College of Chemistry

Mexican fan palms, native to the deserts of northwestern Mexico, are a widely-planted ornamental throughout the Los Angeles basin and are contributing substantially to the organic aerosol pollution in the area, according to a UC Berkeley study. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

California’s restrictions on vehicle emissions have been so effective that in...

David Schaffer, Hertz Fellow, gene therapy researcher, and The Hubbard Howe Jr. Distinguished Professor of Biochemical Engineering at UC Berkeley says he “plays Darwin” in his Berkeley lab, using high throughput genetic sequencing technology to test over a billion genetic samples for the desired biological activity.

He mutates promising genes and selects...

Plastic is a certainly versatile element. There is much we can do with it. Utensils, tools, parts for cars, technological devices. There is only one thing we do not know how to do with plastic: disappear when it is no longer useful. There the real headache begins and the enormous challenge of obtaining a circular or fully recyclable plastic is posed. Plastics contain various additives, such as dyes, fillers or flame retardants and very few of them can be recycled without loss of performance or aesthetics. The most recyclable plastic, PET (ethylene polyterephthalate), is only recycled at a rate of 20-30%. The rest generally goes to incinerators or landfills where it takes centuries to decompose.

Visionary biochemist Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize last year for the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), which has the potential to cure diseases caused by genetic mutations. Correspondent David Pogue talks with Doudna about the promises and perils of CRISPR; and with Walter Isaacson, author of the new book "The Code Breaker," about why the biotech revolution will dwarf the digital revolution in importance.

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