Boning Up On Human Evolution

Tim White, a UC Berkeley professor of Integrative Biology, is on what he calls "a planetary mission," but the planet he's exploring is Earth, albeit a very long time ago. White and an international team of scientists are digging deep into the geological record of remote Ethiopia to find clues about this planet as it existed six million years ago. What was the weather like? What kinds of plants thrived? What animals roamed the terrain? And, of particular interest to paleoanthropologists like White, what did our ancestors look like before evolution transformed them into us?

Mining For Microbes

Every time UC Berkeley professor Jillian Banfield descends into the abandoned Richmond Mine in Iron Mountain, California, she's fascinated by the strange beauty of the pink films floating on pools of green water. Those highly-acidic films are what make Richmond Mine, one of the country's largest Superfund sites, such an environmental nightmare. For nearly a decade, Banfield has studied the communities of microbes in those films, the source of the hazardous acid mine drainage. Someday, her research might even lead to new ways to remediate the ecological damage.

Dealing With Cloudy Data

Looking up, it's easy to spot the clouds. The white fluff is strikingly contrasted by the blue sky. It's not so easy from space, especially above the Earth's poles. The clouds blend in against the vast expanses of snow and ice. This is a problem for scientists who use satellites to study clouds and climate. Recently though, UC Berkeley statistician Bin Yu, her graduate student Tao Shi, and their collaborators have devised a new algorithm that detects clouds even when the poles play tricks on the satellites' electronic eyes.

The oldest known fossil of modern humans, dating back 160,000 years. (© 2000 David L. Brill, Brill Atlanta)