UC Berkeley News

When Pliny the Younger recorded his first-hand experience of the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius 2,000 years ago — a cataclysm that buried Pompeii and killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder — he provided enough detail about the precise date to allow scientists to benchmark methods for dating volcanic eruptions. In a study published today (Sept.

A double-lung transplant reshaped Professor Greg Niemeyer’s understanding of water as circulation, inspiring his latest art installation, now on view at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery. Visitors engage with UC Berkeley Professor Greg Niemeyer’s interactive installation Water Council in the campus's Worth Ryder Art Gallery. The stools represent competing water-governance regimes that shape a shared digital watershed.

In Helen Bateup’s UC Berkeley lab, graduate students and postdocs painstakingly nurture tiny balls of human brain cells for months and even years until they develop structures that mimic those in the brains of newborns shortly after birth. By mutating genes in these so-called organoids, Bateup and her Berkeley team have now discovered a source of seizures in children with one of the most common forms of early-onset epilepsy — and have identified possible treatment strategies.

UC Berkeley was honored today (Sept. 22) as the nation’s top public university by U.S. News & World Report, with programs in economics and data science singled out as the best among every school in the country. Berkeley tied for the top spot among public universities with UCLA. The magazine has ranked Berkeley No. 1 or No. 2 throughout the 21st century.

“Capitalism was under construction from about 1500 to about 1800,” says Professor Trevor Jackon. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Jackson’s recent book, The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, details this complex history.

Follow Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. See all Berkeley Talks. When W. Kamau Bell was a child, his mother bought the family a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home computer of the early 1980s. He had Pong, a ColecoVision and, later, a MiniDisc player. Today, he is still the person his family calls when the TV stops working — and the father who sees technology’s potential to connect his introverted 11-year-old with cousins over FaceTime.

Research, Science & environment, Technology & engineering Charred papyrus scrolls from a library inundated by volcanic ash in 79 C.E. are largely unreadable. UC Berkeley scientists teamed up to create and burn their own scrolls to test a new way to decipher them. A contemporary papyrus scroll before and after burning in a nearly oxygen-free chamber, which carbonized but did not destroy the material.

Forbes has once again ranked UC Berkeley No. 1 among public universities in its annual list of America’s Top Colleges, continuing several years of No. 1 placements in the publication’s annual list. Berkeley came in at No. 9 overall in the ranking, which was published Thursday, Sept. 10.

You’re hurrying out of the grocery story to drive home and start cooking dinner. As the doors close behind you, you step into the parking lot and head… where? Where, among the rows of gleaming vehicles, did you park your car? The memory seems to have disappeared. One important form of memory, episodic memory, is the recollection of these kinds of moments in life. Episodic memories are an important part of how we create long-term memories.

For some UC Berkeley alums, volunteering in the Peace Corps is a chance to take what they learned in the classroom and apply it around the world, from disease prevention in Rwanda to English instruction in Ethiopia. For others, service abroad sets them on a new professional path entirely. And for more than six decades, that drive to support others has shaped individual lives and Berkeley’s identity as a powerhouse for public service.