California

Start-Up U

Articles — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 05:59:00 -0400

Venture capitalists are not known to haunt Sproul Plaza, with its drummers and dreamers, but last spring Silicon Valley’s financiers showed up in force. On March 21 they filed across the flagstones and into the Student Union auditorium to hear such scintillating discussions as “Carbon Regulation and the Impact on Innovation,” and “Energy Storage: Hydrogen, Batteries, and Beyond.” The draw was not the topics, but rather the 400 people sitting in the folding chairs. They encompassed the entire energy universe of California -- researchers in architecture, chemistry, biology, engineering, and economics from Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; influential state… more

Can the City Save the Farm?

Articles — Thu, 31 May 2007 06:32:00 -0400

Even if you’re only the slightest bit familiar with California’s $30 billion-plus farm economy, you may have heard the lament: urban development is steamrolling the state’s agricultural belt. Every day, bountiful fields surrender to big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and residential sprawl. More than 100,000 acres were paved over in the Central Valley alone in the 1990s, and experts estimate that nearly 1 million more could vanish within a generation. Today’s Country Mouse is tomorrow’s City Mouse (or, more likely, a critter skittering across a cookiecutter suburban subdivision).

But while this threat is real and not to be taken lightly, it tends… more

The Power of Less

Articles — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:48:00 -0500

Early one November evening, 1973: Gasoline supplies have been cut by the month-old Arab Oil Embargo and people wait in long lines to buy gas. Inside Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, particle physicist Art Rosenfeld’s office is lit by 12 dazzling 60-watt fluorescent lights, which allows him to make a startling calculation. The light bulbs in his office are burning the equivalent of .05 gallons of oil per hour, and if he leaves them on all weekend, as nearly everyone does, his empty office will have burned the equivalent of four gallons of gasoline by the time he returns on Monday… more