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A brief report on the latest annual A. Starker Leopold Lecture, with a link to video of the lecture.  The speakers were Jerry Emory and Alison Forrestel.

Oxford Street is the western boundary of University of California, Berkeley campus and connects the university to downtown Berkeley and the BART station. Oxford for All is a vision developed by the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning Transportation Studio that envisions an Oxford Street that seeks to serve all users, regardless of ability or mode choice.To better understand the planning context and needs of the corridor’s residents, the project team conducted the following: Historical context research, Academic literature review, Review of relevant planning documents and plans, Interviews with professional and academic subject matter experts, Case studies of other urban university campuses, Review of planned developments, Pedestrian and cyclist counts, Community outreach event, Survey of businesses.This work revealed that Oxford Street does not serve all road users adequately. The street design prioritizes driving, with wide streets, narrow sidewalks, and poor facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists. The lack of character means the street is a psychological boundary between Berkeley’s downtown and campus.

This technical brief estimates the expected performance of a solar photovoltaic and energy storage system (PVESS) for providing backup power during short-duration power interruption events, accounting for the unpredictable nature of those events. The analysis relies on the Power Reliability Event Simulation TOol (PRESTO), a publicly available model developed by Berkeley Lab to simulate the occurrence of short-duration power interruption events at the county-level. A separate storage dispatch model is then used to simulate PVESS operation and backup performance for each of the large number of interruption events produced by PRESTO. In performing this simulation, the analysis accounts for how the customer operates its battery on a day-to-day basis—in this case, we assume the battery is cycled each day in response to time-of-use rates—and how that, in turn, impacts the battery’s state of charge at the beginning of each interruption event. The analysis presented here is intended to demonstrate an application of the PRESTO model as well as to illustrate some of the key determinants of PVESS backup power performance during short-duration power interruption events. The analysis focuses initially on a typical single-family home in Maricopa County, Arizona, and includes a limited set of scenarios related to system sizing, backup power configuration, and whether the customer charges its battery storage system from the grid during normal operating conditions. The analysis also presents comparative results for two other counties, in Massachusetts (Middlesex) and California (Los Angeles), illustrating how regional differences in climate, interruption patterns, and retail rate structures can affect PVESS performance as a backup power source. In the conclusions, we highlight a number of other important considerations for evaluating PVESS backup power capabilities.

This is the framing narrative of the 150w History Project; it defines and explores watershed moments in four sections. Section One :1870s through the Turn of the 19 th Century. Chapter 1 covers the admission of women when the newly opened university was still defining its identity. Chapter 2 describes the 1890s, when students, alumnae, and donors banded together to create a separate system of women’s campus organizations. Chapter 3 narrates UC women’s participation in the 1911 California women’ suffrage campaign and explains its national importance. Section Two: WWI through the 1920s. Chapter 4 is on the impact of WWI in changing gender relations and expectations among the undergraduates; Chapters 5 and 6 describe the arrival of the first cohort of women faculty and their struggle for professional recognition on campus. Section Three: WWII through the 1950s. These chapters describe WWII as the central cause of a rapid increase in women’s academic and leadership opportunities, followed by a sharp drop and lingering postwar decline. Chapter 7 explores the new careers and occupations that war mobilization opened to UC women. Chapter 8 examines the crucial war-time work of the leaders of the all-female student government as well as the exile of Japanese American students and recent graduates to internment camps. Chapters 9 and 10 explain the shrinkage of women’s presence on campus, and their difficulty finding suitable employment once they graduated. The university was also reluctant to hire its own women PhDs, so many were underemployed. Chapter 11 turns to Berkeley’s student movements of the 1960s, which were intertwined with both sexual liberation and civil rights struggles. They prepared the way for the movement led by academic women in the early seventies for nondiscriminatory employment opportunities, which is explored in Chapter 12.

WILDERNESS / UX - DESIGN RESEARCH“Design & Planning Opportunities for the Big Sur Region”THIS RESEARCH WAS SUPPORTED BYTHE PEDER SATHER CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY AT UC BERKELEYLANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNINGUC BERKELEYLDARCH 203 - FALL 2023Isaiah RapkoOlivia JonesLynsey Coke-FerreiraAishwarya DharmarajanEli DemosthenesLulu LiuDongni MaLuis LuJie HanAishvarya DubeyAlex JordanClaudia LambertyInstructor:Richard

Under a collaborative research and development (CRADA) agreement, LBNL scientists investigated the effect of the semi-humic substance, Proximus, on nitrogen dynamics in two contrasting soils. We specifically tested four hypotheses that Proximus (1) binds ammonium and reduces nitrification; (2) does not bind ammonium but chemically inhibits nitrification; (3) stimulates microbial immobilization of N in biomass; (4) stimulates denitrification. We performed two primary experiments, one in the laboratory using a pure culture of a nitrifying bacterium, and one in a greenhouse setting testing the fate of nitrogen and response of microbial communities in soils with and without Proximus.Our findings can be summarized as follows:•Proximus does not chemically inhibit nitrification – this conclusion was reached by analysis of the response of Nitrosomonas europaea (ATCC 19718) to Proximus addition at field relevant concentrations, relative to the known nitrification inhibitor Nitropyrin. No inhibition of growth or ammonia oxidation to nitrite was observed at field relevant concentrations.•In soils with higher clay and silt content with relatively low N fertilizer application rates (100lbs/ac), the effect of Proximus on nitrogen concentrations and microbial communities was minimal. •In sandier soils with low organic matter and clay content and with relatively low N fertilizer application rates (100lbs/ac), Proximus aided delayed availability of inorganic nitrogen in the system. •Using a stable isotope tracer (15N) we observed differential effects of Proximus on N uptake by soil microbial biomass. In sandy soils, although Proximus slowed the release of NH4+ from fertilizer, Proximus did not have any significant effect on nitrogen assimilation by soil microbes. However, in more clay rich Iowa soils, while Proximus did not affect the magnitude or timing of total NH4+ or NO3- availability, it did reduce the availability of fertilizer N to soil microbes, delaying uptake into microbial biomass.•Proximus addition did not significantly affect overall microbial (bacterial, archaeal, fungal) community composition, although specific genera of bacteria and fungi were found to be enriched or repressed due to Proximus addition.•Over the 5 week observation period, Proximus did not stimulate any significant increase in denitrification relative to fertilizer alone. In summary, we see no evidence that Proximus inhibits nitrifiers or nitrification directly, nor does it stimulate more nitrogen loss through denitrification than fertilizer application alone. We do not find strong evidence for the direct role of microbial biomass stimulation as a Proximus mode of action. A consideration for future analyses and experimental design is the fertilization rate simulated in these experiments which may be considered low relative to more intensive agricultural practices. A study of dose dependence of Proximus application rate across soil types would also illuminate the importance of potential interactions with soil mineralogy. A further consideration is the interactions between plants and soil microorganisms not considered here. Root deposition of carbon enhances microbial growth and nutrient demand and we expect that Proximus impacts on the soil microbiome and nutrient retention would differ in the presence of growing plants.

ABSTRACT A yeast-like extremophile organism, Hansenula anomala, has been isolated from the superfund site the Berkeley Pit Lake in Butte, Montana. Studies demonstrate H. anomala growth in some of the known Berkeley Pit Lake solutes. Microbial growth dynamics under controlled conditions were compared of H. anomala for multiple metal concentrations. Each solute/metal was tested separately at previously reported concentrations on the geochemistry of the Berkeley Pit lake in the first 0.2 m in spring (pH 2.5). H. anomala grew well with sulfur (S), MgSO4, CaSO4, potassium chloride (KCl), and NaSO4 and was inhibited with FeSO4, MnSO4, CuSO4, AlSO4, or ZnSO4. With the addition of elemental S, growth was observed for FeSO4 indicating minimal growth rescue. PCR amplification of genomic DNA from the organism using known ribosomal primers indicates the strain to be ATCC8168 (CBS 5759). From this data, it can be concluded that H. anomala ATCC8168 from the Berkeley Pit is an extremophile that exhibits metal-specific growth.IMPORTANCELaboratory growth studies of a strain of Hansenula anomala from the Berkeley Pit have found the organism to be metal specific indicating some unique metabolism possibilities. These studies show that this strain is metal-dependent and provides information about the adaptable tolerance of organisms in superfund sites as well as giving a basis for future bioremediation development utilizing H. anomala.