Bend it like Wu
11/01/13 — Materials science and engineering professor Junqiao Wu and Berkeley Lab colleagues have created a microscale actuator that's smaller than the width of a human hair and can bend like a finger.
Materials science
Artificial forest
11/01/13 — Berkeley researchers have developed an “artificial forest,” a model that directly converts sunlight into chemical fuels in a process that mimics photosynthesis.
Computer memory can be read with a flash of light
06/11/13 Nature — Modern computer memory technologies come with a trade-off between speed and retention time. But a prototype memory device, co-developed by Berkeley Engineering materials scientist Ramamoorthy Ramesh, combines speed, endurance and low power consumption by uniting electronic storage with a readout based on the physics that powers solar panels.
Corrosion plagues new Bay Bridge span
05/20/13 Sacramento Bee — A comprehensive investigation by the Sacramento Bee of constructions problems on the new Bay Bridge quotes Berkeley materials science & engineering professor Thomas Devine as saying Caltrans used the wrong tests for corrosion, resulting in "essentially useless" findings. He called the agency's research "woefully inadequate" and "meaningless" for detecting "environmentally assisted cracking."
A hot spot
05/01/13 — Led by engineering professor Robert Ritchie, researchers have created a facility where scientists can test ceramic composites at extremely high temperatures.
Experts tackle questions about broken Bay Bridge anchor rods
04/16/13 Mercury News — Two Berkeley Engineering professors, metallurgical engineer Tom Devine and mechanical engineer Robert Ritchie, field questions about why 32 high-strength threaded steel anchor rods in the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge weakened and snapped.
Metallurgists say Bay Bridge bolt failure could have been prevented
04/10/13 Contra Costa Times — There are plenty of possible explanations for why 32 huge high-strength steel rods on the new Bay Bridge have snapped, says materials science professor Tom Devine, "but there are no excuses to have them behave in a brittle way."
Space-age ceramics get their toughest test
12/10/12 Berkeley Lab — Berkeley Lab researchers, led by UC Berkeley materials science professor Robert Ritchie, have developed a real-time CT-scan test rig for ceramic composites at ultrahigh temperatures.
In Memoriam: Professor Emeritus Alan Searcy
11/21/12 — Alan W. Searcy, a professor emeritus of materials science and engineering, passed away on Nov. 5 at the John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek.
Precious cargo
11/01/12 — Researcher Ting Xu's new nanocarrier delivers drugs directly to tumors, then disassembles to safely leave the body.
Powerboost
05/01/12 — Artificial photosynthesis, in which solar energy is converted directly into fuel, may just have gotten an important boost.
Berkeley Engineering professor Ron Gronsky selected as one of Princeton Review’s 300 “Best Professors”
04/03/12 The Daily Californian — Materials science and engineering professor Ron Gronsky is among seven UC Berkeley instructors listed as the country's 300 best professors in a book published by the Princeton Review. "We developed this project as a tribute to the extraordinary dedication of America's undergraduate college professors and the vitally important role they play in our culture, and our democracy," said Robert Franek, senior vice president of content development and publishing at Princeton Review.
Self-assembling nanorods: Berkeley researchers obtain 1, 2 and 3D nanorod arrays and networks
02/01/12 Berkeley Lab — A relatively fast, easy and inexpensive technique for inducing nanorods to self-assemble into one-, two- and even three-dimensional macroscopic structures has been developed by a team of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers. Leading this project was Ting Xu, a polymer scientist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley's Departments of Materials Science and Engineering, and Chemistry.
Berkeley Engineering nanotechnology expert Paul Alivisatos wins Wolf Prize in Chemistry
01/12/12 Nanowerk —
Paul Alivisatos, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering, and the Larry and Diane Bock Professor of Nanotechnology, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012. Alivisatos is an internationally recognized authority on nanochemistry and a pioneer in the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots and multi-shaped artificial nanostructures.
The brittleness of aging bones – more than a loss of bone mass
08/29/11 Berkeley Lab — New research at Berkeley shows that at microscopic dimensions, the age-related loss of bone quality can be every bit as important as the loss of quantity in the susceptibility of bone to fracturing. Using a combination of x-ray and electron based analytical techniques as well as macroscopic fracture testing, the researchers showed that the advancement of age ushers in a degradation of the mechanical properties of human cortical bone over a range of different size scales. "In characterizing age-related structural changes in human cortical bone at the micrometer and sub micrometer scales, we found that these changes degrade both the intrinsic and extrinsic toughness of bone," says Berkeley Engineering materials scientist Robert Ritchie.
Engineers stick together
04/08/11 — Take a big concrete wall, a few rolls of duct tape and what do you get? A networking opportunity that bonded Berkeley engineering students in more ways than one. To the cheers, applause and overall amusement of scores of onlookers, nine teams of undergraduates affixed one of their peers to a decidedly nonadhesive wall outside the Bechtel Engineering Center with yards of sticky, silvery stuff. The occasion was a first-ever Duct Tape Competition, one of a series of science and socially themed events celebrating UC Berkeley's EWeek.
Hotspots tamed by BEAST: Secrets of mysterious metal hotspots uncovered by new single molecule imaging technique
01/19/11 Berkeley Lab — The secrets behind the mysterious nano-sized electromagnetic "hotspots" that appear on metal surfaces under a light are finally being revealed with the help of a BEAST. Using the Brownian Emitter Adsorption Super-resolution Technique (BEAST), "we were able to map the electromagnetic field profile within a single hotspot as small as 15 nanometers with an accuracy down to 1.2 nanometers, in just a few minutes," says Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chaired Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley.
Strange new twist: Berkeley researchers discover Möbius symmetry in metamaterials
12/20/10 ScienceBlog — For years, scientists have been searching for an example of Möbius symmetry in natural materials without any success. Now a team of scientists, led by Xiang Zhang of UC Berkeley, has discovered Möbius symmetry in metamaterials - materials engineered from artificial "atoms" and "molecules" with electromagnetic properties that arise from their structure rather than their chemical composition. This discovery opens the door to finding and exploiting novel phenomena in metamaterials.
She paints for power
10/05/10 — What will power our next-generation gizmos? The microdevices, nanodevices and picodevices of the future? Our prediction: the Christine Ho battery. As an MSE graduate student, Ho (B.S.'05, M.S.'07, Ph.D.'10 MSE) developed a novel microbattery technology that promises to not only power the smallest of smart devices but also accelerate a variety of energy applications, from better home energy monitoring systems to large-scale energy storage solutions for wind and solar farms.
Silent and deadly: Smoke from cooking stoves kills poor people
09/23/10 The Economist — The appeal of a stove that produces more heat, more cleanly and with less fuel is clear. But Kirk Smith, a stove specialist at UC Berkeley, points out that most efforts to promote cleaner stoves have flopped. Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking. Another lesson of past failures, says UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kammen, who runs the World Bank's clean-energy programs, is the need for better data about how stoves are actually used