English Bulldog Puppies for Sale in Berkeley, CA

BERKELEY – The best way California wide receiver Jonathan Brady could garner a healthy dose of perspective on the Big Game was to create some perspective himself.

Brady, in his first season with the Golden Bears after transferring from New Mexico State, culminated a weeklong history lesson about the storied rivalry by catching a game-winning 22-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Fernando Mendoza with 2:40 to play to lift Cal to a jolting 24-21 victory over Stanford in the 127^th edition of the Big Game.

"I really thought it was just a regular rivalry, but once I saw some videos and the history, I was like, "OK, this is crazy'," said Brady, who finished with a pair of touchdown receptions. "You felt the energy all week. It was good to be part of it for the first time."

The Bears were happy he was as well. His game-winning grab finished off a legacy-creating 11-play, 98-yard drive that capped off a comeback from a 14-point deficit midway through the third quarter. Mendoza's shovel pass to running back Jaydn Ott gave Cal a successful two-point conversion, and an inspired defense dispatch of Stanford's offense after three plays on the ensuing possession to close things out and open the floodgates for a sold-out crowd to swarm the field at California Memorial Stadium.

"I don't know what it means. I just know after the game, a lot of Cal fans came up to me and thanked me. I never expected anything like that," Brady said. "It's a blessing to be a part of it. I've never felt something so exciting. It means so much to our fans. It was exciting to see a smile on their faces."

Saturday's win didn't only give the Bears a win in the Big Game for the fourth straight year and five out of the past six, it also made them bowl-eligible for the second consecutive season.

For two-and-half quarters, it frankly didn't seem likely. The Cardinal stunned the Bears for two first-quarter touchdowns and led 21-7 with 6:33 to go in the third period. And after Cal fumbled a kickoff away deep in its own territory, it began to look as though the Bears may need a miracle.

It didn't turn out to be that dire, but Cal made the plays to reverse the momentum of the game. The Cardinal took over at the Cal 20 after the fumble but came up empty after a botched snap on a field goal attempt. The Bears cut the deficit to 21-10 on a 46-yard field goal by Ryan Coe and Brady followed with his first touchdown catch – a 30-yarder from Mendoza on a crucial third down.

Cal's defense came up with another stop, setting up the game-winning possession.

"I'm so proud of this team," Travers Family Head Football Coach Justin Wilcox said. "We've been in a lot of tight games this year that certainly haven't gone our way, but we never quit and we found a way to win. That means a lot. There was a time when small people or weak people could have tried to find a way out; that it's not going to be our day. A lot of people would have quit, honestly. It's human nature."

The victory was especially meaningful for sixth-year safety Craig Woodson, who has now helped the Bears retain The Axe five times during his career. He led the Bears with 10 tackles.

"It won't hit me until tonight or a week from now or a year from now," Woodson said. "It's crazy knowing that I've been here my whole career and all the times we've beat Stanford. I think this is the moment I'll remember the most for us to be down like that and come back and win. It means everything. This is something I'll remember for the rest of my life."

The Bears close out the regular season next Saturday at No. 13 SMU. The game kicks off at 12:30 p.m. PT and airs on ESPN2.

STAY POSTED For coverage of Cal football, please follow the Bears on Twitter (@CalFootball, @CalFootballPR) and Instagram (@cal_football).

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Precincts reporting: 100%Election results are unofficial until certified. These results were last updated on November 11, 2024 at 4:53:39 PM Eastern Time.

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Arts & Entertainment

Traditional West African Music Featuring Habib Koité Coming To Berkeley

Community Contributor

|Updated Sat, Nov 2, 2024 at 9:07 am PT

(Clockwise from top center) Mama Koné, Lamine Cissokho, Habib Koité, and Aly Keïta (Photo Taken by Michel De Bock)

Balafon player Aly Keïta (Photo Taken by Urban Lys)

(L to R) Habib Koité, Mama Koné, and Eric Bibb performing live. (Photo Taken By Michel De Bock)

By John Roos

An abundance of traditional West African musical riches will be experienced when guitarist Habib Koité, balafonist Aly Keïta, and kora player Lamine Cissokho (plus Koité's percussionist Mama Koné) take the stage Thursday and Friday nights at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. These two shows are stopovers on a current tour celebrating Mandé Sila, described as the way of the Mandingo empire, symbolizing languages, cultures, music, and the complete organology of West Africa.

Koité, 66, descends from the Khassonke griots, the traditional troubadours who provide wit, wisdom, and music at social gatherings. Koité became immersed in music from an early age, inspired by both his parents and his paternal grandfather who played the kamele n'goni, a traditional four-stringed instrument from the Wassolou region of Mali. His mission over the years has been to make music derived from the different ethnic musics of the region, which have enormous diversity in the sonic landscape as each regional music has quite distinct colors, languages and social protocols. And ultimately, his goal has been to weave in where suited his western rock, folk and jazz influences to create something truly unique.

Koité is perhaps the best-known of these four musicians, having sold more 400,000 albums and performed nearly 2000 concerts worldwide since recording his first album, 1995's Muso Ko.

I got hooked on Koité’s rippling rhythms and enchanting melodies when I first heard his 2001 release, Baro. That 13-track collection pulled me into an unfamiliar yet welcoming world where wisdom, magic, morality, sacrifice and devotion all have a place in our lives. Koité sings in the major languages of Mali, including Bambara, Songhai, Peil, Bobo, and his own Khassonké; therefore, a song derived from a specific music culture will use the language and musical structures of that culture or ethnic group.

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A griot born in Casamance, south of Senegal, Lamine Cissokho became enamored with the kora--a 21-stringed, predominantly West African instrument which is plucked with the fingers and combines features of the lute and harp--as a child when hearing the instrument's intoxicating sounds produced by his father, Sana Cissokho, one of the master kora players of his generation. In addition, Lalo Keba Drame, considered by many as the king of the kora, was Cissokho's great-uncle and another pivotal source of inspiration.

Cissokho has created a style defined by both great finesse and sensitivity, one that generates a calming, tranquil mood. He has recorded six albums since 2011 with a focus on celebrating musical traditions with a spirit of adventure, where unlikley collaborations with the likes of French jazz pianist Olivier Hutman and slide guitarist Manish Pingle created impressively unique results. (For an introduction to Cissokho's lovely music, I highly recommend his jazzy, sublime 2019 release, Sunujazz.)

Aly Keïta, born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and now living in Berlin, fell in love with the balafon (an instrument similar to the marimba) at an early age listening to his father, himself a balafon player. Keïta, 55, who freely wanders from pulsating African rhythms to more subtle, intricate jazz stylings, has long sought out musical collaborations that stretch his talents, including performing alongside Omar Sosa, Jan Galega Bronnimann, Guo Gan, Kélétigui Diabaté, Mimino Garay, and Pharoah Sanders, among others.

Bringing these four men together for the first time germinated from an idea of Koité's U.S. agent working for IMN World. After the highly popular Brothers in Bamako project, where in 2012 Koité teamed with American bluesman Eric Bibb (and the pair was backed by Koné), it was suggested that Koité's loyal fan base would enjoy a slightly lighter, more acoustic version of that sound and style.

Now many years later, the time finally felt right to put Mandé Sila together.

Koité's international manager, Michel De Bock of Contre-Jour in Belgium, suggested that Keïta was a worthy successor to the late balafon player Kélétigui Diabaté. As for the kora, Koité met Cissokho at a concert with Bibb and the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra, hit it off right away. Then Koné, Koité's longtime percussionist, was added to complete the Mandé Sila line-up.

According to De Bock, Habib, the Malian . . . . Aly, the Ivorian . . . . and Lamine, the Senegalese, were the perfect representation of the richness of this great Mandingo empire. He added that this project has come just at the right time to give Koité's career a breath of fresh air before he returns with a personal album with his old band, Bamada.

Can the expectations of this unique collaboration--which does seem quite natural--yet still be daunting in any way for these musicians?

"It will definitely be a new experience and a challenge for us all," said Keïta recently by phone from his Berlin residence. "We might need to make some adjustments, or even compromise. For myself, it's different not having a bass player and I've never played with a drummer or as a quartet, and that's okay. You adapt to the moment and maybe be a little more flexible or spontaneous than usual."

Keïta is excited about this tour and the opportunity to perform alongside Koité, Cissokho, and Koné. He collaborated previously with Koité back in 2006, 2008 and 2012-13, and although Keïta has joined forces with numerous other artists over the years, he told me that he can be very choosy about who 'he says yes to.'

For a collective experience to be truly satisfying, Keïta maintains, "Everyone involved has to share in a common goal. You can't be pulling in different directions. Sometimes, if it gets too complicated, it just might not be the right fit. There has to be a mood or feeling, and a connection, established."

That said, the Mandé Sila project promises to generate nothing but a communal, positive vibe.

"I imagine we all will be very close after these shows," asserts Keïta. "I never thought I'd be touring with Habib. He's so well known and more experienced. I have so much respect for him. We will have fun, and I want those people seeing us to share in the good times we create in the moment."

*Habib Koité, Aly Keïta, and Lamine Cissokho, plus Mama Koné, celebrate Mandé Sila Thursday and Friday nights at Freight & Salvage, 2020 Addison St., Berkeley, (510) 644-2020. 8 p.m. $44-$49, includes fees. www.thefreight.org.

A new type of porous material called a covalent organic framework quickly sucks up carbon dioxide from ambient air

October 23, 2024

Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide humans produce is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but today’s carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases.

Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO₂ levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won’t reach humanity’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions. The porous material — a covalent organic framework (COF) — captures CO₂ from ambient air without degradation by water or other contaminants, one of the limitations of existing DAC technologies.

“We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO₂. Everything,” said Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper that will appear online Oct. 23 in the journal Nature.

“I am excited about it because there’s nothing like it out there in terms of performance. It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem,” he added.

According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO₂ from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO₂ for storage underground.

UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper’s first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO₂ in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.

“Flue gas capture is a way to slow down climate change because you are trying not to release CO₂ to the air. Direct air capture is a method to take us back to like it was 100 or more years ago,” Zhou said. “Currently, the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere is more than 420 ppm, but that will increase to maybe 500 or 550 before we fully develop and employ flue gas capture. So if we want to decrease the concentration and go back to maybe 400 or 300 ppm, we have to use direct air capture.”

COF vs MOF

Yaghi is the inventor of COFs and MOFs (metal-organic frameworks), both of which are rigid crystalline structures with regularly spaced internal pores that provide a large surface area for gases to stick or adsorb. Some MOFs that he and his lab have developed can adsorb water from the air, even in arid conditions, and when heated, release the water for drinking. He has been working on MOFs to capture carbon since the 1990s, long before DAC was on most people’s radar screens, he said.

Two years ago, his lab created a very promising material, MOF-808, that absorbs CO₂, but the researchers found that after hundreds of cycles of adsorption and desorption, the MOFs broke down. These MOFs were decorated inside with amines (NH₂ groups), which efficiently bind CO₂ and are a common component of carbon capture materials. In fact, the dominant carbon capture method involves bubbling exhaust gases through liquid amines that capture the carbon dioxide. Yaghi noted, however, that the energy intensive regeneration and volatility of liquid amines hinders their further industrialization.

Working with colleagues, Yaghi discovered why some MOFs degrade for DAC applications — they are unstable under basic, as opposed to acidic, conditions, and amines are bases. He and Zhou worked with colleagues in Germany and Chicago to design a stronger material, which they call COF-999. Whereas MOFs are held together by metal atoms, COFs are held together by covalent carbon-carbon and carbon-nitrogen double bonds, among the strongest chemical bonds in nature.

As with MOF-808, the pores of COF-999 are decorated inside with amines, allowing uptake of more CO₂ molecules.

“Trapping CO₂ from air is a very challenging problem,” Yaghi said. “It’s energetically demanding, you need a material that has high carbon dioxide capacity, that’s highly selective, that’s water stable, oxidatively stable, recyclable. It needs to have a low regeneration temperature and needs to be scalable. It’s a tall order for a material. And in general, what has been deployed as of today are amine solutions, which are energy intensive because they’re based on having amines in water, and water requires a lot of energy to heat up, or solid materials that ultimately degrade with time.”

Yaghi and his team have spent the last 20 years developing COFs that have a strong enough backbone to withstand contaminants, ranging from acids and bases to water, sulfur and nitrogen, that degrade other porous solid materials. The COF-999 is assembled from a backbone of olefin polymers with an amine group attached. Once the porous material has formed, it is flushed with more amines that attach to NH₂ and form short amine polymers inside the pores. Each amine can capture about one CO₂ molecule.

When 400 ppm CO₂ air is pumped through the COF at room temperature (25 °C) and 50% humidity, it reaches half capacity in about 18 minutes and is filled in about two hours. However, this depends on the sample form and could be speeded up to a fraction a minute when optimized. Heating to a relatively low temperature — 60 °C, or 140 °F — releases the CO₂, and the COF is ready to adsorb CO₂ again. It can hold up to 2 millimoles of CO₂ per gram, standing out from other solid sorbents.

Yaghi noted that not all the amines in the internal polyamine chains currently capture CO₂, so it may be possible to enlarge the pores to bind more than twice as much.

“This COF has a strong chemically and thermally stable backbone, it requires less energy, and we have shown it can withstand 100 cycles with no loss of capacity. No other material has been shown to perform like that,” Yaghi said. “It’s basically the best material out there for direct air capture.”

Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change.

“We’re very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we’ve been doing,” he said.

The work was funded by King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, Yaghi’s carbon capture startup, Atoco Inc., Fifth Generation’s Love, Tito’s, and BIDMaP. Yaghi’s collaborators include Joachim Sauer, a visiting scholar from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and computational scientist Laura Gagliardi from the University of Chicago.