Stellar Flyby Helped Shape Our Solar System 3 Million Years Ago
Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system — an enveloping cloud of comets, dwarf planets in weird orbits and, if it truly exists,…
UC Berkeley
Researchers Use Gelatin to Make Powerful New Hydrogen Fuel Catalyst
A cheap and effective new catalyst developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, can generate hydrogen fuel from water just as efficiently as…
Scientists Find Evidence of ‘Orphan’ Gamma-Ray Bursts
Astronomers typically study objects that are visible night after night or explode suddenly, like supernovas, but Casey Law is scouring vast amounts of data in…
Black Holes Only Contain Small Percentage of the Universe’s Dark Matter
For one brief shining moment after the 2015 detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, astronomers held out hope that the universe’s mysterious dark…
Artificial Intelligence Helps Track Mysterious Cosmic Radio Bursts
Artificial intelligence is invading many fields, most recently astronomy and the search for intelligent life in the universe, or SETI. Researchers at Breakthrough Listen, a…
These Unusual Black Holes Offer an Infinite Number of Possible Futures
In the real world, your past uniquely determines your future. If a physicist knows how the universe starts out, she can calculate its future for…
STORM Reveals Never-Before-Seen Holes in the Cytoskeletal Mesh
One of today’s sharpest imaging tools, super-resolution microscopy, produces sparkling images of what until now has been the blurry interior of cells, detailing not only…
SETI Homes In On Fast Radio Burst Source FRB 121102
Recent observations of a mysterious and distant object that emits intermittent bursts of radio waves so bright that they’re visible across the universe provide new…
Engineers Develop a New Approach to Ultrafast Light Pulses
A team of engineers has developed a new approach to ultrafast light pulses that could be used for rapid light-based communications systems. Two-dimensional materials called…
Astronomers Provide New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs
Using a radio survey of a giant molecular cloud filled with recently formed stars and a mathematical model that can explain the observations, astronomers reveal…
Exoplanet HD 106906b Likely Kicked Out of Its Local Neighborhood
Researchers believe that a planet located at an unusually large distance from its star – 16 times farther than Pluto is from the sun –…
Hubble Confirms Exiled Stars Exploded in Intergalactic Space
Data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has helped confirm that three supernovae exploded in the dark emptiness of intergalactic space, having been flung from their…
Study Shows Poor Sleep Linked to Alzheimer’s Disease
A newly published study from UC Berkeley reveals a new pathway through which Alzheimer’s disease may cause memory decline later in life. UC Berkeley scientists…
Biologists Reverse Bacterial Resistance to Antibiotics
A newly published study details how a team of researchers returned drug-resistant bacteria to a pre-resistant state. Biologist Miriam Barlow of the University of California,…
Berkeley Physicists Demonstrate That Space is Not Squeezed
Using partially entangled atoms, a new experiment by UC Berkeley physicists demonstrated more precisely than ever before that space looks the same in all directions….
A Magnetic Field Flip Could Occur Over a Short Period of Time
Earth’s magnetic field is decreasing 10 times faster than normal, leading some geophysicists to predict a magnetic reversal to occur within a few thousand years….
Researchers Examine Emerging Market for Used Electric Vehicle Batteries
A new report from UCLA and UC Berkeley shows that used electric car batteries could help California achieve its renewable energy, greenhouse gas reduction and…
Grains Captured by NASA’s Stardust Spacecraft Are Likely from Interstellar Space
A newly published study reveals that seven tiny grains of dust captured by NASA’s Stardust Spacecraft probably came from outside our solar system, perhaps created…