窪蹋勛圖厙

Skip to content

Research

Despite their reputation as blood-suckers, mosquitoes actually spend most of their time drinking nectar from flowers. Scientists have identified the chemical cues in flowers that stimulate mosquitoes sense of smell and draw them in. Their findings show how cues from flowers can stimulate the mosquito brain as much as a warm-blooded host information that could help develop less toxic repellents and better traps.

When nearly one million common murres died at sea and washed ashore from California to Alaska in 2015 and 2016, it was unprecedented. Scientists from the 窪蹋勛圖厙, the U.S. Geological Survey and others blame an unexpected squeeze on the ecosystem’s food supply, brought on by a severe and long-lasting marine heat wave known as “the blob.”

While waiting for free firearm storage devices at gun safety events held in sporting goods stores across Washington, nearly 3,000 people filled out a one-page survey asking how they stored guns at home and other household information. What the participants reported emphasizes the need for these public events, Seattle Children’s and 窪蹋勛圖厙 researchers say, because 40% of gun owners at the events reported having at least one firearm in their home that was not locked up. In addition,…

  A teacher discusses respectful world travel, a historian explores Silicon Valleys evolution, a professor and violist plays the music of Robert Schumann and a late English faculty member’s meditation on Seattle returns Heres a quick look at some gift-worthy books and music created by 窪蹋勛圖厙 faculty in the last year and a reminder of some recent favorites. O’Mara’s ‘Code’: History professor Margaret O’Mara provides a sweeping history of California’s computer industry titans in her book The Code:…

To better understand large, disruptive snowstorms, a 窪蹋勛圖厙 atmospheric scientist will lead a NASA field campaign this winter to fly through major snowstorms along the East Coast. The multi-institutional team will observe snow as it forms in clouds to help with satellite monitoring of snowfall and ultimately improve forecasts.

Joyce Yen director of the 窪蹋勛圖厙s ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change, an NSF-funded body to promote female STEM faculty on campus recently worked with the Heising-Simons Foundation to dismantle bias and promote diversity in a prominent grant that the Foundation awards to postdoctoral researchers in planetary science. In this Q&A, Yen shares the many, sometimes counterintuitive ways bias can work against goals toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM fields.

Using a mathematical framework with roots in artificial intelligence and robotics, 窪蹋勛圖厙 researchers were able to uncover the process of how a person makes choices in groups. And, they also found they were able to predict a persons choice more often than more traditional descriptive methods.

New findings from the largest study of socially-transitioned transgender children in the world, conducted by researchers at the 窪蹋勛圖厙, show that gender identity and gender-typed preferences manifest similarly in both cis- and transgender children, even those who recently transitioned.

With a $106 million gift from the Weill Family Foundation, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and the 窪蹋勛圖厙 have launched the Weill Neurohub, an innovative research network that will forge and nurture new collaborations between neuroscientists and researchers working in an array of other disciplines including engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry and mathematics to speed the development of new therapies for diseases and disorders that affect the brain and nervous system.

Researchers at the 窪蹋勛圖厙 have developed a method that could make reproducible manufacturing at the nanoscale possible. The team adapted a light-based technology employed widely in biology known as optical traps or optical tweezers to operate in a water-free liquid environment of carbon-rich organic solvents, thereby enabling new potential applications.

Researchers from the 窪蹋勛圖厙 and the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in the Netherlands have developed a way to map strain in lead halide perovskite solar cells. Their approach shows that misorientation between microscopic perovskite crystals is the primary contributor to the buildup of strain within the solar cell, which creates small-scale defects in the grain structure, interrupts the transport of electrons within the solar cell, and ultimately leads to heat loss through a process known as non-radiative recombination.

窪蹋勛圖厙 political scientist Megan Ming Francis says there is a dearth of academic book series being published on topics of race, ethnicity and politics. Now, she will start to change that. An associate professor of political science, Francis will be the editor of a new series of books from Cambridge University Press called Cambridge Elements in Race, Ethnicity and Politics. Francis, on leave and at Harvard for the 2019-2020 school year, answered a few questions about the new…

Ashleigh Theberge, a 窪蹋勛圖厙 assistant professor of chemistry, has been named a 2019 Packard Fellow for her research on cell signaling. Every year since 1988, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation has awarded Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering to early-career scientists to pursue the types of innovative projects that often fall outside the purview of traditional sources of funding, such as research grants from government agencies. As one of 22 fellows for 2019, Theberge will receive $875,000…