Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color . It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens. The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones. Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley’s School of Optometry, developed the optical imaging platform they used...
May 26, 2025•19 min
When Ann Johnson had a rare brainstem stroke at age 30, she lost control of all of her muscles. One minute, she was playing volleyball with her friends. The next, she couldn’t move or speak. Up until that moment, she’d been a talkative and outgoing person. She taught math and physical education, and coached volleyball and basketball at a high school in Saskatchewan, Canada. She’d just had a baby a year earlier with her new husband. And the thing is, she still was that person. It's just that no o...
Apr 28, 2025•17 min
When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined. The Chinese village was known for mass producing copies of Western art. She’d read about it in The New York Times, which described a kind of compound where thousands of artists painted replicas of famous artworks, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or van Gogh’s Starry Night, for European and U.S. hotels and condos. “We had an expectation, which was that there would be this giant factory,” said Wong, a prof...
Mar 31, 2025•24 min
Have you ever seen letters from the 1800s? Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is remarkable. “Letters sent between friends are often full of the kinds of loving and affectionate language that today we would only associate with romantic or sexual relationships: ‘My darling,’ ‘I love you,’ ‘I can't wait to be near you,’” said UC Berkeley historian Sarah Gold McBride, who in 2022 created the course, Friendship in America, with Ber...
Feb 24, 2025•15 min
Against her mom’s warnings, UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells watched Arachnaphobia as a kid. Ever since, she has been terrified of spiders. But over the years, she has learned to reason with her quick fear response — No, that spider is not 8 feet in diameter — and calmly trap them and put them outside. We all encounter problems like this, she says, where we have quick reactions to things we’ve learned to fear. It might be something that is actually dangerous that we really sho...
Jan 27, 2025•23 min
For UC Berkeley Professor Jack Tseng, the world of paleontology never gets old. With each new discovery, paleontologists like him learn more about the animals that walked the earth millions of years ago. "If you look at books from 50 years ago, they postured dinosaurs very differently from the way we do it today," Tseng says. "This constant profusion of new scientific knowledge into the popular psyche is recorded in children's books, which is a lovely way to see how this science has progressed."...
Dec 30, 2024•18 min
Like millions of other Americans, UC Berkeley Professor Poulomi Saha watched a lot of docuseries about cults during the COVID-19 pandemic. The more Saha watched, the more they felt a kind of change within themself. "I was absolutely enthralled," said Saha. “My reaction no longer fit that old script, the script that I had internalized. I wasn’t just having a passing interest. I wasn’t sort of mildly terrified. I was thinking, “Oh, wow, that makes good sense.’” Saha wanted to understand why. So th...
Nov 25, 2024•29 min
In a June 2024 study, UC Berkeley psychology professor Keanan Joyner and his colleagues found that by using a combination of methods tailored to the multidimensional nature of psychopathy, we could transform how we identify and understand this personality disorder. "I think that it goes toward having a functional and positive society," Joyner said. "Our collaboration is the substance of what makes humans so wonderful as a species." Key takeaways: - Psychopathy exists on a spectrum - Boldness is ...
Oct 28, 2024•23 min
For the first three years of Justin Davidson's childhood in Chicago, his mom spoke only Spanish to him. Although he never spoke the language as a young child, when Davidson began to learn Spanish in middle school, it came very quickly to him, and over the years, he became bilingual. Now an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Davidson is part of a research team that has discovered where in the brain bilinguals process and store language-specific sounds and s...
Apr 16, 2024•13 min
There are countless English varieties in the U.S. There's Boston English and California English and Texas English. There's Black English and Chicano English. There's standard academic, or white, English. They're all the same language, but linguistically, they're different. "Standard academic English is most represented by affluent white males from the Midwest, specifically Ohio in the mid-20th century," says UC Berkeley sociolinguist Justin Davidson. "If you grow up in this country and your Engl...
Apr 05, 2024•12 min
Spanish speakers in the United States, among linguists and non-linguists, have been denigrated for the way they speak, says UC Berkeley sociolinguist Justin Davidson. It’s part of the country's long history of scrutiny of non-monolingual English speakers, he says, dating back to the early 20th century. "It’s groups in power — its discourses and collective communities — that sort of socially determine what kinds of words and what kinds of language are acceptable and unacceptable," says Davidson, ...
Mar 29, 2024•11 min
In his research, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Saagar Asnani looks at music manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries in medieval France. He says only recently have scholars begun to use a wider variety of media and artistic expressions as a way to study language. "If we unpack the genre of music, we will find a very precise record of how language was spoken," Saagar says. To read medieval music, Saagar learned five languages — Latin, German, Italian, Catalan and Occitan — making 10 lan...
Mar 05, 2024•18 min
Brandon Sánchez Mejia stood at a giant wall in UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery and couldn’t believe his eyes. In front of him were 150 black-and-white photos of men’s bodies in all sorts of poses and from all sorts of angles. It was his senior thesis project, " A Masculine Vulnerability ," and it was out for the world to see. "It came from this idea that as men, we are not allowed to show skin as scars or emotions or weakness," said Sánchez, who will graduate from Berkeley this May with a ...
Feb 22, 2024•9 min
The self-guided Black history tour at UC Berkeley begins at Memorial Stadium, where student Walter Gordon was a star of the football team more than 100 years ago. It then weaves through campus, making stops at 13 more locations, each highlighting an important person or landmark related to Black history. There's Ida Louise Jackson Graduate House, named in honor of the first African American woman to teach in Oakland public schools. Next is Barbara Christian Hall, named for the first Black woman t...
Feb 01, 2024•10 min
Bonobos and chimpanzees — the closest extant relatives to humans — could have the longest-lasting nonhuman memory, a study led by a UC Berkeley researcher found . Extensive social memory had previously been documented only in dolphins and up to 20 years. "What we're showing here," said Berkeley comparative psychologist Laura Simone Lewis, "is that chimps and bonobos may be able to remember that long — or longer." Berkeley News writer Jason Pohl first published a story about this study in Decembe...
Jan 26, 2024•7 min
Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the late 19th century. But UC Berkeley history professor Hidetaka Hirota, author of Expelling the Poor , says state immigration laws in the country were created earlier than that — and actually served as models for national immigration policy decades later. This is an episode of Afterthoughts , a series that highlights moments from ...
Jan 08, 2024•5 min
Today, we're sharing the first episode of the new season of the Berkeley Remix, a podcast by UC Berkeley's Oral History Center. The four-episode season, called "From Generation to Generation: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration," centers the experiences of descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. It explores themes of activism, contested memory, identity and belonging, and creative expression as a way to process and heal from intergener...
Dec 14, 2023•27 min
The U.S. transcontinental railroad is considered one of the biggest accomplishments in American history. Completed in 1869, it was the first railroad to connect the East to the West. It cut months off trips across the country and opened up Western trade of goods and ideas throughout the U.S. But building the railroad was treacherous, brutal work. And the companies leading the railroad project had a hard time retaining American workers. So they began to recruit newly arrived immigrants for the jo...
Nov 14, 2023•16 min
UC Berkeley's first social justice theater professor, Timmia Hearn DeRoy, talks about how Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival practice, rooted in emancipation, drives her work today. "Trinidadian Carnival, it’s social justice theater in practice. Every moment, it’s all about emancipation, the subverting of the powerful narrative through humor, through performance, through doublespeak. And it just taught me so much about the possibilities of the art form." Photo courtesy of Timmia Hearn DeRoy. Music b...
Oct 17, 2023•22 min
It was summertime in the early 1970s in New York City. Fifteen-year-old Jim LeBrecht boarded a school bus headed for the Catskill Mountains, home to Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities. As the bus approached the camp, he peered out the window at the warm and raucous group below. "I wasn't exactly sure who was a camper and who was a counselor," he said. "I think that's really indicative of one of the many things that made that camp special." Over several years, the camp changed...
Sep 05, 2023•41 min
Growing up, Linda Kinstler knew that her Latvian grandfather had mysteriously disappeared after World War II. But she didn't think much about it. "That was a very common fate from this part of the world," says Kinstler, a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at UC Berkeley. "It didn't strike me as totally unusual. It was only later when I began looking into it more that I realized there was probably more to the story." What she discovered was too big for her to walk away. In 2022, she published her first...
May 18, 2023•28 min
At 6 months old, Britt H. Young was fitted with her first prosthetic arm. "The belief was that you would get started on using an adaptive device right away and that would be easiest for you, rather than learning to adapt to your body the way that it is, rather than learning about how to navigate the world with the body you have," said Britt, who is graduating from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in geography on May 15. Born missing part of her left arm, Britt never went to school without wearing her pr...
May 10, 2023•18 min
Gericault De La Rose is a queer trans Filipinx woman, and refuses to change for anyone. "Being that queer trans person completely owning herself I hope gives other people permission to be themselves, too," she says. A master's student in UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice, Gericault explores in her art Philippine mythology and her experience as a trans woman. One time, she dressed up like a manananggal — a kind of monster that detaches from her lower body at night to look for unborn babies...
May 08, 2023•22 min
Yesterday at sunset marked the start of Ramadan, the ninth and holiest month of the Islamic calendar. For Ali Bhatti, a Ph.D. candidate in science and math education at UC Berkeley, it’s a time to feel closer to God, to break habits and to remember what he’s thankful for. In this episode, Ali describes, in his own words, what the month means to him. He also talks about how 9/11 shaped his childhood in New Jersey, finding his Muslim community at Berkeley and how Islam, and the support of his fami...
Mar 23, 2023•16 min
In this episode of Be the Change , host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Purvi Shah. Shah is the founder and executive director of Movement Law Lab and a civil rights litigator, policy advocate and law professor who has spent over a decade working at the intersection of law and grassroots social movements. During their conversation, they talk about the nuts and bolts of founding a legal nonprofit in response to current events, an...
Mar 22, 2023•41 min
In this episode of Be the Change , host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Nazune Menka. Menka is a lecturer at Berkeley Law and a supervising attorney for the campus’s Environmental Law Clinic. She is Denaakk’e from Alaska and Lumbee from North Carolina. In fall 2021, Menka designed and taught a new undergraduate legal studies course called Decolonizing UC Berkeley, and she taught Indigenous Peoples, Law and the United States at t...
Mar 15, 2023•46 min
Host Savala Nolan, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, interviews Khiara M. Bridges. Bridges is a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Law and a powerful public intellectual who speaks and writes about race, class, reproductive justice and the intersection of the three. During their conversation, they talk about the process of Bridges claiming and using her voice as a prominent Black woman. And they discuss the complexities of presentation and adornment for...
Mar 08, 2023•52 min
Embodying the change you want to see in the world can feel ... well, intimidating. Impossible, even. But Berkeley Law's Savala Nolan wants to help us all figure it out — one step at a time — in her podcast, Be the Change. "We're talking about transforming the world and being the change and these very lofty concepts," says Nolan, director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. "But I hope what they see is that big, lofty concepts really contain lots of little, teeny, tiny steps th...
Mar 01, 2023•21 min
We’ve heard the acronym DEIBJ a lot on campus, especially in the past few years. For those who might not know, it stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice. A growing number of people at UC Berkeley have positions dedicated solely to this incredibly important work. But sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what DEIBJ means, what it actually looks like in practice — now, in our day-to-day lives, but also in the future, when initiatives and policies and other on-the-ground work ...
Feb 09, 2023•24 min
In this episode of Berkeley Voices , Berkeley Law student Hoda Katebi discusses how, after she began wearing the hijab as a sixth-grader in Oklahoma, she learned that clothes are inherently political. "It played a huge role in shaping my own personal growth, as well as my relationship to politics," Katebi says. Since protests broke out in Iran nearly three months ago, sparked by the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini by Iran's so-called morality police, Katebi has been an outspoken supporter...
Dec 07, 2022•14 min
