“What’s impressive about these cockroaches is that they can run as fast through a quarter-inch gap as a half-inch gap, by reorienting their legs completely out to the side,” said study leader Kaushik Jayaram, who recently obtained his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. “They’re about half an inch tall when they run freely, but can squish their bodies to one-tenth of an inch — the height of two stacked pennies.”

While health monitors have exploded onto the consumer electronics scene over the past decade, researchers say this device, reported in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Nature, is the first fully integrated electronic system that can provide continuous, non-invasive monitoring of multiple biochemicals in sweat.

Paul Fine, a tropical biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, approached Biotropica with the idea for the special issue after helping organize a symposium at a 2013 meeting ATBC held in Costa Rica on white-sand forest ecology and evolution and coming away impressed by the breadth of the talks.

Scientists have found an abrupt change about 6,000 years ago in how terrestrial plant and animal species coexisted, right about the time human populations were ballooning and agriculture was spreading around the world.

The simplicity of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing will soon make studying the genes of any organism, from the simplest slime mold to the octopus, as easy as it now is to study the genes controlling development in standard lab animals such as nematodes, fruit flies, frogs and mice.

$1.76 million over three years for a Conservation Genomics Network, led by UCLA and involving UC Berkeley’s Rasmus Nielsen as co-principal investigator and Michael Nachman, Steven Beissinger and Erica Rosenblum as co-investigators. The goal is to develop a revolutionary bioinformatics toolkit to understand changes in gene expression and how threatened populations respond to changes in their habitats and in the climate.

In 2012, UC Berkeley paleontologist Anthony Barnosky and 20 co-authors published a dire paper warning that Earth’s climate is approaching a tipping point that could irrevocably drive the planet into a scary and uncertain future.

Daniela Kaufer, PhD, is an associate professor at UC Berkeley who studies the biology of stress, examining at the molecular level how the brain responds to anxiety and traumatic events. Her most recent findings show that certain kinds of stress can have surprising benefits. Dr. Kaufer explains the difference between good stress and bad stress, and gives pointers for how to respond to stressful events in a healthy way.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation named 18 of the nation’s most innovative early-career scientists and engineers as recipients of the 2015 Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. Each Fellow will receive a grant of $875,000 over five years to pursue their research.

Leslea J. Hlusko, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology was interviewed by CALIFORNIA Magazine about the question of: What is race? 

"Questions of race and ethnicity are hard to answer, and even risky to ask. We asked them anyway, and here’s what people on the UC Berkeley campus had to say."

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