Berkeley // Current

99 Bottles of Beer

Third annual event in series exploring the anthropology of food. 99 Bottles of Beer... more

amaness
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Berkeley HS Opens Green Academy

Berkeley High School and Pacific Gas and Electric Company have partnered to open a... more

YouthOutlookMultimedia
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UC Berkeley Graduates detained in Iran

Since July, three UC Berkeley graduates have been detained in Iran. The three are held... more

richgailenriquez
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Canvasing the world

Our subject covers a charitable business organization called "Canvassing the World."... more

comega00
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2 months ago
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MIGHTY MOVIE PODCAST on HuffPost: Spike Lee & Stew on PASSING STRANGE: THE MOVIE

It’s got trenchant insights into art and identity, and you can dance to it.... more

DanPersons
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3 months ago
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Burrito: The Conquest

Two dudes go on a conquest all over the Bay Area to find the best burrito!!! On... more

carlosiscool
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4 months ago
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A table-top black hole might sound the worst (and shortest-lived) idea since a Tiger-based daycare, but Berkeley scientists have made it happen. They're using brand new metamaterials to create simulated black holes in a chip, and we'd like to repeat that, but can't because that much coolness in one paragraph could be damaging to the reader.

A material's properties are based on the configuration of the smallest units - everything is made of protons, neutrons and electrons, but different arrangements in different elements lead to wildly differing properties. Metamaterials are mankind realizing "We don't need to be limited by what nature made", using nanotechnology to build brand new materials with otherwise impossible properties out of tiny repeating cells. These cells are bigger than molecules, but still small enough to work.

Professor Zhang and colleagues are experts in metamaterials and their latest creation is the most impressive yet: modeling black holes by taking "analogy" out of writing and into actual hard science. By designing a metamaterial whose reaction to light looks the same as another phenomena, you can effectively examine that phenomena. This is because "looks like" isn't based on color, or shape, but on having exactly the same equations defining its motion - so that it no longer matters if it's because of metamaterials reaction to light or general relativity's to matter. By setting up this "optical-mechanical analogy" you can study an all-consuming gravitational crusher in a simple chip of material.

Some might call it a day after building a tiny black hole - those at Berkeley aren't such people. The team also constructed a way of studying chaotic celestial dynamics, a version of the famous "three-body system" where you have two planets orbiting and affecting each other's motion. By setting up an analogy for one planet's orbit, they can then simulate the perturbations from the other by applying electric fields to the material - again, the effects couldn't be more different in terms of scale, but look exactly the same in terms of equation.

Disturbing planets with electric fields, and building a pocket black hole? It's nice to know that Doctor Doom does exist, and he's a research scientist.A table-top black hole might sound the worst (and shortest-lived) idea since a... more