News

A 411 on water’s next drop

02/02/11 — In the south India city of Hubli, turning on the tap is no easy task. Residents frequently skip work, postpone errands or keep children home from school in anticipation of the precious-but notoriously unreliable-arrival of water along urban pipelines. Missing a delivery can translate into days without household water. “Literally, people wait around their house until the water comes on,” says Anu Sridharan (B.S'09, M.S'10 CEE). Sridharan is part of a Berkeley-based student team pursuing a novel-but surprisingly simple-fix to what is a common occurrence in the developing world. Their project, called NextDrop, deploys ubiquitous mobile phones to alert residents when water is flowing in a neighborhood.

Berkeley scientists create more efficient photocatalyst for use in clean technologies

01/29/11 AZoM — A little disorder goes a long way, especially when it comes to harnessing the sun's energy. Scientists from Berkeley Lab jumbled the atomic structure of the surface layer of titanium dioxide nanocrystals, creating a catalyst that is both long lasting and more efficient than all other materials in using the sun's energy to extract hydrogen from water. "We are trying to find better ways to generate hydrogen from water using sunshine," says Samuel Mao, a mechanical engineering professor and scientist in Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division who led the research.

What he learns from earthquakes prepares us for the big one

01/26/11 Contra Costa Times — The findings of Jonathan Bray, professor of geotechnical engineering at UC Berkeley, help determine whether a building can withstand an earthquake. "The science is focused on engineering systems that are supported on or within the earth," he said. "Whether it's foundations for buildings, building an earth dam or constructing a lifeline like a highway, we have to understand the stability of the geology, the soil and the rock."

Hotspots tamed by BEAST: Secrets of mysterious metal hotspots uncovered by new single molecule imaging technique

01/19/11 Berkeley Lab — The secrets behind the mysterious nano-sized electromagnetic "hotspots" that appear on metal surfaces under a light are finally being revealed with the help of a BEAST. Using the Brownian Emitter Adsorption Super-resolution Technique (BEAST), "we were able to map the electromagnetic field profile within a single hotspot as small as 15 nanometers with an accuracy down to 1.2 nanometers, in just a few minutes," says Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chaired Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley.

UC Berkeley will host Cal Science & Engineering Festival on Sunday

01/18/11 San Jose Mercury News — On Sunday, UC Berkeley will host the free, family-oriented Cal Science & Engineering Festival on campus. The festival will showcase the university's champion unicycle basketball team displaying their "physics" skills, a chemistry magic show and the Banana Slug String Band. Hands-on offerings include viewings through solar telescopes, earthquake demonstrations, fossil displays and a chance for children to power appliances with solar energy.

Berkeley zero net energy cottage deserves study

01/11/11 San Francisco Chronicle — Karen Chapple, an associate professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, has built a 450-square-foot cottage that lays claim to "zero net energy status." With the help of students from UC Berkeley engineering professor Ashok Gadgil's civil and environmental engineering course and a grant from the UC Transportation Center for further study, Chapple built the cottage this fall for $98,000, and wants to see further development in this housing trend.

Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect beyond hackers, hobbyists

01/10/11 San Francisco Chronicle — Microsoft's Kinect, a motion-tracking peripheral for the Xbox console that is packed with an irresistible blend of cameras and sensors, is finding popularity among researchers such as UC Berkeley engineering graduate student Patrick Bouffard. Working out of Professor Claire Tomlin's lab, Bouffard built a Kinect-enhanced robotic helicopter that perceives objects in its path. A video of the device has been a viral hit on YouTube.

99.999% reliable? Don’t hold your breath

01/08/11 The New York Times — AT&T's dial tone was engineered so that 99.999 percent of the time, you could successfully make a phone call. Can we realistically expect that such availability will ever come to Internet services? "Google doesn't have the luxury of scheduled downtime for maintenance," says Armando Fox, an adjunct associate professor in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. Nor can it take down the service, he says, to install upgrades. "It is not uncommon for a place like Google to push out a major release every week," he said, adding that such frequency is "unprecedented" for the software industry.

Chlorine substitutes in water may have risks

01/07/11 National Public Radio — Water systems across the country are changing the way they disinfect drinking water because the traditional disinfectant, chlorine, can leave behind toxic chemicals. But alternatives to chlorine are turning out to have risks of their own, says UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering David Sedlak, who wrote an analysis in the journal Science.

Interview with Fiona Doyle: UC commission’s report seeks new sources of funds

01/07/11 San Francisco Business Times — In November 2010, the University of California Board of Regents published its Commission on the Future report, intended to help the UC system navigate the state's fiscal crisis. The 20 recommendations contained in the report touch on education, research, and the administrative and operational aspects of the UC system. The Business Times spoke with Fiona Doyle, chair of the UC Berkeley division of the academic senate, professor of materials science and engineering, and former executive associate dean of student affairs in the College of Engineering, to gain insight on what these recommendations might mean for life and education at UC Berkeley.

College of Engineering buildings in 1931

Milestones of Berkeley Engineering

01/01/11 —

Engineers make artificial skin out of nanowires

12/24/10 Printed Electronics World — Engineers at UC Berkeley have developed a pressure-sensitive electronic material from semiconductor nanowires that could one day give new meaning to the term "thin-skinned." "The idea is to have a material that functions like the human skin, which means incorporating the ability to feel and touch objects," said Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the UC Berkeley research team developing the artificial skin, dubbed "e-skin."

Strange new twist: Berkeley researchers discover Möbius symmetry in metamaterials

12/20/10 ScienceBlog — For years, scientists have been searching for an example of Möbius symmetry in natural materials without any success. Now a team of scientists, led by Xiang Zhang of UC Berkeley, has discovered Möbius symmetry in metamaterials - materials engineered from artificial "atoms" and "molecules" with electromagnetic properties that arise from their structure rather than their chemical composition. This discovery opens the door to finding and exploiting novel phenomena in metamaterials.

Energizing the energy agenda

12/14/10 — While climate change and carbon emissions are very much in today's headlines, what is less often discussed is the need to provide technological societies with the economic imperative to make changes in our global energy system.

Professional master’s opens for enrollment

12/14/10 — A man of compact build and modest manners, Coleman Fung (B.S'87 IEOR) is living proof that behind that unassuming demeanor could be lurking an engineering dynamo. Appearing in Sibley Auditorium on Nov. 19, Fung tossed aside his prepared remarks to engage the audience in a light-hearted exploration of the personality traits of an engineer. His talk, entitled “Preparing Engineers for Leadership,” was one of several events celebrating the launch of Berkeley Engineering's new professional master's, a one-year intensive program that combines in-depth technical studies with a core leadership curriculum in business skills like management and finance.

Uncommon in every way: Engineers in intercollegiate sports

12/14/10 — Consider these numbers: Of 35,838 students at Berkeley this year, 4,665 are engineers. Of 800 athletes in intercollegiate sports, only a handful-fewer than five at any one time-are working toward an engineering degree. The combination is rare because any sane, reasonable person would wonder: How on earth do you pursue one of Cal's most difficult academic programs while playing for its most demanding teams? In their own distinct way, three members of this rarefied circle, Richard Fisher, Sati Hsu Houston and Dustin Muhn, have managed to do it successfully. Read about them and watch them in action in a dynamic slideshow.

Wheels of change in South Africa

12/14/10 — More than 9 million South African children walk to school every day. Three million walk for more than an hour, and in the rural countryside, some walk more than four hours. “It's madness,” says Louis de Waal (M.S'72 CEE), who grew up in rural South Africa and spent his professional life designing and building thousands of kilometers of roads there, many of which opened up inaccessible places deep in the country's interior. Now retired, De Waal is on a mission to improve mobility for all South Africans, especially in rural areas. The goal, says the 73-year-old Cape Town resident, is to keep children in school and help adults reach work more easily, ultimately easing poverty and slowing the flood of people forced to move to urban areas for work.

Berkeley Engineering grad student uses Kinect to create flying AI robot

12/07/10 Eng Tips — EECS grad student Patrick Bouffard, working with Professor Claire Tomlin from the Hybrid Systems Lab, has used Microsoft's Kinect controller to create a quadcopter which can maneuver around obstacles autonomously. The developers attached the Kinect hardware to the device which delivers a point cloud to the on-board computer and allows the vehicle to map its surroundings and move about intelligently. A video documenting the project and posted on YouTube is on track for going viral.

Earthquake symposium on risk of collapsing buildings stirs some controversy

12/01/10 Los Angeles Times — Structural engineers gather at UCLA Wednesday to talk about the threat from and economic impact of building collapse in an earthquake. Jack Moehle, a professor at UC Berkeley's Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, comments on building codes, safety and lessons learned from this year's 8.8 earthquake in Chile.

Ultrathin alternative to silicon for future electronics

11/24/10 US News & World Report — There's good news in the search for the next generation of semiconductors. Researchers at UC Berkeley have successfully created a nanoscale transistor with excellent electronic properties. Led by Berkeley Engineering professor Ali Javey, they have successfully integrated ultra-thin layers of the semiconductor indium arsenide onto a silicon substrate to create a nanoscale transistor that offers several advantages as an alternative to silicon including superior electron mobility and velocity, which makes it an outstanding candidate for future high-speed, low-power electronic devices.