Home

"Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink." These words, written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 18th century, may soon describe the 21st. In fact, access to fresh water is already an issue of global concern. Scientists involved in UC Berkeley's Keck HydroWatch Center, established in 2006, are hoping to correct our sketchy comprehension of the water cycle by delving into a study so detailed that the water will have nowhere to hide.

A new study led by a UC Berkeley biologist sheds light on the factors influencing the stalled growth of the severely endangered Puerto Rican parrot, and in turn, provides an analytical tool that could help pinpoint the biggest factors hindering the recovery of other endangered species.

Three researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have proposed an innovative way to improve global climate change predictions by using a supercomputer with low-power embedded microprocessors, an approach that would overcome limitations posed by today’s conventional supercomputers.

The Energy Biosciences Institute, the world’s largest public/private consortium dedicated to the application of biosciences to the energy sector, has announced an initial set of 49 research projects for funding during the first year of EBI’s 10-year program.

Twenty-three projects aimed at helping people live more sustainably have been granted a total of $2 million through a new program at the University of California, Berkeley, that is funded by the Dow Chemical Co. Foundation.

Officials will gather today (Tuesday, April 29) to celebrate the University of California, Berkeley's first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-silver certified building - the Haste Street Child Development Center - which also is the state's first freestanding LEED-silver certified child care center.

Using high-speed video, Integrative Biology Professor Mimi Koehl recorded live lobsters as they sniffed using their stick-like antennules bearing rows of odor-sensing hairs. Koehl is studying how structures such as hairy limbs help organisms survive in demanding environments. Gleaning design principles from living things is her stock in trade.

Imagine a technology that would not only provide a green and renewable source of electrical energy, but could also help scrub the atmosphere of excessive carbon dioxide resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. That’s the promise of artificial versions of photosynthesis, the process by which green plants have been converting solar energy into electrochemical energy for millions of years. To get there, however, scientists need a far better understanding of how Nature does it, starting with the harvesting of sunlight and the transporting of this energy to electrochemical reaction centers.

In a half-day meeting, more than 500 participants take stock of progress and challenges, small and large, in the student-fueled movement to green the UC Berkeley campus

The debate over solar power centers on the economic costs and benefits of rooftop solar home systems specifically, such as the 3,200-watt system on my family roof in Oakland, which meets our total annual electricity needs. The argument is that solar power mounted on individual family roofs typically costs 25¢ per kilowatt hour or more (and sometimes more than 40¢ per kWh) - far more than many other options to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions - and thus state and local solar photovoltaic subsidy plans are not the best use of scarce resources.