Episode 2001: A Space Hotel Odyssey

ANCIENT EGYPT COMES ALIVE AT BERKELEY

IT’S NO SECRET THAT BERKELEY’S BANCROFT LIBRARY HOUSES a trove of ancient Egyptian papyri. But how did it end up there? The answer lies in reptile carcasses.

It seems the ancient Egyptian priests had a problem: their mummified crocodiles, intended as offerings to the croc god Sobek, would not keep their shape. So they stuffed them with scraps of used papyri, the ancient precursor to our paper.

Centuries later, in 1899, a team of archaeologists, funded by Berkeley benefactor Phoebe A. Hearst, stumbled across these papyri-stuffed, mummified crocs while on a dig in Umm el-Baragat, Egypt, site of the ancient city of Tebtunis. When the researchers discovered the scraps of letters, bills, and other banal records, they realized they had hit on something big: a paper trail into everyday life in Tebtunis, including such humdrum artifacts as tax documents, contracts, petitions, and complaints. In one example, an ancient villager wrote to a village official petitioning for help after “an attack was made upon my dwelling by Arsinoe.” As Andrew Hogan, postdoctoral fellow at the Bancroft’s Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, Architecture Students told Berkeley News, working with these papyri texts allows researchers to “[peel] Interact in VR Home away below the 1 percent. So, you’re getting to the vast majority of the lived experience for most people in the ancient world.” IT’S BEEN MORE THAN A YEAR since Berkeley moved to remote learning, but students, staff, and faculty

While Hogan focuses on the quotidian at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design history of ancient Egypt, Professor Rita need look no further than their computer screens Lucarelli, faculty curator of Egyptology at the to get a taste of their pre-pandemic lives. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, is working A team of VR specialists and students led by on a virtual reality museum experience. Aptly Berkeley architecture Professor Luisa Caldas crenamed “Return to the Tomb,” the headset- ated Virtual Bauer Wurster, a program that allows enabled tour transports viewers into the realm of the ancient dead. Lucarelli said the VR exhibit allows viewers to “have the experience of entering a tomb, walking around a coffin, and interacting with these beautiful users to visit the beloved architecture building without leaving home. Via avatar, students and faculty can stroll through studio spaces, chat with each other over Slack or Zoom, examine docufunerary texts and images.” ments pinned to digital whiteboards, and upload

The project stems from a push to digitize work to their desks. museum artifacts from around the world in From March to May, Virtual Bauer Wurster hopes that one day they may be returned to even held its first public exhibition: Building for a the tombs, villages, and towns from which Decarceration Nation, which included a gallery talk they were taken. and Q&A session. Project coordinator Chris Hoffman told Berkeley News, “We’re doing something quite groundbreaking, in terms of building an immersive virtual reality experience that is authentic, in using scholarly content and The virtual space will likely survive after campus reopens. Vishaan Chakrabarti, dean of the CED, said he hopes that, in addition to providing “a stopgap for the pandemic circumstances,” the projmaking it available to many more people ect will also “help create new possibilities for the while preserving artifacts.” future of online learning.” — C.P.

Trypophobia

Are you freaked out by sponges? Do honeycombs send you over the edge? You might have trypophobia, a condition that causes one to have a fear of small, clustered holes. While not officially recognized as a medical disorder, trypophobia has gained traction across the internet as more and more people self-diagnose. One study found that 16 percent of participants were repulsed by the ghastly sight of a lotus pod.

Cute aggression

OK, so your brain can handle holes. Congrats! But have you ever seen something cute—think kittens or babies—and instantly felt an urge to: a) eat it, b) squeeze it, or c) crush it in your hands? First described by researchers at Yale, that emotion is now called cute aggression, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the population have experienced the phenomenon. According to UC Riverside psychologist Katherine Stavropoulos, “Cute aggression appears to be a complex and multi-faceted emotional response that likely serves to mediate strong emotional responses and allow caretaking to occur.”

Psychedelic chaplaincy

An irrational fear of holes and a strange yearning to crush cute things. Hmm. It’s safe to say that our brains produce some very odd states of mind. If you’ve ever thought about delving deeper into the back alleys and byways of your consciousness, you might consider contacting a psychedelic chaplain to help guide you. Researchers are refamiliarizing themselves with the potential of psychedelics to treat conditions ranging from addiction to PTSD. Psychedelic chaplains can help prepare patients for their journey. For more on the subject, tune into episode 10 of our podcast, The Edge, “A Shroom of One’s Own.” — C.P.

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Warehouse bots get a grip with suction

ASKED TO CHOOSE A SUPERPOWER, few people would think “suction.” But it turns out that robots with suction hands can achieve superhuman sorting performance, a capability that could soon revolutionize e-commerce warehouses.

In March, Ambi Robotics, a company co-founded in 2019 by Berkeley engineering professor and roboticist Ken Goldberg and four graduate students, announced two flagship products. The first, AmbiSort, is a technology that enables industrial robots to “grasp, scan, and place objects at twice the speed of human workers,” Goldberg said. The second, AmbiKit, is a robotic system for assembling subscription boxes, gift sets, and the like.

The brains of the suction-equipped robots are based on the Dexterity Network (Dex-Net), a deep machine learning program created by Berkeley researchers to train robots to grasp a vast array of novel objects—a notoriously challenging task for machines.

Ambi Robotics raised $6.1 million in seed funding and aims to use the technology to address the growing demand for package handling due to the increase in online shopping, a trend that has accelerated during the pandemic.

As Goldberg sees it, “E-commerce demand will continue to grow, and robots will be there to fill the gaps when there are not enough human workers to do the job— and to tackle the dangerous, dull, and dirty jobs so that human workers can focus on what they do best.”

Mills College Closes, but Opens Doors to Cal Students

IN EARLY MARCH, the leadership of Mills College announced that the institution would discontinue its enrollment for first-year students after fall 2021. By 2023, the small private college in Oakland, established in 1852 for the education of undergraduate women, will be officially closed.

When one door closes, however, another opens. With Mills’s closure, Berkeley has found a partial solution for an ongoing problem: the University has long struggled to provide enough housing or classroom space for its incoming students. To help combat this shortage, Berkeley has already created special programs for firstyear students, including the Fall Program for Freshmen (FPF) and the (pandemic-suspended) Global Edge in London. FPF is a one-semester proA WIN-WIN FOR CALIFORNIA WATER gram, started in 1984, that pro- ACCORDING TO A TEAM OF SCIENTISTS FROM vides the opportunity for about UC MERCED, California’s 4,000 miles of irriga750 first-year students in the tion canals lose 63 billion gallons of water College of Letters and Science each year to evaporation—a problem that to take core classes together off could be solved by shading them with solar Berkeley’s main campus. Berke- panels. ley Global Edge in London is a fall semester international program for incoming students that was created in 2015 and In their feasibility study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability in March, the researchers proposed that an over-canal solar network would not only reduce evaporation but also power the pumps needed to had 90 students in 2019. (The move water across the state. California’s latter was suspended in 2020 massive water conveyance system, the largdue to COVID-19 and will not est in the world, could go from being the return in the fall of 2021.) single largest consumer of electricity in the

Ramu Nagappan, assistant state to being largely self-powering. dean of UC Berkeley Extension, Installing solar panels over aqueducts which runs FPF, told Berkeley News that the program has been a success, demonstrating “small, but measurable differhas the additional benefit of not disturbing the surrounding landscape. As Michael Kiparsky, director of Berkeley’s Wheeler Water Institute, told Wired: “You’re taking something that’s already been altered by human activity ences in academic outcomes— and doubling up on the benefits it provides. their GPAs are slightly higher, their time to graduate is a little faster than That’s the profound piece.” College of Letters and Science students who start on the main campus.” The researchers have not yet put a price

The University hopes to duplicate that success with a new yearlong oppor- tag on their vision, and there are still some tunity, the UC Berkeley Changemaker in Oakland program, for roughly 200 vexing details to contend with. For example, first-year students to take core classes at Mills. the panels could deprive waterbirds of key “The academic experience will be cozier, but otherwise similar, with an even more state-of-the-art Berkeley Changemaker curriculum,” said Richard Lyons, Berkeley’s chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer. Launched in 2020, Berkeley Changemaker is described as “a way to codify an essential part of what UC Berkeley has always stood for” with a curriculum that “activates undergraduates’ passions and helps them develop a sharper sense of who “Stand Up Straight” habitat in a state with increasingly fewer wetlands. But it’s a step in the right direction, Kiparsky said. “With or without climate change, the supply they want to be and how to make that happen.” Said Lyons, “What excites me most about this program is how it points the way to our future. For example, as UC Berkeley gets larger, my sense is that integrated first-year programming like this will become more and more valuable. And having first-year programming like that of Berkeley Changemaker that aligns with values that so sharply distinguish Berkeley—values like question the status quo and serve the greater good—feels like the right direction as well.” Just one of the many sticky notes-toself that former Bears quarterback Aaron Rodgers affixed to the “Jeopardy” podium when he guest-hosted the game show in April. Others read, “Slow Down,” “Speak Less,” “Relax,” and “Energy.” By all accounts the 2020 NFL MVP nailed the gig. of water in California is tightening, and the demand for water in California is increasing. And those two facts together mean that, indeed, any water savings is good, and it’s welcome.” —Kailyn Rhone —K.B.