Big data isn’t just changing the way we shop, date, and communicate. It’s also changing the way we do science. This April 2 to 5, molecular and computational biologists from across the country converged in San Francisco for the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) annual meeting. The JGI was created by the US Department of Energy
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“I stopped taking the medication,” he told me. Recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, my friend lasted only a month on a new cocktail of pills containing lithium, sleeping medication, antipsychotics, and antidepressants. While he could cope with its physical side effects, such as hand tremors and horrible migraines, he could not stand its mental manifestations.
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In the depths of the Earth lurks a mysterious phenomenon: earthquakes are occurring in regions where they should be impossible, and we don’t know what’s causing them. Unlike Professor Lidenbrock, the protagonist of Jules Verne’s classic Journey to the Center of the Earth, we cannot descend down a volcanic shaft to observe the processes that
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“Berkeley is less than the sum of its parts.” My first graduate school professor said this quote, the one I most remember from my first day of graduate school. By transferring from aerospace engineering to studies in global poverty and development in Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group (ERG), I knew I should expect a nontraditional
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Dirty and toxic air, fiery red skies, whole cities scrambling for respirator masks and sheltering indoors: this is what Bay Area residents experienced as two wildfires—some of the most destructive in California history—burned simultaneously in November 2018. As a post-apocalyptic scene dawned over the Bay Area, thousands of homes were destroyed in the blazes more
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I was conducting my first research interviews at the Botswana Innovation Hub in the summer of 2017, working to develop an ethnographic evaluation study of the Botswana innovation ecosystem. After each intense interview, I asked my respondents how I could make the insights more useful to them. Many gave answers I didn’t expect; instead of
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