After eight years and repeated photographs of a nearby star in hopes of finding planets, Berkeley astronomer Paul Kalas finally has his prize: the first visible-light snapshots of a planet outside our solar system, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

If we adopted UC Berkeley seismologist Richard Allen’s breakthrough earthquake alarm system, your cell phone and laptop could alert you to the Big One before the shaking begins. 

Jan de Vries, a professor of both history and economics at U.C. Berkeley, will serve as interim dean of the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Sciences starting Nov. 10, 2008 through June 30, 2009. He succeeds Jon Gjerde, who died on Oct. 26.

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Jon Gjerde, the dean of the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Science and a UC Berkeley history professor, died unexpectedly in his home Sunday evening. He was 55.

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