Latest UC Berkeley Stories

HERNDON, Va., Oct. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. today announced that it has donated $50,000 to both the Stanford Solar Car Project and the University of California, Berkeley's CalSol teams in order to help fund the teams' participation in the 2011 World Solar Challenge. The funds will help cover the costs of designing and building the solar vehicles, as well as the fees to enter the competition. The 2011 World Solar Challenge began on Oct. 16, 2011 in Darwin,...

The end of a California program granting free access to carpool lanes by solo drivers of hybrid cars has unintentionally slowed traffic in all lanes, according to transportation engineers at the University of California, Berkeley. The program, which began in 2005 and ended on July 1, gave consumers an extra incentive to buy low-emission cars. By 2011, some 85,000 low-emission vehicles had gotten the coveted yellow stickers that gave them entry into the carpool lanes, but critics of the...

The largest survey to date of distant exploding stars is giving astronomers new clues to what’s behind the Type Ia supernovae they use to measure distances across the cosmos. These stellar explosions helped astronomers conclude more than a decade ago that dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe, and today (Tuesday, Oct. 4) earned the discoverers – including UC Berkeley physicist Saul Perlmutter – the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. But what caused them was a mystery....

If tripping in public or mistaking an overweight woman for a mother-to-be leaves you red-faced, don’t feel bad. A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that people who are easily embarrassed are also more trustworthy, and more generous. In short, embarrassment can be a good thing. “Embarrassment is one emotional signature of a person to whom you can entrust valuable resources. It’s part of the social glue that fosters trust and cooperation in everyday...

  Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have turned back the clock on mature muscle tissue, coaxing it back to an earlier stem cell stage to form new muscle. Moreover, they showed in mice that the newly reprogrammed muscle stem cells could be used to help repair damaged tissue. The achievement, described in the Sept. 23 issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology, "opens the door to the development of new treatments to combat the degeneration of muscle associated with...

UC Berkeley researchers decode and reconstruct dynamic visual experiences, in this case Hollywood movie trailers Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one's own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have...

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that it is possible to reduce the minimum voltage necessary to store charge in a capacitor, an achievement that could reduce the power draw and heat generation of today's electronics. "Just like a Formula One car, the faster you run your computer, the hotter it gets. So the key to having a fast microprocessor is to make its building block, the transistor, more energy efficient," said Asif Khan, UC Berkeley graduate student in...

Genetic detective work by an international group of researchers may have solved a decades-long mystery of the source of a devastating tree-killing fungus that has hit six of the world’s seven continents. In a study published today (Thursday, Sept. 1) in the peer-reviewed journal Phytopathology, California emerged as the top suspect for the pathogen, Seiridium cardinale, that is the cause of cypress canker disease. It was in California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1928 that S. cardinale...

Cloud-based data make searching the world’s museum collections easier What Google is attempting for books, the University of California, Berkeley, plans to do for the world's vertebrate specimens: store them in "the cloud." Online storage of information from vertebrate collections at the Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History, National Museum of Natural History in Paris, UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) and from hundreds of other animal collections...

By Robert Sanders, UC BerkeleyThe demise of the world's forests some 250 million years ago likely was accelerated by aggressive tree-killing fungi triggered by global climate change, according to a new study by a University of California, Berkeley, scientist and her Dutch and British colleagues.The researchers do not rule out the possibility that today's changing climate could cause a similar increase in pathogenic soil bacteria that could devastate forests already stressed by a warming...