Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color. It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens.

The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones.

Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley’s School of Optometry, developed the optical imaging platform they used in this project. It’s called Oz, after the story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the 1939 film adaptation, the lead character, Dorothy, goes from her black-and-white farm in Kansas to the color world of Oz.

“Ozvision is really directly tied to the book and to the movie where the Emerald City is this unearthly green color,” said Roorda. “The intent and the aspiration was to elicit that same kind of response by going from a natural-colored world to a supernatural-colored world by a direct stimulation of these cones.”

It has enormous potential, he said, to transform how we understand and treat eye diseases, and to expand the way we see the world around us.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo via Unsplash+

This is the last episode of our Berkeley Voices series on transformation. In eight episodes, we have looked at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. We'll be back with a new series in the fall.

See all episodes of the series.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Ann Johnson had a rare brainstem stroke at age 30, she lost control of all of her muscles. One minute, she was playing volleyball with her friends. The next, she couldn’t move or speak.

Up until that moment, she’d been a talkative and outgoing person. She taught math and physical education, and coached volleyball and basketball at a high school in Saskatchewan, Canada. She’d just had a baby a year earlier with her new husband.

And the thing is, she still was that person. It's just that no one could tell. Because the connection between her brain and her body didn’t work anymore. She would try to speak, but her mouth wouldn’t move.

Eighteen years later, she finally heard her voice again.

It's thanks to researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco who are working to restore people’s ability to communicate using a brain-computer interface. The technology, the researchers say, has enormous potential to make the workforce and the world more accessible to people like Ann.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts). There, you can also watch a video about Ann and the research team.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Noah Berger, 2023.

This year on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.

See all episodes of the series.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined.

The Chinese village was known for mass producing copies of Western art. She’d read about it in The New York Times, which described a kind of compound where thousands of artists painted replicas of famous artworks, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or van Gogh’s Starry Night, for European and U.S. hotels and condos.

“We had an expectation, which was that there would be this giant factory,” said Wong, a professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley. “And in this factory, there would be these painters working in an assembly line fashion: One person would paint the rocks, and one person would paint the trees, and one person would paint the sky.”

But when she arrived in the small gated village, what she saw surprised her. In 2013, she published van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, a book about her six years of research in Dafen and how it forever changed the way she thinks about art and authenticity and the nature of creativity.

See more artwork and photos of Dafen from 2015, when Wong and architecture professor Margaret Crawford took a group of graduate students on a 14-day trip to the Pearl River Delta region to study urban art villages.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see more photos on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by José Joaquin Figueroa.

This year on Berkeley Voices, we're exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.

See all episodes of the series.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.