor.
UC Berkeley researchers have turned a benign virus into building blocks for assembling structures that mimic collagen, one of the most important structural proteins in nature. The “self-templating assembly” process they developed could eventually be used to manufacture materials with tunable optical, biomedical and mechanical properties.
Vulnerability to asthma, heart disease, hypertension and stroke in adulthood begins very early in life and is linked to low birth weight and poverty, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health and co-authored by an economist at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
Even as the social safety net frays and the number of people needing care swells, the ranks of traditional family caregivers are steadily shrinking. Who will absorb the cost and impact of care? Women, writes Evelyn Nakano Glenn, professor of ethnic and women’s studies, in her newest book, “Forced to Care: Coercion and Caring in America.”
Newly elected to the Institute of Medicine, chemistry professor Carolyn Bertozzi answers questions about her research and teaching and the creative atmosphere at UC Berkeley.
Often it’s an unexpected pothole or a bumpy road that draws our attention to pavement conditions. But for Professor Carl Monismith, co-director of the campus’s Pavement Research Center, the technology of road surfaces has been his passion for the past 60 years.
