UC Berkeley (Audio)

"We set out to create a type of bandage that could detect bedsores as they are forming, before the damage reaches the surface of the skin," said Michel Maharbiz, UC Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the smart bandage project. Thanks to advances in flexible electronics, Berkeley engineers, in collaboration with colleagues at UC San Francisco, have created a new "smart bandage" that uses electrical currents to detect early tissue damage from pressure ulcers, or bedsores, before they can be seen by human eyes and while recovery is still possible. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 30060]

Geophysicist Horst Rademacher explains how a simple seismograph records the Earth’s shaking. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Show ID: 30062]

UC Berkeley seismologist Peggy Hellweg describes how "tremors" are different than earthquakes and how "Tremorscope" will help understand them better and possibly shed light on how they may be related to earthquakes.

Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Show ID: 30058]

The UC Berkeley Girls in Engineering is a week-long, non-residential summer camp for girls currently in 5th, 6th, and 7th grades to explore different aspects of what it means to be an engineer in a fun, hands-on environment. Participants will learn leadership skills such as goal setting and effective communication, and engage in activities that showcase different engineering disciplines. Participants will also design and create engineering projects throughout the week under the guidance of Berkeley faculty, staff, and students. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Show ID: 30059]

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, for a discussion of the interplay between ethnography and theory in understanding public institutions such as policing and prisons and international engagement such as humanitarianism. Fassin explains how immersion in these public institutions and endeavors when combined with sociological theory and history, highlights the disjunction between reality and avowed purpose and intention of participants. Emphasizing the importance of social inequality, the impact of history, and the displacement of goals, Fassin explores: What is police conduct like in a banlieue of Paris? What is the relationship between the judicial system and the penal system? What is the impact of an emphasis on compassion and suffering in humanitarian reasoning and governance? Series: "Conversations with History" [Humanities] [Show ID: 30563]

University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, three-dimensional scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland. Essentially a computed tomography, or CT scan, of Earth’s interior, the picture emerged from a supercomputer simulation at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The new, high-resolution map of the mantle — the hot rock below Earth’s crust but above the planet’s iron core — not only shows these connections for many hotspots on the planet, but reveals that below about 1,000 kilometers the plumes are between 600 and 1,000 kilometers across, up to five times wider than geophysicists thought. The plumes are likely at least 400 degrees Celsius hotter than surrounding rock. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Show ID: 30056]

There are two questions pertaining to the self – the metaphysical and empirical - that are often confounded. The latter is best approached through neurology as V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, illustrates in this fascinating lecture at UC Berkeley.

Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Health and Medicine] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30558]

Power, money, gold and wine in the making of California. All that, and what it’s like to write best-selling books and operate Berkleyside, the respected local online news site. Award-winning author and journalist Frances Dinkelspiel is in conversation with Deirdre English of Berkeley’s Graduate School. of Journalism. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30555]

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Ralph J. Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, for a discussion of the challenges facing the scientific community. Cicerone describes his research interests and explains the qualities of a scientist and what makes science a unique enterprise. He also focuses on leadership in science discussing his work at UC Irvine to establish a department of geosciences and his goals as President of the National Academy of Science and Chair of the National Research Council. He reflects on his work on, “Climate Change Science: An Analysis on Some Key Questions,” which he chaired-and delivered in one month-in 2001. Cicerone also considers the problem of the politicization of the climate change debate and concludes with positive signs that over time the international community will confront the challenges posed by climate change. Series: "Conversations with History" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30561]

The Montreal Protocol has limited global uses of chemicals that deplete stratospheric ozone. Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, compares its features and success with unsuccessful (to date) efforts to stabilize global climate by limiting greenhouse gas concentrations such as carbon dioxide. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 30557]