The Course Thread Program allows UC Berkeley undergraduates to explore intellectual themes that connect courses across departments and disciplines. Without creating new majors or minors, the program instead highlights connections between existing courses. Course Threads help students see the value in educational breadth while also pursuing a more in-depth and well-rounded knowledge on one particular topic. Course Thread topics include: Human Rights, Cultural Forms in Transit, The Historical & Modern City, Visible Language, Humanities & Environment, Human-Centered Design, Old Things, and Sciences & Society.
Students following a thread enroll in at least 3 courses from the thread over the course of their study at Berkeley, and participate in at least one year-end symposium. The Course Threads Program is made possible by the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
UC Berkeley scientists have identified a key culprit responsible for the fluid loss and resulting shock that are the hallmark of severe – and potentially fatal – dengue virus infections.
A team of researchers led by molecular virologist Eva Harris, a UC Berkeley professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, presented new evidence that a guilty party is a protein secreted by cells infected with the mosquito-borne dengue virus. Called nonstructural protein 1 (NS1), it is the only one of the 10 viral proteins secreted by infected cells to circulate freely in the bloodstream.
NS1 is produced by all serotypes of dengue virus. The researchers homed in on this viral protein after they noticed that the pathogenic effects of dengue virus infection were blocked in mice that had generated antibodies to NS1.
For the full story, visit: http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/09/09/viral-protein-causes-dengue-shock
Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally
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Oppenheimer Lecture: Quantum Degenerate Gases Achievements and Perspectives
Speaker/Performer: Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Nobel Laureate and Honorary Professor, Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure
Our ability to control and to manipulate atomic systems has considerably increased during the last few years. We will review in this lecture a few recent advances in this field, emphasizing in particular the new fruitful dialogue which is being established between atomic physics and other disciplines like statistical physics, condensed matter physics, molecular physics and quantum information. Very precise measurements with ultracold atoms provide now more refined tests of fundamental theories like general relativity. The possibility to control all experimental parameters of an ultracold atomic sample, like the temperature, the density, the strength of the interactions, allows one to realize simple models of more complex systems found in other fields of physics and to get a better understanding of their behavior.
Recorded on March 9, 2009