Kara J. Manke

A team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent months refining and optimizing a rapid and low-cost new technique to test wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This month, the team has launched a new high-throughput pop-up lab that, in conjunction with UC Berkeley and wastewater utilities and public health agencies from throughout the Bay Area, will monitor the region’s wastewater for the virus.

Daniel Richter, usually soft-spoken, becomes animated when talking about the history of the soil that lies beneath our feet. For more than 30 years, Richter has studied the interactions between young Piedmont forests and the soils that sustain them. Though he now conducts most of his research at the Clemson Experimental Forest in South Carolina—a location whose history and ecology parallels that of the Duke Forest—his studies are “built directly on the work of Coile, Korstian, Peet and Christ