UC Berkeley
America's brown-headed cowbird and the European cuckoo are the classic parasitic birds, laying their eggs in the nests of other bird species and leaving the chick-rearing to another parent. But while a cuckoo hatchling thrives by muscling its host's eggs out of the nest and hogging all the food, a new study shows that cowbird chicks survive with a less ruthless strategy.
Photos of red sprites, blue jets, elves and sprite halos are now flowing into the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory from the first satellite instrument devoted to the study of these puzzling high-altitude lightning flashes.
Organisms ranging from bacteria to humans navigate environments that can contain dangerously too little or too much oxygen. Yet, scientists know little about how animals sense oxygen levels around them. Researchers from the Berkeley and San Francisco campuses of the University of California have now discovered how the nematode C. elegans senses oxygen levels in order to steer clear of surrounding areas that are too low or too high in oxygen.
Take something no wider than a human hair and shrink it a thousand fold to a few nanometers across, and its electronic and other properties change radically. But whether the crystal structure of these nanoparticles remains basically the same is a matter scientists continue to debate.
A mysterious 17th century solar funk that some have linked to Europe's Little Ice Age and to global climate change, becomes even more of an enigma as a result of new observations by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers. For 70 years, from 1645 until 1714, early astronomers reported almost no sunspot activity. The number of sunspots - cooler areas on the sun that appear dark against the brighter surroundings - dropped a thousandfold, according to some estimates. Though activity on the sun ebbs and flows today in an 11-year cycle, it has not been that quiet since.
Forget boxers Oscar de la Hoya and Shane Mosley. The fastest punches are delivered by a lowly crustacean - the stomatopod, or mantis shrimp. With the help of a BBC camera crew and the loan of a high-speed video camera, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have recorded the swiftest kick, and perhaps most brutal attack, of any predator. The shrimp flail their club-shaped front leg at peak speeds of 23 meters per second to shatter the hard shells of their prey.
Investing in renewable energy such as solar, wind and the use of municipal and agricultural waste for fuel would produce more American jobs than a comparable investment in the fossil fuel energy sources in place today, according to a report issued today by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
The same cutting-edge technology that speeded sequencing of the human genome could, by the end of the decade, tell us once and for all whether life ever existed on Mars, according to a University of California, Berkeley, chemist. Richard Mathies, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and developer of the first capillary electrophoresis arrays and new energy transfer fluorescent dye labels - both used in today's DNA sequencers - is at work on an instrument that would use these technologies to probe Mars dust for evidence of life-based amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
The mere thought of hauling a 70-pound pack across miles of rugged terrain or up 50 flights of stairs is enough to evoke a grimace in even the burliest individuals. But breakthrough robotics research at the University of California, Berkeley, could soon bring welcome relief -- a self-powered exoskeleton to effectively take the load off people's backs. "We set out to create an exoskeleton that combines a human control system with robotic muscle," said Homayoon Kazerooni, professor of mechanical engineering and director of UC Berkeley's Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory. "We've designed this system to be ergonomic, highly maneuverable and technically robust so the wearer can walk, squat, bend and swing from side to side without noticeable reductions in agility."
A federally funded online absentee voting system scheduled to debut in less than two weeks has security vulnerabilities that could jeopardize voter privacy and allow votes to be altered, according to a report prepared by four prominent researchers invited to analyze the system. All experts in cyber-security, they say the risks associated with Internet voting cannot be eliminated and urge that the system be shut down.
In an important milestone in the fields of nanosciences and nanoengineering, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University are announcing that they have created the first working, integrated silicon circuit that successfully incorporates carbon nanotubes in its design.
Radioactive potassium, common enough on Earth to make potassium-rich bananas one of the ?hottest? foods around, appears also to be a substantial source of heat in the Earth?s core, according to recent experiments by University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists.
People with a genetic mutation that makes them more resistant to the AIDS virus probably have smallpox to thank, according to two population geneticists at the University of California, Berkeley. About 10 percent of Europeans have a mutation that disables a protein the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV-1) uses to slip into immune system cells. HIV-1 has a harder time infecting people who have a mutation in one of the two genes that code for this receptor protein, and if these people become infected, their disease progresses more slowly. Those with mutations in both copies of the gene are almost completely resistant to the virus
The "dark matter" that comprises a still-undetected one-quarter of the universe is not a uniform cosmic fog, says a University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist, but instead forms dense clumps that move about like dust motes dancing in a shaft of light. In a paper submitted this week to Physical Review D, Chung-Pei Ma, an associate professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, and Edmund Bertschinger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), prove that the motion of dark matter clumps can be modeled in a way similar to the Brownian motion of air-borne dust or pollen.
As scientists shrink materials down to the nanometer scale, creating nanodots, nanoparticles, nanorods and nanotubes a few tens of atoms across, they've found weird and puzzling behaviors that have fired their imaginations and promised many unforeseen applications. Now University of California, Berkeley, scientists have found another unusual effect that could have both good and bad implications for semiconductor devices once they've been shrunk to the nanometer scale.
