Robert Sanders

1 month ago | news.berkeley.edu | Robert Sanders

Flamingos feed by dragging their flattened beaks forward along the bottom of shallow lakes. To increase the efficiency of feeding, they stomp dance to churn the bottom, create an upwelling vortex with their heads and clap their beaks constantly to draw food, like brine shrimp, into their mouths. Aztli OrtegaFlamingos standing serenely in a shallow alkaline lake with heads submerged may seem to be placidly feeding, but there’s a lot going on under the surface.

1 month ago | news.berkeley.edu | Robert Sanders

Astronomers have discovered nearly 100 examples of massive black holes shredding and devouring stars, almost all of them where you’d expect to find massive black holes: in the star-dense cores of massive galaxies. University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have now discovered the first instance of a massive black hole tearing apart a star thousands of light years from the galaxy’s core, which itself contains a massive black hole.

1 month ago | news.berkeley.edu | Robert Sanders

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist from Arizona State University (ASU) who currently leads a $1.2 billion NASA mission to explore an asteroid called Psyche, has been chosen as the new director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL).

1 month ago | news.berkeley.edu | Robert Sanders

As a descendent of an indigenous Amazonian tribe, Maria Astolfi was concerned about research she conducted as a graduate student at UC Berkeley involving an extract of a plant long used for medicinal purposes by the Mapuche peoples of Chile. The research in the lab of Jay Keasling, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, sought to reproduce in yeast a molecule from the Chilean soapbark tree that is used as an adjuvant or enhancer in many vaccines.

2 months ago | news.berkeley.edu | Robert Sanders

The academic year 2013-14 changed the direction of Wendy Ingram’s life. Over the course of a few months, four members of the UC Berkeley department in which she was a graduate student died by suicide: an undergraduate student, a doctoral student, a post-doctoral fellow and a faculty member. The tragic events left many in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) reeling, but Ingram also found that the suicides prompted co-workers to share their own mental health issues.