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Nuclear Detective
When the dentist is preparing to x-ray your mouth, she usually drapes your torso in a lead blanket to shield the rest of your body from the radiation. The metal is an excellent radiation shield. Some fear that terrorists might take advantage of that same phenomenon by using lead containers to smuggle radioactive materials for weapons. However, lead is no match for the new radiation detector built by UC Berkeley nuclear engineering graduate student Ionel Dragos Hau and his colleagues. Along with nonproliferation applications, their technology will likely have broader uses in nuclear science, astrophysics, and materials science.
A Logical Approach to Computer Security
One of the biggest challenges of computer security is that the people who write viruses are smarter than the software used to detect the malicious code. In fact, "malware detectors," like virus-scanning software, aren't very intelligent at all. They simply look at whether the pattern particular piece of code, an email attachment for example, matches the signature of a known virus. This isn't a logical approach, says UC Berkeley computer scientist Sanjit Seshia. He means that literally. Seshia is using computational logic to detect the behavioral traits of viruses even if their maliciousness is well-hidden by their creators.
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Computing Material Truths
It can take three decades before a new alloy makes its way from an glimmer in a scientist's mind to, say, the body of an airplane. That's because the development of alloys requires years of experiments to characterize the materials' mechanical properties. But what if you could model those characteristics in a computer? UC Berkeley engineer Daryl Chrzan is doing just that. He uses computational materials science to predict the properties of materials from the bottom up. His research could impact fields as diverse as nanotechnology and aeronautics.
Cool Alums: The most brilliant and practical design idea this side of indoor plumbing
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