Undergraduate

Application Now Open: IB Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program

Justice Williams and Stephen Eun Song
Justice Williams and Stephen Eun Song, 2023 IBSURE interns.

The IB Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (IB SURE) Program has now opened it's application. This program is for undergraduates or recent undergraduates who are considering a graduate degree in the biological sciences. Program runs from May 31 - Aug 9, 2024. Interested students should apply by April 1, 2024. See here for more information.

 

Pacific kelp forests are far older than we thought

Bed of kelp in ocean

A new study by IB researchers (Professor Cindy Looy, PhD alum Rosemary Romero, and BA alum Tony Huynh) and collaborators shows that kelp flourished off the Northwest Coast more than 32 million years ago, long before the appearance of modern groups of marine mammals, sea urchins, birds and bivalves that today call the forests home.

 

Anand Varma, IB BA 2008, starts National Geographic WonderLab

Anand Varma

National Geographic Explorer and photographer Anand Varma (Integrative Biology BA 2008) "will use WonderLab, his new, cutting-edge storytelling studio in Berkeley, Ca. to document the lives of large and miniscule creatures revealing details that are missed with the naked eye." Read more on the National Geographic blog or at the DailyCal.
 

Machine translation could make English-only science accessible to all

“The idea here is that we’re trying to give people the tools and motivation to translate their own scientific research,” Rebecca Tarvin said. “Science doesn’t need to be based on a single language. And there’s lots of additional benefits that come from incorporating multilingual approaches in every phase of science.

Some birds sing the same song for hundreds of thousands of years

A new study by biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Missouri State University in Springfield, however, documents songs in East African sunbirds that have remained nearly unchanged for more than 500,000 years, and perhaps for as long as 1 million years, making the songs nearly indistinguishable from those of relatives from which they’ve long been separated.

Leaping squirrels! Parkour is one of their many feats of agility

Biologists like Robert Full at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown over the last few decades how animals like geckos, cockroaches and squirrels physically move and how their bodies and limbs help them in sticky situations — all of which have been applied to making more agile robots. But now they are tackling a harder problem: How do animals decide whether or not to take a leap? How do they assess their biomechanical abilities to know whether they can stick the landing?