A solar micro grid, now being shipped in pieces, will arrive in Uganda early June. Once assembled on site, it is designed to carry enough energy to power around 20 businesses and homes on Kitobo, a fishing island. “Most of the locals’ electricity is delivered to the wealthy,” said Jalel Sager, a PhD candidate studying in the Energy & Resources Group, an interdisciplinary graduate program at UC Berkeley. “We are going to replace the expensive and noisy diesel generators with…

Unlike most of his classmates at Skyline High School in Oakland, Allan Qin, a shy 18-year-old, finishes class at noon and goes straight to work at the Emeryville headquarters of Peet’s Coffee & Tea. His day is just getting started. A high school senior, Qin has been working at Peet’s in technological support for more than five months. Opportunities for low-income students to find work are hard to find, and meaningful work is even more rare.

What if people could create more colorful neighborhoods by simply throwing herb and vegetable seed balls on the ground? What if they could rescue the declining bee population using this method? Or what if someone could throw them from a small airplane to sow an entire field of wildflowers? That’s the goal of the “Grow a Rainbow” project developed by Christopher Burley, the “Lead Pollinator” and CEO of Seedles LLC, who has set a goal of growing one million wildflowers….

The Oakland Zoo held its fourteenth annual public gala on October 7 to raise awareness about chimpanzees accidentally caught in traps in Africa. The event, which took place in the Marian Zimmer Auditorium and was attended by more than 100 people, featured a silent auction to raise money for the Budongo Snare Removal Project, located in Uganda’s Budongo Forest. “The chimpanzees could lose their hands, limbs, or get infected,” said Amy Gotliffe, conservation director at the zoo. According to wildlife…