10/01/10 IEEE Spectrum — An interview with Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, exploring the historical, philosophical and technical aspects of telepresence robots.
08/08/10 ABC News — Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a laser backpack that scans its surroundings and creates an instant 3D model. The modeling tool, built by a team led by electrical engineering professor Avideh Zakhor, can make video games more realistic and buildings more energy efficient.
07/05/10 Berkeley Lab — Engineers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California Berkeley have created the first nanosized light mill motor whose rotational speed and direction can be controlled by tuning the frequency of the incident light waves. This new light mill opens the door to a broad range of valuable applications, including a new generation of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), nanoscale solar light harvesters, and bots that can perform in vivo manipulations of DNA and other biological molecules.
06/07/10 — Professor Van P. Carey of UC Berkeley's Mechanical Engineering Department is among a select group of professors worldwide that have been selected to receive awards as part of Hewlett Packard's 2010 Innovation Research Program. The award will provide $100K for the 2010-2011 academic year in support of Carey's research. The project led by Professor Carey teams him with HP's Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab in an effort to develop compact and accurate models of the energy use in data centers.
06/03/10 — Albert P. Pisano, Professor and Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering and currently serving as Acting Dean of the College of Engineering at Berkeley, has been unanimously elected to receive Columbia University's 2009 Egleston Medal for Distinguished Engineering Achievement. Pisano was elected to receive the award for his "extraordinary pioneering work in the field of micro-electromechanical systems."
05/18/10 The New York Times — Andrew S. Grove, the former chief executive of Intel, is taking the next step in his quest to infuse the engineering discipline of Silicon Valley into the development of new medical treatments. Mr. Grove has pledged $1.5 million so that the University of California campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley can start a joint master's degree program aimed at so-called translational medicine -- the process of turning biological discoveries into drugs and medical devices that can help patients.
04/30/10 EcoEasy Challenge — Four mechanical engineering undergraduates from UC Berkeley, all women and representing the only U.S. team that reached the finals in the inaugural Staples Global EcoEasy Challenge, have placed as runners-up for first prize for designing the EcoStapler, a mini-stapler made from environmentally preferable materials. Cynthia Bayley, Griselda Cardona, Maha Haji, and Sarah Stern, calling their team the Explosi-Divas, took home a $5,000 prize.
04/07/10 — Clean and green technologies are on the rise in Silicon Valley. Electric car startups like Tesla Motors and solar cell and biofuel innovators are snapping up commercial space, while established companies like Applied Materials are growing their clean energy divisions. “Over the past six years, clean tech's portion of venture [capital] investments has grown from merely 3 percent to more than 25 percent,” reported the San Jose Mercury News in January. The newspaper went on to pronounce clean and green technologies the next great wave of innovation in Silicon Valley. It's no surprise to five Berkeley Engineering alumni who work in the up-and-coming sector.
04/07/10 — At UC Berkeley's Recreational Sports Facility, where Berkeley mechanical engineering students Kimberly Lau and Maha Haji work out, they noticed all those people burning calories on exercise machines. Racing on treadmills. Striding on ellipticals. Churning on stationary bikes. What if that energy could be harnessed? Could workouts be more energy wise? In this video, they explore these questions and learn how you can make greener choices at the gym.
03/31/10 Yahoo Finance News — Taking environmental consciousness to a global level, Staples, Inc., the world's largest office products company, today announced the universities with finalist concepts for the inaugural Staples Global EcoEasy Challenge. Four mechanical engineering undergraduates from UC Berkeley, all women, represent the only U.S. team that has reached the finals. Cynthia Bayley, Griselda Cardona, Maha Haji, and Sarah Stern, calling their team the Explosi-Divas, have designed the EcoStapler
03/03/10 — Inventor, researcher and educator Boris Rubinsky has taken his show on the road. During three prolific decades in Berkeley's labs and classrooms, the professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering stacked up nearly 40 patents and cofounded half a dozen startups in surgical techniques, bionic technology and imaging. Now Rubinsky is finding inspiration in his new role as health care advocate for the economically disadvantaged, building endorsement for his conviction that inexpensive but scientifically advanced technologies can improve health care for underserved populations.
03/02/10 CNN.com — Earthquakes alone don't kill people; collapsed buildings do. But can people engineer buildings that wouldn't crumble when subjected to the rumblings of the Earth? High costs keep countries such as Haiti from adopting the latest building techniques and technologies, said Nicholas Sitar, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. He said making buildings more basic might actually make them stronger and would cost less than high-tech upgrades
02/25/10 UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Department — Continuation funding over the next three years, bringing the total to $5M, has been awarded by DARPA to Professor Costas Grigoropoulos of the Mechanical Engineering Department for research on "Nanofabrication by Tips coupled with Lasers."
02/22/10 — Professor Emeritus Erich G. Thomsen has died at the age of 103. Erich graduated in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, with a B.S. in 1936, M.S. in 1941 and Ph.D. in 1943. After a brief engineering career of some five years in the refrigeration and air-conditioning industry, he joined the faculty of the University of California in 1951. He specialized in teaching and research in metal processing and published some 100 technical papers in engineering journals.
02/18/10 Material Views — In his IoM Franklin Mehl Award lecture this morning, Robert Ritchie, professor of materials science at UC Berkeley, took his audience on a tour de force through the cutting edge of scientific research on mechanical behavior of biological materials and the potential to synthetically produce nature-like structural materials
02/11/10 National Public Radio — Do all the fancy electronics cars need to squeeze 40 or 50 miles out of a gallon of gas mean we've compromised on safety? "Absolutely not," says Simon Washington, director of the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He says that when carmakers are faced with a trade-off between safety and fuel economy, safety typically wins.
02/09/10 ABC News — Navy Commander Scott Shackleton, fifth cousin of the great explorer and assistant dean for capital projects and facilities in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, found his opportunity to follow in Sir Ernest Shackleton's footsteps. For the last three weeks, Cmdr. Shackleton served as an operations officer at McMurdo Station, near the Antarctic coast, as part of this year's Operation Deep Freeze, the annual resupply mission for the research personnel who live on Antarctica year-round.
02/03/10 — Their ingenious designs integrate mechanical and electrical systems into working prototypes that may zoom, zing, fly, agitate, pull, dispense or write their way into engineering glory. At the end of every semester, students in ME 102 "Mechatronics" demonstrate their final mechanical engineering design projects for the public during an open house in Etcheverry Hall. "It was almost overwhelming to see what the students could not only dream up but also fabricate and test in such a short amount of time," says graduate student instructor Sarah Wodin-Schwartz.
01/19/10 FOXNews.com — Tech wizards at UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering are developing mini-robots to help locate earthquake survivors easily, cheaply, and quickly, without jeopardizing the lives of rescuers. They're made of cardboard, plastic, and parts of computers and bits of old toys, and operated by remote control. The goal of the project: to develop swarms of the cheap, diminutive robots that can hunt down the survivors of disasters and relay the location of survivors back to the surface.
01/18/10 ABC News — Earthquake rescues could be made safer and faster with a new robot being developed at UC Berkeley by engineering grad students Paul Birkmeyer and Kevin Peterson with Professor Ron Fearing.