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How smart is today’s artificial intelligence?

05/20/15 PBS News Hour — How far away are we from making intelligent machines that actually have minds of their own? Berkeley researchers Stuart Russell and Pieter Abbeel weigh in on this nine-minute PBS News Hour segment, along with Elon Musk and Google's Ray Kurzweil.
Poppy field

Discovery paves way for homebrewed drugs, prompts call for regulation

05/18/15 — Research led by Berkeley bioengineers has completed key steps needed to turn sugar-fed yeast into a microbial factory for producing therapeutic drugs. But because the work could lead to home-brewing of opiates and other controlled substances, the researchers warn that regulators and law enforcement need to pay attention, too.
Lily drone

Throw this camera drone in the air and it flies itself

05/15/15 Wired — The Lily is a drone that doesn't need a controller, or a pilot; it just follows you. It's the first product from Lily Robotics, founded by a pair of recent UC Berkeley graduates including CTO Henry Bradlow (B.S.'13 EECS).
Microglia in young and old brains

Drug perks up old muscles and aging brains

05/13/15 — UC Berkeley bioengineers have discovered that a small-molecule drug simultaneously perks up old stem cells in the brains and muscles of mice, a finding that could lead to drug interventions for humans that would make aging tissues throughout the body act young again.
Aaron Wienkers

ME’s Wienkers is University Medal finalist

05/12/15 — Aaron Wienkers, a graduating senior in mechanical engineering, is one of four finalists for the 2015 University Medal, which honors honors outstanding scholarship, public service and strength of character. He is also the recipient of the ME department citation.

Smartphone video microscope automates detection of parasites

05/06/15 — A UC Berkeley-led research team has developed a mobile phone microscope, based on CellScope technology from bioengineer Daniel Fletcher's lab, that uses video to automatically detect and quantify infection by parasitic worms in a drop of blood.
Collagen in its twisted, curly form

The skinny on skin

05/04/15 Inside Science — A study co-authored by materials science and engineering professor Robert Ritchie has shown, for the first time, that collagen explains the great durability of skin. The finding could help scientists develop better synthetic skin and improve the strength of man-made materials.
Claude Shannon, the creator of Information Theory, and Alan Turing, the creator of modern Computer Science

Through the computational lens

05/01/15 Simons Institute — EECS professor Umesh Vazirani discusses efforts at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing to foster a dialogue between the disciplines of information theory and computer science.
David Patterson and Carlo Séquin, pictured in 1981.

Simplify: The RISC story

05/01/15 — EECS professors David Patterson and Carlo Séquin, along with the Reduced Instruction Set Computer team, were honored by IEEE for their landmark work from the 1980s.

Seismic song

05/01/15 — Sensors lying on the Hayward Fault, which runs under campus, were connected to lights and sounds for a mid-winter public art show.
Plutonium and warning labels

Lost and found

05/01/15 — A piece of early atomic history was found in a storage closet.
Susan Amrose

For clean water

05/01/15 — Susan Amrose is building new technologies to address arsenic contamination in drinking water.

The graphene switch

05/01/15 — New research holds promise for controlling graphene's properties, potentially opening new applications for its use.