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Reflecting the growing importance of sustainability on campus, Berkeley’s fifth annual summit on the issue is expanding to a half-day, with workshops on everything from greening your own life to the energy frontier far beyond fossil fuels.

A new UC Berkeley-led study finds that the pathogen responsible for Sudden Oak Death, a disease that has felled millions of oaks and tanoaks along the Pacific Coast, is evolving, suggesting that movement of infected plants between different quarantined regions should be minimized. The study also revealed that the pathogen got its first toehold in California's forests outside a nursery in Santa Cruz and at Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a proposed new low-carbon fuel standard for the state and praised the University of California scientists who worked intensively over the past four months to put it together. Farrell, Sperling and their joint, 20-person team not only looked at how to assess the carbon impact of fuels ranging from gasoline and biofuels to hydroelectric power, but produced recommendations to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for policy changes needed to implement the standard. CARB is expected to adopt these policies in June as the most important of the "early action" items to meet the state's global-warming goals.

Leave no trace. This principle, familiar to outdoors enthusiasts, exhorts us to minimize our impact on the natural environment. In the near future, technology may enable us to extend this concept to the process of meeting global energy needs. Rising fuel costs, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, air quality issues, and even national security concerns over dependence on foreign oil have generated both political will and scientific advances in this area. Thanks to a number of recently formed collaborative groups, UC Berkeley researchers are poised to make unique, high-impact contributions to that challenging but achievable goal.

Sperm whales, dolphins and other "toothed" whales today chase squid so deep in the ocean that they have to rely on biosonar instead of their eyes to find them. Two UC Berkeley paleontologists have come up with a likely evolutionary scenario to explain how these whales developed their echolocating "biosonar" over the past 40 million years.

When a whale dies and falls to the bottom in the deep ocean, it attracts a weird community of mollusks, crabs and worms that feed on its oil-rich bones. A 15 million-year-old fossilized whale discovered on Año Nuevo Island is the first fossil whale fall discovered in California, and one of the youngest and most complete fossil whale falls ever found.

If fossil fuel emissions continue their upward course, the land and oceans will eventually exceed their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a new and improved computer climate model. The model, one in the first generation to include the Earth's carbon cycle, indicates that vegetation and the oceans can only absorb so much carbon dioxide before they top out and become less efficient at removing carbon from the atmosphere.

According to UC Berkeley mathematicians and their Russian colleague, turbulence at the boundary between wind and ocean should keep hurricane winds to a gentle breeze. Mathematical models of this interface, however, show that large drops of water thrown up by waves suppress the turbulence, allowing winds to build to tremendous speeds. Perhaps, they speculate, a fast decaying detergent poured on roiling seas could tame a hurricane.

After 35+ years of publishing some of the best (and first) legal scholarship on environmental topics, Boalt Hall's environmental law journal, Ecology Law Quarterly, just released its first issue of a free online publication, Ecology Law Currents. This debut issue deals with the topic of nuclear energy.

An international team of researchers led by UC Berkeley biologists has developed a remarkable new roadmap for finding and protecting the best remaining holdouts for thousands of rare species that live only in Madagascar, an island nation considered one of the world's jewels of biodiversity. The new plan not only includes lemurs – those large-eyed, tree-hopping primates that have become poster children for conservation – but also species of ants, butterflies, frogs, geckos and plants.