Latest UC Berkeley Stories

A thorough study of the million-year evolution of California's horned lizards, sometimes referred to as "horny toads," shows that when it comes to distinguishing such recently diverged species, the most powerful method integrates genetic, anatomical and ecological information.In the study, published this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Geological...

"Practice makes perfect" is the maxim drummed into students struggling to learn a new motor skill - be it riding a bike or developing a killer backhand in tennis. Stunning new research now reveals that the brain can also achieve this motor memory with a prosthetic device, providing hope that physically disabled people can one day master control of artificial limbs with greater ease.In this study, to be published July 21 in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, macaque monkeys...

UC Berlekey-TGen scientists discovery published in Nature GeneticsCalifornia and Arizona researchers have identified a gene variant that carries nearly twice the risk of developing an increasingly common type of blood cancer, according to a study published online today by the science journal Nature Genetics.Investigators at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) found that mutations in a gene called C6orf15, or STG, are...

A large study of patients with mild cognitive impairment revealed that results from cognitive tests and brain scans can work as an early warning system for the subsequent development of Alzheimer's disease.The research found that among 85 participants in the study with mild cognitive impairment, those with low scores on a memory recall test and low glucose metabolism in particular brain regions, as detected through positron emission tomography (PET), had a 15-fold greater risk of developing...

Ask biologists how many species live in a pond, a grassland, a mountain range or on the entire planet, and the answers get increasingly vague. Hence the wide range of estimates for the planet's biodiversity, predicted to be between 2 million and 50 million species.A new way of estimating species richness reported this month in the journal Ecology Letters by University of California, Berkeley, ecologist John Harte and colleagues, will make such estimates more precise for habitats of all...

 A University of California, Berkeley, project to catalog nearly every living thing on the Polynesian island of Moorea is enlisting the help of the island's 5th graders and showing them that science is not for foreigners only.While conducting research for his thesis and for the Moorea Biocode Project, UC Berkeley graduate student Brad Balukjian has been teaching 5th graders at the Paopao Primary School about biodiversity and introducing them to the scientific study of the plants and...

As the popularity of take-home DNA kits to trace ancestry or calculate the risk for serious medical conditions grows, there is an increasingly critical need for federal oversight of "direct-to consumer" genetic testing, as well as of the use of DNA samples for research, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and several other academic institutions.In the past year, scientists, sociologists and bioethicists, among others, have come to agree that the...

South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds paid a visit to UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab last Friday (June 12) to get a feel for the type of research operation the campus and the lab plan to build at his state's famed Homestake gold mine.Rounds has strongly supported efforts to turn the mine, founded in 1877 by mining magnate and California Sen. George Hearst and taken out of operation in 2002, into the world's premier underground research laboratory, and the only one capable of answering critical...

 Although it is known that infants are more susceptible than adults to the toxic effects of pesticides, this increased vulnerability may extend much longer into childhood than expected, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.Among newborns, levels of paraoxonase 1 (PON1), an enzyme critical to the detoxification of organophosphate pesticides, average one-third or less than those of the babies' mothers. It was thought that PON1 enzyme activity in...

 Although it is known that infants are more susceptible than adults to the toxic effects of pesticides, this increased vulnerability may extend much longer into childhood than expected, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.Among newborns, levels of paraoxonase 1 (PON1), an enzyme critical to the detoxification of organophosphate pesticides, average one-third or less than those of the babies' mothers. It was thought that PON1 enzyme activity in...