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Teachers at the top of their game

10/05/10 — Berkeley faculty know their material. Yet to teach it so that students not only understand but find inspiration and wonder in it, takes special talent and dedication. In April, civil and environmental engineering professor Juan Pestana-Nascimento and associate professor Dan Klein of electrical engineering and computer sciences joined two other faculty members elsewhere on campus in receiving the Berkeley 2010 Distinguished Teaching Award. In the award's 51-year history, only 236 faculty have received it, among the thousands who have taught Berkeley courses.

Think globally, surf locally

10/05/10 — Modern surfboards are made with polyurethane foam, fiberglass and epoxy resin, decidedly unromantic and toxic petrochemicals that can harm workers and the environment during manufacture, then languish in landfills at the end of their life. Many manufacturers are making surfboards greener by switching to natural materials. They're doing the right thing, right? Not necessarily, says 26-year-old Tobias Schultz (M.S.'10 ME), a lightly tanned, blond-ponytailed Santa Cruz native who just graduated with his mechanical engineering master's and a certificate in Engineering and Business for Sustainability. He is also the author of an extensive study on the carbon footprint of the surfing lifestyle.

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.

UC Berkeley professor James Demmel receives 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award

10/01/10 PRWeb — James Demmel, UC Berkeley professor of mathematics and of computer sciences, has been named the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his contributions to high-performance linear algebra software. The software he has helped develop is used by hundreds of sites worldwide, including all U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, NASA research laboratories, many universities, and companies in the aerospace, environmental, pharmaceutical and other industries.

Experience keeps UC Berkeley’s Robert Bea in the hot spotlight

09/27/10 San Jose Mercury News — Shuttered in his home office, Robert Bea is plugging away at a report that will, once again, make him a target. The UC Berkeley engineering professor is investigating, with a group he assembled, the April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The blast killed 11 workers and created the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The report, due in December, likely will place blame on oil giant BP, which leased the platform, and the facility's operator, Transocean. And it is likely to bring a volley of public-relations cannonballs to Bea's front door, as did his criticism of Army Corps of Engineers following the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. But despite the stress, health problems and angst, Bea is not apologizing.

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

UK animators use CellScope to film smallest stop-motion animation ever

09/20/10 Popular Science — Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope -- developed by Berkeley Engineering's Daniel Fletcher and winner of a PopSci Best of What's New award in 2008 -- the team behind the Wallace & Gromit series has made the world's smallest stop-motion animation film. Nokia commissioned the film in celebration of CellScope's potential to improve medicine in the developing world. The film features a 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency and rides a bumblebee.

PG&E exceeded its own maximum pressure standard on San Bruno pipeline

09/17/10 San Jose Mercury News — Federal investigators have determined that the natural gas in the pipeline that exploded in San Bruno was running at a higher pressure than the maximum limit PG&E has told the public it maintained. "Between 375 and 400 psi still sounds safe, but it's all premised on a defect-free line," said Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley with extensive pipeline experience. "Here's where the demands on the pipeline from internal pressure have to be matched with a set of capacity questions. Was the steel brittle? Did we have a combination of corrosion and fatigue?"

UC Berkeley Computer Science announces 2011 Siebel Scholars

09/17/10 Siebel Foundation — Computer Science graduate students David Wong and Jerry Zhang are recipients of the Siebel Scholarship for the Class of 2011. Both are enrolled in the 5th Year Master's Degree program. The Siebel Scholars Program was established by the Siebel Foundation to recognize the most talented students at the world's leading graduate schools of business, computer science, and bioengineering.

Are batteries bad for the environment?

09/15/10 Discovery News — The wireless world we live in runs on batteries. That fancy smart phone is nothing more than a few ounces of dead weight in your pocket without a charged battery. But are we paying a high environmental price for all of this battery-operated convenience? "We take into account environmental impact because there is, to a significant degree, a battery recycling industry out there, [and] there are now conferences that deal with nothing but environmental impact and recycling of used batteries," said Elton Cairns, a rechargeable battery and fuel cell expert at UC Berkeley.

Fremont, Livermore have Bay Area’s highest risk gas pipelines

09/14/10 San Jose Mercury News — PG&E's highest-risk gas pipelines in the Bay Area are in the East Bay, according to a regulatory filing last year. The risk was ranked by combining the likelihood they would fail and the consequences to life and property if they did fail. Typically, engineers consider the population density of communities, the age of the pipelines and other factors, such as nearby earthquake faults, when assessing pipeline risk, said Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley who has worked extensively on natural gas and oil pipelines.

Artificial ‘e-skin’ may soon help robots ‘feel’

09/12/10 PCWorld — Engineers at UC Berkeley have developed a new technology that may help robots feel, give the sense of touch back to those with prosthetic limbs, and ultimately help robots do the dishes without breaking them. The material is built using semiconductor nanowires that can operate using low voltages, is more flexible than previous inorganic synthetic skins, and is also stronger than its competing organic materials.

PG&E involved in many gas line breaks in state

09/11/10 San Francisco Chronicle — Eleven of the incidents on PG&E pipelines in the last 10 years were caused by other people digging into buried lines they didn't know were there. "Someone's doing construction on a site, they may or may not have called PG&E, they're working with a backhoe, they snag the pipeline, and then all it takes is a little ignition source," said Kofi Inkabi, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

World Bank appoints clean energy “czar”

09/09/10 Reuters — The World Bank has appointed Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, as chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Kammen will lead its efforts to foster growth of alternative energy programs in developing countries. The position was created amid unprecedented demand from developing countries for support to address development and climate change as interlinked challenges, the bank said

Inspiring the next generation

09/08/10 — As the fall semester 2010 kicks off, the campus is buzzing not only with students but also with capital improvements at the heart of the Berkeley Engineering quadrant. These projects represent the continuation of our strategic plan to transform the educational experience for our 2,800-plus undergraduates.

One engineer’s effort to tame a dangerous world

09/08/10 — Robert Bea's got a problem. In fact, he's got several: The Deepwater Horizon. Hurricane Katrina. California's fragile 100-year-old levees. These are just three of more than 600 disasters or disasters-in-waiting Bea has investigated in his 57-year career as a flood protection engineer, oil and ocean engineer, risk management specialist, UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering and one of the nation's foremost authorities on disaster mitigation. Since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, the 73-year-old Texan has been traveling from coast to coast, investigating the site, serving on advisory panels, writing reports, and giving abundant media interviews, hoping to make sure nothing like this accident ever happens again.

Video feature: Rube Goldberg returns and wackiness ensues

09/08/10 — What's the best device for dispensing a dollop of hand sanitizer? At Berkeley, it's one that also prompts the famous Bellagio fountain to erupt, Evel Knievel to crash his motorcycle and a house of cards to spring up before your eyes. The magic and mayhem were part of a winning, Las Vegas-themed contraption built by a team of engineering students for Berkeley's first-ever Rube Goldberg Machine Contest in April. The competition challenged Cal student teams to build a six-foot by six-foot machine in the spirit of popular cartoonist Rube Goldberg, a 1904 Berkeley Engineering graduate who died in 1970 and is best known for his comic drawings of outrageously complicated machines performing simple tasks.

Man of a thousand faces

09/08/10 — Over the last decade, the line between real and virtual in motion pictures has grown even blurrier with the rise of computer-generated imagery (CGI). If CGI is done well, you could be looking at a pixilated Brad Pitt, not the hunky star himself, and you'd be none the wiser. Any visual effects supervisor will tell you that one of CGI's biggest challenges is replicating faces. Humans look at faces every day and expertly distinguish fact from fiction. But technology is catching up, thanks, in part, to a Berkeley engineer. Paul Debevec (Ph.D.'96 EECS) is a friendly, congenial academic with a love of movies who has engineered an ingenious system to make digital animation, in particular human faces, more realistic.

H.P. to work with Hynix on new computer memory chips

08/31/10 The New York Times — Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday that it would commercialize a new computer memory technology called memristors with Hynix, the South Korean chip maker. The agreement to build the memory chips validates the work of Leon O. Chua, a UC Berkeley electrical engineering professor. In 1971, he proposed a fourth basic circuit element (the other three are the resistor, capacitor and inductor) and called it a memristor, or memory resistor, as a simpler alternative to transistors that would allow more computer memory to be packed in even smaller devices.