“The original focus on fish oil and omega-3s came from studies of Inuit. On their traditional diet, rich in fat from marine mammals, Inuit seemed quite healthy with a low incidence of cardiovascular disease, so fish oil must be protective,” said project leader Rasmus Nielsen, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. “We’ve now found that they have unique genetic adaptations to this diet, so you cannot extrapolate from them to other populations.

Professor Robert Dudley has discovered a new type of nocturnal hunting spider from South America that is able to steer while it glides to the ground, unlike other spiders that just drop.
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“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said marine biologist Roy Caldwell, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of integrative biology.”

“Octopuses typically pounce on their prey or poke around in holes until they find something. When this octopus sees a shrimp at a distance, it compresses itself and creeps up, extends an arm up and over the shrimp, touches it on the far side and either catches it or scares it into its other arms.”
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Professor Todd Dawson has been elected to the Union of Fellows for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) for his long history of work discovering the different roles trees play in hydrological and biogeochemical processes.
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The analysis, using the most comprehensive genetic data set from Native Americans to date, was conducted using three different statistical models, two of them created by UC Berkeley researchers. The first, developed by the lab of Yun Song, a UC Berkeley associate professor of statistics and of electrical engineering and computer sciences, takes into account the full DNA information available from the genomes in the study.

"When I went foraging with Philip Stark and Tom Carlson for what became the first of the California Matters series of videos, I had an idea of what to expect. ...I learned about eating dandelion leaves, roots, and the base where they met, as well as crowns and even the little balls of unbloomed flowers (actually the best part, sautéed). I learned, too, about milkweed, a plant that can be eaten at several stages."

Research by Professor Brent Mishler and IB graduate student Caleb Caswell-Levy on ‘Resurrection Plants’,  desiccation-tolerant mosses and their associated rotifers which can survive long dry spells and spring back to life when exposed to water, is the focus of a video and story on KQED public television.
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Published today in the journal Bioscience, the report outlines how illegal marijuana production is hitting California where it hurts, such as in sensitive watersheds already stressed by the state’s ongoing drought. Networks of pipes and hoses siphon water directly from small streams to irrigate the crops, draining what little water there is for wildlife and plants.

Dubbed “veloci-roach,” the crawling device uses sensors and locomotion like many other bio-inspired devices.

But this one flips on its side to shimmy through spaces that would normally prove too small, according to Chen Li, postdoctoral researcher in the UC Berkeley department of integrative biology, and electrical engineering and computer science.

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“We are on the trajectory of seeing a mass extinction in two human lifetimes if we just keep doing business as usual,” said Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist in UC Berkeley’s integrative biology department and one of the authors of the study.

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