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Dean Sastry appointed to United Nations scientific advisory board

10/04/13 UNESCO — On Sept. 24, the first day of the UN General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his decision to create a Scientific Advisory Board to inform international decision-making on sustainable development. Dean S. Shankar Sastry will serve as one of two U.S. representatives on the 26-member board, which includes leading figures in the natural, social and human sciences. “We must strengthen the interface between science and policy,” said Ki-moon, “so that the latest scientific findings are reflected in our high-level policy discussions.” Ki-moon made the announcement during the inaugural meeting of the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, a platform created to realize the vision adopted at the UN's Rio+20 conference in 2012. He has entrusted UNESCO's Director-General to establish the advisory board.

The talk that wasn’t

09/27/13 Scientific American — A story from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum about EECS professor emeritus Manuel Blum -- a scientist, a teacher, a human, and "a person with a genuine curiosity about everything."

Flood fate: What Colorado’s disaster can teach us

09/24/13 California Magazine blog — Trying to plan and prepare for the kind of disastrous flooding that recently inundated Boulder, Colo., is a futile effort, says UC Berkeley hydrologist and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Sally Thompson. "Rainfall events like that are simply off the charts,” she says.

Berkeley to house NSF-funded nanoscale microscope

09/20/13 QB3 — Researchers using a new tool in QB3-Berkeley's Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center will investigate matter on an unprecedented scale, thanks to a $2 million NSF grant for the purchase and installation of a new ORION Nanofab microscope.

Bike path flaws add millions to Bay Bridge bill

09/12/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Robert Bea, CEE professor emeritus, says design and construction errors in the new Bay Bridge's bike and pedestrian path, which have already cost $3.8 million to remediate, are "symptomatic of a systemic problem ... I think it's becoming clear that the required level of scrutiny and checking has been deficient."

Design: The new toolkit for teaching engineering

09/11/13 — While some educators debate the pros and cons of online learning, we think there's a far more pressing and promising innovation that we need to offer today's engineering students: Immersion in experiential design.

With Melt app, Shane Wey rediscovers the power of voice

09/11/13 — For some, the explosion of visual media and the Internet's transformation as a space dominated by images feels inevitable. But Shane Wey (B.S. '10 EECS) sees things differently. Bucking the digital visual trend, Wey cofounded Melt, an audio-based micro-blogging app that underscores the power of voice. Have a listen.

March of the ‘zombie vortices’

09/11/13 — A team led by Philip Marcus, a mechanical engineering professor and computational physicist, shows how variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form. According to the researchers' models, the change in density is what triggers the violent birth of a new star, upending an otherwise stable dead zone of gas-or what Marcus calls ‘zombie vortices'

Cypriot BioE student receives HHMI award

09/11/13 — Elena Kassianidou left her home to come study in the United States seven years ago. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in bioengineering at Berkeley, she recently became the first student from Cyprus - and the first Berkeley-UCSF bioengineering student - to be awarded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) prestigious International Predoctoral Fellowship.

Berkeley Engineering team builds lamp robot at hackathon

09/09/13 Daily Pennsylvanian — A reporter for the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper shadows four Berkeley Engineering students as they try repeat the Berkeley team's 2012 victory at the PennApps Hackathon, the largest such student-run event in the country.

Berkeley’s computer science major places first in new ranking

09/06/13 Daily Californian — UC Berkeley won the top spot for computer science majors' return on investment in a new ranking compiled by Affordable Colleges Online, surpassing second-place Stanford in the comparison pitting lifetime earnings against educational costs.

Foundry@CITRIS startup aims to get out the (robotic) bugs

09/06/13 TC — Dash Robotics, one of the first projects to come through the Foundry@CITRIS, has created a low-cost “origami” robot that runs fast on six legs, weighs half an ounce, is controlled with a smartphone and can easily be built at home.

8 Berkeley Engineers among 2014 Siebel Scholars

09/06/13 Siebel Foundation — The Siebel Scholars Foundation has named 85 talented graduate students to its Siebel Scholars class of 2014, including five bioengineering students and three computer science students from UC Berkeley.

Oral history project recounts engineering marvels of the Bay Bridge

08/29/13 Bancroft Library — With the new Bay Bridge opening this holiday weekend, Berkeley Engineers Chuck Seim (CE '51) and Bob McDougald (CE '54) are two of more than a dozen people interviewed for the Bancroft Library's Bay Bridge Oral History Project. Seim has the rare distinction to have worked on all ten automobile bridges spanning the San Francisco Bay.

College of Engineering plans to implement design minor for fall 2014

08/21/13 Daily Californian — Berkeley Engineering is planning a new minor in engineering design aimed at giving students more opportunities for hands-on education and experience. The minor, expected to be implemented in fall 2014, will be an expansion of Engineering 10, a hands-on course that focuses on design and analysis.

New technique analyzes shadows to spot photo fakes

08/15/13 Inside Science — A new algorithm, developed by Berkeley computer science professor James O'Brien and colleagues at Dartmouth, can spot fake photos by looking for inconsistent shadows that are not always obvious to the naked eye.

Berkeley and Stanford launch nanofabrication partnership with TSI Semiconductors

08/15/13 — The College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley announced that its Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory, along with Stanford University's Nanofabrication Facility, has initiated a virtual technology transfer exercise with TSI Semiconductors, LLC, a specialty foundry offering flexible technology development and advanced manufacturing solutions for projects ranging from the smallest to very large lot sizes.

Will we ride the Hyperloop before decade’s end?

08/14/13 CNN — In an op-ed article for CNN, Berkeley Engineering alumnus Saurabh Amin (Ph.D. '11 CEE), an assistant professor at MIT, writes that in putting his Hyperloop transportation system before the public in conceptual form, Elon Musk might be able to minimize the design bottleneck that slows most massive infrastructure projects to a crawl.