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Solving a 450-year-old mystery
Brahe's description makes it clear he witnessed a supernova—an exploding star. A team of astronomers including UC’s Alex Filippenko just found another remnant of that cataclysm. A sunlike star is traveling away from the supernova site at three times the speed of its neighbors. Astronomers think it was a companion to the exploding star, source of the extra hydrogen that caused its fatal instability. The team used several instruments and deductive strategies to find out whether the fleeing star is within Tycho’s Supernova Remnant and chemically likely to be the companion. Their evidence helps explain how supernovas happen.
Daguerreotypes were the first commercial photographs. Because they demanded a long exposure—often more than a minute—portrait sitters’ heads had to be braced. In this picture, moving carts and people show up as ghostly smudges. Bancroft Library has hundreds of daguerreotypes dating back to the earliest days of California statehood. To avoid handling these fragile antiques, the library has posted high-resolution copies on the Web.
Working moss The Integrative Biology department fosters cross-disciplinary research. Eric Harris,a Ph.D. candidate, is studying both the human use of moss (by Chinese healers) and the evolutionary history of medicinal mosses. The active ingredient in Shui Mu Cao, used to treat wounds, is probably a family of chemicals called flavonoids. Looking backward, Harris is trying to see what evolutionary edge these chemicals gave their mossy hosts. The University and Jepson Herbaria are joining hands with the department to support this work.
"This is not a photograph," warns Geology Professor William Dietrich. It is a computer rendering, lit to emphasize topography. It can be redrawn from different angles. It is a "desktop watershed," the perfect raw material for mathematical models of erosion and landscape evolution. An airplane uses the Global Positioning System to track its precise location. The onboard laser scans the landscape below. A photosensor times the return of reflections, just as radar does. The first returns from any given spot tend to be signals from the treetops. The last returns tend to be from the ground. The resulting layers of data can be displayed independently. When vegetation is filtered out, the result is a topographic map 1,000 times sharper than satellite radar maps—a clear view of watercourses, landslide features, roads, and even earthquake faults. "This is a revolution in topographic mapping," says Dietrich. He is leading a national effort to realize the technology’s full research potential.
Elizabeth Abel is writing a book on the signs of segregation in the Depression-era South. An English professor and literary critic, she found herself strangely fascinated by the words and signals that marked the color bar. Where were African Americans told to go? Often to places where they would be invisible—hidden behind a partition or up in the balcony. How were they directed there? Often by signs written for white consumption, expressing racist contempt. And how was the evidence filtered by reform-minded Northern photographers? Photographs of "colored" drinking fountains are still held up as a warning against national backsliding. But why is it the drinking fountain, and why is the person shown there always a man? It was not unusual for thirties photographs to hint that the worst effect of segregation was the emasculation of black men.
For the past few summers Ken Light, a teacher in the Journalism School, has been going to West Virginia to photograph mining communities. It’s not news photography, but a continuation of the Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans documentary tradition. He is stubbornly committed to black-and-white film and the hope that photographic evidence will make a political difference, and he regularly exhibits like-minded photographers at the Center for Photography in Northgate Hall. Over the past 25 years he has done five books of documentary photographs. His West Virginia pictures show pale, enigmatic people living uncomfortably close to nature. The setting is chilly, but the people tend to glow. For information about acquiring a print of this photograph, contact studio@kenlight.com.
In his book about Kosovo, co-written with Fred Abrahams, UC human rights researcher Eric Stover marshalls a disturbing array of visual evidence: corpses, soldiers, refugees. The photographer is never there when atrocities occur. Evidence has to be recovered from the rubble and from people’s memories. The Human Rights Center is an interdisciplinary research center that focuses on war crimes, justice, and forced labor. It sponsors events, research, and publications. Stover, the director, is a public health specialist who has investigated human rights atrocities in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq.
Images of children often reflect the evolving attitudes of adults. Heightened fears of kidnapping, for example, can be linked to changes in American families, work habits, and sexual behavior. Grownup fears in turn creep into children’s minds. Professor Paula Fass (History) is investigating the history of childhood. Childhood, like the nuclear family, is often thought of as a universal constant. Fass has edited a three-volume Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (2003) that shows how childhoods vary by time and place. It also helps establish childhood as a significant new field of inquiry.
Chaplin’s transformation into a tree was the kind of switch that fascinated experimental French poets. Christophe Wall-Romana, a graduate student in the French department, is tracing cinema’s impact on avant-garde French poetry. Poet Louis Aragon said of the protean Chaplin, “Each inanimate object becomes a living being, each person an automaton whose crank needs to be found.” Writing about the tree scene, surrealist Jean Cocteau said in 1919, “The gallop of the sauntering little tree, playing hide-and-seek in the forest with the colossus of Wotan, is epic. We watch a blithe spirit triumph over a leaden one.” Soon after World War I, Chaplin’s pioneering films helped inspire experimentalists Guillaume Apollinaire and Antonin Artaud to write scenarios for imaginary movies. Blaise Cendrars also wrote an extended treatment for an unfilmable film.
Awara is the story of a judge, the thief who turns out to be his son, and the beautiful woman who comes between them. It was made only four years aft er independence, when India was still getting used to making and enforcing its own laws. Associate Professor Priya Joshi (English) is teaching and writing about the ways that Bollywood helped a largely illiterate public imagine itself as a body of citizens. Reminiscing about the early days of India, Awara’s director has written, “Pandit-ji [Nehru] said that he wanted every Indian in this country to do something for the nation, to build it up into the beautiful dream that he had. He was a visionary and I tried to follow him, to do my best, whatever I could, through films.” Awara was both a lavish Bollywood spectacle and a political melodrama, the tale of an underdog crushed by the system. It was a huge hit in the Soviet Union and has played twice at the Pacific Film Archive. The problems in the film—love across class lines, crime and a creaky legal system—were obviously on people’s minds. To Prof. Joshi, the “public fantasies” of Bollywood films mirror genuine social stresses. They are “the political unconscious of India.” Whose identity Theresa Hak Kyung Cha often put words and photographs in her work. This one includes small family portraits. It seems to stress photography’s inadequacy as a record of the past and of absent people. The words below—“time’s own shadow two against other”—may allude to the family’s experience as political refugees from Korea.
Like the French poets in Christophe Wall-Romana’s thesis, Cha formats much of her book as a movie script: “She turns her head sharply to her left . cut.” Other parts of the book are in French; she seems painfully averse to speaking in her own voice. In her book The Melancholy of Race, Anne Cheng describes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as an artist who assembled fragments to chronicle a fragmented life. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha did her undergraduate and graduate work at Berkeley. After her untimely death at the age of 31 her family donated her collected works to the Berkeley Art Museum. A BAM show of her work organized by curator Constance Lewallen has appeared in museums across the U.S., and in Austria, Korea, and now Spain. Berkeley professors Norma Alarcón, Elaine Kim, and Trinh T. Minh Ha have all published critical writings on Cha.
UC Berkeley anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber was famed for his documentation of traditional Native Californian cultures. Among the most important of these were his photographs of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian. During the last years of Ishi’s life (1911–16), he lived at the UC Anthropology Museum, then in San Francisco. In May 1914, Kroeber and a research team took Ishi back to his ancestral homeland in the Deer Creek area of Tehama County, in northeastern California. For a month, Ishi demonstrated the now-vanished customs of his people, which Kroeber and his friends recorded in about 150 images. These evocative pictures, which have been widely reproduced to depict Ishi’s traditional life, were, in fact, staged, and often misrepresent Yahi culture as well as Ishi’s new life. For example, while living in San Francisco, Ishi wore Western-style clothing such as trousers, shirts, jackets, and shoes. Although he went up to Deer Creek in these clothes, Kroeber had him strip down for performances to be documented by the camera (sequences of fire-making, bow and arrow-making, hunting, fishing). In these photos, Ishi wears a loincloth that he had probably never worn before coming into the white world; Yahi men formerly dressed in a variety of animal skin robes, blankets, and aprons. Why did Kroeber feel the need to resort to such reconstruction? Ishi was a major public sensation, and Kroeber undoubtedly wanted to fulfill public expectations. More importantly, however, this was the only way that the anthropologist could obtain images of a now-vanished world. As Kroeber once explained, his mission was to “reconstruct and present the scheme within which these people in ancient and more recent times lived their lives.” He wanted to present “the appearance they presented on discovery.” Yet, the lives of Native Californians had changed immensely since contact, especially in such critical material forms as clothing and houses, and the camera was powerless to record this vanished culture. Kroeber’s Ishi pictures were thus photographs that he could never get. —Ira Jacknis Research Anthropologist, Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology
When and where did the rabbits diverge from their cousins the pikas? Brian Kraatz, a graduate student in Integrative Biology, is trying to find out by comparing their teeth. One thing he’s looking at is a V-shaped enamel structure that can be seen on the second, third, and fourth teeth from the left in this scan. Modern rabbits lack this feature. CAT scans are the sum of many X-rays taken from different angles. They help Kraatz see subtle differences among his specimens, particularly structures within the teeth. He then has to decide whether they represent evolutionary change or are simply the peculiarities of a particular individual, its age, and diet. He is studying 2,000 fossilized skulls from Asia, and is now gathering more from Europe and North America.
Ken Finger, curator of the microfossil collection at Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology, is using microfossils to help unravel the history of Chile’s coastline. Sedimentary rocks often contain microfossils, and because of their abundance and diversity in the geologic record, they are useful in age-dating rock layers and interpreting paleooceanographic conditions. Finger is also studying the microscopic inhabitants of Oakland’s Lake Merritt as part of the effort to clean it up.
Professor Alexander Purcell in the College of Natural Resources is working to head off a disease now threatening California vineyards. Sharpshooter leafhoppers feeding on grapevines transmit the bacterium (Xylella fastidiosa) that causes Pierce’s disease, which eliminated viticulture in the Los Angeles basin more than 100 years ago. An insect that recently invaded the state, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, is raising the incidence of Pierce’s disease in San Joaquin Valley and Southern California vineyards. It may be on its way to the Napa and Sonoma valleys. This image shows how plant juices enter a leafhopper’s needle-like stylets and pass through a funnel-shaped organ toward the insect’s digestive tract. Colonies of the Pierce’s bacteria often grow in the yawning cavity at lower left, which is probably their jumping-off place. Professor Purcell is trying to understand how the insects pass the bacteria along. He is also investigating how the same bacteria can grow in other plants without harming them. He and other UC researchers are trying to learn more about the epidemiology of Pierce’s disease in hopes of controlling its spread.
Professor Imke de Pater (Astronomy) studies the planets—their composition, dynamics, and history. Although spaceborne cameras have helped her immensely, she also relies on the earthbound Keck. An innovation called “adaptive optics” gives that telescope unprecedented sharpness. Its segmented mirror corrects for atmospheric distortion—the twinkling of stars. The target’s shimmering is monitored and the 10-meter mirror continuously recontoured to counteract distortion. Long-term observation from Earth has enabled de Pater and her colleagues to study weather on Uranus, as well as features of the rings that only become clear when Earth, Uranus, and the sun are in the right configuration.
Nature photographer Stephen Sharnoff has photographed over 1,200 species of Sierra Nevada plants for a new guidebook to be published by the University of California Press. Elizabeth Wenk, a graduate student in Integrative Biology, is writing the text. Sharnoff wandered the Sierras for three years photographing plants and collecting samples for drying. The specimens, housed at the University and Jepson Herbaria on campus, will help Wenk identify species and enable future scholars to crosscheck. The plant in this photograph, for example, may turn out to be a Montia. Sharnoff’s trademark is the close-up shot with diffused lighting that eliminates extremes of light and dark. The results are both beautiful and informative. His previous book, Lichens of North America, a collaboration with Sylvia Sharnoff and author Irwin M. Brodo, looks like a museum catalog of elegant abstractions.
Electron microscopes form images as the shadow or reflection of an electron beam. Because its wavelength is much shorter than visible light, an electron beam can resolve details far smaller than optical microscopes. The area shown here would fit 12,500 times into the period at the end of this sentence. Dr. Peidong Yang (Chemistry), a member of the Berkeley Nanosciences and Nanoengineering Institute, has made nanowires out of metal and semiconductors. Their potential uses include optical waveguides, lasers, and electronic components. In this example, short nanowires are floated on a liquid to pack them tightly, then deposited on a surface. Since the wire array has an exceptionally high surface area it can be used in sensing devices—for example, the explosives detectors at airports.
Birds and insects maneuver in ways that aircraft cannot. And flapping flight is far more complex than inventors like Leonardo da Vinci ever imagined. Professor Robert Dudley, postdoc Sagiri Horisawa, and Ph.D. candidate Chris Clark (Integrative Biology) are trying to see how it’s done. They videotape hummingbirds with multiple high-speed cameras and analyze the relative motion of key body parts. Motion is plotted in animated diagrams, providing a mathematical record of movement in three-dimensional space. The experimenters vary many parameters—changing air pressure, adding weights, and modifying the shape of the tail. They also study bats, insects, and gliding lizards.
Professor Kurt Cuffey of Earth and Planetary Sciences is delving into the Earth’s climatic past to put the present warming into perspective. How unusual is the present trend? What causes it? What are the odds it will accelerate? He drills into Arctic and Antarctic icepacks, thousands of years worth of accumulated snow, to reconstruct prehistoric weather by measuring temperature gradients, trapped gases, and other variables. The evidence does not make him optimistic. His analyses show that the climate is much more changeable than previously recognized, especially in the Arctic. He estimates, for example, that the range in average temperatures between icy and warm periods has been 27 degrees Fahrenheit. And he has found evidence of rapid fluctuations—up to 15 degrees—within 10 years. The photograph shows how Cuffey’s team sampled the top of the Greenland icecap. They dug side-by-side 6-meter pits with a common snow wall. Light shining through the wall made annual strata visible. The filament grid helped them map where samples were withdrawn. William Smock is a Berkeley writer and filmmaker. His book The Bauhaus Ideal is a rapid-fire history of modern design. He produced and edited Isamu Noguchi, a PBS American Masters special. His photography can be found at the Library of Congress American Memory site (www.loc.gov). Picture Credits and Acknowledgments: 1874 view of Sacramento Street daguerreotype courtesy of the Bancroft Library. Tycho’s Supernova Remnant image courtesy of NASA. Laundry truck courtesy of the Birmingham, Alabama, Public Library and Elizabeth Abel. After the storm ©2005 Ken Light/Contact Press Images. Kosovo combatant courtesy of Human Rights Watch. Chaplin: thanks to the Pacific Film Archive library for research help. Awara movie poster courtesy of the National Film Archive of India, Pune, and Priya Joshi. Chronology courtesy of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation (photo: Benjamin Blackwell). Ishi photos courtesy of the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Fossilized rabbit skull: SCIRun, the software used to produce this 3-D model, was developed by the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute of the University of Utah. Blue-Green Sharpshooter ©Rodrigo Almeida, University of California, used by permission. Microplankton courtesy Chevron/Texaco. |
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