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Sink or swim

02/07/13 — To test new modeling software from DARPA, teams of students from mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni's ME 102B mechatronics design class spent months building a fleet of amphibious vehicles, along with other inventions and novel devices. Then in early December, they put their creations to the test on the soggy volleyball court behind Soda Hall - with splashy results.

A new loo

02/07/13 — Answering a challenge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve sanitation in developing countries, environmental engineering professor Kara Nelson and postdoctoral researcher Temitope Ogunyoku have developed a toilet that safely disinfects waste. Their hand-cranked pHree Loo yields “safe sludge” that does not endanger human health.

Berkeley students make finals for Disney design competition

01/30/13 Daily Californian — A trio of UC Berkeley students, including Kathryn Moore from Mechanical Engineering and Andrew Lin from Bioengineering, have made it to the finals of a national Disney-sponsored design competition with their plan for SAMM-E, a robot-turned-food-truck.

Fastest-turning robot from EECS lab uses tail to take corners

01/29/13 New Scientist — A tail-swinging robot, developed by Nick Kohut and colleagues in Ron Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, can turn precisely without slowing down, allowing it to corner more rapidly than any other legged robot to date. This video from New Scientist TV shows it in action.

New bioengineering master’s degree approved

01/24/13 — Berkeley's Master of Engineering program now includes a track in bioengineering. The one-year program integrates engineering and entrepreneurship, preparing graduates for industry leadership. February 1 is the deadline to apply for fall 2013.

BioE alumna advising legislator through science and technology fellowship

01/22/13 Daily Cal — An-Chi Tsou (Ph.D. '12), who received her doctorate from the UC Berkeley-UCSF Bioengineering Graduate Program, is serving in the office of Assemblymember Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, as a health and science adviser. Tsou is one of 10 scientists and engineers appointed to one-year advisory posts by the California Science and Technology Policy Fellowship.

EECS team to lead $27.5 million TerraSwarm Research Center

01/17/13 TerraSwarm — A nine-university team led by researchers in Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences has been awarded $27.5 million over five years to spearhead the new TerraSwarm Research Center, which will address the huge potential - and risks - of the pervasive integration of smart, networked sensors connecting our world.

Engineering alum’s startup creates ultrathin batteries

01/10/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Imprint Energy, an Alameda startup co-founded by Engineering alumna Christine Ho, B.S. '05, M.S. '07, Ph.D. '10 MSE, is developing zinc-based batteries that are slim, flexible, powerful, and just might free gadget makers from the constraints of standard rechargeable batteries.

Physicist Art Rosenfeld to receive National Medal of Technology & Innovation

01/03/13 Berkeley Lab — President Barack Obama has named UC Berkeley and LBNL physicist Arthur Rosenfeld one of this year's 11 recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Rosenfeld is often called the “godfather of energy efficiency” because of his pioneering work on reducing the nation's energy usage.

Flexing fingers for micro-robotics

12/19/12 Berkeley Lab — Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Berkeley Engineering have developed an elegant and powerful new microscale actuator that can flex like a tiny beckoning finger in response to a small temperature variation

EECS professors selected as ACM fellows

12/13/12 Association for Computing Machinery — Three professors from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences - Alistair Sinclair, Ion Stoica and Katherine Yelick - have been named fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to computing that have fundamentally advanced technology

Amy Herr’s lab has shrunk the Western Blot

12/12/12 — Bioengineering professor Amy Herr and BioE graduate student Alex Hughes have created a microfluidic Western blot device that can run 48 assays in an hour or less. Their improvement of the Western blot, a workhorse of biology labs, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Space-age ceramics get their toughest test

12/10/12 Berkeley Lab — Berkeley Lab researchers, led by UC Berkeley materials science professor Robert Ritchie, have developed a real-time CT-scan test rig for ceramic composites at ultrahigh temperatures.

Study gives glimpse of crowd-sourced commuting future

12/10/12 New Cities Foundation — Sharing real-time information about traffic or other transportation delays provides drivers and riders greater control over their commute, and it could help local authorities improve transportation planning, says a new study conducted by CITRIS researchers in partnership with San Jose and Ericsson.

Berkeley’s exoskeletons a ‘Miracle of Nature’

12/03/12 BBC One — The new BBC show "Miracles of Nature," hosted by Richard Hammond, filmed a recent episode at Berkeley's Etcheverry Hall, where the crew explored the medical exoskeleton system being developed by mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni and his graduate students.

Personal robots moving closer to reality

11/28/12 CBS This Morning — Personal robots that can bake cookies, shoot pool and -- in the hands of EECS professor Pieter Abbeel -- fold laundry are evidence of a new generation in artificial intelligence, jump-started by a Silicon Valley tech company's PR2 robots.

Seafloor platform ‘cloaks’ structures from big ocean waves

11/19/12 Discovery News — Offshore oil drilling platforms, wind farms and buoys are vulnerable to waves and damage from storm swells. But a team led by Berkeley's Mohammed-Reza Alam, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has found a way to make such structures invisible to waves, using a rippled platform that sits on the seafloor to 'cloak' the structure directly above.