How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health
Awe can mean many things. It can be witnessing a total solar eclipse. Or seeing your child take her first steps. Or hearing Lizzo perform live. But, while many of us know it when we feel it, awe is not easy to define. “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast […]
Ramamoorthy Ramesh elected to the National Academy of Inventors
The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) announced today that UC Berkeley engineer and physicist Ramamoorthy Ramesh has been elected to the 2022 class of NAI Fellows, the highest professional distinction awarded to academic inventors. …
Berkeley Talks: Learning from nature to design better robots
In Berkeley Talks episode 148, Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology and founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research at UC Berkeley, discusses how nature and its creatures — cockroaches, crabs, centipedes, geckos — inspire innovative design in all sorts of useful things, from bomb-detecting, stair-climbing robots to prosthetics […]
An astrophysicist breaks down what NASA’s Webb telescope tells us about our universe
NPR’s Morning Edition speaks with astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley about the latest findings of the Webb Telescope. …
Commencement Speech – UC Berkeley Cognitive Science ’22, Akash Kulgod
It began my freshman semester when I took David Presti’s Drugs and the Brain. I learned that we are amidst a tremendous resurgence of a class of compounds known as psychedelics. A couple of sessions with psilocybin, a molecule found in 200 species of mushrooms, and people heal from a Pandora’s box of ailments like […]
Eyes Toward Tomorrow Program Enhancing Collaboration, Connections, and Community Using Bioinspired Design (Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 61, Issue 5, November 2021, Pages 1966–1980)
The goal of our Eyes Toward Tomorrow Program is to enrich the future workforce with STEM by providing students with an early, inspirational, interdisciplinary experience fostering inclusive excellence. We attempt to open the eyes of students who never realized how much their voice is urgently needed by providing an opportunity for involvement, imagination, invention, and […]
There’s an earthquake coming!
One Saturday afternoon a few years ago, Richard Allen was riding Bay Area Rapid Transit between Berkeley and Oakland when the train suddenly stopped. “We’ve had an alert for an earthquake,” the conductor announced. “We’re going to assess the situation and decide what to do.” Allen, the director of the Seismological Laboratory at the University […]
Sign Up for Discovery
It wasn’t until her third year at Berkeley that computer science major Elicia Ye learned about the University’s fascinating Discovery Courses. …
Toward a life of meaning: In conversation with UC Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner
I’d been intrigued by his talk on happiness during my Golden Bear Orientation. Keltner teaches the Human Happiness class (LSC160V/PsychC162) here on campus, and his lab, the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, investigates positive emotions like compassion, awe and gratitude, among others. …
The Next Big One—Earthquake Technology
Allen teaches Berkeley’s oldest course on earthquakes. He calls it “Earthquakes in Your Backyard.” The name couldn’t be more appropriate, because the Hayward is a particularly dangerous fault. It hasn’t spawned a major earthquake since 1868. Sometime soon, it could go. …