Berkeley's Star Planet Hunter

When most of us gaze up at the sky on a clear night, we marvel at the majesty of the constellations. UC Berkeley professor Geoffrey Marcy sees much more than that though. He's inspired by the fact that the thousands of visible suns could each be the center of a planetary system. Marcy is the world's foremost planet hunter. In the last decade, the team of astronomers that he leads has found more than 100 planets outside our solar system. Some of those planets could even have a rocky surface, ponds, or oceans like our Earth. A few of them may even support life.

Tiny Test Tubes and Nanoscale Membranes

It's no surprise that UC Berkeley chemist John Arnold spends most of his time working with test tubes. What's interesting is that some of Arnold's test tubes are thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. In collaboration with chemistry professor Peidong Yang, Arnold and his colleagues are using Berkeley's latest innovations in nanoscience to synthesize new materials that could someday lead to longer-lasting batteries and ultrasensitive detectors of poisonous arsenic in drinking water.

Yosemite Then and Now

A plaque in UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is engraved with a prophetic quote from founding director Joseph Grinnell. In 1910, Grinnell said "the value of the museum will not be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century." Only after such a long time passed could researchers benefit from hindsight, comparing today's fauna to the snapshot Grinnell and his colleagues took of California's wildlife during a landmark survey launched in 1904. A century later, UC Berkeley scientists led by Craig Moritz and Jim Patton are finally taking that look backward as they follow in Grinnell's footsteps through Yosemite National Park.

This artist's concept shows a newfound Neptune-size planet — one of the smallest extrasolar planets detected to date — circling the star 55 Cancri. In this depiction, the new planet has a rocky composition, like Earth. In reality, astronomers do not know if the planet is rocky or gaseous, like Jupiter. The planet's temperature is at least a scorching 1,500 Celsius (2,700 Fahrenheit). (Image courtesy NASA)