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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.

ShanghaiTech, Berkeley launch 5-year collaboration

11/13/12 ShanghaiTech — ShanghaiTech University and UC Berkeley have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to launch a collaboration in education, culture, and scientific research over the next five years. The first stage of the project will involve Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences faculty from Berkeley sharing core instructional resources and research methodology with their Chinese counterparts.

Bullet-train planners face huge engineering challenge

11/12/12 Los Angeles Times — An audacious plan is taking shape on the drawing boards of California's bullet train planners as they envision a high-speed rail line from Bakersfield to L.A. that will travel over two mountain ranges and more than half a dozen earthquake faults. The crossing is seizing the imagination of engineers who see it as the greatest design challenge of the $68-billion project. "It is the project of the century," said Berkeley civil engineering professor Bill Ibbs.

Engineering Innovation by Design: Solutions for the real world

11/12/12 Fung Institute/CET — Hundreds of researchers, designers and industry leaders gathered at Berkeley on Tuesday, Nov. 13, for the 2012 Global Technology Leaders conference, Engineering Innovation by Design. Sessions explored emerging technologies that meet real-world needs in health care, energy efficiency, sustainability and other fields. (The conference webcast is now online.)

Engineering innovation by design

11/05/12 — "Technology with soul." That's how Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers Without Borders, describes engineering solutions that are designed and built with human needs in mind. Amadei, one of our own Ph.D.s (CE '82) and the Mortenson Professor at the University of Colorado, will be one of our featured speakers at our November 13th conference, "Engineering Innovation by Design," held here in the College of Engineering and open to all.

Quake model aids in fault studies

11/05/12 — A new civil engineering study reveals that the more time an earthquake fault has to heal, the faster the shake it will produce when it finally ruptures. Because the rapidity and strength of the shaking are what causes damage to major structures, the new findings could help engineers better assess the vulnerabilities of buildings, bridges and roads.

Decisions, decisions

11/05/12 — It has been a busy year for the developers of the new web app, Politify. It was only October of 2011 when Nikita Bier, then a political economy and business major, approached Jeremy Blalock, a second-year EECS student, to collaborate on an easy-to-use app to analyze public policy. They developed a non-partisan tool that enables voters to evaluate the costs and benefits of each presidential candidate's promised policies.

Shining a light on brain tumors

11/05/12 — Llewellyn “Trey” Jalbert knows what cancer looks like up close. Before applying to be a Ph.D. candidate in the Joint UC Berkeley/UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering, he had spent two years as a research associate examining MRI images of patients with malignant brain tumors in the UCSF lab of Professor Sarah Nelson. Then, Jalbert himself was diagnosed with cancer-a malignant melanoma-and underwent surgery.

Dean’s word: Innovation by design

11/02/12 — Step into room 122 of Hesse Hall on a weekday afternoon, and you're likely to see more than 100 freshmen building-and then bending, melting and even breaking-their own product prototypes.
Chart showing info collected by Quantified Traveler app

Rerouting behavior

11/01/12 — Associate professors of civil and environmental engineering Raja Sengupta and Joan Walker created the Quantified Traveler app to quantify what influences travel behavior and to encourage more sustainable travel.
Student welding steel bridge component

Fabricating the ApoCALypse

11/01/12 — CEE Steel Bridge team competed against 600 students from 47 engineering schools in May 2012 to win the national title.

Decisions, decisions

11/01/12 — Two Berkeley students - an EECS and a political economy and business major- developed Politify, a non-partisan mobile app that enables voters to evaluate the costs and benefits of a candidate's policy platforms.