UC Berkeley News

Follow Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. See all Berkeley Talks. When Princeton University Professor Mark Johnston’s daughter was 18 months old, she stood on a beach with what he describes as a “quizzical philosophical look on her face, as if she was thinking, ‘Is this my only life?'” That question is the heart of Johnston’s talk at UC Berkeley this past March, where he revisits a topic he wrote about two decades ago.

An artistic reconstruction of the understory of a late Cretaceous forest based on 75-million-year-old fossils from an inland environment that is now part of New Mexico. The scene depicts two hypothetical examples of dispersers of large flowering plant (angiosperm) seeds before the dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago.

Watch: How to enjoy gel nails without fear of UV skin damage Learn how a UC Berkeley professor's innovation can protect your skin. By Charlotte Khadra June 25, 2026 VIDEO Gel nails are beautiful and durable, but they come with a red flag warning: the LED UV light used to harden them may contribute to skin cancer risk. That led UC Berkeley Professor Alex Katz to come up with a no-worries way to protect your skin while nails cure.

Key takeaways Sudden cardiac arrest kills more than 300,000 people in the U.S. each year. A new AI system trained on heart scans can better identify those at risk. It may also have discovered something new about heart physiology. Findings were published today (June 24) in the journal Nature. Each year in the U.S., more than 300,000 people die from sudden cardiac arrest, a condition where the heart’s electrical system malfunctions without warning.

For decades, Maren Hassinger didn’t consider the political impact her art might have. She created work not to influence others, but to express how she felt about our shared humanity. “The problems that we associate with life here on Earth are problems that are caused by our inability to see each other as one,” Hassinger has said. “One thing that we all share is nature.” Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Hassinger is widely considered a foundational figure in Black conceptual art.

A misidentified skull in a museum collection turned out to be a very early saber-toothed cat, highlighting the evolutionary tendency toward longer and longer fangs. An artist’s rendering of what the early saber-toothed cat, Adelphailurus kansensis, might have looked like in its heyday 5 million years ago.

Millions of Californians, in every part of the state, live with an uneasy day-to-day preoccupation: Housing is so expensive here, food and gas and utilities are so expensive — would it make sense to pull up stakes and leave for another state? In a new study, researchers at the California Policy Lab dove deep into the data to discover who leaves, where they go and what happens to their finances in their new communities.

Most of us have used the sniff test to decide whether a slightly expired bottle of milk or a week-old box of takeout is still good to eat. But while the human nose can be quite astute, it doesn’t always catch everything. Each year, millions of people in the U.S. are sickened by food-borne pathogens that thrive in undercooked or spoiled food.

Awards, Campus & community, Campus news The 2026 Best Global Universities rankings evaluated 2,250 research institutions from more than 100 countries.

Micah Parzen, a longtime museum leader who oversaw the multiyear transformation of one of the country’s most visited anthropology museums, has been named the next executive director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Parzen, a Berkeley alum, has spent the past 16 years helming the Museum of Us in San Diego’s Balboa Park through a period of profound change.