Berkeley Voices

We’re at UC Berkeley’s Campanile courtyard listening to sounds of an ancient bell that have never been heard before. It’s the 20-foot-tall, 200-ton Russian “Tsar Bell” — the largest bell in the world — in duet with the campus’s carillon.

But the bell isn’t actually here. It’s at the Moscow Kremlin. A UC Berkeley team, along with researchers at Stanford and the University of Michigan, worked together to digitally create the sound they believed the bell would make.

Read the story on UC Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/04/21/russian-tsar-bell-podcast/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The CDC released a report recommending that women of childbearing age who aren’t taking birth control should abstain from drinking alcohol. Berkeley Law professor Melissa Murray says the report gives the impression that women are incapable of making responsible choices about their reproductive health.

Photo by Frédéric Poirot via Flickr.

Story on UC Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/02/18/is-cdc-alcohol-warning-paternalistic/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.