These days so many of our devices are smart. Our phones are smart. Our cars are smart. Our TVs are smart. And now, even vibrators can be smart. It’s called Lioness. It’s a sleek, sophisticated vibrator that works kind of like a running app on your smartphone, but instead of mapping the distance and terrain of a route, it records a person’s sexual arousal states.

Liz Klinger is the CEO and co-founder of Lioness. She and her team work out of SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s incubator for startups. She says her upbringing inspired her to pursue a career in sexual health.

Photos, video and story on UC Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/02/11/lioness-smart-vibrator/

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Marriage — modernly — is seen as sort of unalloyed good, says law professor Melissa Murray. “Everyone would like to get married, or most people would like to get married. Certainly, most people’s mothers want them to get married.”

Murray teaches family law at UC Berkeley. She says the marriage equality movement has built up the idea that marriage is this wonderful thing that everyone should want. And there are a lot of benefits to being married in the United States. People who are married have better financial outcomes than people who aren’t. They are often healthier (especially men), and they have access to a range of public and private benefits, like Social Security and shared employee health and other benefit plans.

But she says there’s a darker side to marriage that’s been overlooked.

Photo by Blyth Scott Photography via Flickr. See photos and read the story on UC Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/11/10/the-darker-side-of-marriage/

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In 2004, Scott Zimmermann had a big idea. He had just quit the oil and gas industry — he’d been working in it for eight years, trying to reduce the impacts of fossil fuels — and enrolled at UC Berkeley as a dual-degree law student and master’s student in the Energy and Resources Group.

He knew he wanted to do something about climate change. But instead of lobbying for the state or the federal government to adopt carbon cap laws, as a lot of environmentalists were doing at the time, he decided to start right where he was — with the campus.

Read the story on UC Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/10/01/cal-climate-action-partnership-big-idea/

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The Campanile clock tower is the campus’s North Star. At 100 years old and 307 feet tall, it’s a landmark everyone knows and trusts. But what happens when the clocks stop? There’s only one person to call: Art Simmons.

“Everybody in Berkeley watches those clocks,” says Simmons. “Not just the people on campus. So when the clocks stop, the whole city knows about it and it doesn’t look good.”

Read the story on UC Berkeley News: https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/07/29/campanile-clocks/

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We’re at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. A long line curves through the gardens, and a small group huddles in a steamy greenhouse, all here to get a whiff of Trudy.

Garden director Paul Licht stands at the front, talking to one of the many groups to visit during the latest Trudy mania. “It goes in waves, doesn’t it?” he asks. “None have ever smelled as much the day after it opened.”

Trudy is a tropical plant called a Titan Arum, known best for the putrid odor it emits when it blooms.

Read the story on UC Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/07/27/trudys-bloom-raises-a-stink/

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