Latest UC Berkeley Stories

Rural Community Empowered to Make Local Calls and Send Global SMS for the First Time SAN FRANCISCO, May 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/-- Range Networks, the leading provider of American-made commercial open source cellular systems, today announced the deployment of a cellular network to rural Papua, Indonesia. The deployment is made possible by Range Networks' collaboration with UC Berkeley's Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group. The network was deployed...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Known for her lethal lips, Batman villainess Poison Ivy might appreciate a new study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley who found dangerous levels of lead, chromium and other metals in a number of commonly sold lipsticks. Previous research, including a 2011 FDA study, has found toxic metals in commercial lipsticks, but the UC Berkeley team has specifically studied how long-term exposure to various...

It’s no accident that money obtained through dishonest or illegal means is called “dirty money.” A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that when people perceive money as morally tainted, they also view it as having less value and purchasing power. Challenging the belief that “all money is green,” and that people will cross ethical boundaries to amass it, social scientists from UC Berkeley and Stanford University have found compelling evidence that the...

UC Berkeley study shows how we refocus to track down a human, animal or thing A contact lens on the bathroom floor, an escaped hamster in the backyard, a car key in a bed of gravel: How are we able to focus so sharply to find that proverbial needle in a haystack? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that when we embark on a targeted search, various visual and non-visual regions of the brain mobilize to track down a person, animal or thing. That means...

University of California, Berkeley NASA has awarded the University of California, Berkeley, up to $200 million to build a satellite to determine how Earth’s weather affects weather at the edge of space, in hopes of improving forecasts of extreme “space weather” that can disrupt global positioning satellites (GPS) and radio communications. The satellite mission, called the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), will be designed, built and operated by scientists at UC Berkeley’s...

Religious affiliation in the United States is at its lowest point since it began to be tracked in the 1930s, according to analysis of newly released survey data by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University. Last year, one in five Americans claimed they had no religious preference, more than double the number reported in 1990. UC Berkeley sociologists Mike Hout and Claude Fischer , along with  Mark Chaves of Duke University, analyzed data on religious...

New Study Advances Leading-Edge Field of Optogenetics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and UC Berkeley A new study from engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, pairs light and genetics to give researchers a powerful new tool for manipulating cells. Results of the study, published in the journal Nature Methods, show how blue light can be used as a switch to prompt targeted proteins to accumulate into large clusters. This process of...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online We’ve had an increasing fascination with comets and asteroids over the past several years. We’ve fictionally sent a rogue group of astronauts to detonate one of these heavenly travelers. We’ve seen the disastrous effect of a potential impact in both movies and on television. We’ve elevated our global anxiety tracking the trajectory of these large, quickly moving celestial bodies. And it seems our vigilance on this matter,...

Public opinion on environmental issues such as climate change, deforestation, and toxic waste seems to fall along increasingly partisan lines. But new research suggests that environmental messages framed in terms of conservative morals — describing environmental stewardship in terms of fending off threats to the “purity” and “sanctity” of Earth and our bodies — may help to narrow the partisan gap. A study from researchers at UC Berkeley has found that while people who...

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory $2.1 Million Grant to Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics advances dark energy research at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the development of revolutionary technologies for BigBOSS, a project now in the proposal stage designed to study dark energy with unprecedented...