Competitions

Video feature: Rube Goldberg returns and wackiness ensues

09/08/10 — What's the best device for dispensing a dollop of hand sanitizer? At Berkeley, it's one that also prompts the famous Bellagio fountain to erupt, Evel Knievel to crash his motorcycle and a house of cards to spring up before your eyes. The magic and mayhem were part of a winning, Las Vegas-themed contraption built by a team of engineering students for Berkeley's first-ever Rube Goldberg Machine Contest in April. The competition challenged Cal student teams to build a six-foot by six-foot machine in the spirit of popular cartoonist Rube Goldberg, a 1904 Berkeley Engineering graduate who died in 1970 and is best known for his comic drawings of outrageously complicated machines performing simple tasks.

Team of Berkeley Engineering undergraduate women reaches finals in Staples green office product competition

03/31/10 Yahoo Finance News — Taking environmental consciousness to a global level, Staples, Inc., the world's largest office products company, today announced the universities with finalist concepts for the inaugural Staples Global EcoEasy Challenge. Four mechanical engineering undergraduates from UC Berkeley, all women, represent the only U.S. team that has reached the finals. Cynthia Bayley, Griselda Cardona, Maha Haji, and Sarah Stern, calling their team the Explosi-Divas, have designed the EcoStapler

Boy Meets Twirl, a Bollywood Romance

11/13/09 — Bollywood is in the building! Bioengineering undergraduates Nickesh Viswanathan and Anwesh Thakur are two of the male dancers in red who shook up NBC-TV's America's Got Talent this summer with their showstopping routine to “Jai Ho” from Slumdog Millionaire. Their group, Ishaara, was the first Bollywood dance group to advance in the show's history, making it all the way to the quarterfinals before they were eliminated.

Heavyweight Champs

09/04/09 — In the world of quirky contests, the U.S. National Concrete Canoe Competition isn't as far-out as, say, the Extreme Ironing World Championships or as appalling as the World Bog Snorkeling Championships, but it has its own ability to astound the public and lure fanatical participants. As devoted undertakings go, it is a little silly and a lot serious, especially here at Berkeley Engineering, where a team of 25 civil engineers won the national championship this summer, their first since 1992.

A (Golden) Bear of a Bridge

08/02/08 — It's the size of a theater catwalk and weighs just 142 pounds. But the gently arched bridge -- designed, built and ambitiously named "Calatrava" by Cal engineering students -- is the new heavyweight champ of collegiate bridge building. The 21-foot-long span swept a field of 42 finalists on May 23-24 to capture top honors at the 2008 National Student Steel Bridge

Students Grab Gold with Bacteria-to-Blood Project

02/02/08 — A team of Cal undergraduates has demonstrated how genetically modified E. coli bacteria might be converted into a cheap-and safe-blood substitute. The engineered product, called “Bactoblood,” addresses a global shortage of human blood for transfusions, particularly in developing countries and emergency situations, the young developers say.