News

Race to the pump: Biofuel technologies vie to provide a sustainable supply of transportation fuels

02/14/11 Chemical & Engineering News — Chemists, chemical engineers, and synthetic biologists have largely met the technical challenge of developing biofuels to replace petroleum-derived transportation fuels in the coming decades. For biofuels to reach the U.S. market, however, these technologies have to fit into the existing transportation fuel infrastructure. Every major chemical and petrochemical firm has claimed a stake in the race to biofuel commercialization. "Because the energy industry is so large, there is room for everybody to play, as long as you can meet the economics," says Jay D. Keasling, a synthetic biologist at UC Berkeley.

Bioengineering faculty members Amy Herr and Sanjay Kumar receive NSF CAREER Awards

02/14/11 — Berkeley Bioengineering Assistant Professors Amy Herr and Sanjay Kumar have received 2011 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program awards. CAREER awards are given to young researchers in science and engineering who have also translated their work into significant educational activities. Herr is a leading researcher in microscale biomarker detection technology, and Kumar is a pioneer in molecular cell dynamics and the mechanobiology of the cytoskeleton.

Charles A. Desoer receives IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award

02/09/11 IEEE — IEEE, the world's largest association for the advancement of technology, has awarded the Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award to the late Charles A. Desoer, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, for crucial conceptual research contributions to the behavior and the use of electrical circuits and systems.

Berkeley Lab’s Ashok Gadgil takes fuel efficient cookstoves to Ethiopia

02/08/11 Energy.gov — Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are using technology and innovation to bring clean-burning cookstoves to the developing world. Lead scientist Dr. Ashok Gadgil describes the partnership between the DOE lab and several non-governmental organizations including Oxfam America and the Clinton Global Initiative. Now with help from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Technology Commercialization Fund, Dr. Gadgil is bringing his latest innovation to Ethiopian households.

Can-do engineers

02/02/11 — What did you do over the holiday break? Fifty-nine of our extraordinary undergraduates spent six action-packed, 15-hour days at the Alliance Redwoods Camp in Occidental, California, learning how to tap into their highest potential for leadership through a program called the LeaderShape Institute.

How to measure an oil spill

02/02/11 — When oil was flowing from BP's broken well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico last spring, the company estimated the flow rate at about 1,000 barrels a day. But news outlets wanted an independent estimate. Could Ömer Savaş, an expert in fluid mechanics and turbulent flows, help? Soon Savaş became involved in a national effort to establish the “official” flow rate, a number that would dictate not only the level of resources assigned to the cleanup but also its legal ramifications once the emergency had passed.

This is your brain on neuromarketing

02/02/11 — When it comes to the quest for a better potato chip, a sleeker cell phone or a knockout TV ad, A.K. Pradeep (Ph.D'92 ME) believes in digging deep. A leading figure in the emerging field of neuromarketing, he conducts market research by studying how the subconscious mind responds to a variety of flavors, designs and sales pitches. His Berkeley-based company, NeuroFocus, advises companies on everything from developing a new product to packaging, marketing and advertising.

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.