Building the Materials for Next-Gen Tech

Felix Fischer, a 2022 Heising-Simons Faculty Fellow, uses his organic chemistry background to build materials for next-generation computers, sensors and communications platforms.

Drawn to Superconducting Magnets

James Analytis wants to understand the underpinnings of superconductors, which could lead to new kinds of MRI machines or supercomputers.

Digging Deep

The unassuming Pacific mole crab, Emerita analoga, is about to make some waves. UC Berkeley researchers have debuted a unique robot inspired by this burrowing crustacean that may someday help evaluate the soil of agricultural sites, collect marine data and study soil and rock conditions at construction sites.

Physics Nobel Recognizes Berkeley Experiment on ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’

In 1971, graduate student Stuart Freedman and postdoctoral fellow John Clauser took over a room in the sub-basement of Birge Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and built an experiment that would put to the test one of the most enduring weirdnesses of quantum mechanics, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

As Online Harms Surge, Our Better Web Initiative Advances at UC Berkeley

With the U.S. midterm elections approaching and political disinformation posing a continued threat to democracy, UC Berkeley’s ambitious new Our Better Web initiative, launched on a small scale in April, is advancing efforts to study and combat online harms including deception, discrimination and child exploitation.

Berkeley Talks: Learning From Nature to Design Better Robots

In Berkeley Talks episode 148, Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology and founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research at UC Berkeley, discusses how nature and its creatures — cockroaches, crabs, centipedes, geckos — inspire innovative design in all sorts of useful things, from bomb-detecting, stair-climbing robots to prosthetics and other medical equipment.

A Simple, Cheap Material for Carbon Capture, Perhaps From Tailpipes

Using an inexpensive polymer called melamine — the main component of Formica — chemists have created a cheap, easy and energy-efficient way to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks, a key goal for the United States and other nations as they seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Just For You

In a study presented at the 2022 International Conference on Machine Learning, a UC Berkeley-led research team revealed that certain recommender systems try to manipulate user preferences, beliefs, mood and psychological state

Fired Up for the Future

As another potentially devastating wildfire season begins, California is facing a shortage of wildland firefighters. To meet this challenge, the Marin County Fire Department and UC Berkeley have partnered to form FIRE Foundry (Fire, Innovation, Recruitment and Education), a program that recruits young adults from underrepresented communities for a career in fire service and trains them on cutting-edge firefighting technologies.

New Single-Mode Semiconductor Laser Delivers Power With Scalability

Berkeley engineers have created a new type of semiconductor laser that accomplishes an elusive goal in the field of optics: the ability to emit a single mode of light while maintaining the ability to scale up in size and power. It is an achievement that means size does not have to come at the expense of coherence, enabling lasers to be more powerful and to cover longer distances for many applications.

A Decade of Innovation and Inspiration at the CITRIS Invention Lab

The CITRIS Invention Lab is currently one of several UC Berkeley maker spaces where students and researchers can design and prototype interactive technologies. In the Invention Lab, these creations can be as simple as articulated plastic figurines and as complex as hydration-tracking smart cups. The carefully cultivated community of makers has helped thousands of UC Berkeley students and researchers develop creative skills and prototype novel products.

Engineered Crystals Could Help Computers Run on Less Power

In a study published online this week in the journal Nature, University of California, Berkeley, engineers describe a major breakthrough in the design of a component of transistors — the tiny electrical switches that form the building blocks of computers — that could significantly reduce their energy consumption without sacrificing speed, size or performance.

Advancing New Battery Design With Deep Learning

A team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) recently moved this effort forward with the development of deep-learning algorithms to automate the quality control and assessment of new battery designs.

Thwarting Disinformation, Defending Democracy — Scholar Sees a New Approach

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter— in the space of barely a decade, these massive data platforms and others have transformed society. But each is like a black box: While they are blamed for undermining public health and eroding democracy, and while their profits mount to tens of billions of dollars every year, their innermost operations are largely hidden from view.

Slicing the Way to Wearable Sensor Prototypes

Engineers at UC Berkeley have developed a new technique for making wearable sensors that enables medical researchers to prototype test new designs much faster and at a far lower cost than existing methods.

New Smart-Roof Coating Enables Year-Round Energy Savings

Scientists have developed an all-season smart-roof coating that keeps homes warm during the winter and cool during the summer without consuming natural gas or electricity. Research findings reported in the journal Science point to a groundbreaking technology that outperforms commercial cool-roof systems in energy savings.

New Kavli Center at UC Berkeley to Foster Ethics, Engagement in Science

UC Berkeley announced that the campus will be home to a new Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, which, alongside a second center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, will connect scientists, ethicists, social scientists, science communicators and the public in necessary and intentional discussions about the potential impacts of scientific discoveries.

CRISPRing the Microbiome is Just Around the Corner

To date, CRISPR enzymes have been used to edit the genomes of one type of cell at a time: They cut, delete or add genes to a specific kind of cell within a tissue or organ, for example, or to one kind of microbe growing in a test tube. Now, the University of California, Berkeley, group that invented the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology nearly 10 years ago has found a way to add or modify genes within a community of many different species simultaneously, opening the door to what could be called “community editing.”

Microbes Provide Sustainable Hydrocarbons for Petrochemical Industry

A team of chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota has now engineered microbes to make hydrocarbon chains that can be deoxygenated more easily and using less energy — basically just the sugar glucose that the bacteria eat, plus a little heat.

'Portable Oasis' Extracts Water from Dry Desert Air

An ultraporous compound can extract water molecules from dry desert air, store them as tiny "icicles" and then release them as clean drinking water. A new study has shown this novel humidity sponge's developers how it works in detail, taking it a step closer to practical applications. Along with government, industry and university partners, the researchers are working to turn their project into portable hydration systems capable of conjuring fresh water almost anywhere in an increasingly thirsty world. The specific mechanism underlying these superior water-extraction abilities has now been explained by an international team led by University of California, Berkeley, chemist Omar Yaghi . "We figured out which water comes first and the way it fills up, step by step," he says. Yaghi's team had previously developed MOF-303 specifically for water extraction and successfully demonstrated it in dry laboratory conditions.

Could Liposomes Be the Unsung Heroes of the Pandemic?

Liposomes may be the unsung heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Without the protection of these microscopic vesicles, the delicate strands of messenger RNA (mRNA) that lie at the heart of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines would be quickly destroyed by enzymes in the body, making it nearly impossible for their genetic instructions to reach the insides of human cells. But vaccine delivery isn’t the only way that these particles can be used in the battle against COVID-19. In a new study, a team of engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, attached SARS-CoV-2 “spike” proteins to the surface of liposomes, creating lab-made mimics of the deadly virus which the researchers call “spike-liposomes.”

How CRISPR Is Changing the Role of Researchers

A new paper in the journal Ethics and Human Research co-authored by Berkeley Public Health Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities Jodi Halpern and Lecturer Sharon E. O’Hara, among others, explores how scientists perceive the potential of CRISPR technology and how the transition of many researchers from bench science (making new discoveries in the lab) to translational science (using these new discoveries to create novel medical treatments) may affect the treatment of those with genetic conditions.

Time Crystals in the Limelight

UC Berkeley physicist Norman Yao first described five years ago how to make a time crystal — a new form of matter whose patterns repeat in time instead of space. Unlike crystals of emerald or ruby, however, those time crystals existed for only a fraction of a second.

2-D Room-Temperature Magnets Could Unlock Quantum Computing

From computers to credit cards to cloud servers, today's technology relies on magnets to hold encoded data in place on a storage device. But a magnet's size limits storage capacity; even a paper-thin magnet takes up space that could be better used for encoding information. Now, for a study published in Nature Communications, researchers have engineered a magnet among the world's thinnest—a flexible sheet of zinc oxide and cobalt just one atom thick. "That means we can store larger amounts of data using the same amount of materials," says University of California, Berkeley, engineer Jie Yao , the study's senior author.

Using Berkeley Technology, Glasgow Debuts New GHG Monitoring Network

UC Berkeley’s Ronald Cohen was beaming behind his mask as he joined governmental officials from Scotland and California today (Nov. 3) at the 2021 Climate Summit (COP26) in Glasgow to demonstrate a sensor network he pioneered to provide realtime monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions in cities.

Synthetic biology moves into the realm of the unnatural

A collaboration between synthetic chemists and synthetic biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has now overcome that hurdle, engineering bacteria that can make a molecule that, until now, could only be synthesized in a laboratory.

This Is What a Solid Made of Electrons Looks Like

If the conditions are just right, some of the electrons inside a material will arrange themselves into a tidy honeycomb pattern — like a solid within a solid. Physicists have now directly imaged these 'Wigner crystals', named after the Hungarian-born theorist Eugene Wigner, who first imagined them almost 90 years ago. Researchers had convincingly created Wigner crystals and measured their properties before, but this is the first time that anyone has actually taken a snapshot of the patterns, says study co-author Feng Wang, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you say you have an electron crystal, show me the crystal," he says. For more on this story, please see our press release at Berkeley News

Physicists snap first image of an ‘electron ice’

More than 90 years ago, physicist Eugene Wigner predicted that at low densities and cold temperatures, electrons that usually zip through materials would freeze into place, forming an electron ice, or what has been dubbed a Wigner crystal. While physicists have obtained indirect evidence that Wigner crystals exist, no one has been able to snap a picture of one — until now. UC Berkeley physicists published last week in the journal Nature an image of just such an electron ice sandwiched between two semiconductor layers. The image is proof positive that these crystals exist.

VIDEO: How to make plastic truly biodegradable

UC Berkeley’s Ting Xu and her students have come up with one solution for the global problem of single-use plastics: embed enzymes in the plastic, so that once the bag or cup is no longer wanted, it will self-destruct with a little heat and water.

LED Material Shines Under Strain

Smartphones, laptops, and lighting applications rely on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to shine bright. But the brighter these LED technologies shine, the more inefficient they become, releasing more energy as heat instead of light. Now, as reported in the journal Science, a team led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has demonstrated an approach for achieving near 100% light-emission efficiency at all brightness levels.
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