We recently completed moving our site over to a new domain. Don’t get left behind! If you currently subscribe to our RSS feed or have us bookmarked on your computer, come join us over at our new website, http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/. The new RSS feed is http://sciencereview.dreamhosters.com/feed/.
Don’t hesitate… make the change right now. We have lots of great posts coming up, all of which will show up exclusively on the new blog page. What are you waiting for?
Well-being has been one of the most important concerns for humans since we evolved big enough brains to contemplate more than mere survival. Researchers measure well-being as feeling satisfied with your life and experiencing more positive than negative affect, but colloquially, most of us just refer to it as happiness. We spend much of our time pursuing what we think will make us happy. We surround ourselves with friends, find hobbies like stamp collecting, and seek out pleasures like good food.
One of the most controversial debates in the well-being literature is about money. While it seems obvious that money can buy us many of the things that make life more enjoyable, most of us (myself included) shudder to think that a material object can have such a strong influence on our well-being. So, how important is wealth to happiness?
In an effort to understand how economic hardships could affect well-being, Gallup Polls—one of the largest polling agencies in the country—collected one million responses assessing Americans happiness, well-being, and how much individuals felt they were thriving, struggling, or suffering. They looked at the period from 2008 until 2010, with a particular focus on the effect of the 2009 economic recession.
The Coalition for Excellence and Diversity in Mathematics, Science and Engineering is the “Justice League” of programs on campus confronting the problems of underrepresentation in math, science and engineering. The following post is one in a series, kicked off by this introduction, highlighting the work of each of the Coalites and the programs they represent.
If the traditional path to joining the UC Berkeley faculty is a well-traveled, strenuous uphill climb, John Matsui hacked his way up the side of K2 with a machete. “No matter where I’ve gone, I’ve had to create what I wanted to see in education,” he says. Some of the places John has gone, few of his faculty peers have ever been.
“My educational pathway has been anything but a straight line. The way they taught science in high school wasn’t in a way I was able to learn. So I came out disinterested in science and generally unprepared for a four-year college,” says John. So instead he spent three and a half years at community college before transferring to a four-year university. He would go on to earn a Master’s degree in Biology from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara, but during that time he took another unusual detour.
While finishing his dissertation at UC Santa Barbara, John took a teaching position at a local community college. Noticing a glaring lack of support for scientifically-inclined Latino students, John founded a bilingual biology program at the college, despite speaking no Spanish himself. This knack for taking the initiative, for creating, didn’t come naturally to John Matsui. “I’d always been told ‘You can’t. You’re not capable. That’ll never work.’ And I believed them because I was afraid, and I didn’t trust myself. But at some point I started saying ‘No, they’re wrong.’”
Impressed with his vision and his passion for addressing the needs of underserved populations, the Student Learning Center at UC Berkeley hired John to help run their academic programs. His work there grabbed the attention of the Dean of Biology, (now Emeritus) Professor Caroline Kane, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They recruited John in 1991 to help develop what would become the nationally-renowned Biology Scholars Program (BSP).
I recently went to see (or, I suppose, hear) a new sound exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco called “Are We There Yet?”, which will be on display until July. This exhibit is, in a word, cool. I walked into an architecturally beautiful room and heard different voices reading questions, sometimes overlapping and sometimes complementing each other. Just as cool as the aesthetic experience, though, is the visual tracking system that UC Berkeley engineers developed to give every participant a unique experience. The combination of cutting edge sound equipment with cleverly engineered computer tracking allows the voices to seemingly follow a viewer throughout the room.
The questioning voices of the exhibit are intended to invoke the practice of questioning within the Jewish faith. The engineers who designed the technical scaffolding to achieve this vision also started with a question. “How do you accurately tell the difference between the sun’s reflection on the floor and a person’s bright white shirt, if you’re a computer?” asks UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering graduate student Andrew Godbehere.
What do diplomacy, nuclear fusion, and quantum teleportation have in common? Read on for the answer, or if you’re too impatient, go straight to the source: WikiLeaks cable 10BEIJING263.
In case you were living under a rock for the second half of 2010, let’s briefly review the facts of the WikiLeaks scandal. WikiLeaks is an organization whose stated goal is to “publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous.” Since 2006, they have been publishing previously secret information on their website, helping whistle-blowers either outrage or embarrass various military and political figures. In late November of last year, the group began releasing a slew of classified diplomatic cables sent by US State Department representatives since 1966.
Despite massive amounts of media attention given to WikiLeaks and its spokesperson Julian Assange, I found myself wondering why this release of information upset so many people. In an effort to find some personal connection to the scandal, or at least to share in the sense of mystery and espionage surrounding the cables, I did a quick search for one word: “science”. I’d like to share with you the most interesting result of that search, which was a cable sent on February 2, 2010 from the US embassy in Beijing, China.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Amy Cook, a professor at Indiana University, about some interesting new inroads that are being made between psychology and art. Professor Cook exists at the intersection of two fields that have historically been very far apart: theater and cognitive science.
She explained to me that both of these fields are ultimately touching on the same kinds of ideas, albeit from very different directions. While it is quite obvious that cognitive science is concerned with understanding the mind, theater is driven by our knowledge of the human psyche as well. Put the two together, and you have a very powerful combination. In a talk she gave at UC Berkeley, Professor Cook used a cognitive science perspective to look at Henry V, one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays. It turns out that The Bard was actually quite crafty about weaving a story that plays with your mind and deals with some pretty sophisticated mental concepts.
One of the fundamental themes that Dr. Cook sees embodied in Henry V is emergence.
The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and the kids were shooting 2L bottle rockets 30 feet into the air! Cal Day 2011 was an absolute hit with local families and college-seeking high school students. If you weren’t there, then you missed out.
Each year, the departments and museums of UC Berkeley open their doors to share all sorts of Cal-tastic projects, research, and activities with thousands of visitors. With the beautiful sunny weather, this year’s crowd nearly exhausted the hundreds of Cal students who volunteered their time… exhausted with fun, that is!
Outside McLaughlin Hall, a dedicated team of undergraduate students (CalSol) showed off their recently completed, street-legal solar car. With a price tag of $200k for the final product, this project brought together engineering undergrads from throughout the college, providing them with practical, hands-on experience in design. Meanwhile, in Hearst Mining Circle another group of undergrad engineers spent the afternoon grilling up hot dogs for hungry passersby. On Memorial Glade, kids posed for pictures with a larger-than-life Oski. And Sproul Plaza was packed.
Did you miss last week’s writing seminar with Mary Roach? Or more likely—did you go to that seminar and then sink into a deep depression, worrying that you would have to wait a whole year before the next one? Today is your lucky day! The Berkeley Science Review invites you to our second science writing seminar of the year, featuring Brian Mossop and Ruchir Shah. Brian is a science writer who works for the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Ruchir is the associate editor of PLoS Biology.
Come hear about open-source publishing, establishing a career as a science writer, and how editors view your articles and manuscripts. Brian and Ruchir will present both sides of scientific publishing, as well as suggestions for those looking to join the field.
Wednesday, April 27th, 6-7pm
421 Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley campus
Mind reading has come a long way from its ignominious origins alongside the likes of fortune telling and witchcraft. Scientists and medical doctors have made great strides in their ability to extract and interpret electromagnetic signals from the brain, and unlike mind readers of the past, they have very real practical gains to show for it. One notable success story is the cochlear implant, which is currently in use by nearly a quarter of a million deaf or hard-of-hearing patients. (For a look at more state-of-the-art applications in the field, consider attending the upcoming California Cognitive Science Conference, featured on our blog last week by Chris Holdgraf).
The so-called brain-machine interface (BMI) technology has not yet been perfected to the point that we need to worry about hackers stealing our secrets or erasing our memories. But it has come far enough that researchers may soon be able to restore physical and sensory functionality to patients with immobilizing conditions such as paralysis and Parkinson’s Disease. Scientists at UC Berkeley and UCSF’s Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses (CNEP) are among the pioneers in developing this sort of brain repair technology.
“Problems cannot be solved at the level of awareness that created them.” – Albert Einstein
I had never heard the above Einstein quote until I attended “Green Chemistry: Collaborative Approaches & New Solutions”, a conference hosted by the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry on March 24th, 2011. To my surprise, two separate speakers included this quote in their presentation; by the end of the conference, I understood why. Making materials that are both safe and inexpensive is one of the main challenges in the field of chemistry today. After listening to all of the speakers, I’m convinced that chemists can only overcome this challenge if we consider it an opportunity to think about chemistry in a new way.
The field of green chemistry grew from an awareness among chemists of the environmental and human health effects of many chemicals. Green chemists endeavor to design molecules with toxicology in mind, ultimately replacing hazardous materials that must be contained with materials that are designed to safe. Two of the founders of green chemistry, Dr. Paul Anastas and Dr. John Warner, spoke at the conference about their twelve principles for chemists who are dedicated to creating less hazardous materials. These principles include using safer solvents in synthesis and designing molecules that will degrade into harmless components. Warner refuted the idea that “green chemistry is a set of handcuffs that slows productivity,” citing examples from his own company (Beyond Benign) of chemicals which are both profitable and harmless, such as a green hair dye.
