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Fire-cleared area in Yosemite

Wildfire management vs. suppression benefits forest and watershed

10/24/16 — An unprecedented 40-year experiment in Yosemite National Park, led by a team of Berkeley civil and environmental engineers, strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.

Huawei puts $1M into AI research partnership with UC Berkeley

10/11/16 TechCrunch — China's Huawei on Tuesday announced a $1 million partnership between its Noah's Ark Laboratory and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab to perform basic research into machine learning, computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence.
Ali Javey and graduate student Sujay Desai with a vacuum probe station

Smallest. Transistor. Ever.

10/10/16 — For more than a decade, engineers have been racing to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. Now, a research team led by EECS professor Ali Javey has surpassed a theoretical limit of physics and created the smallest transistor reported to date.
Berkeley research team and their autonomous car

Berkeley team recognized for autonomous car research

10/05/16 — ME professors Francesco Borrelli and Karl Hedrick, Ph.D. student Ashwin Carvalho, and Associate Director for Self-Driving Vehicle Development Chan Kyu Lee were in attendance for the U.S. Department of Transportation's announcement of a new policy on Automated Vehicle Development.
VeHICaL project approach graphic

NSF funds cyber-physical systems research

09/06/16 National Science Foundation — The NSF on Tuesday awarded $4.6 million to VeHICaL (Verified Human Interfaces, Control, and Learning for Semi-Autonomous Systems), a project led by by EECS professor Sanjit Seshia that seeks to "impact the way humans collaborate and interact with automation." Researchers include EECS professors Ruzena Bajcsy, Shankar Sastry, Bjoern Hartmann, Claire Tomlin, and Tom Griffiths.
LBNL molecular foundry

Adam Arkin on Big Data and big problems

09/02/16 — Bioengineering professor Adam Arkin digs deep on current and future efforts to to harness the genetic potential of the earth to solve problems in soil quality, water quality, plant productivity, nutrition, and human-impacted health.
phasor measurement unit and EECS professor Alexandra von Meier

Detecting cybersecurity threats by taking the grid’s pulse

08/10/16 IEEE Spectrum — EECS professor Alexandra von Meier and power quality expert Alex McEachern set out to build an advanced power sensor for utility distribution grids, and accidentally produced a promising tool to protect those grids from cyber attack.
The mountainous headwaters of the East River catchment, located in the Upper Colorado River Basin

Lab to lead new watershed study

08/04/16 Berkeley Lab — Geophysicist Susan Hubbard (Ph.D'98 CEE), Berkeley Lab's associate director for earth and environmental sciences, will head up a three-year DOE initiative to quantify how mountainous watershed floods, drought, fire and early snowmelt affect the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon and metals.
Tiny (3mm) sensor on a fingertip

Sprinkling of neural dust opens door to electroceuticals

08/04/16 — Tiny, implantable wireless sensors have been developed by a team led by EECS professors Michel Maharbiz and Jose Carmena. The dust-sized prototypes could stimulate and monitor internal nerves, muscles and organs, as well as introduce the possibility of "electroceuticals" to be used in a wide variety of treatments.
Voice commanad prompt on an Android phone

How secret voice commands in YouTube could hijack your phone

07/18/16 PCWorld — EECS Ph.D. student Nick Carlini, professor David Wagner and a team of Georgetown University researchers have revealed how secret commands could use voice-control tools like Siri and Google Now to take over your smartphone.
Diagram of the effect of transforming growth factor-beta 1 on stem cell activity and aging

The bloody battle against aging

06/29/16 Berkeley Science Review — By examining the chemical makeup of young blood, bioengineers Irina Conboy and David Schaffer have discovered a drug that could turn back the age clock.
Marcus Lehmann presents the Wave Carpet at Berkeley Lab

Wave energy’s make-or-break moment

06/21/16 University of California — The CalWave team, led by researchers from Berkeley Engineering and Berkeley Lab, is working to take their unique “wave carpet” technology out of the test tank and into the open ocean, in hopes of winning a $2.5 million Department of Energy competition.
Size comparison of liposomes and 3HM nanocarriers

Finding chemo

06/17/16 Berkeley Science Review — New cancer treatments come in tiny packages, like the 3HM nanocarriers being developed by materials science professor Ting Xu and her collaborators to protect drugs during their journey through the bloodstream to brain tumors.
Two two VelociRoACH robots work together to climb a step

Roach-like robots run, climb and communicate with people

06/13/16 National Science Foundation — While the ability of insects to go just about anywhere can be disturbing at times, electrical engineer Ronald Fearing sees their talent as inspiration for a special breed of tiny robots that can travel rough terrain, follow instructions, and work together to save lives in a disaster.
Per Peterson amid cooling pipes

An energy strategy that can take the heat

06/08/16 Berkeley Research — Working with Chinese colleagues through the Clean Energy Research Center for Water-Energy Technologies, nuclear engineering professor Per Peterson is exploring the use of superhot molten salts to boost efficiency in both nuclear and solar energy production.
Artist

On the road to driverless cars

05/24/16 Berkeley Science Review — How Berkeley research, including foundational work by PATH plus recent advances in engineering and computer science, is fundamental to industry progress on automated transportation.
Postdoctoral researcher Florence Bonvin and David Sedlak use liquid chromatography as one of their tools to track chemical contaminants in water supplies

Hazards and opportunities in the pipeline

05/10/16 Berkeley Research — Environmental engineering professor David Sedlak, whose book Water 4.0 calls for a new revolution in urban water systems, is studying the fate of chemical contaminants in wastewater, seeking better ways to treat and clean the water we depend on.