UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley engineers have created an insect robot that can scamper along quickly and turn on a dime – perhaps literally. The bot owes its fancy footwork to… well, its fancy feet, using varying voltages to alternate stickiness and make sharp turns.

Scientists have recreated in the lab some of the wild weather that might be found on Jupiter and Saturn. Using extremely high pressures and laser shock waves, the researchers produced helium rain which has been hypothesized to fall on these planets.

Most plastics don’t break down easily – and when they do, they create problematic microplastic particles. A new type of compostable plastic is embedded with enzymes that, when triggered, quickly break the material down to its constituent molecules.

A team has developed a process that turns waste plastic into an adhesive that's more valuable. The goal was to find ways to "upcycle" plastics by putting them to new uses while preserving the properties that made them attractive in the first place.

There are already computer vision systems and sensor-equipped gloves that can detect a person's hand gestures. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed an alternative technology, however, that offers some key advantages.

Scientists at University of California, Berkeley have leveraged 3D printing to produce a polymer lattice structure that can act as the backbone for low-carbon concrete that also boasts great strength and durability.

Silicon has been the material of choice for electronics for decades, but it’s beginning to bump up against efficiency limits. Now engineers at UC Berkeley have created metallic graphene nanoribbons, which can make wires for all-carbon electronics.

A UC Berkeley study has found an association between poor sleep and accumulation of the toxic proteins thought to cause Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers suggest poor sleep could be a way to predict those at risk of developing the degenerative disease.

A new genomic study has homed in on exactly when and where modern penguins originated, suggesting the birds first appeared in Australian and New Zealand waters about 22 million years ago before later spreading south into the cooler Antarctic waters.

Information can be encoded into many patterns, such as ones and zeroes for computers. A new proof of concept has been demonstrated to encode information into artificial molecules, which could enable programmable materials or new types of computers.

A new study has, for the first time, homed in on a novel EEG signature that can identify when a subject is in an REM sleep stage. Prior to this, scientists were unable to differentiate between dreaming and waking states using EEG brainwave data alone.

A new type of data storage system could be denser, smaller, faster and more energy efficient than silicon chips. The new method involves encoding data in sliding stacks of two-dimensional layers of metals.