Latest UC Berkeley Stories

Solar physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have captured for the first time the collision of a comet with the sun.Using instruments aboard NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft, four post-doctoral fellows at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory were able to track the comet as it approached the sun and estimate an approximate time and place of impact. STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), launched in 2006, consists of identical spacecraft orbiting the sun, one ahead of...

Study shows impact to pregnancies in women with no direct connection to eventsStress caused by psychological shock from the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, felt even by people with no direct link to the event, may have led to an increase in male children being miscarried in the U.S.Tim Bruckner, assistant professor of public health at UC Irvine, and colleagues at UC Berkeley found that the fetal death rate for males spiked in September 2001 and that significantly fewer boys were born than...

New action mechanism for topoisomerases could help improve antibiotics, anticancer drugsMany standard antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs block the enzymes that snip the kinks and knots out of DNA "“ DNA tangles are lethal to cells "“ but the drugs are increasingly encountering resistant bacteria and tumors.A new discovery by University of California, Berkeley, biochemists could pave the way for new research into how to re-design these drugs to make them more effective poisons for cancer...

In the past decade, robotic telescopes have turned astronomers' attention to scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may or may not point to new and unusual physics.But supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California, Berkeley's Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), is one of eight known "calcium-rich supernovae" that seem to stand out as horses of a different color."With the sheer numbers of supernovae we're detecting, we're...

A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the University of California, Berkeley, is publishing this week the first genome sequence of an amphibian, the African clawed frog Xenopus tropicalis, filling in a major gap among the vertebrates sequenced to date."A lot of furry animals have been sequenced, but far fewer other vertebrates," said co-author Richard Harland, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. "Having a...

Knocking out apoptosis genes is critical, but so is revving up insulin pathwayUniversity of California, Berkeley, biologists have found a signal that keeps stem cells alive in the adult brain, providing a focus for scientists looking for ways to re-grow or re-seed stem cells in the brain to allow injured areas to repair themselves. The researchers discovered in fruit flies that keeping the insulin receptor revved up in the brain prevents the die-off of neural stem cells that occurs when most...

Sloan Digital Survey data provide test that rules out alternative theories of gravityAn analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies by University of California, Berkeley, University of Zurich and Princeton University physicists demonstrates that the universe "“ at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth "“ plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.By calculating the clustering of these galaxies, which stretch nearly...

Naegleria genome sheds light on transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotesIn the long evolutionary road from bacteria to humans, a major milestone occurred some 1.5 billion years ago when microbes started building closets for all their stuff, storing DNA inside a nucleus, for example, or cramming all the energy machinery inside mitochondria.Scientists have now sequenced the genome of a weird, single-celled organism called Naegleria gruberi that is telling biologists about that transition from...

Atrazine, one of the world's most widely used pesticides, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.The 75 percent that are chemically castrated are essentially "dead" because of their inability to reproduce in the wild, reports UC Berkeley's Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology."These male frogs are missing...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $24.5 million to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, to head an ambitious, multi-institutional center that could one day lead to a million-fold reduction in power consumption by electronics.The researchers said such a dramatic increase in energy efficiency could allow the digital revolution to continue well beyond the limits that would otherwise be imposed by its growing demand for energy, and allow portable applications...