Skimming through the lists of new articles in my RSS reader today, my eyes stopped at one paper in particular. The title, “Genesis of Creativity“, would not have seemed out of place in a psychology text (indeed, there are whole journals devoted to creativity research), but this journal was ACS Nano. I clicked through, thinking that the article was perhaps about the discovery of creativity-inducing nanowires.

In fact, the article was something much less far-fetched but still quite interesting. It was a perspective by James Tour, a chemist at Rice University and recipient of the 2012 ACS Nano Lectureship Award. On the occasion of this honor, Tour felt compelled to think back on the greatest successes from his research career and trace them back to their sources. He starts by recognizing the students and postdocs who did the labwork, of course, but he doesn’t stop there. He profiles three exceptionally creative problem solvers from his lab and asks the question: If the greatest discoveries in nanoscience have come from these brilliant minds, where did the brilliant minds come from?

Last night was a big night for the Berkeley Science Review. We were named Best Magazine at the ASUC Publications banquet for 2011-2012!

In case you think the competition wasn’t fierce, here’s a list of all the ASUC sponsored publications. ASUC is the student government here at UC Berkeley, and each year they host a ceremony honoring the best publications from around campus. The BSR is no stranger to these awards, having been recognized almost each year since we began publishing in 2001. It was an honor to be there last night and see the BSR recognized as part of the body of high quality work being produced by Berkeley students. The student presenting our award commented on how easy it is for people of any background to pick up an issue of the BSR and enjoy it. Accessibility is one of our major goals in communicating the amazing science happening at UC Berkeley, and it’s nice to know that those efforts are paying off.

In my last post, I told you that Berkeley Physics professor Richard Muller is the go-to guy for proof of anthropogenic climate change. Maybe that strikes you as odd. Why would I look to a physicist for information about our atmosphere? Shouldn’t we be talking with UC Berkeley’s Atmospheric Sciences program instead?

Of course, Muller and his team at Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature don’t claim to be the first people to measure the change in global temperature over time. When they began that project in 2010, there was an active field of climate scientists claiming that the Earth is warming, and there was also an extremely vocal group of skeptics disagreeing with their results. Muller entered the conversation with the mindset of an impartial third party, someone who could analyze the data without any political or financial incentives often attributed to the climate scientists.