The Telescope at the South Pole

This past December, while children across the nation were fantasizing about Santa and his elves at the North Pole, UC Berkeley Professor of Physics Bill Holzapfel was focused in the opposite direction. On Christmas Day, Holzapfel and his colleagues were mobilizing to assemble an ambitious new instrument at the coldest astronomy observing station in the world: the South Pole Telescope.

Keeping the Body on Schedule

Hours before you wake, an inner alarm clock primes your body for a day on the go. From deep within your brain, it triggers the release of hormones that tell your cells to spur to action, keeping the body's systems working in harmony. UC Berkeley Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Lance Kriegsfeld is interested in how the brain's clock affects hormone cycles in the body. His findings not only could help more women conceive but may also help make jet lag a thing of the past.

Semiclassical Chemistry

The world as we know it is a soup of chemicals. Air has a complex recipe of oxygen, nitrogen, smog, and a dozen other substances; the oceans, their briny broth of salts and minerals and water. Even our own cells are seething cauldrons of ions and proteins and DNA. UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry William Miller has developed the theory to help understand molecular transformations molecule by molecule.

Professor Holzapfel and colleagues were responsible for designing and building the detector system on the South Pole Telescope. Antarctica's arid atmosphere provides the best viewing conditions available on earth.