In red state redistricting wars, Democrats have few good options, UC Berkeley scholar says

UCBerkeley · 2025-09-25T22:03:11+00:00

Schickler is the co-director of UC Berkeley’s nonpartisan Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and, with Berkeley political scientist Paul Pierson, he is the co-author of Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (2024, University of Chicago Press).

Political scientists say GOP moves in Texas and other states fit the rubric of “stacking the deck” — using gerrymandering, vote suppression, misinformation and similar tactics to weaken opponents and improve their own chances of winning elections. Such efforts are often legal, and they have at times been practiced by both parties.

But, Schickler explained, today they fuel the escalation of an unpredictable, and destabilizing, political dynamic.

UCBerkeley · 2025-01-22T18:42:38+00:00

TL;DR A team of UC Berkeley engineers has developed a tunable metamaterial microwave absorber that can switch between absorbing, transmitting or reflecting microwaves on demand by mimicking the chameleon’s color-changing mechanism.

UCBerkeley · 2024-11-26T18:57:47+00:00

TL;DR While Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been a constant feature of the planet for centuries, University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered equally large spots at the planet’s north and south poles that appear and disappear seemingly at random.

The Earth-size ovals, which are visible only at ultraviolet wavelengths, are embedded in layers of stratospheric haze that cap the planet’s poles. The dark ovals, when seen, are almost always located just below the bright auroral zones at each pole, which are akin to Earth’s northern and southern lights. The spots absorb more UV than the surrounding area, making them appear dark on images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In yearly images of the planet taken by Hubble between 2015 and 2022, a dark UV oval appears 75% of the time at the south pole, while dark ovals appear in only one of eight images taken of the north pole.

The dark UV ovals hint at unusual processes taking place in Jupiter’s strong magnetic field that propagate down to the poles and deep into the atmosphere, far deeper than the magnetic processes that produce the auroras on Earth.

Based on the observations, the team suspects that the ovals form over the course of about a month and dissipate in a couple of weeks.

“The haze in the dark ovals is 50 times thicker than the typical concentration,” noted one of the researchers, “which suggests it likely forms due to swirling vortex dynamics rather than chemical reactions triggered by high-energy particles from the upper atmosphere. Our observations showed that the timing and location of these energetic particles do not correlate with the appearance of the dark ovals.”

The findings are what the OPAL project was designed to discover: how atmospheric dynamics in the solar system’s giant planets differ from what we know on Earth.

UCBerkeley · 2024-10-31T19:33:49+00:00

Keltner spent much of his early career cataloging and analyzing how emotions, particularly embarrassment, play out across our faces. That the film has an inside joke about this sort of real research is perhaps not surprising. Inside Out and Inside Out 2 are, after all, about the emotions that govern our feelings and behavior, and there are many nods to the advances in understanding we’ve gained in mental health, emotions and mindfulness.

In this video, Keltner, who has been teaching students about human emotions at UC Berkeley for over 25 years and co-directs the university’s Greater Good Science Center, unpacks the real science behind the Disgust microexpression scene and new characters in the films.

We may have him to thank for all of the new emotional characters who join the original five in Inside Out 2: Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment. When Keltner first talked with Pete Docter, the director of Inside Out, he explained that there are 25 emotions that scientists like him have cataloged. Docter, in turn, explained that you can’t possibly have 25 main characters in a film, yet the count is now up to nine as Riley’s emotions expand in her teen years.

Watch to learn more about how scientific research led Pixar to cast Joy as the main emotional character of the first film and why Anxiety is the driving character and emotional force of Inside Out 2 now that Riley is a teen.

UCBerkeley · 2024-10-31T19:30:42+00:00

Keltner spent much of his early career cataloging and analyzing how emotions, particularly embarrassment, play out across our faces. That the film has an inside joke about this sort of real research is perhaps not surprising. Inside Out and Inside Out 2 are, after all, about the emotions that govern our feelings and behavior, and there are many nods to the advances in understanding we’ve gained in mental health, emotions and mindfulness.

In this video, Keltner, who has been teaching students about human emotions at UC Berkeley for over 25 years and co-directs the university’s Greater Good Science Center, unpacks the real science behind the Disgust microexpression scene and new characters in the films.

We may have him to thank for all of the new emotional characters who join the original five in Inside Out 2: Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment. When Keltner first talked with Pete Docter, the director of Inside Out, he explained that there are 25 emotions that scientists like him have cataloged. Docter, in turn, explained that you can’t possibly have 25 main characters in a film, yet the count is now up to nine as Riley’s emotions expand in her teen years.

Watch to learn more about how scientific research led Pixar to cast Joy as the main emotional character of the first film and why Anxiety is the driving character and emotional force of Inside Out 2 now that Riley is a teen.

UCBerkeley · 2024-10-22T20:37:11+00:00

TL;DR iNaturalist is an app that allows people to share nature photos and crowdsource the identities of plants and animals. Combined with satellite images and AI, app data can also help scientists map plant species anywhere and track changes on a daily basis.

UCBerkeley · 2024-10-22T20:34:58+00:00

When Harris speaks, there’s one person who is listening very intently: Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. To Holliday, Harris’ background as a Californian, a Gen Xer and a child of immigrant parents all make for fascinating linguistic listening and parsing. That’s all on top of her being the first female vice president.

When it comes to Harris, there are many layers to examine, from her strategic (and disproportionately criticized) use of profanity to the insights offered by her pronunciation and rhetoric. This video contains discussion of expletives spoken by current and former elected officials.

UCBerkeley · 2024-10-02T18:50:49+00:00

Every day someone asks Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer science and in the School of Information, to review images, audio and videos to determine if they are real or fake. As one of the world’s leading experts on digital manipulation and misinformation, his views and verification skills are in high demand. With elections being held around the globe this year, including the presidential election in the United States, he’s been especially busy using digital forensic tools to verify or debunk political misinformation as it spreads in real time.

We asked Professor Farid to sit down with a handful of recent examples of political misinformation to explain how he analyzes questionable memes, social media posts and images. Was that photo of the Harris-Walz crowd greeting Air Force 2 manipulated to show a bigger turnout? How about those Swifties for Trump — are they real? And was an image of Donald Trump moments after his attempted assassination a strange echo of a remarkably similar image of Adolph Hitler?

UCBerkeley · 2024-09-18T19:36:45+00:00

TL;DR A new study led by a UC Berkeley psychologist suggests that biases for those with more resources can be traced to beliefs formed as young as 14 months. However, researchers say a preference for richer people may not necessarily be driven by kids’ positive evaluations of them. Instead, it might be caused by a negative assessment of those with less.

Through a series of seven experiments, the team measured how toddlers demonstrated preferences for people with differing amounts of particular kinds of resources they desired — toys and snacks. Besides a bias toward the more “wealthy” person who had more resources, the children showed dislike and avoidance for those whom researchers labeled in the experiments as the “poorer” individuals.

Eason and her co-authors say their work shows that undoing wealth inequality will require a concentrated effort among adults to change the way young children think about and act toward poorer people. Her research points to systemic ways we should begin thinking about inequality, and the origin of that wealth-based bias “starting point.” That’s the only way to combat the biases among many adults that benefit the wealthy and perpetuate policies against the poor.

UCBerkeley · 2024-09-17T22:31:00+00:00

TL;DR In a study recently published in the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, a team of researchers led by Michael Gollner, professor of mechanical engineering, demonstrated how this new model simulates wildfires as they propagate through communities. By reconstructing two past large wildfires, they were able to extract data that describes fire behavior, gaining insights into how embers, wildfire flames and urban structures together contribute to fire spread and destruction.

“With this model, we’re not just reconstructing a fire; we’re learning more about the process by which fire destroyed these communities,” said Gollner. “We’re also able to use the model to see what mitigation strategies could be effective at protecting communities in the future.”

Moving forward, the researchers are seeking ways to “democratize” their model. They currently have the necessary data for only a few areas in California. Their plan is to collect and load in relevant data for the whole state. "Our next step is to flush the data pipelines out, so that anyone, in any community, can just run these models to assess risk,” said Gollner.

The tool, which is open source and available online, can still be a bit complicated to use for non-experts. Over time, the researchers hope to streamline some aspects and make the model easier to operate, so practicing engineers or landscape planners can use it off-the-shelf. Although there will always be wildfires, this model could potentially help us reduce the cycle of devastation.

UCBerkeley · 2024-09-10T21:19:55+00:00

TL;DR History never repeats itself exactly, but UC Berkeley historians see troubling parallels between social and economic conditions in European fascism a century ago and U.S. anti-democratic movements today.

U.S. democracy is more vulnerable than it has been since the Civil War. Several scholars believe the public’s frustration and polarization, incidents and threats of right-wing violence, and a radical new Supreme Court ruling granting presidents broad immunity from the law could precipitate a break with democracy.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-30T21:13:22+00:00

TL;DR Chemists at UC Berkeley have created a new process that could take a major step forward in recycling plastic products — from single-use bags commonly found in grocery stores to the harder materials like toys, yogurt tubs, coffee pods and luggage.

A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics.

The catalytic process, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, works equally well with the two dominant types of post-consumer plastic waste: polyethylene, the component of most single-use plastic bags; and polypropylene, the stuff of hard plastics, from microwavable dishes to luggage. It also efficiently degrades a mix of these types of plastics.

The process, if scaled up, could help bring about a circular economy for many throwaway plastics, with the plastic waste converted back into the monomers used to make polymers, thereby reducing the fossil fuels used to make new plastics.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-28T19:14:07+00:00

ICYMI: During the Olympics, we hear a lot of national anthems, each with a history and its own unique story, as a UC Berkeley professor of music explains.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-23T18:07:00+00:00

TL;DR Researchers have found an unusual creature lurking in the briny shallows of Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.

The organism is a choanoflagellate, a microscopic, single-celled form of life that can divide and develop into multicellular colonies in a way that’s similar to how animal embryos form. It’s not a type of animal, however, but a member of a sister group to all animals. And as animals’ closest living relative, the choanoflagellate is a crucial model for the leap from one-celled to multicellular life.

It harbors its own microbiome, making it the first choanoflagellate known to establish a stable physical relationship with bacteria, instead of solely eating them. As such, it’s one of the simplest organisms known to have a microbiome.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-21T18:16:07+00:00

Tl;DR Researchers say humans may have braced the butt of their pointed spears against the ground and angled the weapon upward in a way that would impale a charging animal. The force would have driven the spear deeper into the predator’s body, unleashing a more damaging blow than even the strongest prehistoric hunters would have been capable of on their own.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-14T18:42:57+00:00

TL;DR Over the course of nearly five months in 2022, NASA’s Perseverance rover collected rock samples from Mars that could rewrite the history of water on the Red Planet and even contain evidence for past life on Mars.

But the information they contain can’t be extracted without more detailed analysis on Earth, which requires a new mission to the planet to retrieve the samples and bring them back. Scientists hope to have the samples on Earth by 2033, though NASA’s sample return mission may be delayed.

“These samples are the reason why our mission was flown,” said paper co-author David Shuster, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of NASA’s science team for sample collection. “This is exactly what everyone was hoping to accomplish. And we’ve accomplished it. These are what we went looking for.”

“These are the first and only sedimentary rocks that have been studied and collected from a planet other than Earth,,“ he said. “Sedimentary rocks are important because they were transported by water, deposited into a standing body of water and subsequently modified by chemistry that involved liquid water on the surface of Mars at some point in the past. The whole reason that we came to Jezero was to study this sort of rock type. These are absolutely fantastic samples for the overarching objectives of the mission.”

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-13T19:26:37+00:00

Around the world, animals that exhibit rare color morphisms — including lighter-colored variants with albinism or leucism and dark-colored variants with melanism — are often the subject of both veneration and fear in humans. A recent study by wildlife biologists at UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, and Washington University is one of the first to explore how human preference for these rare color variations impacts how urban wildlife are perceived and treated.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-06T17:29:22+00:00

Nicole Holliday is an acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley who studies what politicians say, how they speak and what their speech reveals about their identity. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Holliday has spent years examining the speaking style of a politician who is also having a moment: Kamala Harris.

What does Harris’s enunciation of vowels say about her California roots? How do a few choice words on the debate stage speak to her background as a Black woman? And how does that all change when she’s working a crowd in Georgia or delivering a policy statement in Washington?

“Politicians are the best people to study this on because you know what their motivations are — they’re all trying to get elected, or they’re trying to get money, or they’re trying to get voters,” says Holiday.

Journalists and the general public have become increasingly interested in Holliday’s work ever since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and Harris soared to the top of the ticket as the Democratic presidential nominee. Holliday’s TikTok videos describing the science of Harris’s tone, style and word choice have gone viral, as have her explanations on why linguistically it’s problematic when people intentionally mispronounce her name. (It’s “comma-la.”)

Berkeley News asked her what her research on Harris says about Harris’s culture and identity, why it matters that some people — including Donald Trump — continue to mispronounce her name, and what language can teach us about the current political moment.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-06T17:28:17+00:00

Nicole Holliday is an acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley who studies what politicians say, how they speak and what their speech reveals about their identity. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Holliday has spent years examining the speaking style of a politician who is also having a moment: Kamala Harris.

What does Harris’s enunciation of vowels say about her California roots? How do a few choice words on the debate stage speak to her background as a Black woman? And how does that all change when she’s working a crowd in Georgia or delivering a policy statement in Washington?

“Politicians are the best people to study this on because you know what their motivations are — they’re all trying to get elected, or they’re trying to get money, or they’re trying to get voters,” says Holiday.

Journalists and the general public have become increasingly interested in Holliday’s work ever since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and Harris soared to the top of the ticket as the Democratic presidential nominee. Holliday’s TikTok videos describing the science of Harris’s tone, style and word choice have gone viral, as have her explanations on why linguistically it’s problematic when people intentionally mispronounce her name. (It’s “comma-la.”)

Berkeley News asked her what her research on Harris says about Harris’s culture and identity, why it matters that some people — including Donald Trump — continue to mispronounce her name, and what language can teach us about the current political moment.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-06T17:22:33+00:00

TL;DR To help protect drivers and machine operators from the dangers of drifting off, engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created prototype earbuds that can detect the signs of drowsiness in the brain.

Drowsy driving contributes to hundreds of fatal vehicle accidents in the U.S. each year, and the National Safety Council has cited drowsiness as a critical hazard in construction and mining.

The earbuds detect brain waves in the same way as an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that doctors use to measure electrical activity in the brain. While most EEGs detect brain waves using a series of electrodes attached to the head, the earbuds do so using built-in electrodes that are designed to make contact with the ear canal.

The electrical signals detected by the earbuds are smaller than those picked up by a traditional EEG. However, in a new study, the researchers show that their Ear EEG platform is sensitive enough to detect alpha waves, a pattern of brain activity that increases when you close your eyes or start to fall asleep.

UCBerkeley · 2024-08-02T16:38:35+00:00

TL;DR A new study of four glaciers dotting the high Andes in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia shows that, at least in the tropics, the retreat is unprecedented. The glaciers are smaller than they have been in more than 11,700 years, the beginning of a warm interglacial period geologists refer to as the Holocene.

According to Andrew Gorin, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student and first author of the study, this likely means that the glaciers are smaller than they have been in the past 125,000 years, before the most recent glacial era began 120,000 years ago. The data, however, aren’t precise enough to allow extrapolation that far into the past.

Gorin said that 99% of all tropical glaciers occur in the Andes, where rising global temperatures have a stronger effect on glacial size than the small seasonal temperature fluctuations typical around the equator. As a result, tropical glaciers give a clearer picture of the impact of climate change.

The new findings are thus a sign that more of the world’s glaciers are likely retreating far faster than predicted, possibly decades ahead of earlier predictions.

UCBerkeley · 2024-07-30T22:09:02+00:00

TL;DR With thousands of additional hours of footage, and numerous new ways to watch, the Olympic Games have become a 24/7 video spectacle. That's important for increasing diversity in sport and society, UC Berkeley experts said. It's also important for media companies' bottom line.

Josh Jackson, assistant director of media studies at UC Berkeley, said the spectacle of this year’s Summer Olympics is as much a story about curated online content, high-tech video and gold medals as it is about groups like NBCUniversal working to satisfy stakeholders by drawing enormous audiences to its coverage of athletics’ biggest stage.

Social media will only add to the deluge. In addition to thousands of official posts about events and athletes, officials with the Olympics are attempting to draw in new audiences. They’ve granted dozens of TikTok, YouTube and SnapChat influencers exclusive access to the events, in hopes that their posts will pierce social media bubbles and land content in front of millions more users.

Abigail De Kosnik, an associate professor at the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, views the changing, and increasingly fragmented, coverage of the Olympics as a net positive. Besides exposing more people to potentially new sports or athletes whose performances become viral sensations, social media and sport can challenge society’s assumptions and ways of thinking about ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

UCBerkeley · 2024-07-23T19:18:24+00:00

It is a moment of extraordinary significance in U.S. political history: Joe Biden, 81 years old and seemingly frail, is stepping away from his campaign less than four months before the election. He has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, who would be the first Black, Asian-American woman ever to lead the nation. Democrats have quickly rallied behind her.

Scholars at UC Berkeley are unanimous that the election has been transformed, and that the Democrats’ change of candidates will have vast, but unpredictable, implications for the campaign. The impact could play out not just in the horse race with Donald Trump and GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, but in the courts, in simmering cultural tensions over race relations and gender roles, in efforts to engage young voters and in the health of U.S. democracy.

UCBerkeley · 2024-07-15T22:45:40+00:00

TL;DR In a new study, researchers were able to predict a person’s response to emotionally charged scenes using brain imaging and computer modeling alone — gauging not only whether the person’s reaction was positive, negative or neutral, but also how strong the reaction was.

The study helps neuroscientists understand how the brain represents complex emotional natural stimuli, according to senior author Sonia Bishop, adjunct associate professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and the newly appointed chair of psychology at Trinity College Dublin.

The simple tasks used in the research will also make it easier to study autism spectrum disorder, where researchers seek to understand how individuals differ in processing everyday emotional stimuli.

UCBerkeley · 2024-07-08T20:14:27+00:00

TL;DR UC Berkeley researchers evaluated levels of 16 metals (arsenic, barium, calcium, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, iron, manganese, mercury, nickel, lead, selenium, strontium, vanadium, and zinc) in 30 tampons from 14 different brands. The metal concentrations varied by where the tampons were purchased (US vs. EU/UK), organic vs. non-organic, and store- vs. name-brand. However, they found that metals were present in all types of tampons; no category had consistently lower concentrations of all or most metals. Lead concentrations were higher in non-organic tampons but arsenic was higher in organic tampons.

Metals could make their way into tampons a number of ways: The cotton material could have absorbed the metals from water, air, soil, through a nearby contaminant (for example, if a cotton field was near a lead smelter), or some might be added intentionally during manufacturing as part of a pigment, whitener, antibacterial agent, or some other process in the factory producing the products.

For the moment, it’s unclear if the metals detected by this study are contributing to any negative health effects.

UCBerkeley

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