Faculty

Montgomery Slatkin is honored with the Kimura Motoo Award

Montgomery Slatkin

In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Kimura Motoo Foundation, we have created the Kimura Motoo Award. The executive committee has selected the most outstanding scientist, as a recipient, from each of four research fields of evolutionary biology; population genetics, molecular phylogeny, molecular evolution and evolutionary genomics, and human evolution.  Population Genetics- Dr.

Bromances may be good for men’s health

“A bromance can be a good thing,” said lead author Elizabeth Kirby, who started work on the study while a doctoral student at UC Berkeley and continued it after assuming a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. “Males are getting a bad rap when you look at animal models of social interactions, because they are assumed to be instinctively aggressive. But even rats can have a good cuddle – essentially a male-male bromance – to help recover from a bad day.”

Worldwide bee epidemic linked to human cause: colony trafficking

To determine the course and source of the virus’s spread around the globe, a UC Berkeley researcher Michael Boots, professor of integrative biology, collaborated with colleagues at Exeter University in the UK to analyze the genomes of viruses collected from around Europe, Asia, Australia and North America.

Cockroach Inspires Robot that Squeezes Through Cracks

“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.”

Let them see you sweat: What new wearable sensors can reveal from perspiration

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.

South America’s white-sand forests: poorly known and under threat

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.