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Synthetic biology: Key field of the future

01/06/12 Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies — Synthetic biology and bioengineering could have a significant future impact with the potential to pro-actively manage biology and reshape many industrial sectors. The current status of the field was indicated at a recent industry event, the Synthetic Biology conference at the University of California, San Francisco, held on December 14, 2011 and featuring presentations by many faculty and students from UC Berkeley's bioengineering department.

Leaping lizards and the power of interdisciplinary collaboration

01/04/12 The Washington Post — What happens when a lizard slips just before leaping into the air? Does the tail go up or down? And what on earth does it have to do with emergency first responders and retaining students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields? The answers start with a study by scientists and engineers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Berkeley engineer reduces violence against Darfuri women through better cooking technology

01/03/12 San Jose Mercury News — Zam Zam refugee camp in North Darfur is home to 200,000 refugees fleeing the civil war in Sudan. Women in the camps cook over open fires and then walk for miles through dust and desolation to search for firewood. Every wood-collecting trip exposes women to rape by Sudanese militiamen. UC Berkeley's Ashok Gadgil thought the women of Darfur deserved better cooking technology. So he not only worked with the women to develop a better stove, he also created a local market for it.

Berkeley Engineering alum’s designs help Santiago’s skyscrapers endure earthquakes

01/03/12 Bloomberg — Civil engineer Juan Carlos de la Llera, president and co-founder of the engineering company Sirve, designed the quake-resistant technology that helped save Santiago's tallest skyscraper, the 52-story, $200 million Torre Titanium La Portada office building, during the 8.8-magnitude Chilean quake in February 2010. De la Llera earned his doctorate in civil engineering from UC Berkeley.

Computers implanted in brain could help paralyzed

12/27/11 San Francisco Chronicle — It sounds like science fiction, but scientists around the world are getting tantalizingly close to building the mind-controlled prosthetic arms, computer cursors and mechanical wheelchairs of the future. Jose Carmena, a neuro-engineer at UC Berkeley and co-director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses at Berkeley and UCSF, puts his thoughts succinctly: "There's going to be an explosion in neural prosthetics."

Luke Lee awarded Gates Foundation grant

12/16/11 — Berkeley Bioengineering Professor Luke Lee has been selected to receive a Point-of-Care Diagnostics grant through Grand Challenges in Global Health, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project goal is to develop a microfluidic Universal Sample Preparation (USP) module that is relevant for parallel diagnostics of infectious diseases. The grant will provide $1.47 million in research funding over three years.

Computer scientists may have what it takes to help cure cancer

12/05/11 The New York Times — Berkeley Engineering professor David Patterson discusses how computer scientists will fight the war on cancer by taking on the Big Data challenges of information processing, genome sequencing, cloud computing, crowd-sourcing and other complex tasks. Patterson argues, "Given that millions of people do have and will get cancer, if there is a chance that computer scientists may have the best skill set to fight cancer today, as moral people aren't we obligated to try?"

Driving toward millivolt electronics

12/01/11 EDN — Thanks to new behaviors and the characteristics of materials at small geometries, nanotechnology has the potential to introduce great change to the electronics arena. UC Berkeley's Center for E3S (Energy Efficient Electronics Science) is working to develop fundamental devices that will result in a millionfold reduction in power for future generations of electronic systems. EECS professor Eli Yablonovitch leads the research group, which focuses on nanoelectronics, nanomechanics, nanophotonics, nanomagnetics, and system integration.

UC Berkeley gets grant for quake-warning study

11/30/11 San Francisco Chronicle — With the goal of giving people precious seconds to run for their lives before the Big One hits, three West Coast universities will share a $6 million grant to improve an earthquake early warning system already being tested, UC Berkeley announced Tuesday. Berkeley and Caltech are currently testing ShakeAlert, a warning system that is supposed to open a pop-up alert on personal computers at the first sign of a major quake.

Expanding the reach of robotics

11/29/11 — From flying and crawling through quake-ravaged wreckage to performing dexterous feats of minimally invasive surgery and enabling paraplegics to walk, the vision of what robots and intelligent machines can do has come a long way since I first began the robotics effort at Berkeley in 1983.

An ergonomic retrofit

11/29/11 — The Memorial Stadium seismic retrofit project necessitates boring some 40,000 holes into concrete foundations with drills weighing up to 45 pounds-potentially exposing drill operators to the harmful effects of muscle injury, dust, and vibration exposure. “These workers typically have pain and fatigue in the wrists, shoulders and back; some have also experienced damage to the nerves in the fingers,” says David Rempel, bioengineering professor and director of the Ergonomics Program in UC's Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. The Ergonomics Program has been designing ways to minimize the adverse health effects of such labor on workers.

A Cal ‘Kinect-ion’

11/29/11 — In the fall of 2008, Jack Kang (B.S'04 EECS) was settling into a new marketing position at Marvell, a Santa Clara-based semiconductor company, when Microsoft came knocking with a mysterious assignment for the company. Working on an undisclosed product, the computing giant needed a team to design a complex chip for manufacture on a massive scale. “This project was very secretive,” recalls Kang. Many months into the development of a specialized microprocessor, he got his answer. The mystery chip was destined for Kinect, Microsoft's controller-free and immensely popular electronic game sensor device.

‘Rayce’ down under

11/29/11 — For the first time since its founding in 1990, CalSol, Berkeley Engineering's solar car team, competed in the international World Solar Challenge (WSC). Held in October in Australia, the WSC drew 37 solar-powered cars to a weeklong “rayce” crossing 3,000 kilometers of the barren Outback from Darwin to Adelaide. CalSol's Impulse team members posted these reports from the field.

The partnership at the heart of heart-monitoring technology

11/25/11 The Atlantic — We have the diagnostic tools to monitor our hearts thanks to the work of two creative and persistent men, Berkeley Engineering alumnus Bruce Del Mar (B.S.'37 ME) and Norman "Jeff" Holter. Their collaboration, which spanned two decades, produced a commercially viable heart monitor known as the Holter Monitor Test.

Cal engineering dean supports diversity plan

11/21/11 California Watch — S. Shankar Sastry, the dean of UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, expressed support today for a recommendation from a student group that the college create a recruitment and retention plan for women and underrepresented minority students. The move came after representatives from several engineering student groups presented a list of recommendations to increase diversity and equity in the college at a meeting of the college's executive committee.

Cal, Stanford students battle IBM supercomputer

11/17/11 CBS News — Two days before the Big Game, students from UC Berkeley and Stanford battled IBM supercomputer Watson in a game of Jeopardy. While Watson came in first in the "IBM Watson Stanford/Berkeley Jeopardy! Challenge," Berkeley placed second, only a thousand points short of Watson, the best performance yet of any student team against the supercomputer. Watch video.

Berkeley reveals plan for academic center in China

11/16/11 The New York Times — The University of California, Berkeley announced this week that it plans to open a large research and teaching facility here as part of a broader plan to bolster its presence in China. The public university said the Shanghai center would cater to engineering graduate students and be financed over the next five years largely by the Shanghai government and companies operating here. The program is expected to begin in July 2012.