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UC Science Today is produced by the University of California and covers the latest and greatest research throughout the system. From breakthroughs in medicine, agriculture and the environment to insights into the world around us, Science Today covers it all.
In 1989, UC Berkeley psychologist Robert Levenson began to study a group of people who had been married at least 15 years or 35 years, depending on age, to get a better sense of what fairly successful marriages are like. This was not purely a behavioral study, as they also managed to collect genetic samples from many of these 156 couples. In this interview excerpt, Levenson explains the implications for future couples.
Robert Levenson: "Well, one of the things that motivated us to do this study is that we felt this might be the last opportunity to study the dinosaurs of marriage. The people who had 50 years with a particular person. And at the time we started in the 80s it looked like the divorce rate was reaching 65 percent in this country. Seven out of 10 marriages ending in divorce. And so here was a group that grew up in a different era and had you know sort of stayed together and we wanted to understand them just in case they disappeared from the earth.
Well, I think things are different now and you know we’re in this period of flux in marriage. A lot of people don’t marry. The divorce rate has gone back down again to 50 percent. I don’t know whether the modal marriage for the millennial generation will be, you know, marry once, marry twice, marry three times. But I think the basic biology here, the relationship between behavior and biology doesn’t require you to be married.
You know this is a statement about what counts in terms of your being happy in a relationship. And although our tools may not be strong enough to detect these in the first and second and third years, I still expect that these genetic influences are having the same effects on relationships today as they did, you know, 20 and 40 years ago in those marriages."
Branin/host: "Right and as you say with the dinosaurs, I mean I think that’s the joke, you know, people will say about their grandparents - they stuck together even though they didn’t seem very happy and yet they did."
Robert Levenson: "Now that might happen again. You know we go through these pendular kinds of sociological changes and for a while it seemed like we were in sort of a casual relationship. People lived together, they didn’t marry, but who knows what it’s going to be like in the future. And who knows probably the best bet is the pendulum will swing back and maybe people will form better marriages and will find ways of making better mate selection. And maybe even genes will play a role in that.
And you know you’ll go and you’ll talk to your grandma and your grandpa and they’ll give you advice and then you’ll go to your geneticist and she’ll give you advice and you’ll put that all together in this kind of unique algorithm that will say okay I’m going to go this way. And then if you’re smart you’ll listen. And if you’re not you’ll say ah, I know best. I’m just going to marry whoever I want to. But I don’t think human nature is going to get re-writ in any particular, you know, in any short period of time."
Want to hear the entire interview? https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/robert-levenson
Or, listen to several experts, including Levenson, describe our brain in love in this discussion: https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/brain_love
If you’ve been around awhile, chances are you’ve experienced foods that were once touted to be good for you, suddenly becoming the worst thing you could possibly eat. Or at least that’s how it feels when there’s a lot of media coverage about the latest scientific studies. Take eggs, for example. Over the years, these nutrient-rich orbs have gone from what’s for breakfast, to heart-attacks waiting to happen … only to be redeemed again as a healthy choice. Of course, moderation is key – for anything, but what gives when it comes to such nutritional see-saws? We asked nutrition researcher Angela Zivkovic of the University of California, Davis.
"Part of the problem is that we just have natural variability between people, and if we keep trying to find the answer about how a certain diet affects all humans, we're probably never going to find the answer, and we're going to keep having these sort of pendulum swings back and forth. Eggs are good for you, eggs are not good for you, eggs are good for you, eggs are not good for you because every time you get a different population, you'll get a different answer. Really, it's that eggs are good for some people at certain points in time, and eggs are not so good for other people especially at certain points in time. So, you know, we just need to try to figure out, how do we understand how different people respond to different diets at different points? And, again, it's not even just about, how do you respond to eggs? It's today versus three years from now versus 10 years ago. It's very different. People change over time and people are very unique and individual. And it's the overall context, too. That's often something that's really forgotten and missed. It's like, you know, we try to isolate these foods as if we eat them in isolation of other things. Of course, we eat them as complete diets. So let's say I'm on a vegan diet except I eat eggs. The effect of those eggs might be very different than if I eat eggs, but I'm actually on a Paleo-type diet, where I'm also eating a lot of other animal products. So it's really all about context and trying to understand how different people vary and change and respond to these different dietary treatments."
It's a workday, just after lunch. You have a deadline and there's plenty of time left in the day to get the task done. If only you could stop thinking about other things. One thought can lead to your mind just...wandering away. This can't be good, right? You've probably been scolded as a kid for daydreaming in class. But in recent years, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that there are some very redeeming qualities to this mental state - in fact, it could be an essential cognitive skill. Here's an excerpt from an interview conducted with one of those researchers.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, might be close to finding a drug that could cure glaucoma, which is the world’s second-leading cause of blindness. Karsten Gronert, a professor of optometry, says it has been a long process of trial and error.
"With decades worth of research there have been several approaches to try to develop neuroprotective drugs that somehow can stop once you see neurodegenerartion. And there have been several approaches and none of them actually were able to stop the progression of neurodegeneration."
But Gronert discovered that astrocytes - cells in the eye retina - produce lipid signals that protect nerves from damage. And when the eye is stressed, the astrocytes stop making the protective signal.
"It was an unexpected finding. This means it has some unknown role with nerves that we were not aware of."
So, if researchers can find a way to protect astrocytes, they might get on the right track to fight glaucoma.
How does one make a brain atlas? John Ngai, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley explains.
“You can think of it as a taxonomy. You might think about what are all the species of birds that there are on Earth, you might think of it as needing to first identify those types.”
So, just like with a bird encyclopedia, UC Berkeley neurologists are trying to find and organize brain cells into a catalogue of sorts.
“We know there are many different types of neurons in the brain. They look different. We might have some ideas about how they function differently. But we have no rational way of categorizing them. But using new molecular and genetic techniques, we have a very powerful way of classifying them.”
The brain atlas is an ambitious multimillion-dollar project that will help researchers better understand how brain cells wire up and function. And that could be the key to cure of neurological diseases, including autism and Alzheimer’s. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, affects over two million people worldwide. The neurodegenerative disease strikes when the immune system attacks myelin, layers of a fatty insulating membrane that surround nerve fibers and help send nerve signals faster. Ari Green, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has found an over the counter allergy drug called Clemastine that could possibly help repair damaged myelin.
“It was originally designed back in the 1970s as an antihistamine and we were excited that it showed the evidence that myelin repair is possible even with injury that is not immediate or acute, but has been there for some time."
Green says because of possible side effects of the medication, Clemastine is only a prototype for a better myelin repairing drug that researchers have yet to develop.
"What we want is a drug that has a very targeted effect that would be capable of inducing this repair without causing other side effects."
Believe it or not, neuroscience is still considered a relatively new field of medical research. That’s because there’s still a lot of the unknown about our brain. For instance, how do brain cells wire up and function? To answer this question, John Ngai, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is creating a brain catalogue or - as researchers call it – an atlas.
“So the idea behind this brain atlas project is to identify all the cell types in the mouse brain as a model for understanding the human brain and then to understand their physiological properties, how they connect with other so this can be used as a basis for understanding not only normal function of the brain, but also how diseases might progress and eventually how you might treat those diseases in human neurological conditions."
The effort is part of the federal government’s BRAIN Initiative, which launched four years ago. Its ultimate goal is to understand brain circuits well enough to devise new therapies for diseases of the human brain and nervous system.
Exposure to flame retardant chemicals or PBDEs during pregnancy can affect children’s neurodevelopment. Environmental health scientist Tracey Woodruff of the University of California, San Francisco, found ten-fold increases in a mother's PBDE levels could lead to a drop of 3.7 IQ points in her child. While that may sound like a small number…
"If you look at it over a population, it becomes very significant, because you have everybody exposed to PBDEs at a smaller risk. The small risk over a large population means that you can have a relatively large number of people who can have some type of effect."
If this happens, the population level IQ could get shifted. This means there will be more people with an IQ score of about 70, which is considered a mentally-impaired category.
“It can also decrease the number of people who are in the mentally-gifted categories."
PBDEs can be found in many household items from furniture to toys to electronics. So, Woodruff says buying flame retardant-free products could make a big difference in your children’s health.
Glaucoma is the world’s second-leading cause of blindness, and it affects about 80 million people worldwide and has no cure. But vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered molecules that could probably halt the progression of the disease. Gronert: “We identified a novel factor, a new factor that potentially protects the optic nerve against damage, which is one of the underlying causes of glaucoma.
That’s Karsten Gronert, a professor of optometry at UC Berkeley. He says, for decades, academic labs and pharmaceutical companies were trying to find treatment for glaucoma, but couldn’t show any promising results. This is probably because they were targeting the disease when it was already too late.
"Once you have a degeneration of the optic nerve head, which is what causes glaucoma and eventually leads to blindness, that process is irreversible and cannot be stopped.”
So Gronert and his colleagues took a different route. Instead of trying to fix what has been permanently damaged, they focused on prevention - protecting the mechanism that stops nerve degeneration.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have started an ambitious project to build a brain atlas. According to neuroscientist John Ngai, the goal is to create a catalogue of different brain cells.
"The human brain contains about 80 billion neurons, nerve cells. And of the neurons we suspect there could be hundreds, if not thousands of types of distinct types of those cells, but until recently we really haven’t had a way of categorizing or classifying those cells in a quantitative or rational way."
But why do researchers need this mapping tool?
"In order to understand how the brain processes information and gives raise to things like cognition, emotion, we really need to know what different parts are."
Ngai also hopes this atlas will help scientists understand brain cells’ connections well enough to launch new therapies for treating cognitive and neurological diseases.
Social connections are important and can make you happier, according to psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley. But how can those who are, shall we say, not so easy going build such a network? Mauss says – just be yourself, and open up to others.
“People who are perceived to be more authentic are better liked by others and have better social connections. And we have found that if you hold in your emotions, you stifle them, then others tend to perceive that as.. on average, finding you less authentic.”
Mauss says accepting your negative emotions could also help you become more personable.
“Having that accepting attitudes about your own emotions will make you be more open about your own emotions which I believe would be perceived by others as greater authenticity.”
So, if you shy away from sharing your feelings, just give it another try!
Will software engineers ever be able to outsmart hackers and build an unbreakable wall of defense? Dawn Song, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley says it’s possible, but don’t expect results in the near future. Part of the reason is due to artificial intelligence, or AI.
“On one hand AI – these techniques can really help us to enhance our capabilities for defenders to build stronger defenses, but also on the other hand unfortunately it could be misused by attackers. In the long run, we do hope that the defenders will win, but in the short term it could make it easier for attackers to develop new attacks, but can be much, much harder for defenders to build sufficient defenses.”
So, what will it take for programmers to win this cat-and-mouse game? According to Song, the advancement of artificial intelligence allows researchers to better identify vulnerable spots in software installed on our smartphones, laptops and tablets.
It seems there’s more to high-density lipoproteins, or HDLs, than we previously thought. Nutrition researcher Angela Zivkovic of the University of California, Davis, led an analyses of how the composition of complex sugars attached to HDLs called glycans are linked to the body’s inflammatory response. Traditional markers like LDL cholesterol, body mass index and blood pressure are not able to predict whose HDL is pro- or anti-inflammatory.
"That’s something that had not really been looked at very extensively before. So, how can we actually start to look at people to see what their metabolic phenotype might be like that’s something other than how we’ve categorized them so far?”
Being a nutrition researcher, Zivkovic is looking into which diets are pro- or anti-inflammatory.
"I think we can actually start to think about the possibility of giving people recommendations to improve their health that take into account both who they are as genetically, but also what they choose."
Medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, are learning about the human body in a new, experimental setting. Anatomy professor Derek Harmon is piloting a virtual reality class. But as exciting as it sounds - not every student is thrilled about the 3D experience.
"I think one potential negative with virtual reality is that some studies quote that something like 20 percent of people or 1 out of 5 have this motion sickness."
So, Harmon says for that reason some of his anatomy students opted out. But the class is optional, designed in addition to the traditional mandatory classes taught on cadavers.
"Virtual reality is one way we are looking at it. We are looking at augmented reality concepts too. Potentially mixed reality like a HoloLens, to try to make sure that we can get as many students involved in this type of space as possible."
According to Harmon, the concept of spatial building that three-dimension provides is a very important skill for medical students. And it’s easier to understand using virtual reality.
When you accept your own negative emotions – you will likely have a more positive outlook on mood swings than people around you have. That’s according to Iris Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“If you have an accepting attitude for other people’s emotions that tend to make those other people feel better and it helps you respond to their distress in a more constructive way.”
Mauss says this mindset is invaluable for parents who often deal with their little ones’ tantrums.
“Small children have difficulty regulating their emotions because, they are - children."
But if their moms and dads are responsive and understanding –
“We believe that over time that might actually help children develop better emotion-regulatory skills. ”
And not only that. Mauss says if you learn how to accept your negative emotions, you’ll become a better role model for your kids.
Artificial Intelligence has been developing fast – and it’s making more and more decisions on humans’ behalf. From simple web searches to e-commerce to self-driving cars. But researchers like Dawn Song, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, are struggling to find the best ways to protect this technology from hackers.
“One thing we are looking at how we can use AI and deep learning techniques to develop stronger security capabilities to enable us to build better defenses. One of our recent works uses advanced deep learning techniques to try to identify software vulnerabilities in IOT devises.”
Deep learning techniques are advanced algorithms, which allow researchers to process massive amounts of data.
“The advantage of deep learning is that it can enable us to build very large data sets. And now we have very good computation framework and hardware to perform a variety of tasks.”
But as machines becomes smarter, so do viruses that attack them, so scientists are challenged to stay one step ahead of hackers.
Sleep disorders during pregnancy can lead to a preterm birth. To improve sleeping patterns of mothers-to-be, Jennifer Felder, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is running an intervention research.
“So we are doing a research on expecting moms and it is a digital intervention for sleep during pregnancies, so we are able to recruit women across the nation and in Canada. So we are hoping to have a really broad reach with that."
Besides pre-term birth outcomes, Insomnia is linked to other problems in pregnant women.
“Poor sleep during pregnancy may also increase risk of perinatal depression and there are some data that suggests that it might increase risk of suicidal ideation, gestational diabetes, cesarean section births. So it does appear to have really broad consequences both psychologically and physically."
Treating sleep disorders might help reduce the rate of pre-term births, which affect 1 in 10 women in the United States.
Virtual Reality becomes a reality in medical research. Derek Harmon, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, is working with software companies to develop 3D brain scan visualization tools.
“With your two hand-held controllers of the virtual space you can slice with one axes and then the other and see a view of a head CT scan. In real time you can see all these different angles and again, build on special arrangement of the body, which I don’t know where else you can even do something like that.”
Harmon has just started a pilot curriculum that offers virtual reality anatomy classes to medical students, so a 360-degree view of a digital human body using Google glasses. Harmon says lessons like these will help students become better physicians in the future.
“If you have a company that built the software for you, you have pre-selected layers of tissue, organs and whatever you want to learn from, which does a lot of legwork for you and because of that people can start experimenting with it. I think it is so early on in the technology, but there is a lot of promise on things that you really can’t do on another type of medium."
Medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, are learning about human anatomy not only on cadavers, but also in virtual reality. This is part of a new pilot curriculum led by anatomy professor Derek Harmon.
"The students, as soon as they learn the material on actual cadavers, on skeletons, or in the lab itself, they could go into the space where we had virtual reality set up and they could do the exact same type of lesson, but they could take it piece-by-piece off of the model in the virtual space, which means they could physically walk around the virtual model getting this kind of 360 degree view that they could not get in the lab."
This way, even though students can’t feel the virtual body, they can explore its every little detail.
"You can really quickly see that it helped more with the depth level and by that I mean from the superficial skin level down to the deepest part in the body, because they can take every piece layer-by-layer off."
Harmon says in just a couple of years VR's popularity will likely skyrocket among medical doctors.
A couple of decades ago flame retardants – or PBDEs - were widely used in furniture because of the fire safety standards. But that policy has since changed in many states, including California.
“Because of concern about increasing exposures as well as the facts that people were concerned about in terms of how they may be affecting neurodevelopment, PBDE were phased out for use.”
That’s Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco. She has run a study measuring pregnant women’s exposure to PBDEs that can affect children’s neurodevelopment and lower IQ. Woodruff found that despite a series of bans, these chemicals are still ubiquitous in our homes.
“So we see decline in some of the exposures, but we see that we still going to have exposures for a while because they are still hanging around, they probably still in a lot of furniture."
Woodruff urges policymakers not to weaken environmental health laws.
How much stress can you take? Maybe you’re OK with a small bump in the road, like a parking ticket or a spat with your neighbor. But what about more serious troubles?
“Things like going through a divorce, financial troubles, unemployment. Those are pretty big stressors.”
That’s Irene Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In her recent study, she discovered that you will be much better off if you accept your negative emotions, no matter how bad they are.
“We found the same positive effect of emotional acceptance. I don’t know at this point where the upper boundary is, but from other research we can speculate that actually there is no upper boundary in terms of the intensity of stressors."
But Mauss says accepting your negative emotions doesn’t mean accepting negative reality. You should still work on making positive changes in your life if things took a wrong turn.
What really makes you happy or sad? According to Psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley it is not so much about what’s happening to you, but how you perceive the situations you are in.
"How you relate to your own emotions, transforms the experiences that you have in some way."
Mauss says the right way of thinking is the best way to protect yourself from moodiness, depression and anxiety.
"If you accept your negative emotions as just a natural response, you are going to pay less attention to them and so while they exist and happen, they blow over pretty quickly. Another idea is if you accept the negative emotions you have, you basically don’t punish yourself for feeling them and you avoid piling negativity upon negativity."
Or if you simply don’t chalk up your misfortunes to “bad luck,” this alone might cheer you up.
If your home has furniture that contains flame retardant materials, you may want to consider getting rid of it. A study by Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has shown that exposure to flame retardant chemicals, or PBDEs, may affect your health.
"The thing about the flame retardants use in a polyurethane foam is that they are not bound to the polyurethane, so they can get out and they can get into dust, and then they can migrate through dust, and people can get exposed through the dust, and they can also get into food. Another thing about PBDEs is that their chemical structure is such that it makes them persistent: once they get out they don’t break down, they hang around in the environment."
According to Woodruff, pregnant women and children are especially vulnerable. PBDEs may slow down children’s neurodevelopment, lower their IQ and possibly increase the risk of ADHD.
"Children may be more highly exposed to PBDEs, as it gets out in dust, because they are lower to the ground, they crawl around, they put their hands in their mouth."
So, not having furniture with these chemicals is the safest bet.
About a quarter of all the global climate change problems we’re seeing today can be attributed back to our food system and the dietary choices we’re making on a daily basis.
"This is greater than all of the cars on the planet; in fact it’s about twice as much global warming pollution as the cars."
That’s Benjamin Houlton, director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He studies the connection between climate and diet. For instance, just switching from a meat-heavy American diet to a Mediterranean diet, which has less meat, more fish and lots of vegetables is not only good for your health, it’s good for the planet’s health, too.
"If we all switch to a diet like the Mediterranean diet – that is equivalent to taking somewhere around a billion cars off of the streets in terms of vehicle emissions each year. So, it’s a huge number that has a tremendous amount. In terms of percentages, it could solve up to 15 percent of global warming pollution by 2050. We thing these are really important things to understand; our dietary choice does matter and it’s something we can do every day."
How do you handle stress? Psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley wanted to learn how people deal with stressors, so she ran an experiment that involved exposing study participants to uncomfortable situations.
“We stressed everybody out by having them giving an impromptu speech that we said would be videotaped and later scrutinized by judges. It’s an experience that people find very unpleasant. ”
But the way one reacts to a stressful situation like this changes the outcome.
“We found that people who tend to be more accepting of their negative emotions actually responded with less stress to that experience.”
According to Mauss, their study refutes previous notions that fewer bad things happen to happier people. It’s just that these people often see their negative experiences in a positive light.
Exposure to flame retardant chemicals or PBDEs during pregnancy can affect children’s neurodevelopment. That’s according to Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco.
“There’s been studies in multiple locations including the United States and in other countries around the world and what was found was that women with higher exposures to PBDEs during pregnancies, their children had lower IQ scores.”
Woodruff says they measured IQ scores of 5 to 7-year-old exposed to these chemicals in infancy.
“For about 10-fold increase in PBDEs there was a drop of IQ score of about 4 IQ points."
But how did women get exposed to the chemicals? Turns out, through furnishings at home.
“PBDE flame retardants are the class of chemicals that were used primarily in upholstered furniture, so polyurethane foam. They were put in as a requirement to flammability standards. They are also used sometimes in electronics."
Can pregnant women be cured of insomnia? Jennifer Felder, a clinical phycologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is testing out a therapy called cognitive behavioral treatment, which could help expecting mothers fight sleep disorders.
“There is not currently much research on how best to treat insomnia during pregnancy. We know that cognitive behavioral treatment is effective for insomnia generally, but we don’t yet know if it is effective during pregnancy. “
Felder’s study shows that insomnia during pregnancy put women at a higher risk for delivering before 34 weeks of gestation. But according to Felder, doctors don’t always see lack of sleep as a problem.
“Insomnia is often going undetected. It maybe dismissed as part of the normal process of pregnancy.”
Yet, In the United States one in 10 women deliver their babies preterm, so Felder hopes the insomnia therapy could reduce the rate of preterm birth.
Can parents protect their children from developing asthma and eczema? Michael Cabana, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, believes it could be possible if parents follow these recommendations very early in their children’s lives, starting from birth.
“Longer duration of breastfeeding might be helpful, avoiding the use of antibiotics is also important and it seems to be a beneficial effect of vaginal delivery."
Cabana’s recent study also showed that positive health effects of probiotics might be overstated, despite a widely accepted belief that they help prevent eczema or asthma in kids. Cabana says researchers need to take a closer look at children’s microbiota.
“I think as we develop better tools to understand microbiota and how that microbiota evolves and what is a normal microbiota in a normally developing child I think that is the type of background information we still need to continue and develop."
Do you feel bad when you’re moody, upset or depressed? Well, don’t be. Negative emotions are not so bad. So says Iris Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We found that some people regard their negative emotions with some suspicion. But some people actually have what we call emotionally excepting stance. They regard their negative emotions as something very natural, part of life that doesn’t need to be avoided or altered or pushed away.”
Turns out, this type of thinking may work in your favor.
"Paradoxically, people who actually accept their own negative emotions more, tend to have less negative emotions when they face stressful events, and then overtime sort of like a healthy diet this decreased experience of negative emotions adds up to better psychological health, more well-being, satisfaction with life and also less depression.”
When we think about our food system, we need to factor in that about 33 percent of the land area is now used for animals for food. And according to Ben Houlton, director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Davis, that has a huge influence on the global climate cycle.
"We have to think about the methane that’s being released from animals and rice patties and areas where we’re growing food. And we have to consider this nitrous oxide gas that’s being produced from the fertilizers we’re feeding to the microbes that live in the soil."
Nitrous oxide, or N2O, is the third largest contributor to global warming. Houlton and his colleagues identified nitrogen ‘fingerprints’ in soil samples to trace its journey and model how it moves through ecosystems and escapes into the air or water. Without adding the nitrogen cycle, Houlton says previous climate models were underestimated.
"Our discovery helped improve that understanding greatly so that we can now put this into our global models and help policymakers make better informed decisions."
Are yogurt, kefir and other probiotics really good for you? Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, believe the benefits of these products may be overstated. Michael Cabana, a professor of pediatrics, came to this conclusion while trying to figure out if a probiotic strain called LGG helps prevent the development of eczema or asthma in kids predisposed to these diseases.
“At two years of age we found that there is no difference in eczema levels between the kids. Despite the fact that previous studies have shown this probiotic strain helps prevent eczema in other countries, in the San Francisco area we didn’t find the same results.”
The UCSF findings further fuel the ongoing debate about the benefits of friendly bacteria in dietary supplements.
“We still learned a lot from this study and we still continue following these kids. It is probably more complicated than just giving a probiotic supplement.”
Genetic factors and other types of baby food, including breast milk, also affect a child’s microbiota. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
Why do pregnant women tend to suffer from sleep disorders? Financial status of the future mothers could be one of the reasons leading to insomnia. That’s according to Jennifer Felder, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Women of color and women from more economically disadvantaged background are disproportionately affected by poor sleep during pregnancy so it is possible that this may explain part of the reason we have such big disparities in the preterm birth rate.”
Lack of resources brings along other inequality factors affecting pregnant women’s sleep.
"Stress and psychological problems, noisy neighborhoods, discrimination and racism, not feeling safe.”
Felder says researchers studying different disciplines – be it psychology, environmental science or public health - need to combine their efforts in helping low income pregnant women improve sleeping patterns.
Environmental pollutants can damage our health, but how much do we know about their harmful effects? As part of a prenatal patients’ study, Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco has surveyed OBGYNs. The goal was to find out if doctors inform their patients about environmental health as part of their prenatal care.
“We actually surveyed doctors, obstetricians to ask them do you talk to your patients about environmental health, what do they say to you, do you think it is an important issue to ask them. And doctors by and large, at least obstetricians said we think this issue is really Important, but we don’t talk to our patients because we don’t have the kind of information we need to give to them.”
Woodruff and her team are now filling in the gap integrating environmental health into clinical care.
“One thing we have been doing is working with their professional societies to provide this foundational information so it is easier for a physician to give a patient information about environmental exposure they are concerned about.”
How technological advances are factored in climate change models by University of California
Private space tourism is no longer a faraway dream. In fact, Thomas Lang, an imaging scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, is trying to predict what tourists’ lives would be like in space. Researchers, for example, already have plans for designing commercial space habitats.
“What happens when you have private space stations? And those stations are geared for commercial activities. You would have people doing manufacturing or research or some other activity in space.”
The most pressing question for researchers is how to provide space tourists with an adequate training so they could stay in good health.
“Does it have to be NASA-like training program? Will they cut these health requirements down? What’s going to be the right trade off?”
Lang says, aging happens very quickly in space and can severely affect astronauts’ bones with lifetime bone structure being lost in just six months. But according to Lang, this could probably be prevented.
How important is it for pregnant women to get enough sleep? Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have recently conducted a study linking the lack of a good night’s rest to complications at delivery.
“Our study was the first to examine insomnia diagnosed during pregnancy and the risk of preterm birth. And our findings suggested that women with an insomnia diagnoses during pregnancy are at nearly two times higher risk for delivering before 34 weeks of gestation”.
That’s UCSF clinical psychologist Jennifer Felder. She urges mothers to pay extra attention to sleeping patterns in order to protect their babies.
“And this is really important because In the United States one in 10 women deliver their babies preterm. And it is now the leading cause of death before the age of 5 globally.”
Scientists hope that by treating sleep disorders they could reduce the rate of preterm births. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
Every year, more than 25 thousand pounds of chemicals are imported or manufactured in the United States, but scientists have very little data on many of those chemicals’ heath effects. Tracy Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, explains.
"We do know a lot about some environmental chemicals, so air pollution, cigarette smoke, some carcinogens and chemicals that cause effects other than cancer. There is still a lot of scientific knowledge to be gained about any of the industrial chemicals that we are using currently in the market place and we are exposed to.”
Woodruff says the effect of chemicals on humans is often underestimated, because most studies involve lab animals.
“But that doesn’t really reflect somebody who lives in a neighborhood that has a lot of crime or they are low income and so they have a lot of other stressers in their lives.”
Woodruff says measuring the combined health effects of people’s social and environmental hardships could give researchers a more complete picture.
Every year, almost 2 million Americans suffer from traumatic brain injury, which often lead to severe memory loss and learning disabilities. Peter Walter, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, has recently discovered a drug that can completely reverse these impairments in mice.
“The mice learned better. They have a better ability of taking short term memory and storing it in long term memory. It is a drug that enhances synaptic plasticity that allow memory to form.”
Scientists need to conduct more studies to learn if the same improvements can be achieved in humans.
“Whether we can extrapolate it to humans is still an open question. Mice’ brains are very different from human brains.”
But since traumatic brain injury is a serious problem with no approved therapies available for patients, these studies may offer researchers new insight. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
Sometimes, breakthroughs in science really do come down to simple curiosity. That was definitely the case when a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis decided to look more closely at the composition of HDL particles in the body. One of HDL's jobs is to transport cholesterol out of cells. Nutrition researcher Angela Zivkovic says it was a picture that prompted her to question if HDL may be covered in glycans, or sugars, and how that may impact the body.
"It was an electron micrograph of the inside of an arterial wall and it was hairy looking, right? And it’s because the endothelial cells that line the inside of your arteries are actually covered with these sugars. They’re kind of like these structures that help make sure certain things get through and certain things don’t get through from the bloodstream. And when I saw that picture I realized, well if your cells that these HDL particles have to kind of interact with are covered with sugars, then the HJDL must be covered with sugars, too."
Their ultimate finding that these sugars do influence anti-inflammatory proteins in the body could lead to biomarkers for disease. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
This week on Science Today, we learned something that many of you probably already know – and that’s how curiosity is often the main ingredient in scientific discovery. So many of the researchers we interview every week, often make breakthroughs by simply wondering about the world around them or asking different questions.
In the case of nutrition researcher Angela Zivkovic at UC Davis, in her case it was a picture that prompted her to a discovery that the composition of sugars coating HDL particles in body may be a biomarker for disease.
"It was an electron micrograph of the inside of an arterial wall and it was hairy looking, right? And it’s because the endothelial cells that line the inside of your arteries are actually covered with these sugars. They’re kind of like these structures that help make sure certain things get through and certain things don’t get through from the bloodstream. And when I saw that picture I realized, well if your cells that these HDL particles have to kind of interact with are covered with sugars, then the HDL must be covered with sugars, too."
And at UCSF, environmental health scientist Tracey Woodruff wanted to understand how chemicals in the environment intersect with health disparities.
"For example, African American women have higher rates of adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth and low birthweight. Is it because one of the reasons of this health disparity is because there is some type of environmental factors that are also combining with the factors that are due to their circumstances, that put their pregnancy more at risk?"
And additional stressors like discrimination or domestic violence are exacerbated by environmental factors like air pollution or cigarette smoke. So by asking this question and digging further, Woodruff hopes their findings may lead to the implementation of better environmental policies, especially in impoverished areas that often get exposed to chemicals. And these are just two University of California researchers who are trying to make a difference in the world. Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud to hear about others. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Everything that humans are used to on Earth changes in space and that’s what astronauts should be prepared for during long space trips.
“You are now in microgravity, which means that you don’t have these loads on not just your skeleton, but your skeletal muscle, your heart, your sense of balance.”
That's imaging scientist Thomas Lang, of the University of California, San Francisco. He explains that astronauts are exposed to a dangerous level of radiation, which increases the risk of cancer and brain damage.
“To some extent in lower Earth orbit we are protected by Earth’s magnetic field, but once we go to, as proposed to these NASA missions, back to the Moon or to deep space habitats in cislunar orbit, there we are going to be exposed to solar, wind, as well as galactic heavy ion- radiation.”
Add to that isolation and the absence of daylight, and space travel might not seem so appealing. But researchers like Lang are working on strategies to make space trips a healthier experience.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have discovered that a specific virus called cytomegalovirus, or CMV, could trigger childhood leukemia - a type of cancer that strikes about 15,000 American children each year.
“We found evidence of this virus at birth and it was found more frequently in children that went on to get leukemia. This virus was found years before diagnosis.”
That’s study leader Adam de Smith, who says CMV could also lead to other diseases.
“Children born with CMV may have developmental defects and particularly hearing los affected with CMV virus. So it is a pretty big public health issue and one thing that may come out of this research is a potential for a vaccine against CMV virus.”
While the development of this vaccine has been a priority for American health officials, the process is complicated. So De Smith says a lot more research needs to be done before a vaccine is available.
Virtual reality may help people with a visual condition called amblyopia, in which there is reduced vision in one eye. Neuroscientist Adrian Chopin of the University of California, Berkeley, says they’re treating patients with this visual defect by having them play 3D computer games that, he says, could restore their eyesight.
“Virtual reality is really developing tremendously right now. We are trying to develop a new game. That is something in between a video game industry and treatment.”
Chopin hopes this new 3D computer game treatment will overwrite the old dogma that adult patients’ amblyopia cannot be cured.
“Now we have all these optometrists and ophthalmologists out there telling the patients very often that there is nothing that can be done for them because they are too old and they needed to be treated when they were children. And we realize it is not true. I mean, it is difficult to change it, but it is not that it is impossible."
Chopin says the virtual reality study is already showing signs of success with some patients’ eyesight significantly improving.
Pregnant women exposed to social stress and environmental chemicals, have a higher risk of prenatal developmental problems and low-birth-weight babies. Study leader Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, says the key here is the combined effect of the risk factors.
“Our study was evaluating the literature to understand what the combined effects were of being exposed to environmental chemicals and stresses that people may experience during life. Stresses that are due to things like living in poor living circumstances, issue that might be due to discrimination like racism, etc. or poverty."
Babies born to mothers exposed to these hardships are at higher risk of developing multiple diseases in childhood and having cardiovascular problems and diabetes in adulthood.
“We have to do a better job of figuring out how do these varies factors that influence somebody’s health work together rather than just studying them separately, because they might be in combination more important.”
Space missions are exciting, but they’re risky for astronauts’ health. The lack of gravity in space may seriously damage their musculoskeletal systems, especially the spine and hip. Thomas Lang, an imaging scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has recently discovered crucial details about bone loss in space.
“What we did in our study is to look at how this corresponded to architectural changes in the hips. We used a 3-dimentional approach called quantitative computed tomography and in particular in the hip we found the trabecular bone – the spongy bone in the center of the medullary canal in the hip - was lost at about up to 3 percent per month.”
That’s similar to the bone structure that 70 or 80-year old women might lose in a year.
“The driving factor is disuse. Very similar to what happens when somebody has a spinal cord injury and they sit down in a wheel chair.”
One solution is to ensure that astronauts get strenuous workouts in space.
Parents who used to smoke, but quit before conceiving, may still put their child’s heath at risk. Researchers of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco, have studied dust in homes where children were diagnosed with leukemia and found an increased level of tobacco particles in the carpeting. UCSF Associate Researcher Adam de Smith explains the connection.
“If a family is smoking relatively heavily, they might not even be smoking in the house, they might be smoking outside, but when they come into the home, particles drop onto the carpet. If they have children several years later, we have found that those particles can remain there several years later. So it is possible if a child is playing around on the carpet, he may still be exposed to toxic particles that could perhaps increase the leukemia risk."
Studies show that even if you don’t smoke inside the house and frequently vacuum, only about 10 percent of dust gets removed. So de Smith says, best way to protect your children from tobacco-contaminated dust exposure is to never start smoking.
Hi there – I’m Larissa Branin, host of Science Today and it’s that time of the week again where we go over some of the stories covered this past week. First, we learned that by the end of the century climate change will likely cause a decline in wheat and barley yields by up to 33 percent. This statistical model was developed by a team of researchers led by UC Davis. Graduate student Matthew Gammans, who worked on the study, told us it was based on 65 years of weather records and data from wheat and barley yields in France.
“So we started by looking at the relationship between weather and yields and then using some climate change projections, we forecasted that relationship into the future to see what we can expect to happen to these yields.”
Their work is one of the first flexible statistical models applied to these cereal crops, which means that every potential temperature was included in the analysis. We then chatted with public health professor Kristine Madsen of UC Berkeley about soda consumption in the U.S. falling to a 31-year low last year. Instead, consumers seem to be reaching for lower-calorie produces, including bottled water. Madsen had found similar findings in Berkeley, California after the city passed the nation’s first soda tax back in 2014.
“Even in the comparison cities of Oakland and San Francisco, there was an overall increase of 20 percent in water consumption. But it was 63 percent in Berkeley. So, it looks like people were switching from sugar-sweetened beverages to really what I would say is the healthiest alternative.”
Speaking of healthy alternatives, there’s even more reason to never start smoking. We learned that even if parents quit before conception, their prior smoking habit may still put their child’s health at risk. UC San Francisco researcher Adam de Smith studied dust in homes where children were diagnosed with leukemia and found an increased level of tobacco particles in the carpeting.
“If a family is smoking relatively heavily, they might not even be smoking in the house, they might be smoking outside, but when they come into the home, particles drop onto the carpet. If they have children several years later, we have found that those particles can remain there several years later. So it is possible if a child is playing around on the carpet, he may still be exposed to toxic particles that could perhaps increase the leukemia risk.”
And even frequently vacuuming does not eliminate all the dust. So again – all the more reason to never pick up the habit. Well, that’s all for now. If you want to keep on top of all the latest science and health news coming from the University of California system, you’ll find UC Science Today on iTunes. Please subscribe and thanks for listening.
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What’s the best way to treat people suffering from substance abuse? Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has been studying the hormone oxytocin as a possible cure for addictions, due to its ability to reduce stress, anxiety and social discomfort.
“By enabling people to make better social connections and by attenuating the craving for that other substance or act, or giving them a better set of tools with which to embark on this road to recovery, and it is not that it is to say that it is like a panacea: you are going to take a little intranasal oxytocin and everything is going to be perfect, but perhaps it could be one of many tools that people use to get better and get back into a healthy life style.”
Mitchell says oxytocin could be a substitute for those self-medicating with alcohol, opioids or even gambling.
“Whether or not it is related to depression or stress or anxiety or PTSD, the bottom line is they are experiencing the state of despair.”
Mitchell hopes doctors will start offering oxytocin as a therapy.
Soda consumption in the United States fell to a 31-year low last year. This, according to the trade publication, Beverage-Digest. Instead, consumers seem to be reaching for lower-calorie products, including bottled water. This is something public health professor Kristine Madsen found in a University of California, Berkeley study, which was conducted after the City of Berkeley passed the nation’s first soda tax in 2014.
"Even in the comparison cities of Oakland and San Francisco, there was an overall increase of 20 percent in water consumption. But it was 63 percent in Berkeley. So, it looks like people were switching from sugar-sweetened beverages to really what I would say is the healthiest alternative."
Madsen agrees that many consumers are becoming more health conscious. But even trends could have a role in the decline of sugary drinks – like all of the eco-friendly water bottles being carried around these days.
"So, that ‘cool factor’ is really important and could absolutely be an important driver moving people to healthier choices, you now, in beverages and in diets in general."
By the end of the century, climate change will likely cause a decline of wheat and barley yields by 17 to 33 percent. Those were the findings of a new statistical model by the University of California, Davis. Matthew Gammans, a graduate student who worked on the study, says it was based on 65 years of weather records and data from wheat and barley yields in France.
"So we started by looking at the relationship between weather and yields and then using some climate change projections, we forecasted that relationship into the future to see what we can expect to happen to these yields."
Their work is one of the first flexible statistical models applied to wheat and other cereal crops.
"When I say “flexible”, I mean not just kind of the average temperature or the max temperature, but kind of looking at exposure to every temperature bin, so every potential temperature is included in the analysis and it’s the first to apply that to Europe and it’s also the first to use that kind of flexible methodology to look at both fall and winter and summer seasons – so really trying to understand what’s driving these yield changes."
The sight of farmers in China, bent over rice fields enveloped in air pollution, inspired researcher Colin Carter of the University of California, Davis to find out how surface ozone was impacting their most important crop.
"You couldn’t see from one end of the field to the other. And the sunlight wasn’t even getting to the plants. So it sort of struck me that pollution today in China is a bigger issue for agriculture than climate change is. The two are related, but they are different."
For the first time, Carter and his colleagues were able to identify a specific stage of a rice plant’s development as being vulnerable to surface ozone, a form of pollution that’s similar to smog. This information can be used to help the country implement regulatory policies to control surface ozone during critical stages of a rice plant’s growth.
"The factors that cause surface ozone also lead to climate change. So, if the pollution is controlled, not only will it give immediate benefit to agriculture, but it will also help in the battle against climate change."
Taking care of a loved one suffering from dementia is not an easy job. In fact, family members who look after sick relatives, often suffer from depression and could use some caregiving, too. That’s according to Robert Levenson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Part of it is just an understanding that this is really important, really prevalent and preventable in a way. We don’t know how to cure dementia, but I think we can probably keep caregivers a lot more healthy.”
Levenson’s recent study shows that depression of family caregivers may contribute to dementia patients’ earlier death. He suggests this is where social services can step in and help caregivers.
“We are talking about providing some health with making meals, letting caregivers have a few hours to get out of the house and maybe get some exercise. Some of these solutions to these problems are low-tech, not high-tech, low-cost, not high-cost."
Dementia is a growing public health problem. Five million Americans have the disease and this number is expected to reach 8 million in just 15 years.
More than a third of American adults are obese. Experts often call it an epidemic and have long been struggling to find ways to fight obesity.
“Knowledge is definitely a great way to combat that. That’s what happened with cigarette smoking when it became obvious this is going to be detrimental. Are we at that stage yet, I don’t think so. We are still going to have an epidemic and people are still becoming more and more obese. And it is a problem and we need to find solutions."
That’s Andrew Dillin, a molecular biologist of the University of California, Berkeley. He is looking into the possibility of defeating obesity with our - nose.
“Can we actually go through human population, the obese people and actually test their sense of smell? Maybe we can stratify the obese population, attenuating their sense of smell may be very beneficial."
This hypothesis is based on Dillin’s recent study. It showed that lab animals without a sense of smell were not gaining extra weight and were losing excessive pounds. Dillin hopes scientists could soon test if this could also work in humans.
Many American parents are concerned about preschools becoming too formalized – with teachers being too focused on kids’ academic performance rather than play. But academically-rich activities at a young age is not a bad thing, according to Bruce Fuller, professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Preschool educators then feel they gotta have kids ready to do well on tests and there’s been a good deal of research showing that in preschools that are just play-focused, a lot of kids spend time wandering around classrooms, a lot of youngsters are in dress-up corners for 40-50 minutes."
Fuller says while children have a good time, they don’t learn as much as they should at a preschool age.
“Kids’ brains are like sponges. They can pick up pre-literacy skills, new vocabulary. They can pick up understanding of math concepts quickly. Our finding pushed the early education establishment to think how can we blend playful activity and move from childrens’ natural curiosity while at the same time challenging them in cognitive ways to boost their growth, when they are three or four years of age.”
HDL, or high-density lipoprotein, is often referred to as the ‘good cholesterol’. That’s because HDL particles remove cholesterol out of our cells and out of our bodies. But a University of California, Davis study has found there’s more to HDLs than that. Angela Zivkovic, an assistant professor of nutrition, explains.
"They don’t just suck cholesterol out. They also actually interact with your immune cells and do some really interesting things to modify the way that your immune system is responding to different things. So, it looks like they can really be remodeled."
Zivkovic found that the composition of HDLs, particularly the amount and structure of sugars called glycans, varies in individuals. And this can cause different functions, including influencing the body’s inflammatory response.
"It’s not really been understood how exactly that happens, and so what we’re really interested in is, how can you change the composition of the HDL particles to get them to be more anti-inflammatory?"
The hope is, HDL sugars can be tested to better predict one’s susceptibility to disease.
Hey there! This week on Science Today, we learned how the sense of smell impacts our metabolism. According to Andrew Dillin, a molecular biologist at UC Berkeley, if there is a lack of smell the body is wired to burn all the food that comes in. It doesn’t store any of it. And Dillin discovered that lab animals lacking a sense of smell remained thin even after gorging on fatty food.
“There is something about the wiring of the sensory system of smell into the brain to control the rest of the body’s metabolism."
But before you think you’ve found the perfect diet, Dillin says scientists still don’t know exactly how the sensory organs for smell are integrated with the brain. That requires more research in the lab – and then there will be more work looking into if the mice research translates to humans. While on campus, we visited psychologist Robert Levenson, who told us that when it comes to looking after loved ones with dementia, caregivers really need to give it their all.
“If you are not able to bring your A game to caregiving, the whole quality of caregiving might suffer. As caregivers get more depressed, their level of the stress sort of permeates the entire household. It might be almost contagious in a way that a virus would be contagious. But this would be a psychological virus."
Levenson hopes that social services can step in to help caregivers who are depressed, which would not only improve their quality of life, but boost the mortality of the dementia patients they’re looking after. Well, that’s it for this week. To hear more stories about University of California research, check out UC Science Today on iTunes or Soundcloud. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for listening.
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The preschool system in America needs a lot of improvement. That’s according to Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Preschool in America is about 50 years behind preschool in Europe, preschools in Scandinavian countries like Finland or Sweden. Even UK, which has a more conservative political history. These countries fund high quality pre-K for low income and true middle class families. They might not subsidize pre-K for wealthy families, but for the true middle-class quality pre-K is pretty well funded.”
America’s approach is quite different.
“In many parts of the country the lowest quality pre-K are in true middle class communities, communities where families earn $52-53,000 a year. They don’t qualify for government subsidies, but they can’t pay high fees."
So Fuller says very often low qualified pre-K teachers get hired.
“And it is really the middle class of America that’s hurt the most."
If family caregivers for dementia patients become depressed, they may not be able to give their disease-stricken loved ones the full attention that they need. And this may even contribute to the patient’s earlier death. This, according to Robert Levenson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“If you are not able to bring your A game to caregiving, the whole quality of caregiving might suffer. As caregivers get more depressed, their level of the stress sort of permeates the entire household. It might be almost contagious in a way that a virus would be contagious. But this would be a psychological virus."
But there might be a different explanation for this dynamic, what Levenson calls - reverse causation.
“And that is even if we measure depression many, many years before the death of the patients, it may be that if the patients destined to die early, they are already more difficult for caregivers to care for. So their decline may have been causing some of that depression.”
When you are hungry, you may notice that your sense of smell grows stronger. But what happens to our appetite if we have a stuffy nose? According to Andrew Dillin, a molecular biologist of the University of California, Berkeley, we don’t necessarily eat less, but our metabolism does get affected.
“If there is this lack of smell, this perception of the sense of smell, the body is wired to burn all the food that comes in. It doesn’t store any of it."
While working on his study, Dillin has discovered that lab animals lacking a sense of smell remained thin even after eating fatty food.
“There is something about the wiring of the sensory system of smell into the brain to control the rest of the body’s metabolism."
And while this may sound like a great way to lose weight, scientists still don’t know exactly how the sensory organs for smell are integrated with the brain. Dillin says this requires more research in the lab – and then there will be more work looking into if the mice research translates to humans and if they, too, can effectively lose weight if their sense of smell is altered.
Narrator: This is Science Today. Sustainable dining is a huge deal on college campuses and the University of California, Santa Barbara is no exception. In fact, for years they’ve been taking an innovative approach towards reducing food waste that incorporates some behavioral psychology. Jill Horst, director of dining services, describes how they dealt with all the half-eaten apples they were noticing in their tray returns. Horst: 9:17 It wasn’t because the apple wasn’t good, but the apple was so large. 9:27 So …we decided, well they have different sized apples, so why don’t we take a look at what would be the best size apple that somebody could consume without any waste? Narrator: They found that a five to six ounce apple was the proper portion. And while the change resulted in much less waste in the dining hall, it wasn’t without some initial push back from students. Horst: “Uh, what happened to the apples? These are, like mini apples”. But we never took anything away, we just sized things the right way. How do you educate them and why are you doing this? And you have a bunch of half-eaten apples as a display to say, this is why we’re doing that. It really resonated with them. Narrator: For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
This week on Science Today, caregiving was a theme – from helping out dementia patients and those who look after them; to giving rice crops in polluted China the best chances to thrive. And even a story about how a college dining hall’s desire to care for the planet, led to an interesting way to cut down on food waste. First, did you know that one in 10 people age 65 and older suffer from dementia? And that the disease takes a toll only on patients, but their caregivers, too. We spoke to psychologist Robert Levenson of UC Berkeley. His new study showed that rates of depression among caregivers are about four times higher than non-caregiving adults in the same age group. And that a depressed caregiver contributes to a faster decline of the loved one with dementia.
"If you are being cared for by a quite depressed person, you are going to live, on average, by about 14 months less than if you are being cared for by a person who is not very depressed. This is a significant shortening of life."
And at UC Davis, we met with Colin Carter, a professor of agricultural and resource economics. He cares about how surface ozone impacts rice plant production in polluted China.
"There’s a critical period during the growing season where you have a day of extremely high ozone that it can reduce the yield up to 1 percent – just one day. So we measured across the country that yields could be reduced by two percent or more."
That may not sound like a lot, but it is when you consider the fact that China is the world’s largest producer of rice and the world’s largest importer. So, Carter is hoping their findings will help China enact regulatory polices to alleviate damaging effects of ozone pollution on rice yields. Finally, in an effort to reduce food waste and create a more sustainable approach to dining, Jill Horst at UC Santa Barbara describes how they dealt with all the half-eaten apples they were noticing in their tray returns.
"And it wasn’t because the apple wasn’t good, but the apple was so large. So we decided, well, they have different sized apples, so why don’t we take a look at what would be the best size apple that somebody could consume without any waste?"
While students at first questioned these dinky apples and wondered why they had them, Horst put up a display of all the wasted, larger apples to show students. It worked and led to much less waste in the dining hall – meaning much less waste in the landfill. That’s all for this week, if you want to stay on top of University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or Soundcloud. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Male fetuses may be more sensitive than females to maternal smoking, before and during a woman’s pregnancy. Chemicals in tobacco may lead to increased vulnerability of developing lymphocytes and cause genetic damage or what scientists call deletions. That’s according to a study by Adam de Smith, an associate researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
"Male fetuses grow quicker than females. So we think perhaps there could be a higher rate of turnover of immune cells in male fetuses compared with females. Those male immune cells are more prone to developing these deletions."
Inflammation in mothers’ bodies during pregnancy, possibly exacerbated by tobacco smoke exposure, might also trigger genetic mutations.
"It has been shown that there are differences between the inflammation that’s found in mothers carrying male fetuses compared with females. I believe it is a higher inflammation with a male fetus. So that’s another potential mechanism for increasing the number of deletions."
As America is becoming more culturally and ethnically diverse, researchers are trying to pin down the features of preschools to benefit all children. According to a new study by Bruce Fuller, professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, African-American children get the most out of a high-quality, rigorous curriculum.
“The biggest effect from academic-oriented preschool, the largest punch is felt by poor African American kids. They are ahead by three to four months relative to children that stay at home. ”
The results for children from Latino families came out differently.
"We did find modest social development on Latino kids from quality preschool, but we didn’t find same cognitive growth. Whether that’s a shortage of bilingual teachers, whether the quality of these programs for Latino kids is weak, we really are not sure.”
Fuller says the study adds to the growing debate on what types of preschools should be nurtured in America to improve our pre-K education.
There’s good ozone, and there’s bad ozone. The good is high up in the stratosphere and the bad, a mixture of sunlight and nitrous oxide, is near the surface of the Earth. This pollution affects not only human health, but also plant growth. A research team led by Colin Carter of the University of California, Davis, has made a key discovery about how surface ozone impacts rice production.
"There’s a critical period during the growing season where you have a day of extremely high ozone, that it can reduce the yield up to 1 percent, just one day. So we measured across the country that yields could be reduced by two percent or more, which doesn’t sound like a large number, but it is when you consider the fact that China is the world’s largest producer of rice and the world’s largest importer.
By identifying this critical stage of development, Carter hopes their data can inform better regulatory policies in China to alleviate the damaging effects of ozone pollution on rice yields and ultimately, the global market.
It’s time for the weekly roundup again; first – when you think about preschool, you may think it’s all about quality. And while that’s certainly true, we learned that quantity of time spent in pre-K education is just as important. Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the UC Berkeley says this is especially the case for kids from low-income families.
“If kids were growing up in poor households, a lot of these parents were working swing shifts, grave yard shifts, or they can’t afford high quality children’s books. So it is probably a resource problem. But when young kids are growing up in these more impoverished settings, then a quality pre-school can pack a much bigger punch."
The same study found that middle-class kids showed no change in their academic performance if they stayed in preschool a whole day vs. half a day. And over at UC San Francisco, we learned more about the study linking maternal smoking with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer. Adam de Smith says that moms who smoke during pregnancy and after birth are putting their children at risk of the disease.
“In the mothers who are exposed to tobacco smoke, there was a higher rate of deletion in the fetal cells that was likely caused by a particular mechanism. It is an innate mechanism in our immune system, which functions to create antibodies to particularly create diversity in our antibodies. And we think when this mechanism goes wrong, or goes into overdrive and has abnormal effects, it can increase the risk of causing deletions in genes around across the genome.”
You can hear these and much more stories about University of California research by following Science Today on iTunes. That’s it for now, thanks for listening! I’m Larissa Branin.
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Over 5 million Americans, which is one in 10 people, age 65 and older suffer from dementia. The disease takes its toll not only on patients, but on their caregivers, too.
“Probably the most common thing these days is that the care of patients with dementia largely falls on a spouse or family members. Among caregivers the rates of depression are about 4 times as high as they are among non-caregiving adults at that age group. So it really is a dramatic increase."
That’s psychologist Robert Levenson of the University of California, Berkeley. His new study shows that if a family caregiver is stressed or depressed, it contributes to a faster decline of the loved one with dementia.
“If you are being cared for by quite depressed person, you are going to live on average by about 14 months less than if you are being cared for by a person who is not very depressed. This is a significant shortening of life."
By 2030, rates of dementia will rise to 8 million, making this a pressing national public health challenge.
If you want to have better stereoscopic vision, you may want to try your hand at dressmaking. Really. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are enrolling participants in a study run by neuroscientist Adrian Chopin. They found previously that dressmakers had better stereovision than other professionals.
“If there is a specific pattern of a stereoscopic vision, we may use it as a form of training, to be tested by a training study. So we have people come in, they are not dressmakers. And then we will train them in dressmaking. ”
The researchers will test participants’ stereoscopic vision before and after the training trying to spot any signs of improvement.
“That will have an excellent clinical implication because right now it is very expensive when people are trying to treat amblyopia. They may have to come see an optometrist and it is very expensive and takes a lot of time.”
Chopin says it is way cheaper to sharpen your stereovision with just threads and needles.
The amount of time spent in pre-K education is important, especially for kids from low-income families. This, according to education professor Bruce Fuller of the University of California, Berkeley.
“If kids were growing up in poor households, a lot of these parents were working swing shifts, grave yard shifts, or they can’t afford high quality children’s books. So it is probably a resource problem. But when young kids are growing up in these more impoverished settings, then a quality pre-school can pack a much bigger punch."
Their study also found that middle-class kids showed no change in their academic performance if they stayed in pre-school for a whole day versus half-day.
“If the teachers are very intentional about introducing cognitively challenging tasks, getting around in circle time digging into kids books, teaching kids how to count in colorful blocks, you can sort of get a big boost of that in 3 to 4 hours. After that kids might be outside on playground or the teachers getting tired. ”
So, Fuller urges educators and researchers to get a better understanding of how differing features of pre-K may benefit all children.
Mothers who smoke during pregnancy and after birth put their children at increased risk of a common type of childhood cancer. This, according to a new University of California, San Francisco study. Adam de Smith says their work is the first to find an association between maternal smoking and acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“In the mothers who are exposed to tobacco smoke, there was a higher rate of deletion in the fetal cells that was likely caused by a particular mechanism. It is an innate mechanism in our immune system, which functions to create antibodies to particularly create diversity in our antibodies. And we think when this mechanism goes wrong, or goes into overdrive and has abnormal effects, it can increase the risk of causing deletions in genes around across the genome.”
Deletions are genetic mutations that can lead to cancer and other diseases.
“We think that the tobacco smoke maybe increasing the abnormal effects of this immune mechanism, that lead to increased deletions. And this maybe through inflammation, because we know tobacco smoke has inflammatory properties.”
Hi there, hope you’re all having a nice summer – in case you’ve missed some of our stories, he’s a bit of a recap. First, atmospheric scientist Veerabadhran Ramanathan of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is looking for a million climate warriors. To get the message out about climate change, Ramanathan is teaming up with 50 University of California academics in various disciplines to propose a hybrid course taught by about 20 faculty that combines videotaped lectures in a class that’s devoted to discussing solutions.
"These are people who can roll up their sleeves and try to solve the problem. So, I’m on my own pathway to create those million climate warriors in the UC system."
The goal is to pilot these classes first on nine UC campuses and then expand the coursework to other colleges. And on the subject of classes – are you a parent struggling wondering whether or not to send your child to preschool? For four years, Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at UC Berkeley tracked the academic performance of over 6,000 kids up to five years of age.
"We have known over the last half century that quality preschools can boost the early learning of children from poor families, but much less is known about the long-term effects of preschool on children from middle class families."
But those benefits tended to come from exposure to more academically-intense preschool programs, especially those focused on developing early math skills and verbal communication. While at Berkeley, we learned how neuroscientist Adrian Chopin is trying to help people with a condition called amblyopia, in which vision in one of the eyes is reduced and leads to a loss of stereoscopic vision.
"When we train people to have better stereoscopic vision, we put them in front of a computer. We project on a screen, lines of different depth. The task is just to say do you see the line in front or behind the other line, for example."
Chopin explained that about 10 percent of people around the world are stereo-impaired, but the rest of us see the world in 3 dimensions and could also benefit from improved stereoscopic vision. Well, that’s all for this week. If you miss Science Today on your local CBS radio affiliate, you can listen to all of our episodes on iTunes. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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When it comes to composting, there are different phases. There is pre-consumer waste, like scraps from prepping food, and then there’s post-consumer waste, or table scrap refuse, which needs to be separated from the other trash. Jill Horst, director of dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says composting on their campus has evolved over the years.
"We started small and we just did pre-consumer waste to compost and we really wanted to do post-consumer because we were trying to divert as much as possible from the landfill."
By partnering with a local company, Horst says the campus now has a compost compactor to scrap everything in the dining hall.
"So right now, we divert 90 percent of our waste from the landfill, so 90 percent of our waste is going to this composting company up that street. It is huge."
And it’s in keeping with the University of California’s efforts to be carbon neutral by 2025.
If you have a good stereovision, you could be a perfect fit for jobs that require action, speed and precision, according to neuroscientist of the University of California, Berkeley, Adrian Chopin.
“If you are part of a baseball team or a basketball team, it will be easier if you had stereovision. If you already have a good stereovision but that you want to be better, one way to go there is to be a military person."
But in his study Chopin mainly targets people with a condition called amblyopia – when vision in one of the eyes is reduced. This often leads to a loss of stereoscopic vision.
“When we train people to have a better stereoscopic vision, we put them in front of a computer. We project on a screen lines of different depth. The task is just to say do you see the line in front or behind the other line, for example."
Chopin says, over 10 percent of people around the world are stereo-impaired, but the rest of us see the world in 3-dimensions and can benefit from improved stereoscopic vision.
We can lose our sense of smell because of a disease, injury, or simply - aging, but doctors don’t pay a lot of attention to this problem, according to neuroscientist John Ngai at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Most people that write to me or call me, and say I've lost a sense of smell and I would ask them, what does your doctor say? And the doctor says no big deal don't worry about it, right? In fact, there aren't even any good, widely-used standardized tests for smell.”
That’s because scientists still don’t really know how to repair the olfactory cells responsible for the sense of smell. But Ngai hopes his new research on stem cells could help find answers.
“Now the challenge is to really start digging in to see, can we actually alter what these cells do. We've identified some pathways and manipulated them genetically, and shown that this can affect how the stem cell behaves in terms of, do I make a neuron? Do I not make a neuron? And then the question is, if I actually do, for example, increase the production of neurons from these stem cells, could it actually overcome an olfactory deficit that's caused by a loss of neurons?”
Should you enroll your children in preschool if you can provide a good early education for them at home? Parents struggling with this choice can find useful tips in a new study by Bruce Fuller, professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We have known over the last half century that quality preschools can boost the early learning of children from poor families, but much less is known about the long-term effects of preschool on children from middle class families.”
For four years, Fuller tracked the academic performance of over six thousand children up to 5 years of age and found that kids from middle-class families did benefit from preschool.
“Those benefits tended to come from exposure to more academically intense preschool programs."
Especially, in classes focused on developing verbal communication and early math skills. So maybe parents who prefer home education before their children hit elementary school age, should give pre-K a second thought?
When it comes to getting the message out about climate change, it’s one thing to get political leaders onboard, but you also need public support. In fact, atmospheric scientist Veerabadhran Ramanathan of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says he’s hoping for ‘climate warriors’.
"These are not just flag bearing, which is important, but people who can roll up their sleeves and try to solve the problem. So, I’m on my own pathway to create those million climate warriors in the UC system."
Ramanathan has teamed up with 50 systemwide academics in disciplines like engineering, technology, social science and humanities – to propose a hybrid course taught by about 20 faculty that combines videotaped lectures in a classroom devoted to discussing solutions. The goal would be to pilot it first on nine UC campuses, and then expand the coursework to other colleges.
"We are thinking of ‘cradle to grave’ approach; getting people to understand the scientific method and the need to protect nature."
Over 40 million liters of donor blood are collected annually all over the world, but it is not enough to meet blood transfusion demands. On top of that, these donations don’t last long. Blood cannot be stored for more than just a couple of days. So blood centers are in constant demand for new donors. But according to Mark Looney, a professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco this is not the only problem with donated blood.
“It seems like we are in an antiquated era of collecting blood from strangers, collecting mature cells from strangers and giving them as a transfusion."
According to Looney, foreign blood can bring along viruses and bacteria to a recipient’s body. That’s a big risk. And that’s why researchers are looking for new ways of getting blood to patients.
“So if we could come up with a more effective approach, maybe something that is cell based, than maybe it is going to be the way of the future.”
Looney says engineered blood cells from patients’ own bodies could be a better solution in modern medicine when it comes to blood transfusion or cell transplants.
If you had to guess who has the sharpest vision, you may think of a surgeon or a dentist, but probably not a dressmaker. But according to University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist Adrian Chopin, it’s dressmakers who have the best stereoscopic vision.
“In general we see in 3D. In our mind the environment is in 3D. However, it does not necessarily feel in 3D. So that’s feeling of depth that we call stereopsis is very strongly coming from stereoscopic vision, which means a difference of viewpoint between these two eyes.”
But how do we use it in our daily lives?
“It is very important in grasping objects, that’s because you need high precision when you put your finger on an object, not to crash it or not to miss it. We also need it for driving, especially when you are at night.
Chopin and his team are working on developing tools, like computer games, that could help people with sight disorders to improve their stereoscopic vision skills.
If you are a parent and a smoker, your children’s DNA may be affected, even if you quit smoking before conception. Adam de Smith an associate researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has found that prenatal smoking by either parent can cause what’s called a genetic deletion in their children.
De Smith: 7:40 It is a chunk of DNA that’s missing from a chromosome. The health effects are really to do with a particular area or region of DNA that is deleted. If this region includes important genes, than it usually lead to a health effect.”
The researchers looked at the gene deletions in the immune system, which can cause acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of childhood cancer.
“Thankfully, nowadays cure rates are upwards of 85-90 percent. Even though they have survived the cancers, they go on to health issues in later life. For example, increase risks of heart disease, pulmonary disease and also increased secondary cancer rates. Ideally, we would like to prevent childhood leukemia in the first place.”
]
New ways of studying stem cells allow scientists to better understand how they turn into other types of cells. Neuroscientist John Ngai at the University of California, Berkeley, has discovered a revolutionary method to look at stem cells. He explains that studying these in the past was limited to looking at the entire population of cells at once.
“My analogy would be if you come to Memorial Stadium on a big game day and you want to get an idea of how many Stanford fans there are and how many Cal fans there are and where they are sitting. The old way would only allow us to look at the entire stadium and to get an average of red hats and blue hats, and you might get an idea of what fraction of people are wearing read versus blue, but you wouldn’t have a precise definition of numbers, locations or anything like that. So the revolution for us has been the ability to interrogate what genes are being expressed not in the entire tissue but on a cell-by-cell basis.”
Studies of alcohol abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, are mostly focused on male soldiers, while female military members are often excluded. Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco explains why.
“So you can imagine that female subjects that have alcohol use disorder and comorbid PTSD are individuals that have experienced rape or other forms of domestic abuse. And those individuals might respond very well to a drug like intranasal oxytocin, but it’s a very hard subject population for us to identify. ”
In a recent study, Mitchell used oxytocin to treat military personnel suffering from depression and anxiety. So far the experimental therapy has been successful, but the results were skewed as only male combat members participated.
‘’We’d love to have good access to that population because then we could perhaps study the effects of intranasal oxytocin in a group of female subjects that have alcohol or substance- use disorder and comorbid PTSD.”
The longer a woman is able to reproduce, before she reaches menopause, the less her risk to have heart failure. That, according to a study by Nisha Parikh, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“This is a very interesting study and a very important study."
It is based on medical records of over 160 thousand women gathered by the Women’s Health Initiative in the 1990s – up until 2014. The initiative was set up to address major heath issues causing morbidity and mortality in postmenopausal women.
“Over the years the Women’s Health Initiative has been funded by NIH as well as the national Heart Lung and Blood institute. There was a lack of studies on women’s health. And it really represented the first systematic study of women.”
Parikh is now planning to expand this research and hopes to discover what exactly drives the association between the menstrual cycle and heart disease.
In the 1990s, oxytocin, the so called love hormone that reduces stress and anxiety, used to be a popular treatment in America. But this changed a couple of years ago.
“Oxytocin used to be FDA approved for use in the United States. It wasn’t removed for any health related, or side effect related reason, it just sort of fell out of favor”.
That’s Jennifer Mitchell, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. She is conducting an oxytocin study to treat active military members suffering from PTSD and alcohol abuse. Mitchell says the hormone is practically side effect-free and should be put back on the market.
“That’s an interesting conundrum because the question is what’s the path to reapply through the FDA to make it available for everyone to use. And there are several drug companies now that are also developing intranasal oxytocin for other indications.”
Hey there, in today’s weekly roundup, we find out how a college dining hall makes a dent when it comes to climate change. Jill Horst, the director of residential dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says they stopped using trays in their dining hall.
"It just overall was this big, huge impact. The food waste per person, per tray, reduced by 50 percent. That’s a lot! That’s a significant impact to help with not only the food waste, but food cost."
Psychology was definitely at play here, as people naturally want to load up a large tray with food, so by removing it, people were carrying their food to the table and their portions adjusted accordingly. Next, as we’re about to hit the triple digits this weekend in parts of the Bay Area, we spoke to Ronnen Levinson, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has been studying how lighter, more reflective pavements lessen the phenomenon called ‘urban heat islands’, where dark-colored roads and buildings bring a city’s air temperature up. But in a new study, Levinson found there are some trade-offs.
"We found that in many cases, switching to a more reflective pavement technology for example, a light grey cement concrete pavement in place of a black asphalt concrete pavement, requires much more energy and carbon."
So Levinson suggests that city officials bear this in mind when choosing pavements. Meanwhile, at another national lab – this time, the Livermore Lab – computer scientists describe a tool they’ve developed to improve the computer network security of government agencies, along with state and local agencies. Domingo Colon says their network mapping system called NeMS, gives network managers a comprehensive view of their computer network environments.
"So there are a lot of tools out there that provide different vantage points of network security, but what we needed was something a lot more specific that told us behaviorially what’s happening on our network, and also structurally, how is the composition of our network put together at any point in time. These things provide what’s called “attack surface” for someone from the external world and what you want, as an enterprise, is to reduce that surface."
Well, that’s it for now. You can hear these full episodes and more by subscribing to Science Today on iTunes or following us on Soundcloud. Thanks for tuning in; I’m Larissa Branin.
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If you suffer from deficiencies in the bone marrow, a tissue in our body that produces blood cells, your lungs can come to the rescue. That’s according Mark Looney, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“It is curious that when patients get a bone marrow transplant or a stem cell transplant, those cells are given intravenously and the first place that they go is the lung. So it could be that the lung is part of a cycle here that is necessary for the maturation of these cells and their normal function”.
In his recent study Looney discovered that about 50 percent of platelets are produced directly in the lungs, inside the cells called megakaryocytes. So how will this finding help patients?
“Perhaps we can come up with a strategy where we give them megakaryocytes transfusions, and then we put them back in to the vein and they do their natural thing, they go back to the lung and there they produce platelets.”
That could be a new way of treatment for patients with a low level of platelets.
One way to fight what’s called ‘urban heat islands’ – a phenomenon in which dark-colored roads and buildings bring cities’ air temperature up – is to change the color of the pavement. That’s according to Ronnen Levinson, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“You can choose a more reflective pavement surface instead of a darker less reflective pavement surface. The more reflective pavement surface will stay cooler in the sun. It also won’t heat the air of the city as much as the darker, hotter pavement will.”
But there are trade-offs; Levinson was part of a team that found that the energy spent on manufacturing light-colored pavements can lead to increased carbon emissions.
“We found that in many cases switching to a more reflective pavement technology, for example, a light grey cement concrete pavement in place of a black asphalt concrete pavement, requires much more energy and carbon.”
So Levinson says city officials need to keep this in mind when they choose pavements.
How can a college dining hall make a difference when it comes to climate change? Get rid of the trays. That’s just what Jill Horst, director of residential dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara did in an effort to reduce the amount of food waste that the university produced.
"It, just overall, was this big huge impact. The food waste per person, per tray, reduced by 50 percent. That’s a lot! That's a significant impact to help with not only the food waste, but food cost."
Psychology played a part in this in that people naturally want to load up a large tray with food.
"So by removing - the trays, people are managing how to carry their food to the table. And by doing that they're not taking as much. They're taking you know smaller portions to start, and then they could get back up, and go have more food, but it really was about why do we want to reduce food waste, which reduced costs, which helps the environment."
To learn more about how the University of California is working to be carbon neutral by 2025, go to: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/climate-lab
Infertility could be linked to heart problems. That’s according to Nisha Parikh, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In a new study, the researcher is trying to find out how pregnancy loss, which is sometimes related to infertility, is connected to heart disease.
“There has been several studies that shown a link between pregnancy loss, including miscarriage and stillbirth with cardiovascular disease in the future. And we are very interested in our laboratory in studying the mechanisms that underlie this association. ”
Parikh says, it also might be a good idea for women and their doctors to follow these guidelines during medial check-ups.
“When practitioners, and by that I mean your primary care doctor or somebody’s cardiologist has a woman in their office and they are trying to figure out what their risk for developing heart disease and heart failure is, than reproductive factors and pregnancy factors are important to ask”.
Your mental state often affects the way you handle uncomfortable situations. Jennifer Mitchell, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco has recently tested what she calls stress reactivity of patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and alcohol abuse.
“We make people nervous in a social situation. And that induces really robust cortisol response, increase in heart rate, changes in respiration and blood pressure. And we administer either oxytocin or placebo and then we look to see whether oxytocin enables people to be less nervous and less apprehensive in that situation.”
The oxytocin therapy reduces stress and anxiety and also helps patients be more resilient to alcohol cravings.
“A lot of people who have troubles with alcohol use disorder and PTSD are self medicating. They are anxious, they are stressed, they are fearful and they find that drinking alcohol ameliorates some of those problems.”
Hi there – just catching up with the weekly roundup after a bit of a break. The show did go on, so here are some of the stories covered. First, did you know that heart disease is the leading cause of death among American women? Now, researcher Nisha Parikh of UC San Francisco has found that the age a woman is when she reaches menopause affects her risk of developing heart disease.
"We found that a longer reproductive period duration was actually associated with less of a risk of heart failure, and that was mostly driven by the age of menopause, so that having an earlier age at menopause was associated with a higher risk of heart failure."
But researchers still don’t know what causes it and are working on further studies to find answers. Meanwhile, across the Bay at UC Berkeley, physicist Jeffrey Neaton is looking to Mother Nature to improve energy production skills. In particular, he’s working on making photosynthesis more efficient.
"A leaf can convert the energy in sunlight into fuel with a one to two percent efficiency. A major Department of Energy program that I’m part of, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, recently developed a prototype material that is made of semiconductors that can go from sunlight to fuel at 10 percent efficiency. Much greater efficiency than plants, actually."
So, Neaton is working on creating an artificial leaf that could someday generate fuel and become a new alternative energy source. And finally, we learned something new about our lungs. They don’t just pump air in and out of our bodies – they make blood cells, too.
"The lung is quite sophisticated, not just respiring, moving oxygen. Around 50 percent or more of platelets are produced directly in the lung."
That’s Mark Looney, a professor of medicine at UCSF. He explains that since platelets are components that make our blood clot, and it used to be thought were formed only in the bone marrow, this new finding will have significant clinical implications. So, that’s it for now. But there’s plenty more research stories at the University of California, so please subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud to keep updated. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
The lungs don’t just pump air in and out of our bodies, they also make blood cells.
“A lung is quite sophisticated, not just respiring, moving oxygen. About 50 percent of platelets are produced directly in the lungs.”
That’s Mark Looney, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He says platelets are components that make our blood clot. Scientists used to think that they get formed only in the bone marrow. So this new finding will have an important clinical implication.
“The dogma in the field for patients with low platelets count is that it is a problem with the bone marrow. Now we have a more nuanced understanding that that is not just cells in that location, but lung is a significant contributor to that. Now with the more complete understanding hopefully we will be able to develop approaches that can more effectively treat these patients.”
Researchers at the University of California, Berkley, are competing with Mother Nature to improve energy production skills. In particular, physicist Jeffrey Neaton is working on making photosynthesis more efficient.
“A leaf can convert the energy in sun light into fuel with a one to two percent efficiency. A major Department of Energy program that I’m part of, the joint center for artificial photosynthesis, has recently developed a prototype material that is made of semiconductors that can go from sunlight to fuel at 10 percent efficiency. Much greater efficiency than plants, actually”.
Neaton is working on an artificial leaf that could generate fuel and can someday become a new alternative energy source.
“Right now the artificial leaf prototypes are not made of materials that are cheap enough or abandoned enough to be saleable to a level where they will impact society yet.”
But technology moves forward fast. Take solar panels, for example. In just 10 years, the price of this energy source has fallen by over 60 percent. So, we may want to use an artificial leaf sooner than we think. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
Time: a little over. The 1st bite can be trimmed I think. Last sentence, in Italic.
Oxytocin is most commonly called the “love” hormone, but it has also been referred to as the "mama bear" hormone. Jennifer Mitchel, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, describes why.
“I love my baby, I love my baby so much, that if you get anywhere close to my baby, I will rip you to shreds. So when we administer oxytocin to our populations, we are trying to keep these darker behaviors in mind as well."
In a new study Mitchell is also testing oxytocin as a therapy for military personnel who suffer from PTSD and alcohol abuse. She says it is an effective way to keep stress and anxiety in check.
"Oxytocin can make one feel more pair-bonded, it is important for maternal attachment, for breastfeeding, for child birth, perhaps falling in love or those feelings associated with falling in love, but it also contributes to sort of non-group behavior. Believing there is an enemy or feeling that you have to protect yourself against others."
But so far - Mitchell says - she hasn’t seen any signs of "mama bear"- type behavior in her study group.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death among American women, killing 1 in 3 of them each year. A study by Nisha Parikh, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that the age a woman is when she reaches menopause affects her risk of developing a heart disease.
“We found that a longer reproductive period duration was actually associated with less of a risk of heart failure. And that was mostly driven by the age of menopause, so that having an early age at menopause was associated with a higher risk of heart failure”.
But researchers still don’t know what causes it and are working on further studies to find the answers.
“We need to understand what it is about sort of an increased reproductive period that protects a woman from heart failure. Is it something biologic or is it something related to sociodemographic factors or lifestyle choices. I think all of that will be really interesting to explore in the future.”
Will genetic sequencing become standard procedure for diagnosing disease? by University of California
Solar panels have become a popular and efficient way to make electricity, but they are not as good when it comes to storing it. Now, physicist Jeffrey Neaton of the University of California, Berkeley has found a better way to preserve energy.
Neaton: “What we are doing here is thinking about harnessing that energy and not turning it into electricity, but into fuel, much like gasoline. Fuel is a very compact, energy-dense way of storing of energy”
Neaton and his colleagues consider photosynthesis as a model to generate fuel and are working on building an artificial leaf that could become a new alternative energy source.
“This artificial leaf is a set of inorganic materials that one combined does what a leaf does, which is take sunlight and carbon dioxide and generate a fuel, chemical fuel, and oxygen.”
Neaton says it’s still a long way before the artificial leaf become a technology like solar panels, but step-by-step, the idea is turning into reality.
Obsessive thoughts, nightmares and alcohol addiction are often associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In a quest to ease these symptoms, neuroscientist Jennifer Mitchell, of the University of California, San Francisco, is testing the power of oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone”. This could be a new therapy for combat veterans and active military personnel.
“We are interested in general in developing novel therapeutics for alcohol use disorder and co-morbid PTSD, because it is a population that is very difficult to treat and there are not a lot of treatments currently prescribed for. One of the therapeutics that we are looking at is oxytocin.”
This 'love hormone', also called the “moral molecule” and the “cuddle chemical” - makes people feel bonded. It helps us manage stress and anxiety, be more social, trusting and empathetic.
“Perhaps the oxytocin could ameliorate some of the signs and symptoms of the alcohol use disorder, the craving and some of the emotional reactivity and the signs and symptoms of PTSD as well.”
When it comes to the future of medicine, think digital! That’s what researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, along with tech giants like Google and Intel - are doing. UCSF pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee is converting troves of medical records into digital format and storing them in a unified online database.
“We do have collaborations through our digital center for health innovation. When we are able to get a power of what I would argue at UCSF, the singular world’s leading research medical institution, and as an aggregate the UC system, really the world’s leading system of academic medical centers, partnering up with the leading companies that make processors that can do machine learning and can do deep learning like Intel, have companies like Cisco and GE that are interface between devices and data, I think it is such a powerful combination, I think that’s exactly where medicine is heading.”
Lee says the digital era of medicine will open new doors for experimental studies and the quality of treatment.
A 3D mammogram could be more effective for women with dense breasts than a regular mammography test. That’s because a three-dimensional scan is easier to detect abnormalities in dense tissue. This according to breast cancer researcher Karla Kerlikowske of University of California, San Francisco.
But the technology has not been widely used yet. While the FDA approved the devises 5 years ago, only 30 percent of clinics across the country purchased them. Kerlikowske says more studies are needed to prove how reliable 3D scanners are.
“The technology often, in particular for devices - not for drugs, for drugs there is always randomized trials - they don’t say you can use this drug for such and such until the FDA approves it. But when it comes to devices, they often get released before there is evidence to show that they are really better than what exists.”
But Kerlikowske hopes she will soon have the data.
“That’s actually grants we are working on now to try and figure that out who benefits the most from that technology".
The human brain has been studied for several centuries, but there is still a lot we don’t understand about it. And according to radiologist Pratik Mukherjee of the University of California, San Francisco, this includes how concussions affect the brain.
“There is a controversy with soldiers that were repeatedly exposed to blasts in the battlefield, about whether they may get dementia in earlier ages and it’s been actively investigated.”
Mukherjee says new technology, like higher quality images from MRI scanners, might be an answer that doctors, researchers and injured patients have long been looking for.
"The brain is harder than other organs, even other important organs like the heart and so while it’s been recognized that this is a big problem for centuries and even if you look at prior wars, where they talk about shell shock in WWI where they had a lot of artillery explosion for the first time. They are basically describing these repetitive blast injuries, their concussions, but they just didn’t have the tools to understand any of that at that time."
Hi there! It’s been a busy week here at Science Today. We learned that diagnosing brain disorders can often be a challenge for doctors because some psychological diseases have overlapping symptoms. These include memory loss in patients with depression and suppressed mood in people suffering from dementia. But radiologist Cyrus Raji of UC San Francisco led a study, which found that neuroimaging and machine learning can help improve diagnosis.
"Each individual had a perfusion neuroimaging, where this is a nuclear tracer injected into them and that allowed the mapping of the blood flow in the brain and that allows us to quantify blood flow in 128 regions and use machine learning analysis to separate who had depression or cognitive disorders or both."
Raji explains that machine learning is often used to quickly process and analyze patient’s data in digital format – and it may be used in the future to find new biomarkers that can help in deciphering if one has a brain disorder vs. another issue. While on campus, we also visited pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee, who is working to get more pediatric grants to provide devices and therapeutics for children. Right now, Lee says when it comes to spending on research and innovation, adults get the lion’s share of benefits.
"The market for most drugs and devices is significantly better and bigger and more robust in the adult world. I think we just need to be staunch advocates for children. I firmly believe that that is the best investment that you could make, is in the health of our children."
And finally, some great news for advocates for coral reef preservation. A decade-long study led by Jennifer Smith of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography has found that remote coral reefs can thrive despite threats posed by climate change. Smith says coral reefs surrounding remote islands were dramatically healthier than those in populated areas subject to a variety of human impacts, including overfishing and coastal development.
"In a healthy coral reef, you have a landscape that is dominated by these beautiful reef building corals that are really the ecosystem engineers - that provides food and shelter for all the other organisms that live in that ecosystem."
This shows that preservation efforts can buy researchers time as they figure out how to deal with the threat posed by ocean warming. That’s it for the weekly update – to hear more episodes about University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. I’m Larissa Branin – have a great Mother’s Day weekend.
When it comes to spending on research and innovation, adult patients get way more benefits then children. That’s according to pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee of the University of California, San Francisco.
“The market for most drugs and devices is significantly better, bigger and more robust in the adult world.”
For health and medical corporations it’s simply a matter of profit and numbers. They can get more clients from the adult population and there are currently more adults on this planet than children. But Lee thinks this approach can be changed.
“I think we just need to be staunch advocates for children. In the Bay Area with the immense amount of intellectual capacity and financial capacity, we have to energize the Bay area to invest in the health of our children going forward, because I firmly believe that the best investment that you can make is in the health of our children.”
Lee says one way to achieve that is to get pediatrics grants to provide more devices and therapeutics for children.
Excessively overweight women may be at higher risk of developing breast cancer. That’s a big problem in the United States where over half the country's population is overweight or obese.
“Even though it is not a very strong risk factor it becomes so prevalent. If you look at postmenopausal women who are diagnosed with breast cancer, about a third of them are overweight or obese."
Study leader Karla Kerlikowske says the hormone estrogen is to blame.
"When you are a postmenopausal woman, your estrogen level becomes very low, approaching 0. But when you are obese, that fat can create estrogen metabolite, so instead of your estrogen levels being 0, they would remain higher than they would otherwise. And that circulating estrogen from being overweight women contributes to women developing breast cancer. ”
So keeping body mass index under control might help you lower the risk of cancer.
Diagnosing brain disorders can often be a challenge for doctors, as some psychological diseases have overlapping symptoms. These include memory loss in patients with depression and suppressed mood in people suffering from dementia. But neuroimaging and machine learning can help improve diagnosis. In fact, radiologist Cyrus Raji of the University of California, San Francisco, led a study to prove just that.
“Each individual had a perfusion neuroimaging, where there is a nuclear tracer injected into them and that allowed the mapping of the blood flow in the brain. And that allow us to quantify blood flow in 128 regions of the brain and use machine learning analysis to separate who had depression or cognitive disorders or both."
Machine learning is used often to quickly process and analyze patients’ data in digital format.
“What machine learning will do in the future for research is it will help us find new biomarkers that are helpful in predicting either who has a disorder or who has one disorder vs another that we are trying to separate from each other.”
Stem cells studies have been controversial, but once scientists started using adult cells, instead of embryos, their experiments became more acceptable. Neurologist Lauren Weiss of the University of California, San Francisco, says with technological advancements, researchers are now facing new challenges.
"A lot of the current public debates are around gene editing technologies, so we are not actively using those in the labs now. But I think that’s where I think some of the concern has shifted. So with this new ability to make a change in someone’s genome, if it is done at a very early stage of development, it could affect every generation from there on out.”
Weiss, who is studying brain disorders using neurons grown out of stem cells, thinks that researchers can use gene editing without ethical implications.
"But that is sort of a thought of where it could go in the future, where we sort of need to be prepared to think about what are the limitations that we want to impose and need to impose.”
Younger women are more likely to develop breast cancer if their breasts are dense. This means they have more supportive tissue, rather than fatty tissue, around the ducts. That’s according to a new study by Karla Kerlikowske of the University of California, San Francisco.
“The risk of breast cancer increases with age, but if you look among younger women who do develop breast cancer, more of them will have dense breasts. “
Cancer rarely develops in fat, so that’s why when it comes to breast density older women have a smaller risk of developing the disease. And that’s because compared to younger women, they tend to have fatty breast tissue.
“In older women it maybe a third of women that have dense breasts, when in premenopausal women it is about two-thirds of women who have dense breasts. It is a more common risk factor, but it is also a strong risk factor. ”
This week on Science Today, we learned that the treatment of concussions has not been very well-defined, so radiologist Pratik Mukherjee at UC San Francisco is calling for more studies and a better understanding from doctors and researchers.
"Some people recommend cognitive rest, where you stay away from doing anything intense; physical or mental activities; stay away from bright lights and loud noises for several days. Some of the more recent studies are saying, well, maybe that’s not quite the right approach. People should try to return to their regular activities as soon as they can and stay active."
We also learned while at UCSF that younger women are more likely to develop breast cancer if their breasts are dense. That means, there is more supportive tissue, rather than fatty tissue around the ducts. Breast cancer researcher Karla Kerlikowske told us that cancer rarely develops in fat and older women have a smaller risk of developing the disease because compared to younger women, they tend to have fatty breast tissue.
"In older women, maybe a third of women that have dense breasts; when in premenopausal women, it is about two-thirds of women who have dense breasts. It is a more common risk factor, but it is also a strong risk factor."
Well, that’s all for now - but if you want to learn more about the University of California’s efforts to mitigate climate change, you should check out climate.universityofcaliornia.edu - there’s a lot to look at there! And please go to iTunes to subscribe to Science Today. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for listening.
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The treatment of concussions has not been well-defined, and it’s sometimes controversial. So radiologist Pratik Mukherjee of the University of California, San Francisco is calling for more studies and a better understanding from doctors and researchers.
“Some people recommend cognitive rest, where you stay away from doing any intense physical or mental activities, stay away from bright lights and loud noises for several days. Some of the more resent studies are saying, well, maybe this is not quite the right approach. People should try to return to their regular activities as soon as they can and stay active and that would be better for leaving the symptom of concussion and doing better long term.”
Mukherjee has been studying injured brains with advanced MRI scanners, which he believes could help solve some of the mystery about concussions.
“The methods to do cognitive training, cognitive rehabilitation in the areas that are affected by concussions, namely attention, memory, decision making are improving all the time. ”
Advanced image-capturing technology for MRI scanners paired with powerful computers, allow researchers to quickly detect and analyze the smallest changes in brain function after a concussion. Radiologist Pratik Mukherjee of the University of California, San Francisco explains how it works.
“With the latest technology that we are starting to apply, we can actually get several images of the brain within one second. So we can image the entire brain in less than a second. And we do it continually during the scan for many minutes so we are getting thousands, even tens of thousands images of the brain, which are snapshots over time of function in the brain and the way different brain regions connected to each other.”
In the late 1990s, it used to take the whole day to process much smaller amount of data with the best computers scientists had at the time.
“Now we can do the statistics within seconds. So as we are doing the scan, we can start getting the information we need.”
Want to know how our brain is formed and what causes changes in its structure? You could look at a mini-brain…this is emerging 3D technology created from stem cells.
“Mini brains allow you to ask some questions that are more challenging to ask about a single cell essentially in isolation, vs. what happens when cells are moving in a three-dimensional space and interacting with each other in three-dimensions as well.”
That’s neurologist Lauren Weiss of the University of California, San Francisco. She has been studying brain disorders in the lab by looking at neurons grown from skin cells. Weiss says a mini brain is the next step in research because it re-creates the structure of a real brain.
“It is layers of cells that have different kinds of structures and functions, ultimately.”
Using mini-brains Weiss hopes to study micro- and macrocephaly, autism and other developmental disorders.
This week on Science Today, we learned that a major risk factor for breast cancer is a woman’s breast structure – specifically, what’s called breast density. Karla Kerlikowske of the University of California, San Francisco explains it’s a radiologic term because on a mammogram, doctors look at how much dense tissue someone has versus how much fat tissue.
"We found breast density was four times more likely to account for the development of breast cancer than having a first degree relative who'd had breast cancer."
So Kerlikowske recommends that women in this risk group should pay extra attention to screening. Meanwhile, at UCLA, we talked to Karen Gylys at the School of Nursing, who says when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease, some simple lifestyle changes can make a huge difference – even in patients who are already cognitively impaired.
"So things like exercise, things like Mediterranean diet, fish oil, there’s evidence that that these things can move the dial on neuropsychiatric tests in elderly subjects and in some studies in elderly subjects who are beginning to be impaired."
And the added benefit? These lifestyle changes are also good for your heart. Now while we’re on the subject of the brain – have you ever heard of a mini brain? Jokes aside, it’s an emerging 3D technology created from adult stem cells.
"Mini brains can allow you to ask some questions that are more challenging to ask about a single cell, essentially in isolation vs. what happens when cells are moving through more of a three-dimensional space and interacting with each other in three-dimensions as well."
That’s neurologist Lauren Weiss at the University of California, San Francisco. She’s been studying brain disorders in the lab looking at neurons grown from skin cells and says a mini-brain is the next step in research because it recreates the structure of a real brain. Well, that’s it for this weekly update. To hear full episodes about the latest research at the University of California, please subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. You’ll be more informed if you do! Thank for listening, I’m Larissa Branin - have a great weekend!
This is Science Today. Every year, about 250 thousand women in America are diagnosed with breast cancer, making it one of the leading types of cancers nationwide. And now a University of California, San Francisco study reveals a major risk factor of the disease. Study leader Karla Kerlikowske says it’s breast structure, or as researchers says, breast density.
“Breast density is a radiologic term. On a mammogram, you look at how much in quotes “dense” tissue someone has vs how much fat."
Kerlikowske’s team evaluated over 200,000 women and discovered that breast density by far exceeds other risk factors.
“People commonly think if you have a family history of breast cancer that contributes mostly to women developing breast cancer, but we found breast density was 4 times more likely to account for the development of breast cancer than having a first degree relative who had breast cancer."
Kerlikowske says women in this risk group should pay extra attention to screening tests.
Precision medicine should change the way researchers conduct experimental studies. That’s according to pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee of the University of California, San Francisco.
“All the studies that are currently done right now and all the data that is collected is generally on one subset of patients which is generally older white men. But for let’s say young under-represented female minority patients, the implication of this manifestation, this disease, might be far different.“
So, Lee says scientists should make studies more inclusive.
“And we can only get to that if we look at large data sets as opposed to what we’ve done historically in the past, which is looking at a 100 or 200 patients in a trial.”
Lee hopes the era of electronic medical records will give researchers and doctors access to a large volume of reliable data, which will help make studies and medicine more precise.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new drug that could halt multiple sclerosis, a devastating disease that affects hundreds of thousands of Americans. Neurologist Bruce Cree of the University of California, San Francisco, was part of the team testing ocrelizumab, which goes by the brand name Ocrevus. Cree explains that it targets B cells in the human body and blocks the inflammation that drives the disease. Most MS therapies in the past targeted T cells, which often had serious side effects.
"You can have profound immunological effects and clinical benefits by just targeting B cells alone. And I think this is actually an important advance for multiple sclerosis because when you just target these cells without affecting T cells, you have less of a potential for adverse events due to broad spectrum immune suppression."
There was a lot of exciting University of California research news this past week. First the Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug that could halt Multiple Sclerosis. We had previously spoken to neurologist Bruce Cree of the University of California, San Francisco about his work testing the new drug, called ocrelizumab. At the time, Cree explained that it actually targets B-cells in the human body, blocking the inflammation that drives the disease. He explained that most MS therapies in the past targeted T-cells, which often had serious side effects.
"You can have profound immunological effects and clinical benefits by just targeting B-cells alone. And I think this is actually an important advance for multiple sclerosis because when you just target B-cells without affecting T-cells, you have less of a potential for adverse events due to broad spectrum immune suppression."
Really, such great news considering this devastating disease affects hundreds of thousands of Americans and more than 2.3 million people worldwide. While at UCSF we visited neurologist Lauren Weiss, who has discovered a new way to study brain disorders. Basically, they are growing brain cells out of simple skin biopsies taken from patients with autism and other developmental problems.
"We can grow those cells in a lab and then turn them into stem cells and ultimately in the cells of the brain. That’s a pretty amazing advance when you think about how challenging it is to study the human brain. Nobody wants to give you too much access to that!"
Hear these and other stories about the latest research at the University of California. Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud and Stitcher. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
Researchers have found a new way to study brain disorders. Neurologist Lauren Weiss of the University of California, San Francisco is growing brain cells out of simple skin biopsies taken from patients with autism and other developmental problems.
“We can grow those cells in a lab and then turn them into stem cells, and ultimately into the cells of the brain. That’s a pretty amazing advance when you think about how challenging it is to study the human brain. Nobody wants to give you too much access to that.”
Obtaining living neurons is complicated and may raise ethical concerns. So this new method solves these problems by effectively growing brain cells in petri dishes.
“The technology has evolved very quickly. We are increasing the number of different types of neurons we can pretty consistently make in the lab."
And that gives scientists more opportunities to study brain abnormalities. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
A new technique called exome sequencing is a revolutionary way to look at our DNA. This, according to psychiatrist Stephen Sanders of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. Basically, it allows researchers to determine the structure of all expressed genes in a genome and recently, it helped UCSF scientists find mutations in a gene that triggers autism.
“And that was a gene called SCN2A, which stands for Voltage Gated Sodium Channel 2 Alpha. When we saw that result, we were very excited, because we could show that this gene was associated with autism. It was playing an important role in what autism is on a neurological level.”
Sanders and his colleagues found that people with autism have more S-C-N-2-A mutations, than those without this disease.
“And before this technology it would have been impossible to have found enough mutations to work this out."
Sanders says the next step will be to identify the specific type of the gene mutation and predict the severity of autism.
One way to improve the nation’s healthcare quality is to start effectively analyzing medical data using modern technology in clinics and hospitals. This is something that the industry hasn’t done just yet, according to pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee of the University of California, San Francisco.
“We don’t have one unified electronic medical record system. So it is hard to aggregate big data, but I believe we are on the cusp of that. ”
Lee says diagnostic methods should be improved too.
“For instance, the data that the nurses collect to determine whether a patient is in a good or bad nutritional status is they record how much food is left on a patient’s tray when it gets taken away by the support staff. So that’s the best metric to ascertain whether or not patients are at high or low risk of decubitus ulcers. To currently use this, it borders on the preposterous.”
According to Lee, with a modernized approach to data and technology, doctors could better understand diseases and bring precision medicine to fruition.
Globally, head injuries are a growing problem. In the U.S., more than 3 million Americans are admitted to emergency rooms every year after suffering a concussion.
“And concussion rates are rising in other countries, too. Especially in developing countries like China and India because they have many more motor vehicles on the roads now. “
That’s radiologist Pratik Mukherjee of the University of California, San Francisco, He says this topic doesn’t get a lot of media attention, unless athletes or military personal suffer head trauma. Even injured people normally ignore minor concussions, usually after they fall down or get into a car accident. But fortunately, there is increasing awareness about concussions.
“You know, having your bell rung, is not necessarily a benign condition and is not something you just walk off like people used to say.”
Undetected and untreated concussions can lead to continued problems like headaches, insomnia, depression, or even to dementia and premature death. For Science Today.
A proof-of-concept study at the University of California, Berkeley has found promise in a pill-sized technology that could lead to painless oral vaccines. Aside from not having to deal with a needle anymore, we asked study leader Dorian Liepmann what are some of the other advantages of a system like this?
"Well, the great thing is we can actually do this at home. You could give this to people so they don’t need to go to a pediatrician. One of my co-investigators suggested that we could actually put this in a lollipop for children. And so they would just hold it in their mouth until the drug was delivered, and then they’d have the rest of the lollipop. You don’t need trained personnel to give you a shot, which is a huge expense. Also, for better distribution to Third World countries or to rural areas, you could actually get your vaccinations done very, very easily and effectively."
The technology, called Mucojet, still needs to go through clinical trials, so it could be 5 to 10 years before it’s available, but Liepmann says he and his team are very excited about its potential impact on healthcare.
This week on Science Today, we learned how a pediatric surgeon is helping to kick-start innovative projects to bring to clinics in an effort to advance children’s health. Dr. Hanmin Lee of UC San Francisco, says even though technology, biology and medicine go hand-in-hand, advanced devices are not always available to the most vulnerable hospital patients because of insufficient funding.
"We organize the engineering of children’s health symposiums to try to bring all the emerging technologies to the benefit of children’s health."
UCSF is involved in developing many such emerging technologies, including different types of monitoring sensors, artificial organs, and little robots - all to help children with a variety of disabilities for their benefit. And when it comes to vaccinations for kids, we spoke to a UC Berkeley’s Dorian Liepmann about their new pill-sized technology that could lead to painless oral vaccines.
"One of my co-investigators suggested that we could actually put this in a lollipop for children. And so they would just hold it in their mouth until the drug was delivered and then they’d have the rest of the lollipop."
While their needleless technology is still proof of concept, Liepmann says some of the advantages – besides no more needle! – would be that you wouldn’t need to pay trained personnel to administer the shot, which is a huge expense. And an easy and effective vaccine like this could lead to better distribution to Third World countries or to rural areas. Liepmann says their technology still needs to undergo clinical trial, so it could be another 5 to 10 years before it’s available, but it sure sounds promising to us! Hear these and other episodes on Science Today. You can subscribe to iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. I’m Larissa Branin – thanks for listening everyone!
Researchers have discovered a new way to spot brain injuries that arise after a concussion. With advanced, functional MRI scanners, doctors can not only make images of what the brain looks like after the injury, but also how it works.
“To get a better handle of being able to say what’s going wrong in the brain after the concussions, we are actually looking at brain function and connectivity in the brain, how different brain regions connect with each other and talk to each other.”
Pratik Mukherjee, a professor of radiology at the University of California, San Francisco adds that the new technology allows scientists to see what traditional MRI tests failed to detect.
“The typical MRI scan that people get at a hospital or in outpatient clinics are not useful for concussions because they just look at the anatomy of the brain and most people with concussions don’t have big problems anatomically. Few might have tiny little bleeds in the brain, but even that is a minority.”
Technology, biology and medicine now go hand and hand. But state-of-the-art devices are not always available to the most vulnerable hospital patients, often because of insufficient funding. Pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee of the University of California, San Francisco helps kick-start innovative projects to bring to clinics.
“We organize the engineering children’s heath symposiums to try to bring all the emerging technologies to the benefit of children’s health. ”
UCSF is now developing different types of monitoring sensors, artificial organs and even orthopedic magnets that can correct skeletal deformities – all in the hopes of advancing children’s health.
“Little robots, all sorts of enabling technologies that we will be able to implement into children with a variety of disabilities for their benefit. And that’s including using, for instance, augmented reality and virtual reality.”
The Miracle Babies / Advances in fetal surgery at UCSF's Fetal Treatment Center save twins in a dire situation
Katherine Seligman Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 11, 2005
LIFE SCIENCE_060_fl.jpg Doctors Robert Ball and Hanmin Lee were Anna Endter high risk obstetrician that work in the Fetal Treatment Center at UCSF. Story is about miracle babies William and James Endter, born in October after living through fetal surgery to correct potentially deadly circulatory problem. Doctors Ball and Hanmin at UCSF used new technology that allowed them to zap veins by threading a tube the size of a piece of spaghetti into the uterus. They had a touch and go gestation, but are now healthy guys living with their relieved parents in SF. Parents are Anna and Brian Endter. 11/5/05 San Francisco CA Frederic Larson San Francisco Chronicle Photo: Frederic Larson
Photo: Frederic Larson
In the last couple of years, researchers have come a long way in their understanding of the genetic risk factors for autism – from not knowing how to find autism genes to discovering a variety of mutations linked to the disorder. Psychiatrist Stephen Sanders and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco recently found a molecule responsible for infantile autism.
“The hope is that this gene gives us insight of what autism is at a fundamental new logical level. So key things we want to find out are – is there an age at which we could fix this gene problem and see if the problem can go away? Or we have to do it early on?”
Basically, the discovery gives scientists hope that autism could possibly be cured not only in children, but in adults, too.
“We also want to see where in the brain and when in the brain which cell types are involved to try to work out what autism is and see if this underlying defect can be repaired or at least changed in an adult.“
This week on Science Today, we learned a lot from University of California researchers. For instance, radiologist Pratik Mukherjee at UCSF told us even though people often don’t pay much attention to small brain injuries – like those suffered in a fall or a minor car collision – these types of traumas should never be ignored.
"There is a significant minority ranging from anywhere between one-fifth to one-third of people who have what’s called persistent post-concussive syndrome where for months or even years after the injury they have continued problems like headaches, dizziness, insomnia, depression, problems with thinking."
These small brain injuries may go undetected by traditional MRI scans, so Mukherjee is using more advanced image capturing technology for diagnosing these concussions and this may allow researchers to predict if injured people will continue experiencing symptoms later in life. On the subject of new technology, researchers at UC Berkeley may have a game changer when it comes to vaccinations. Mechanical and bioengineer Dorian Liepmann developed a proof-of-concept for a needleless technology that’s designed to self-administer vaccines orally.
"What we have is a pill that actually shoots a jet of drug into your cheek without pain. We use a reaction in here just like vinegar and baking soda – once it starts reacting, it makes a gas and builds up pressure inside of the pill and it shoots a jet of the drug into the cheek."
The team is also looking to design a smaller pill form that could be used for diabetics who could swallow a pill instead of administering an insulin injection. These are just some of the discoveries we covered this week. Listen to Science Today episodes on Soundcloud or subscribe to the program on iTunes to catch some more. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Genome sequencing, which is figuring out the order of genetic letters in your DNA code, will most likely become a standard testing procedure in the next decades. This, according scientist Diane Dickel of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This will help identify diseases you might be prone to.
"We’ll continue to accelerate people getting the whole genome sequencing as a routine type of genetic testing rather than what previously been done which is testing a few genes for mutations.”
Now, doctors mostly perform genetic testing for people with heart problems or a history of breast cancer, since these diseases have a strong genetic component.
“We could use it better for preventative or monitoring types of mechanisms, being able to identify genetically which people should have yearly mammograms vs maybe mammograms every 5 years.”
Dickel hopes in the future, more diseases, like diabetes, which is less understood genetically, can be studied with DNA sequencing.
Do you dread getting vaccinations because of the needle? Well, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed what could be a game-changer for vaccinations. Dorian Liepmann, a professor of mechanical and bioengineering says their needleless technology is called MucoJet, and it’s designed to self-administer vaccines.
"What we have is a pill that actually shoots a jet of drug into your cheek without pain. We use a reaction in here just like vinegar and baking soda. Once that starts reacting, it makes a gas and builds up the pressure inside of the pill. On the end of the nozzle, we have a membrane that holds the pressure in and when it gets to a certain pressure, it releases. This piston pushes down, pushes the drug out and it shoots a jet of the drug into the cheek."
Right now, this is a proof-of-concept study, but Liepmann hopes it will be available within the next five to ten years.
"The next step is actually a smaller pill and this one’s actually designed to be swallowed. One of the target possibilities would be insulin for diabetics – swallow a pill versus having to take an injection."
People often don’t pay much attention to small brain injuries suffered in a minor car collision or after accidentally falling and hitting their head. But these types of traumas should not be ignored.
“There is a significant minority ranging from anywhere from 1/5 to 1/3 of people who have what’s called persistent post-concussive syndrome where for months or even years after the injury they have continued problems like headaches, dizziness, insomnia, depression, problems with thinking."
That’s Pratik Mukherjee, a professor of radiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Small brain injuries often go undetected by traditional MRI scans. But Mukherjee may have found a solution.
“We are trying to develop better MRI methods for diagnosing these concussions.”
They’re using more advanced image capturing technology, which may allow researchers to predict if injured people continue experiencing symptoms later in life.
In what’s being called a genetic ‘Rosetta Stone', researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have discovered molecules that can lead to infantile epilepsy or autism. Specifically, a neuronal protein called NaV1.2 and the gene that produces it, called SCN2A. Both play a crucial role in early brain development, according to the neuroscientist Kevin Bender.
“One of the central functions of the brain cell is to fire something that is called an action potential, which is a way of transmitting information from one cell to the next. And SCN2A and NaV1.2 are at the heart of that process.”
Genetic defects that increase neuronal activity as they transmit signals lead to epilepsy, and when this process abnormally slows down, it may cause autism.
“We now have a roadmap for understanding how different mutations in SCN2A could lead to different diseases and if we understand that, it might uncover new areas for intervention in the future.”
Hi there, thanks for tuning in to Science Today’s weekly roundup. As usual, we covered a range of topics and met with some really great researchers. First, as cool as it is to have a medical device to check up on the health of astronauts in deep space, it’s even better if the same technology can be used here on Earth. That’s just what research scientist Matthew Coleman at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had in mind when he developed a prototype of a handheld diagnostic device for NASA. In fact, he can see it being used for environmental monitoring, too.
"To look at even just water. I mean, if it works with saliva, it will certainly work with water from the environment. It could work with material isolated from insects and plants and trees. So, we could do all kinds of environmental sensing."
And since the handheld device is rugged enough for space, Coleman says it would be perfect to use in the African desert, too. Meanwhile, over at the Berkeley Lab, researchers are striving to unveil the secrets about ‘dark’ DNA, part of the genome that does not code proteins, but plays an important role in regulating genes. Scientist Diane Dickel has been working on finding all of these non-coding regulators, called enhancers, and is pinning them on a map.
"I mean, it’s kind of like building a road map and adding information onto that to point that particular pairs in the genome act as these enhancer elements to regulate gene expression."
So, why are they doing this? The map will help researchers get a better picture of dark DNA and this, in turn, could shed light on whether mutations in the enhancers cause genetic diseases. This could be the next step towards improving genetic testing. And speaking of improvements – a dentist at UCSF is working to get more prevention in dental care and less use of the drill. Dr. Peter Rechmann found better education about caries risk could especially help low-income patients.
"The income on its own actually doesn’t matter at all. It’s just if someone suffers to survive, he doesn’t have the time to spend ‘x’ minutes of taking care of their teeth."
Hear these and other University of California research stories. Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or Soundcloud. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Does poverty affect children’s teeth? A study by the University of California, San Francisco found that low-income patients were at higher risk of developing cavities, than those with means. UCSF School of Dentistry professor Peter Rechmann surveyed patients who receive dental care at California’s subsidized clinics.
"If you go with me into the clinics, and we take a look and there are 80-something people sitting. You will be frustrated how much cavities you see, how much teeth, which are destroyed right now."
But Rechmann says we shouldn’t blame income alone for poor dental hygiene.
"The income on its own actually doesn’t matter at all. It’s just if someone suffers to survive, he doesn’t have the time to spend x minutes of taking care of their teeth."
Rechmann believes instead of drilling, dentists should focus more on preventive care and better educating patients about caries risk. He says more than 30 universities across the United States have joined efforts to follow this path of dental care.
Some researchers say cows are worse than cars when it comes to global warming because they emit more methane than vehicles produce CO2. The theory was disputed, but it turns out it may not be too far from the truth. Physicist Marc Fisher of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been grossly underestimated, and cows are mainly to blame, at least in California.
“The major source of methane in California as a whole is a very large livestock industry in Central Valley. Cows breath out methane it is because their first stomach is essentially a bioreactor, the manure from cows gets put into wastewater treatment or large treatment lagoons.”
And Fisher says methane is harder to calculate than carbon dioxide, but it needs to be better regulated – as more careful management of methane emissions could help reduce the threat of climate change.
A medical device that could be used in deep space to check up on the health of astronauts, could also someday be used for various environmental monitoring here on terra firma.
"I mean, if it works with saliva, it will certainly work with water from the environment; it could work with material isolated from insects and plants and trees. So we could do all kinds of environmental sensing."
That’s Matthew Coleman, a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He says that if they can make a handheld diagnostic device like this rugged enough for space, it would also be perfect in the African desert.
"We’re thinking of something that’s doesn’t require a cold storage, so you don’t have to keep it in the refrigerator until you use it. You’ll just have to add water or an actual blood or saliva or breath condensate sample."
Researchers are striving to unveil the secrets about “dark” DNA, part of the genome that does not code proteins, but plays an important role in regulating genes. Scientist Diane Dickel of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been working on finding all of these non-coding regulators -so called enhancers - and pinning them on a map.
“I mean, it is like building a road map and adding information onto that, to point that particular pairs in the genome act as these enhancer elements to regulate gene expression.”
This map will help researchers get a better picture of the dark DNA, which could shed a light on whether mutations in the enhancers cause genetic diseases. Dickel says this would also be the next step towards improving genetic testing.
“The hope of genetic testing is to try to understand biology of what’s happening in the cell to develop treatments for that longer term."
And, give patients clear answers about their health and genetic predispositions. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
This week on Science Today, we covered a lot of topics, including a new finding sheds light on the unknown parts of the genome. This has often been called ‘junk DNA’, but scientist Diane Dickel of the Berkeley Lab doesn’t like that term. Instead, she says these are non-coding parts of the genome.
"Only about 3 percent of the genome consists of genes, the other, more than 95 percent of the genome, what we call non-coding, which just means that it does not encode genes. And it is clear these are important things in that non-coding sequence."
It is mutations in these non-encoding sequences, called enhancers, that causes genetic diseases. And this is an important finding because doctors don’t know what triggers some of these diseases, including cardiomyopathy – that’s a genetic heart disease. And that’s because researchers were looking for clues in the wrong part of the genome. Meanwhile, at UC San Diego, researchers looking into the mental health of seniors made a startling discovery about young adults. Dilip Jeste explains that there’s long been an assumption that the mental health of older people mirrors their declining physical and cognitive function – but that’s not the case. They seem to do better with age, despite physical ailments. It’s those in their 20s and 30s who have very high levels of depression and anxiety. So Jeste suggests people do more studies looking into the value of intergenerational activities.
"I think we need larger scale, better studies in which you can have younger people having an older person and they become partners or a team with mentorship in both directions."
So, a younger person can teach seniors about, technology for instance; and older folks can pass along pearls of wisdom about certain aspects of life. The main goal would be to promote mental health in all age groups. And in a similar vein, UC Santa Barbara has a new Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential. We spoke to co-director Jonathan Schooler about how in the last decade, mindfulness has been picking up steam as a topic of scientific research.
"Ten to 15 years ago, it would have been considered almost a taboo topic, like not really science. Almost more in the realm of spirituality or something. But now, the mound of research showing the value of mindfulness has just become demonstrated so many times, in so many contexts."
To hear more about this and other stories about University of California research, follow Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for tuning in!
There’s long been an assumption that the mental health of older people mirrors their declining physical and cognitive function. But according to a University of California, San Diego study, despite physical ailments, aging adults seem to get better over time. In the same study, Dilip Jeste found high levels of depression and anxiety among adults in their 20s and 30s. It made him wish that there were more studies looking into the value of intergenerational activities.
"There has been some work of that kind in the past, but I think we need larger scale, better studies in which you can have younger people having an older person, and they become partners or a team with mentorship in both directions. The younger ones are teaching the older ones, let’s say, about technology; and the older ones are teaching the younger ones about how to live life and so on. And we need to measure the outcomes in terms of not just their satisfaction, but even biological measures."
And this would help develop broader interventions to promote mental health in all age groups.
This is Science Today. Landfills are a large source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And new research across the state of California has found that its amount in the atmosphere might have been underestimated. Physicist Marc Fisher of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found exactly where excessive methane was coming from and why it was happening.
“Most of the emissions from landfills are assumed to be gathered by landfill gas mitigation technology and if this technology is not working as effectively as it was designed to be, then more gas could have escaped to the atmosphere”.
This is especially problematic for the Bay Area, where 50 percent of all the methane comes from landfills, which are ubiquitous in the region.
“There is now active research identifying how to manage landfills in a way that they emit less”.
As part of the solution, Fisher recommends improving methods of collecting emissions. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
This is Science Today. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory might have found what causes cardiomyopathy, a genetic heart disease. According to scientist Diane Dickel, that is an important discovery because doctors don't know what triggers this disease in half the patients. And that may be because researchers were looking for clues in the wrong part of the genome.
“Only about 3 percent of the genome consists of genes, the other 95 percent of the genome – what we call non coding, which just means that it does not encode genes. And it is clear there are important things in that non-coding sequence. ”
So it is the mutations in these non-coding sequences - called enhancers - that causes genetic diseases.
“These enhancer elements regulate gene expression. They are like switchers that tell the genes when and where to turn off and on.”
Dickel says this discovery sheds light on the unknown parts of the genome and will help improve clinical diagnosis.
This week on Science Today. Have some researchers underestimated the amount of methane emitted into the atmosphere? According to physicist Marc Fisher of the Berkeley Lab, they may have, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"We found that emissions are roughly one and a half to two times the emissions expected based on inventory estimates, counting how many landfills, how many cows, how many wastewater treatment plants, how many different things that might emit methane."
Because methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, Fisher says their finding calls for better management of pollutant sources like landfills to reduce its contribution. And at UC Davis, we learned how sometimes in medicine, there are compounds that are found to be good for one thing, but not so great for another. Like in the case of NSAIDs, a class of anti-inflammatory drugs, including ibuprofen. Aldrin Gomes explains how NSAIDs are known to be linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke, but he and his colleagues have found they seem to be beneficial in cancer.
"NSAIDs have been known to kill cancer cells and it’s killing cancer cells by a similar mechanism as it’s killing the healthy cells, so it’s actually too good at doing a job, so it’s ironic."
Gomes and his team found that NSAIDs can harm heart tissue because it can reduce the heart cells’ ability to produce energy and it’s a similar mechanism that some papers have shown NSAIDs can be used to treat cancer. One tip from Gomes – to prevent cardiac cell death – take vitamin C before ingesting an NSAID. They found it had preventative properties. That’s all for now – to hear these and other stories about the latest University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin.
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Sometimes in medicine, there are compounds that are found to be good for one thing, but not so great for another. That seems to be the case when it comes to a class of anti-inflammatory drugs known as NSAIDs. These include pain relievers like ibuprofen. Aldrin Gomes of the University of California, Davis explains that NSAIDs are known to be linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. But they’ve also found that NSAIDS seem to be beneficial in cancer.
"In cancer, NSAIDS have been known to kill cancer cells. And it’s killing cancer cells by a similar mechanism as it’s killing the healthy cells, so it’s actually too good at doing a job. So, it’s ironic."
Gomes and his team uncovered some of the reasons why NSAIDs can harm heart tissue – including reducing the heart cells’ ability to produce energy. Yet, Gomes says there are some papers showing that NSAIDs can be used to treat cancer.
"And the reason for that is that it’s a similar mechanism as how it’s actually damaging the heart cells."
Racial issues have been widely discussed by sociologists, anthropologists, artists and filmmakers. Now, medical researchers are chiming in with their expertise.
"We’re thinking about race in terms of self-identified race and ethnicity, a very specific measure in the context of biomedical research. And we’re the first group that’s looked at genome-wide molecular signature of race and ethnicity and shown that it differs not for just genetic reasons, but also probably for environmental reasons."
That’s Noah Zaitlen, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He came to this conclusion with his colleagues while studying asthma rates in different ethnic groups.
"It’s very high in Puerto Ricans. It’s high in African-Americans. It’s very low in Mexicans."
So Zaitlen wanted to know why. He says if doctors looked not only at these groups’ genetics, but also at the communities they live in and the air that they breathe, they might have improved their diagnosis and treatments.
There may soon be a new way to treat multiple sclerosis, a debilitating autoimmune disease. Neurologist Bruce Cree of the University of California, San Francisco has been testing an experimental medication called ocrelizumab, which suppresses the immune system’s B-cells, which are a class of white blood cells.
"And we think that B cells potentially play a very important role in multiple sclerosis.”
Most existing MS drugs target T-cells and there are more side effects.
“Because when you just target B cells without affecting T-cells, you have less of a potential for adverse events due to broad spectrum immune suppression. I think that’s the key distinction. I think the big advantage for B cell directed therapy in multiple sclerosis is going to be the ability to have highly effective treatment with a better tolerated and improved side effect profile for our patients."
PHOTOGRAPH: Hugo Paice
Researchers may have underestimated the amount of methane emitted into the atmosphere in certain parts of the country. That’s according to physicist Marc Fisher of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“We conducted a study of methane emissions from San Francisco Bay Area and we found that emissions are roughly one and a half to two times the emissions expected based on inventory estimates, counting how many landfills, how many cows, how many wastewater treatment plants, how many different things that might emit methane.”
So what does this discovery mean for us?
“From a human health perspective methane itself is not a hazard unless it reaches such high levels that it combusts, but it is a very potent greenhouse gas."
And this requires better management of the pollutant sources, like landfills, to reduce its contribution to climate change.
Here are some of the stories covered this week on Science Today. Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease that can paralyze the brain and spinal cord when the immune system attacks the body. MS affects about 2 million people globally and while there is no cure for the chronic disease, drug regimens and behavioral therapy have allowed people with MS to lead better quality lives. Now, neurologist Bruce Cree of UC San Francisco has been testing a drug in clinical trial that’s designed to reduce MS symptoms – in fact, Cree found that patients’ brain inflammation was practically gone.
“This was very impressive and suggests that we have a highly effective therapy. There is some advantage in medication in terms of tolerability, in terms of efficacy and I think it’s going to be a very important new therapy."
It’s called ocrelizumab and it’s currently under review by the FDA. While at UCSF, we also checked in with researchers hoping to improve a powerful gene editing tool called CRISPR, which scientists hope can one day treat genetic disorders. Microbiologist Benjamin Rauch explains that the technology hasn’t been precise enough.
"CRISPR is not perfect; CRISPR will cut DNA in the wrong place if we give it enough time to do so. You can’t edit in the wrong place because it will have some negative effects."
So they’re working with so-called anti-CRISPR proteins that they found can stop CRISPR before it makes the wrong cut. This is a story we’ll definitely keep track of because a safer more accurate CRISPR brings scientists a step closer to developing an effective DNA-editing therapy in the future. And finally, UC San Diego’s Catherine Marinac is looking into simple and novel ways to reduce a woman’s risk of breast cancer. She found that fasting at least 12 hours overnight may help because women who fasted longer had better control over their blood sugar connections.
"We know that it influences inflammation and many of these metabolic factors are related, so you’ll typically see abnormal glucose with inflammation. We know it influences some parameters related to Circadian rhythms and Circadian misalignment and all of these things are on the same cascade. So, we don’t know the exact mechanism, but that’s currently being investigated in animals."
Stay on top of the latest University of California research – subscribe to Science Today on iTunes of follow us on Facebook. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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If you want to protect yourself from a dangerous foodborne infection called Listeriosis, don’t store food in the fridge for too long.
“A lot of bacteria can’t grow when you store the food in the refrigerator, but Listeria is actually one of the few things that can grow at refrigerator temperature. ”
That’s a piece of advice from microbiologist Anna Bakardjiev of the University of California, San Francisco. She’s studied the bacteria Listeria, which causes the disease, and says it’s not very choosy.
“Cheeses or fruits, there was an outbreak associated with coleslaw where the cabbage had been in the cool house for a relatively long time. Any kind of food had been implicated.”
So Bakardjiev says to prevent an infection that sickens hundreds of Americans every year, eat your food while it’s still fresh. And if you do have leftovers, like stew, reheat it thoroughly.
When you fill out forms at the doctor’s office, you often have to check off boxes to identify as Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian or African–American. Noah Zaitlen of the University of California, San Francisco, says that’s because people of different ethnic backgrounds respond differently to medication and treatments. Still, Zailten says this method is far from perfect; in fact, he found adding social and environmental factors may be just as important.
"What would happen in a hospital system if instead of saying you can be Latino, let people tell me more about what community they identify with. Could we do a better job of practicing medicine if we sort of broaden these categories or maybe used some genetics to help enrich the community identification?”
So Zaitlin suggests doctors collect more information about exposure to pollutants or stress.
”And if we collected extra information, how much of the difference between drug response, diagnostic ranges, disease prevalence does that explain? And how much would that help us in the clinic?"
Researchers have found a new strategy for treating multiple sclerosis, which affects about 2 million people globally. This chronic disease is incurable and can paralyze the brain and spinal cord when the immune system attacks the body. The progressive form of the disease is especially dangerous.
"And it is typically characterized by weakness and numbness in a leg, then spreading to the other leg and gradually involving more and more of body in terms of disability."
That’s neurologist Bruce Cree of the University of California, San Francisco. He’s been testing a new drug in clinical trial that’s designed to reduce MS symptoms and found that patients’ brain inflammation was practically gone.
"This was very impressive and suggests that we have a highly effective therapy. There is some advantage in medication in terms of tolerability, in terms of efficacy and I think it’s going to be a very important new therapy."
The drug is called ocrelizumab and it’s currently under review by the Food and Drug Administration.
Researchers might have found a way to improve a powerful gene editing tool called CRISPR, which scientists hope can one day treat genetic disorders. According to microbiologist Benjamin Rauch of the University of California, San Francisco, the technology hasn't been precise enough and often makes mistakes.
"CRISPR is not perfect. CRISPR will actually cut DNA in the wrong place, if we give it enough time to do so. You can't edit in the wrong place, because it will have some negative effects."
So called anti-CRISPR proteins that Rauch and his colleagues recently discovered could stop CRISPR before it makes the wrong cut. The researchers basically used bacterial viruses to replicate what happens in nature.
“CRISPR's job in nature is to kill virus by cutting its DNA. So virus by encoding anti-CRISPR is able to fight back against CRISPR."
Rauch says a safer and more accurate CRISPR brings scientists a step closer to developing an effective DNA-editing therapy in the future.
This week on Science Today – we looked into how race and ethnicity affect health. Noah Zaitlen at the University of California, San Francisco, describes the connection they found in their new research.
"People from different countries, from different communities, get sick from different diseases, they respond differently to different medications. We know that some of that is because of differences in their genetics and some of that is because of differences in their environment."
And that includes exposure to pollution or differences in diet or stress levels – all of which doctors and scientists alike overlooked in the past in favor of genetics and ancestry. So Zaitlen hopes doctors will start including this information in their usual form, as it's a better way to assess a patient’s health. And on the subject of patients and health, wouldn’t it be wonderful if cancer patients did not suffer from the systemic toxicity of chemotherapy? We talked to a materials scientist Chelsea Chen at the Berkeley Lab who has been collaborating with a UCSF physician to design a device to do just that.
"What he came up with is that he wants to place this device at the draining vein exiting the tumor, so this device can catch the excessive chemotherapy before it enters the body circulation and this way, it further reduces the systemic toxicity of the drugs. So we designed this device that we call the ChemoFilter."
Hopefully this will be ready for treatment in a few years. And finally, do you snack a lot during the day? If so, your teeth are at risk. Dr. Peter Rechmann of the UCSF School of Dentistry says one tip to reduce cavities is to eat fast.
"We kept on telling our patients you can have chocolate, no problem, eat the whole thing in 10 minutes and brush your teeth or use chewing gum, but don’t eat the chocolate over, piece-by-piece, ever 10 minutes a piece. That is terrible."
The problem is, it leaves more sugar for bacteria in your mouth. For you snackers out there one tip is to munch on nuts – Rechmann says it’s one of the safest snacks because there’s not a lot of sugar for bacteria and it kills your hunger pangs pretty fast. So, how’s that for food for thought? To hear more University of California research stories, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud or Facebook. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have recently discovered the origin of Listeriosis. This is a foodborne disease that often strikes pregnant women and could affect the fetus, too. Microbiologist Anna Bakardjiev discovered a protein secreted by Listeria bacteria attacks the placenta – and this was surprising to her.
"There are only very few pathogens that can infect the placenta and the baby during pregnancy. Placenta and the fetus are very protected against infection."
But that specific protein has found a way to break through the placenta's protective barrier and help bacteria grow there rapidly. These findings challenge current thinking that a pregnant woman's weakened immune system increases susceptibility to the infection.
"This is the first time I think for any kind of infection that we have identified the protein that is specifically important for the infection of the placenta."
Bakardjiev says, this could help scientists develop new strategies to prevent and treat Listeriosis and other pregnancy complications triggered by infections.
If you often snack throughout the day, your teeth are at risk. That’s according to Peter Rechmann, a professor of dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco. In his recent study called Caries Management by Risk Assessment, Rechmann has shed light on how to save your teeth before caries ruins them. So for those who like to graze during the day, Rechman says one tip to prevent cavities is to eat fast.
“We kept on telling our patients - you can have chocolate, no problem, eat the whole thing in 10 minutes and brush your teeth or use chewing gums, but don’t eat the chocolate over, piece by piece, every 10 minutes a piece. That is terrible.”
Savoring like this leaves more sugar for bacteria in your mouth. And types of snack also matter for your dental hygiene. So, try cutting down on carbohydrates.
“I even suggest not to snack at all on carbohydrates. So if you do more than three times, your caries risk really, really goes up.”
Over the years, cancer treatment has improved with minimally-invasive surgeries and more localized chemotherapy techniques. But even if chemotherapy can be localized and delivered directly to a tumor, over half of the drug can pass the tumor and become systemic.
"It goes all over your body. The current popular drugs, they are effective, but they are also very toxic. So, they have bad side effects."
That’s materials scientist Chelsea Chen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She collaborated with a University of California, San Francisco physician to come up with a device that can filter out the toxins.
"What he came up with is that he wants to place this device at the draining vein exiting the tumor, so this device can catch the excessive chemotherapy before it enters the body circulation and this way, it further reduces the systemic toxicity of the drugs. So we designed this device that we call the ‘ChemoFilter’."
Chen says it may be ready for treatment in a few years.
There’s new insight into how race and ethnicity affect health, thanks to new research at the University of California, San Francisco. Study leader Noah Zaitlen explains the connection.
"People from different countries, from different communities get sick from different diseases, they respond differently to different medications. We know that some of that is because of differences in their genetics and some of that is because of differences in their environment."
This includes exposure to pollution, differences in diet or stress levels, all of which scientists and doctors overlooked in the past in favor of genetics and ancestry. And this approach, Zaitlen says, has shaped the way patients get screened.
"When you walk into a hospital right now, you fill out this form, you see two choices for ethnicity – it can be Hispanic or non-Hispanic and then you have these racial categories and the selection can impact how you are treated. Diagnostic tests will get reported differently depending on which category you check."
To better assess patients’ health, Zaitlen suggests that doctors include social and environmental factors, too.
If a brain functions normally, neuron excitation and inhibition work in balance.
“And when you have this good balance, then you have normal cognitive function. When this is disrupted, that’s when people have seizures – where you have excess excitation, dysregulated activity of the brain, and don’t have appropriate inhibition.”
That’s neurologist Mercedes Paredes of the University of California, San Francisco. She says researchers used to pay more attention to excitatory neurons in their studies and downplayed the role of inhibitory neurons. But according to Paredes these neurons are crucial for the newborns’ brain development.
“So excitatory neurons are the largest population and they pretty much are active, their normal function is what causes brain activity. It’s the regulation of that function, the fine-tuning of that function, where we use inhibitory neurons.”
By understanding how inhibitory neurons develop, Paredes hopes to shed new light on the origin of neurological disorders, like seizures or epilepsy.
Why do fools fall — and stay — in love?
University of California love experts chat with Science Today host, Larissa Branin, about the science behind romance. Originally broadcast as a Facebook Live video, this is the audio version of UC Berkeley psychologists and neurologists Arthur Aron, Robert Levenson and Emiliana Simon-Thomas discussing the drug-like effects of budding romance, and how that differs from the psychology and brain chemistry at work in a long-term relationship.
If alcohol was not as readily available, would people's hearts be healthier? To find out, cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the University of California, San Francisco, looked to the state of Texas.
"We leveraged the fact that in Texas some counties don't allow access to alcohol, at least purchase of alcohol, and others counties do."
Since alcohol consumption is linked to cardiovascular disease, Marcus wanted to see if being in a dry county would affect the number of atrial fibrillation cases. This is the most common abnormal heart rhythm, which can cause stroke.
"And what we found in wet counties, meaning where there was no restriction on alcohol sale, that the prevalence and development of atrial fibrillation was more common than in the counties that prohibited sales of alcohol. At the same time we found that those wet counties also had less heart attacks or less myocardial infractions."
Marcus’ findings show that different people respond differently to alcohol. So if you’re wondering if your heart would benefit from moderate drinking, you should first find out if you’re at risk of developing heart disease.
3D bioprinting is an emerging technology in which 3D printers are used with bio-inks to artificially construct living tissue by outputting layers of living cells. To do this, research engineer Monica Moya of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says bioprinters need to output a dissolvable gel to support and protect cells during printing.
"So we have to keep them happy before they’re going to be printed, during the print process and then afterwards. And so during the print process, the biggest challenge that we have is when they’re going through those nozzles. We have to make sure that the gel is the right kind of consistency. So, it’s sort of a Goldilocks conundrum, where it has to be just right."
Too liquid and researchers have a puddle instead of a structure; too stiff and they can shear cells, causing them to burst and die. So, what is the right consistency?
"Well, it’s kind of like snot, where it’s a little bit formed but it’s still kind of liquid, enough so that the cells can come out in a liquid form."
Moya’s team has bioprinted an unorganized network of blood vessels – a feat that could someday revolutionize medical practice.
Certain medications may be bad for your teeth. In a new study, Peter Rechmann, a professor of dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco, found that patients who take, for example, blood pressure medicine or anti-anxiety drugs are more likely to develop cavities. This is because some of these drugs can cause dry mouth.
"What we do with each and every patient, when we figure out a caries risk, we let them spit in a tube and if they produce during two minutes around two millimeters of saliva per minute, that’s normal. Those with medication produce much less."
When there isn’t enough saliva, bacteria can run wild. And while this may damage your teeth with acid.
“Saliva protects your teeth because it has calcium, phosphate and fluoride in it and it helps to remineralize the tooth. “
So if you can’t get off medication, Rechmann recommends protecting your teeth with fluoride-rich toothpaste, mouthwash with chlorhexidine and chewing gum with xylitol.
Researchers have discovered a molecule that triggers Listeriosis, a foodborne infection caused by Listeria bacteria. The illness makes hundreds of Americans sick every year and pregnant women are especially vulnerable, since the infection can result in miscarriage and pre-term birth.
"The bacterium Listeria is actually ubiquitous. We can find it in the environment, in any kind of food products. And it can cause an occasional disease or it can cause outbreaks. There have been outbreaks associated with cantaloupes, with hotdogs.”
That’s microbiologist Anna BakArdjiev of the University of California, San Francisco. She explains their finding debunk previous theories that a pregnant woman’s weakened immune system could trigger the disease. By identifying the culprit as a bacterial protein, Bakardjiev says researchers now have more tools to fight Listeria.
"Could we use this protein and vaccinate people with this protein so the bacteria that infected the mother can be eliminated before they get into the placenta if they express the protein?"
If you could do something to avoid facing the dental drill, wouldn’t you do it? This week on Science Today, we chatted with Dr. Peter Rechmann of the UC San Francisco School of Dentistry about a new approach they’re using there called Caries Management by Risk Assessment, or CAMBRA. Basically, it means fighting cavities before they invade your teeth.
"You recommend to a patient some behavior change and additional chemical interventions like fluoride, which makes the teeth harder, like chlorhexidine, which kills bacteria."
Rechmann says adding chewing gum with xylitol can also save teeth in the pre-cavity stage. He’s even seen lesions in x-rays that would have otherwise called for the drill, completely disappear. So next time, you may want to think twice before passing up an offer for gum..just make sure it’s a brand with xylitol. Next, we visit UC Berkeley, where we learned how researchers there are designing a water filter made of a material so thin, it’s 2-dimensional. Baoxia Mi says they make these membrane filters by organizing the nanomaterial graphene oxide into single layers of carbon, and then stacking them together.
"This material has a lot of properties that are suitable for membrane filtration, especially for water purification – disinfection, absorption, or some other properties, that can help us enhance the removal of water contaminants."
Unlike current membrane filters, Mi’s design does not require as much energy to push the water through the membrane, since water passes quickly across graphene. Really, there’s so much exciting research like this going on like the University of California, so please come back for more. You can subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/cavity_prevention
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Studies have found that people who believe that alcohol is good for the heart, drink more. While this is not surprising, cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the University of California, San Francisco, says the question is – what are the real benefits of drinking?
"Whereas there is some evidence that moderate consumption of alcohol might help prevent heart attacks, there was also evidence that alcohol may increase the risk for high blood pressure, it might increase the risk for heart failure. And then there is growing evidence that alcohol may increase the risk for atrial fibrillation."
That is the most common abnormal heart rhythm, which may cause stroke.
"There is no randomized data to demonstrate that consumption of alcohol can reduce a heart attack. All of the data has been what we call observational, and we know from previous studies that observational data can fool us."
So Marcus recommends that drinkers pace themselves: no more than one drink a day for women and for men, no more than two drinks a day.
Historically, neuroscientists have been mainly focused on excitatory neurons, which stimulate our brain and have paid less attention to the calming, inhibitory neurons. According to Mercedes Paredes, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, it turns out that these inhibitory neurons play a more important role than previously thought.
"They make a lot more of synaptic connections with other neurons and play a role not just in maintaining the balance and the activity, but also in the potential for the brain to be flexible."
Paredes has discovered that inhibitory neurons, also called interneurons, continue shaping our brain long after we are born, making the brain extremely vulnerable in the first couple of months to a year of our lives.
"Inhibitory neurons are the main regulators of the balance between excitation and inhibition in the cortex. When there is damage to interneurons, balance is at risk and it can lead to disorders all the way from epilepsy to potentially neuropsychiatric disorders."
When it comes to dealing with cavities, not all dentists want to get out that formidable drill. Dr. Peter Rechmann of the University of California, San Francisco School of Dentistry follows a new approach, called Caries Management by Risk Assessment, or CAMBRA. This basically means - fighting cavities before they invade your teeth.
“You recommend to a patient some behavior change and additional chemical interventions like fluoride, which makes the teeth harder, like chlorhexidine, which kills bacteria."
Add to that chewing gum with xylitol and teeth may be saved in the pre-caries stage without dental procedures.
“I watched under x-rays those lesions where someone would take a drill and drill it, and I saw some of them completely disappearing”.
Since Rechmann started the caries management program, word of mouth has brought him many new patients for checkups and cleanings, so he calls on his colleagues to consider following his footsteps.
Does talking or singing to a newborn really their brain development? This week on Science Today, we chatted with neurologist Mercedes Paredes of the University of California, San Francisco to find out. She says this type of stimulation may affect inhibitory neurons, which keep fine-tuning and shaping infants’ brains during the first couple months of life.
"These cells are reaching their target, these brain regions that control the development of motor skills, social skills and language skills. So, I imagine that they might play a role in that. And understanding how they do that will be important for parents knowing, OK, these are the foundations of how the milestones develop."
And as far as we’re concerned, talking or singing to newborns is hard to resist! But how about when those babies become adolescents? There may not be as much talking going then as they hole up in their rooms using social media. But how is that affecting their brains? UCLA’s Adriana Galván says there’s still not enough data to determine the impact because the media itself is still relatively new.
"And so we don’t have the long-term data over many years to determine what it’s doing to the brain, but certainly we do know that it’s another form of teenagers having more social interactions, having greater reactions emotionally to things that they see on media or read about, but we don’t really know what it’s doing to the brain, yet, but stay tuned - a lot of people are doing that research."
Finally, with heavy rainfalls helping quench the parched state of California, there are some questions being raised in the aftermath of drought. UC Berkeley biologist Todd Dawson says in the last couple of years, droughts have killed millions of trees in the Golden State.
"Will we have to manage our forests in different ways? So for example, we have to thin some of our forests, so the limited water resources that we have can keep at least some trees alive, but maybe not at the densities that our current forests are at."
So Dawson calls for scientists to work more closely with governmental agencies to choose the best environmental strategies, especially when it comes to water. That’s all for now – if you want to hear these and other University of California research stories, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for listening.
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/baby_brain
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/adolescent_brain_research
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/drought_aftermath
Bacteria and fungi are fingerprints of asthma and allergies, which newborn children could develop later in life. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, tested stool samples of about 300 babies and found that when bacteria and fungi interact, sometimes it changes microbiota and can trigger the diseases.
"So this kind of a new technology where it allows us to look at variations in specific genes characteristically found in bacteria and fungi. Variation in those genes will allow us to assess which microbes the genes came from. And in that way, we can get a sense of which bacteria and which fungi are present in the gut of these children".
Lynch says this discovery will help researchers advance their testing techniques and predict more precisely if children might become allergic or asthmatic.
Over the past two years, the effect of a strong El Nino has dramatically increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, while the amount of fossil fuel emissions produced did not grow. Trevor Keenan, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found out exactly why this happened.
“The effect of El Nino was negative for ecosystems, had a detrimental impact of global droughts and high temperatures caused a net release of carbon dioxide from ecosystems to the atmosphere. ”
Keenan says ecosystems play an important role in regulating the carbon cycle. Sometimes plants release more carbon dioxide, and sometimes they retain more CO2. So, when drastic climate events like El Nino happen, living conditions for plants become more difficult and they release CO2 back into the atmosphere.
“Hence, speeding up climate change independent of what we do with emissions. So we really need to think about how to protect ecosystems."
Especially because scientists are projecting that the earth is accelerating its warming pace.
There's been a lot of interest in how media is affecting the brain during adolescence, but there still isn’t enough data for researchers to determine whether or not it’s beneficial or harmful to the teenage brain. UCLA’s Adriana Galván is an expert on adolescent brain development and says that’s in part because the media itself is still relatively new.
"And so we don’t have the long-term data over many years to determine what it’s doing to the brain, but certainly we do know that it’s another form of teenagers having more social interactions, having great reactions emotionally to things that they see on media or read about, but we don’t really know what it’s doing to their brain yet – but stay tuned, a lot of people are doing that research."
Adolescent neurobiology generates so much interest because the teen years are such a key period of developmental transition. UCLA is even leading the UC system's multi-campus, multi-disciplinary Consortium on the Developmental Science of Adolescence.
Many mothers talk or sing to their newborns, but how does this really help babies’ development? Mercedes Paredes, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, thinks such stimulation might affect inhibitory neurons that keep fine-tuning and shaping infants’ brains during the first couple of months of their lives.
“These cells are reaching their target, these brain regions that control the development of motor skills, social skills and language skills. So, I imagine that they might play a role in that. And understanding how they do that will be important for parents. These are foundations of how the milestones develop.”
But Paredes adds, if these neurons become damaged – during or soon after birth - that could trigger childhood psychiatric and neurological disorders – like epilepsy.
“The first couple of months to a year of life are uniquely active for the brain and we need to do things to protect the brain or at least be cognizant of the potential damage that could happen.”
In the last couple of years, droughts have killed millions of trees in California. This has raised some important questions for scientists:
“Under the global climatic change that we are experiencing, will we have to manage our forests in different ways? So for example, will we have to thin some of our forests, so the limited water resources that we have can keep at least some trees alive, But maybe not at the densities that our current forests are at."
That’s Todd Dawson, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He thinks that scientists need to work closely with governmental agencies to choose the best environmental strategies, especially when it comes to water.
“We need to really be paying attention to how we manage our water resources. So how do we regulate how much water goes to agriculture, goes to industry, does to supporting people? And then some of the water that we actually just leave alone because it feeds our forests, it feeds our natural ecosystems."
Dawson hopes government will continue to support climate change research, so scientists can better detect and mitigate the negative impact of global warming.
Doctors may soon be able to cure more cancers with immunotherapy, thanks to new technologies to fight malignant tumors. Wendell Lim, a molecular scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has designed smart immune T-cells that he says now more than ever have a better chance to defeat the disease.
"That’s where I think this idea that we really have to attack the problem from two sides. We really have to provide T-cells that can effectively recognize and kill the cancers, as well as ways to counteract immunosuppression."
Immunotherapy has shown some success in treating melanoma and lung cancers, but solid tumors - the majority of cancers – are still a challenge.
“The immune system has this kind of potential. I'm pretty optimistic that our understanding and the tools that we have in immunotherapy are just really accelerating at a dramatic pace."
The Food and Drug Administration may approve first therapies with engineered T-cells as early as this year.
Hey there! It’s been another action-packed week, full of interesting research from around the University of California system. First up, did you know our brains take more time to develop than previously thought? Neither did researcher; they thought most of the development that happened after birth was simply fine-tuning. But Neurologist Mercedes Parades of UC San Francisco discovered that our brains are still developing right after birth – with young neurons moving to the frontal lobe of the brain where they become functional.
"And this is something new, both in terms of how long brain development is still ongoing, but also the fact that this is a period right around the time of birth and there is a lot of pathological changes that can happen and the brain is vulnerable."
This new understanding of what’s happening in newborn babies' brains will help scientists get a better sense of what triggers developmental disorders. Next, we go from babies to Baby Boomers. They make up the ‘silver tsunami’, a metaphor used to describe a spike in the aging American population, mostly due to the greying of the Baby Boomer generation. Dr. Dilip Jeste of UC San Diego says there’s some misapprehension about this great grey wave coming towards us. Specifically, that they’re a drag and are just going to bog us down with costs.
"That’s wrong. I strongly believe that intergenerational activities are critical for successful aging because it’s mutually beneficial. If we keep older people happier and engaged and involved in intergenerational activities, they will be healthier. If they’re healthier, the health care cost is going to go down. So, we need to take good care of older people – not out of compassion, but even from the point of view of economics; it saves us money."
And Jeste adds, older people can transfer a lot of wisdom to the younger generation. To hear these and other stories, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or check out on Facebook. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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If your children have mental health problems, their physical health might suffer, too. But psychiatrist Nicole Bush of the University of California, San Francisco, say this connection is often overlooked because of lack of research and funding in this field.
"A lot of people are less motivated to support and provide funding to improve the mental health of children, a lot of people point to parents as being responsible for caring for that outcome. But when people realize that a child has an immune system problem that maybe affecting their metabolic profile, increasing their risk for obesity, their risk for infectious illness or asthma or other airway health outcomes, they start to be more concerned."
Bush thinks all this may be a result of a psychological trauma or multiple adverse events in a child's life. She is currently analyzing data from her recent study to prove this point.
"It has large societal impact. So, if we can identify harmful biological marks associated with that adversity, people maybe more motivated to invest in interventions for these populations".
The ‘silver tsunami’ is a metaphor often used to describe a spike in the aging American population due to advances in medicine keeping people alive longer, as well as the greying of the Baby Boomer generation. Dr. Dilip Jeste, director of the Center on Healthy Aging at the University of California, San Diego, says that with this great grey wave, there’s also the notion that older people will drain society with cost.
"That’s wrong. To me, old age is the fountain of wisdom; and the older people can contribute to society by transferring their wisdom to the younger generation. And I strongly believe that intergenerational activities are critical for successful aging because it is mutually beneficial. If we keep older people happier and engaged and involved in intergenerational activities, they will be healthier. If they’re healthier, the health care cost is going to go down. So, we need to take good care of older people – not out of compassion, but even from the point of view of economics, it saves us money."
Our brains take more time to develop than was previously thought. Those were the findings of a new study conducted by neurologist Mercedes Paredes of the University of California, San Francisco.
“The old dogma has been that a lot of the development that happened after birth was more related to fine tuning, changes such as white matter development and synaptic connections, the connections between brain cells or neurons.”
But Paredes has found that the brain is still developing – significantly right after birth, with young neurons moving to the frontal lobe of the brain, where they then become functional.
“And that is something new, both in terms of how long brain development is still ongoing, but also the fact that this is period right around the time of birth and there is a lot of pathological changes that can happen and the brain is vulnerable.”
So trying to understand what’s happening in newborn babies’ brains will help scientists get a better sense of what triggers developmental disorders.
Immunotherapy is the future of cancer treatment. Wendell Lim, a molecular scientist of the University of California, San Francisco, says he is very optimistic about its success, but the caveat is - the cure comes at a price.
"Currently the therapies use patient's own T cells and modify those. And what's good about that is you won't get an immune reaction against those T cells because they come from you. But that's highly customized and that's part of what makes therapy more expensive."
Researchers are looking for ways to make the therapy more affordable so everyone who needs it could pay for it.
"One of the things that people in the field are working on hard is to develop more off-the-shelf cells – that you might have a cell that comes from either a universal donor, or has been generated from stem cells that is compatible with a certain patient, just the way that an organ would be matched".
Lim hopes more funds to tackle this cost savings will be available through the Moonshot Initiative, a project that Vice President Joseph Biden spearheaded to accelerate cancer research.
Time to catch up on Science Today stories. First up, environmental scientists are starting to use drone technology to monitor how forests are affected by droughts, particularly those that have been affecting the Golden State’s iconic sequoia trees. Molecular biologist Todd Dawson of UC Berkeley says with drones, researchers can get a more refined picture in areas where there has been a lot of tree mortality. That’s because in a matter of minutes, drones can allow researchers to survey canopies of individual trees and entire forests.
"That means we are basically keeping our finger on the pulse of the forest change, which we have never been able to do with any of our other tools before."
Next, if you have some pain relievers in your medicine cabinet, you may want to take a closer look at the back of the bottle. The FDA has been putting bigger warning labels on pain relievers like ibuprofen and other drugs known as NSAIDs because of their known risk to increase heart disease and stroke. Researcher Aldrin Gomes of UC Davis, who found that NSAIDs can cause cardiac cells to die after prolonged use, says he’s particularly interested in educating certain age groups about this.
"Between 45 and 65, your risk of stroke from natural causes increases. And above 65, it increases even further. And when you add NSAIDs to this at these different age groups, it further increases your risk."
So if you’re in this age group, try not to use NSAIDs on a regular basis. And finally, if your mind started to wander during this update, I won’t get offended; that’s because UC Santa Barbara’s Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences, told us that there’s some cognitive value to daydreaming. He conducted a study looking specifically at creative scientists and creative writers to see when they have innovative ideas.
"What we found is that in both of these groups, about a third of their ideas happened while they’re mind wandering; we also find that the ideas that they have when they’re mind wandering are more likely to be an ‘ah-ha!’ kind of solution. Something where they really were not expecting it and more likely to involve overcoming an impasse."
So if you’re not really tuning in to this right now, let’s hope it’s because you just had an ‘ah-ha!’ moment. That’s all for this week – for more stories about the latest University of California, research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. Until next week, I’m Larissa Branin.
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https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/nsaids_age
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/daydreaming_cognition
Being called a daydreamer, especially as an adult, often has negative connotations. But researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been studying the value of what they call ‘mind wandering’. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences has been looking specifically at creative scientists and creative writers to see when they have creative ideas.
"What we found is that in both of these groups, about a third of their ideas happened while they’re mind wandering. And interestingly, we found although overall they don’t find their ideas that they had while mind wandering any more creative than the ones that they had at work, they’re no less. And in many ways, that’s pretty striking, too. If the idea that you have, you know, while gardening is good as the one that you have at your desk, that tells me something. But we also find that the ideas that they have when they’re mind wandering are more likely to be an ‘Ah-ha!’ kind of solution. Something where they really were not expecting it and more likely to involve overcoming an impasse."
So the next time someone knocks you for being caught in a daydream, let them know – your brain needs this break.
Should doctors pay more attention to pregnant women's mental health? Nicole Bush, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, thinks the medical community shows little appreciation of what future mothers are going through psychologically.
“Currently it is not standard practice for obstetricians or primary care people working with pregnant women to even screen for depression or high levels of stress."
..which also affects their developing offspring and could lead to mental and physical problems after they are born. Children may be at risk of obesity, immune dysfunction and neurological disorders.
"We would have massive public health improvement if we could prioritize screening and understanding the challenges that pregnant women face and providing support during pregnancy and early postpartum period to buffer the effects of stress or provide resources to get their needs met."
The Food and Drug Administration has been putting bigger warning labels on pain relievers like ibuprofen and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDS. That’s because of their known risk to increase heart disease and stroke. At the University of California, Davis, researcher Aldrin Gomes has found that when taken for prolonged periods, NSAIDs can cause cardiac cells to die. So, Gomes says part of their effort is to educate certain age groups.
"Between 45 and 65, your risk of stroke from natural causes increases. And above 65, it increases even further. And when you add NSAIDs to this, at these different age groups, it further increases your risk."
Since many people typically start using NSAIDs the most as they age, Gomes says it’s imperative to educate those 45 and older to stop using them on a regular basis. For those listening who may be concerned about previous usage and the damage it may have caused, Gomes offers simple advice.
"We can’t change what we have done, we can only change what we can do."
This is Science Today. As drone technology is getting cheaper, they’re being used in a host of different ways, including environmental science. Todd Dawson, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, is using drones to study how forests get affected by droughts, particularly those that have been affecting the Golden State’s iconic sequoia trees.
"We see a lot of trees dying in California but we don't really understand why certain places are dying more than others. And now we are starting to get, with this drone images, a more refined picture in areas where is a lot of tree mortality".
In a matter of minutes researchers can survey canopies of individual trees and entire forests, as drones fly over and take images with multi-spectral cameras.
"That means we are basically keeping our finger on the pulse of the forest change, which we have never been able to do with any of our other tools before."
Dawson says the need to save the trees is urgent, as the drought killed over 60 million of them in California last year alone.
This week on Science Today, we talked about how children who suffer from emotional or physical abuse are at higher risk of developing health problems. Psychiatrist Nicole Bush of the University of California, San Francisco says scientists are unclear about how to reverse the harmful effects, so she is focusing on this in a study.
"One of our goals was to look across a variety of systems to see, for example, whether we can improve immune functioning, cortisol stress hormone level, telomere length, DNA methylation profiles."
DNA methylation is essential for normal development– if the process goes awry, it can be linked to health issues like cancer or cardiovascular disease. So Bush his hoping to improve this and other functions like immune functioning and telomere length using psychotherapy, which studies have proven have been effective for mental and physical health. On the subject of health, we hope you're starting a healthy and happy New Year. This time of year there’s a higher risk of what’s called ‘holiday heart syndrome’. Cardiologist Gregory Marcus, also at UCSF, tells us that it’s basically a link between excessive alcohol consumption and atrial fibrillation.
"Those who drank more alcohol tended to have larger left atritum, those with large atrium this has long been known, are more prone to atrial fibrillation – the most common abnormal heart rhythm that we see. And it is very important because of stroke."
So while occasional drinking can lift your holiday spirit and do no harm, Marcus warns that excessive alcohol consumption is never good for anyone. And finally, we stuck around UCSF to better understand the origins or asthma and allergies. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist there, may have narrowed it down to one molecule. She and her collaborators at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found a metabolite, which is a product of metabolism, can trigger these diseases.
"There was a specific lipid called 12, 13 diHome and this really stood out to us because this specific lipid is an established biomarker for asthma in adults and we are finding it in the heightened concentration in neonates who go on to develop asthma in childhood."
Lynch explains that it actually suppresses the T-cells that are necessary to dampen down allergic inflammation. To hear about more University of California research – and not just at our San Francisco campus - subscribe to Science Today on iTunes. You can also follow us on Facebook or Soundcloud. Thanks for tuning in, until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/abuse_health
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/post_holidays
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/asthma_molecule
Researchers may have narrowed down the origins of asthma and allergies to just one molecule. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco and her colleagues at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit have found a metabolite - a product of metabolism - that can trigger the diseases.
"There was a specific Lipid called 12, 13-diHome. This specific lipid is an established biomarker for asthma in adults, and we are finding it in the heightened concentration in neonates who go on to develop asthma in childhood".
The researchers have also discovered how this molecule affects babies' immune systems.
"That specific lipid actually suppresses the critical cell type, the T- regulatory cells that are necessary to dampen allergic inflammation".
Lynch explains that the weakening of these cells is one of the most critical immune dysfunctions that underlie allergies.
Age matters when it comes to spotting the warning signs of memory decline and other thinking skills. Kristine Yaffe, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, has been studying a group of young adults from 18 to 30 years old, until they've reached midlife. And in doing so, Yaffe observed some of their weakening brain activity.
"If you just study people when they are in their eighties and nineties with dementia, that's very helpful in terms of trying to come up with better treatment and better care of patients, but it's not very helpful if you are trying to prevent or really try to intervene early. For that you have to back up the time, probably by decades and really get a better understanding of some of the early signs and the early risk factors."
Yaffe found other factors, like alcohol use, depression and poverty, also contribute to mental decline. The good news is, it’s not too late – that changes in lifestyle may help these people prevent dementia later in life.
Hopefully you made it through the holiday season safely and in good health. According to Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, there is something called ‘holiday heart syndrome’ – basically, a link between excessive alcohol consumption and atrial fibrillation.
"Those who drank more alcohol tended to have larger left atrium, those with large atrium are more prone to atrial fibrillation. Atiral fibrillation is the most common abnormal heart rhythm that we see, it affects millions of individuals and it is a very important cause of stroke."
But there’s evidence that has shown moderate consumption of alcohol could help prevent heart attacks. Such conflicting studies confuse patients, who often ask their doctor ...
"Should I drink alcohol, should I avoid alcohol, and frankly - we still really don't know. Different patients respond differently to alcohol."
One thing is clear to all researchers: while occasional drinking can lift your holiday spirit and will do no harm, excessive alcohol consumption is never good for anyone.
Children who suffer from emotional or physical abuse are at higher risk of developing health problems, but scientists are unclear about how to reverse these harmful effects. So, this is the focus of a new study by Nicole Bush, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco.
"One of our goals was to look across the variety of systems to see for example whether we can improve immune functioning, cortisol stress hormone level, telomere lengths and DNA methylation profiles."
Bush hopes to achieve this with psychotherapy, which could be very effective for mental and physical health. And studies have proven just that.
"There has been a recent meta-analysis that suggests we can improve children's cortisol functioning through intervention after adversity and we can get them to return to normal levels."
And less stress means fewer health problems in the future, including obesity, depression and diabetes, which is widespread among young Americans.
It’s a New Year and that means, lots of new stories are in the hopper! First up, do you have trouble sleeping at night? And if you do, how many of you spend time propped up on your pillows, scrolling through your smartphone or tablets before getting some sleep? Our guess is, probably many of you do this, as it turns out 70% of Americans keep their phones on their bedside table. We spoke to cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the UC San Francisco about this. In case you’re wondering why a cardiologist is talking about sleep, he explains that a lack of Zzz’s can cause high blood pressure, heart attacks, arrhythmia and strokes.
"Poor sleep quality is not simply an issue of feeling tired the next day, we recognize now that sleep is extremely important to mood, to brain function, cognition."
Marcus adds that he’s not trying to demonize technology. Instead, he suggests vigilance and putting the phone away at least an hour before sleep. Give it a try. Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, researchers took a cue from nature to create Salto. Roboticist Duncan Haldane says Salto can jump higher and faster than any other robot out there.
"Salto is inspired by a galago, which is a bushbaby. Biologists have found animals adapted specifically for jumping had this kind of super crouch posture. The longer they stay in a crouch, the more energy they can transfer into the tendons and the more energy they can return for jumping."
The team is hoping Salto’s novel locomotive abilities can be used in search and rescue efforts. And finally, we meet UCLA neuroscientist Adriana Galván to discuss the adolescent brain. You may have thought people become adults at 18, but from a neuroscience perspective, the brain keeps growing and developing beyond that age and current literature suggests that it’s around age 25 that the brain finishes the period of adolescence.
"The majority of what we call ‘plasticity’ or sensitivity to the environment changes around the mid-twenties and so that means that although the brain can keep changing in response to new experiences or learning something new, the majority of that development has ended."
To hear these and other episodes about the latest University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
Smarter T-cells that can effectively fight cancer may be the key to successful immunotherapy. Molecular scientist Wendell Lim of the University of California, San Francisco, has engineered synthetic receptors, called syn-Notch receptors, that can not only recognize tumors, but also produce molecules that can suppress cancerous microenvironments in the body.
"The syn-Notch receptors are kind of a universal sensing platform that allows us to program the T-cells with many kinds of input/output responses. So it really allows us to treat the T-cell much like the way you would program a robot that can sense whether there are obstacles in front of it."
Lim says scientists are testing these highly efficient multi-pronged T-cells in labs, but they may be available for patients within the next couple of years.
"I think we can really transform what cancer therapy is like."
Lim also hopes that smart T-cells will target cancers that can’t currently be treated with immunotherapy.
Asthma and allergies begin in our guts. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has made this discovery while studying stool samples from newborn babies. Lynch found that certain types of bacteria that healthy infants usually have, were missing in the group she tested.
"Perhaps, microbial metabolism in the gut is reprogrammed in this high risk group that lacks these bacteria."
Lynch explains that microbes in the guts of unhealthy children were digesting amino acids, carbohydrates and lipids - the building blocks of our bodies - in an abnormal way. And that’s something scientists were not able to prove before.
"This was the first time we could show definitely that the products associated with the microbiota in the gut drive immune dysfunction."
This bacterial disruption put children at higher risk of developing allergies at age 2 and asthma at age 4.
People are considered adults when they turn eighteen, but from a neuroscience perspective, the brain keeps growing and developing beyond that age. Dr. Adriana Galván, director of the UCLA Developmental Neuroscience Lab, explains that current literature suggests it's around age 25 that the brain finishes the period of adolescence.
"But the majority of what we call 'plasticity' or sensitivity to the environment, changes around the mid-20s and so that means that although the brain can keep changing in response to new experiences or learning something new, the majority of that development has ended."
One of Galván's studies found that in comparison to adults, the adolescent brain is more excited by positive feedback.
"And so this is good evidence for us that there is something very unique about the reward system in the adolescent brain that is distinct from that of childhood as well."
And since the reward center of the brain is linked to learning, understanding these differences may have broader implications in the classroom and beyond.
Sometimes the best ideas are found in nature. At the University of California, Berkeley, researchers at the Biomimetic Millisystems Laboratory have long looked to insects and animals for inspiration in their robotic designs; from cockroaches to lizards. Now, roboticist Duncan Haldane says their latest creation called Salto took a cue from nature and it can jump higher and faster than any other robot out there.
"Salto is inspired by a galago, which is bushbaby. Biologists have found animals adapted specifically for jumping had this kind of super crouch posture. The longer they stay in a crouch, the more energy they can transfer into the tendons and the more energy they can return for jumping."
Now that Salto is jumping as well as these small primates, they’re looking to humans to explore different behaviors.
"The closest model for what we’re trying to do is human parkour. You have these people that excel at running over buildings, bouncing off of all these crazy obstacles like a wall as a feature to help yourself move."
If you’re still clutching your smartphone as you hit the sheets at night you might deprive yourself of a good night’s sleep. That's according to a study by cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the University of California, San Francisco. So, why is a cardiologist looking into this? Marcus explains that a lack of sleep can cause high blood pressure, heart attacks, arrhythmia and strokes.
"Poor sleep quality is not simply an issue of feeling tired the next day, we recognize now that sleep is extremely important to mood, to brain function, cognition."
Almost 70 percent of Americans keep their phones on a bedside table at night and often scroll through content before falling asleep. Despite the health risks, Marcus says cell phones can still be our friends.
"It is important not to broadly demonize technology that in general I think has such a great capacity to help enhance health."
The key, Marcus says, is vigilance and putting the phone away at least an hour before sleep.
When it comes to teens, sometimes overparenting, or exerting too much influence, may interfere with their ability to learn from consequences.
"The brain is very responsive to the environment that it develops as based on feedback from the environment. So, if an adolescent is not experiencing consequences or decision-making on their own, or goal-setting on their own, then that is limiting how well the prefrontal cortex is developing in response to those activities or behaviors.
That’s Adrianna Galván, director of UCLA’s Developmental Neuroscience Lab. One of her studies found that the brain’s reward center is hyperactive during adolescence.
"And because we know that the reward center is also where learning occurs, we were interested in testing the hypothesis that teenagers would also show greater activation in this region in response to learning, and greater than adults."
Their study found this to be the case and underscores the value of adolescents learning from behaviors and associations.
What causes asthma and allergies? Scientists think it may very well stem from our own mothers. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has been studying the origin of these diseases and says it all starts with a woman's lifestyle when she is pregnant or right after she has given birth.
"Some of the risk factors for allergic asthma include very early life exposures, such as a lack of the mother's exposure to livestock or furred pets, while she is pregnant, formula feeding, cesarean section delivery and antibiotic use either during pregnancy or in the very early life postnatal period."
All these factors define the types of microbes that form in our bodies and could drive our immune system's dysfunction.
"In very early life, the gut microbiome changes very dramatically as it accumulates bacterial and fungal genomes and species from the environment."
So changing this environment even before women start thinking of having babies - might be one of the easiest ways to prevent asthma and allergies.
Immunotherapy can be effective in fighting cancer, but the immune system's killer T-cells sometimes make mistakes and attack normal cells instead. Wendell Lim, a molecular scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, believes he can change this by engineering T-cells.
"One of the things that has been a challenge is how we increase the precision of the cell that they are better at recognizing cancer cells and discriminating them from normal cells. We have successfully programmed the T-cells like robots that can search the body and then deliver various payloads there. So it is like a smart weapon for combatting cancer. "
In fact, Lim says, in just a couple of years the Food and Drug Administration might approve the engineered cells as a therapy to battle cancer. So, the scientists have geared up and are actively testing the technology now in labs.
"I think we can transform what cancer therapy is like. Some of these immune therapies really might give much longer extensions of life."
This is Science Today. What can leap into the air, spring off a wall and perform multiple jumps in a row? That would be Salto – the most vertically agile, wall-jumping robot ever built. Roboticist Duncan Haldane, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, led the work.
"The special thing about this robot is that it can jump higher and faster than any other robot that’s out there right now. Salto can jump better than a human; once it does that jump, Salto jumps again. So, we can do this really high-powered jumping behavior continuously and chain together these maneuvers made out of large leaps."
Salto’s design was based on a galago – the most vertically agile animal in nature. These creatures have a special ability to store energy in their tendons so they can jump to heights not possible by muscles alone. This is done while in a crouched position.
"So what we built into Salto the capability for a super crouch. What that allows is to have the motor be able to stretch out the spring and keep the robot crouched for longer."
Such novel locomotive abilities could be used in search and rescue efforts. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
How many times a day does your mind start to wander? Now, be honest; it probably happens a lot. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies what actually goes on when this occurs.
"There are three general categories of things we’ve looked at, in terms of mind wandering. The first is its costs. How does mind wandering interfere with peoples’ abilities in various different situations? And we find that it’s quite costly. That if people have mind wandering while reading, that it substantially interferes with their ability to process and remember what they’ve read."
If that’s the case, why do people do it so much? Schooler says one reason is it’s helpful for creativity.
"We’ve been looking at creative scientists and creative writers and looking to see when they have their creative ideas about a third of their ideas happened while they’re mind wandering."
So, if your mind wandered during this episode, hopefully it’s because you just had an ‘ah-ha!’ moment!
Access to good education might be the key to preventing dementia and other mental problems affecting memory and thinking. This, according to Kristine Yaffe, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. Yaffe conducted a study looking into how poverty affects our brain and says one of the most obvious connections is that people with higher income usually get a better education than those who struggle financially.
“Even if you have the same number of years of education, the quality of education may not be as good."
And that, Yaffe says, can have a snowball effect in other areas of our lives.
“Hobbies or access to other kinds of mentally-stimulating activities maybe less. Some of these things cost money, some are neighborhood-affiliated."
Yaffe says all of these factors, over time, may weaken our cognitive power.
“So Ideally we would have better programs to fight poverty and economic hardship.”
In the meantime, Yaffe says programs improving the quality of education – especially for children - are crucial.
Several American cities have approved ballot measures in favor of taxing sugar-sweetened beverages. Public health expert Kristine Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley explains how smoking and a subsequent tobacco tax set a precedent for the more recent sugar-sweetened beverage taxes.
"So, tobacco and the taxes on tobacco are a great analogy when we’re just talking about something like sugar-sweetened beverages because it’s a luxury. It’s a little bit like a luxury tax on alcohol or cigarettes. That’s your choice – that’s fine, but clearly it should only happen occasionally."
There’s also the public perception – smoking is not considered as ‘cool’ as it used to be in popular ads and culture. Currently, that’s not the case with many sugar-sweetened beverages.
"You’ve got all these athletes who are doing it and so it looks cool, so I think that would be a huge win if there was a shift in the population away from thinking that was a good drink."
Madsen’s preliminary research has found that a ‘soda tax’ could have a really big impact on consumption.
Every year, almost 800 thousand Americans have a stroke, but not all patients fully recover. Anthony Kim, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine says doctors should put more effort into helping stroke patients get better.
“Most of our interventions post-stroke are geared towards preventing the next stroke and we have relatively fewer interventions that are geared toward actually improving the recovery.”
One way to fix this is to focus on therapies, which, as Kim says, is a huge unmet need.
"That’s the question that patients ask after they have had the stroke. I mean they want to improve from the stroke that’s already occurred."
Kim says a way to address this is if more patients enrolled in clinical studies. Her says this would help doctors develop and choose the right treatments.
As we head off for a bit of a holiday break, here are a few stories to go with the season. First, not to put a damper on things – but in case you decide to channel your inner Bob Cratchit and “make rather merry” – you may want to take it a bit easy. Cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the University of California, San Francisco says that’s because tis the season for ‘holiday heart syndrome’. Marcus explains that this term was coined in the 1970s to describe patients who experience a common and potentially dangerous form of heart palpitation. This happens after excessive drinking and it usually occurs around the winter holiday season.
"Patients would present with their first episode of atrial fibrillation and these patients had no known underlying heart disease and it turned out that on further questioning, that they had quite a bit to drink prior to just coming in and prior to developing their palpitations."
So, if you’re planning to raise a glass, keep it in moderation. And what about those who have a more ‘bah humbug’ feeling around the holidays – or any day? Are some people just born to be happier than others? Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky of UC Riverside says even if there are genetic influences on happiness, that does not mean people can’t change.
"If we can’t really change our happiness set point, I believe you can change your happiness level. So, people can, with a lot of effort, become happier. And when it comes to something like slowing down adaptation – why is that hard? Well, probably because adaptation is so hardwired. It’s evolutionarily adaptive. It’s just something that all human beings experience and it’s hard to kind of fight a natural process."
Listen these and other episodes – including one from UCLA about the science of your pie crust. Tune into Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. And check us out on Facebook, too. I’m Larissa Branin – have a safe and happy holiday season.
Subscribe to Science Today:
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/holiday_heart
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/happiness_setpoint
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/piemaking
It’s hard enough feeling under the weather on terra firma, so imagine how it must be for astronauts in Deep Space. We spoke to a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who is helping NASA develop a handheld medical diagnostic device for space travel. Matthew Coleman says it may even contain biomarkers for radiation sensitivity, which is a concern in microgravity since there is much higher levels of radiation beyond our atmosphere.
"And so if you’re somebody that’s more sensitive to radiation exposure, you may not want to go out on too many spacewalks and you may need to limit those sorts of activities and therefore, somebody else will have to complete that mission requirement."
Meanwhile, researchers at UC San Francisco are calling for access to a good education in the hopes of preventing dementia and other mental problems affecting memory and thinking. Psychiatrist Kristine Yaffe has made a connection between poverty and dementia later in life. She says people with higher income usually get a better education than those who struggle financially, so improving the quality of education would be a great start.
"Even if you have the same number of years of education, the quality of education may not be as good."
And while on the UC San Francisco campus, we visited Dr. Anthony Kim at the School of Medicine to talk about stroke, which affects almost 800 thousand Americans every year. He explains that not all of these patients fully recover and says doctors need to put more effort into helping stroke patients get better.
"Most of our interventions post-stroke are geared towards preventing the next stroke and we have relatively fewer interventions that are geared toward actually improving the recovery."
To hear these and other episodes about the latest research at the University of California, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today:
iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/deep_space
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/dementia_prevention
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/stroke_recovery
The mental health of aging adults seems to consistently improve with age. But in the same study of adults ages 21 to 100, researchers discovered that those in their 20s and 30s had far worse levels of psychological well-being than any other period of adulthood.
"I must say, I was actually surprised in our study by this very high level of stress and depression and anxiety that we found in the younger age groups."
That’s study leader Dilip Jeste of the University of California, San Diego. He explains that there have been other studies reporting that in one’s twenties, there’s a high level of well-being that slowly comes down towards mid-life and then it starts to improve again.
"My personal feeling is that adolescence is a difficult period of life, so how is it possible that suddenly in the twenties you would have the best wellbeing level? That’s not possible. So, I do believe that our findings are more consistent with what is happening, at least now."
Jeste adds that their findings suggest more attention should be paid to the mental health of younger adults.
We’ve all seen astronauts floating around weightless in the space shuttle and while it seems like fun, prolonged exposure to microgravity results in bone loss and muscle atrophy. Matthew Coleman, a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says there are other concerns, too.
"You also have different levels of ionizing radiation that you’re being bombarded by in space because here on Earth, we’re protected because we have an atmosphere. But when we go beyond the atmosphere and beyond where the Space Station is now, there’s going to be much higher levels of radiation."
Coleman is part of a team of researchers working on a single, handheld diagnostic device that may contain a host of biomarkers, including some for radiation sensitivity.
"And so if you’re somebody that’s more sensitive to radiation exposure, you may not want to go out on too many spacewalks and you may need to limit those sorts of activities and therefore, somebody else will have to complete that mission requirement."
It’s time for the weekly roundup again. This week we spoke to a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory about how the amount of carbon dioxide that trees and plants have been grabbing from the atmosphere has increased over the years. Trevor Keenan says explains that plants have been ‘inhaling’ more carbon dioxide through photosynthesis but they did not ‘exhale’ more CO2 into the atmosphere through respiration.
"So, this is called the CO2 fertilization effect, a well-known and widely-studied effect of how CO2 affects plants. During the last decade, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere continue to go up and this means that plants have more CO2 to use."
And while this sounds like a good thing, Keenan warns that the threat of global warming is still there and this study underscores the value of protecting vital ecosystems. Next up, we find out that economic hardship can actually shape the way our brain works. Psychiatrist Kristine Yaffe of UC San Francisco explains that poverty affects cognitive function due to a concept called ‘cognitive reserve’.
"And what that means is the more you grow your brain, the more you have education, the more it is simulated, the more complex your occupation is, the more complex your lifestyle activities are, your leisure activities."
By understanding this, Yaffe hopes researchers can help prevent cognitive diseases later in life. And speaking of issues later in life, we really enjoyed our time with Dilip Jeste, a geriatric neuropsychiatrist at UC San Diego. He told us that the mental health of older adults actually improves with time, even in those with physical ailments.
"We wanted to look at, not only the physical illnesses and cognitive problem, but also the positive characteristics. Things like resilience, optimism, social engagement, compassion, wisdom. So, we got a much more comprehensive understanding of aging that many of the studies do."
To hear these episodes and more like them, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes. You can also follow us on Soundcloud or Facebook. Thanks for listening…until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today:
iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/plants_carbon
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/brain_poverty
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/aging_happy
If you live with a teenager, you’ve probably blamed some of their antics solely on puberty and hormones. But according to new research at UCLA, it’s also that their brains are still undergoing some remodeling. Psychologist Adriana Galván, who directs UCLA’s Developmental Neuroscience Lab, says the common assumption has been that as kids enter the teen years, they need less sleep.
"But in fact, they need just as much sleep, maybe even more so. And there’s actually a tendency for teenagers to sleep less, not simply because they’re on social media or they’re staying up late to complete homework, but because there’s a biological shift in how the brain induces sleep."
Basically, the sleep hormone melatonin, is not released in teens until later in the night. In a study of how sleep affects their developing brains, Galván found that a lack of sleep affects a teen’s pre-frontal cortex the most.
"And that translates into poorer performance on a self-control task – and that impacts their ability to regulate emotions or pay attention in class."
Now that recreational marijuana has been legalized in California and a handful of other states, public health experts are raising concerns over its advertising and distribution.
"You are going to see the rise of mass marketing, branding in order to maximize sales and revenue."
That’s Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Glantz explains that over the years, tobacco companies used additives and chemicals to create a highly addictive product.
“We’ve only seen a little bit of that in the marijuana market. We haven’t yet seen the kind of high tech product engineering designed to maximize use. Because the distributors – mom and pop marijuana market that we have just haven’t had technological capability to do what the big corporations could do once they take control of this market."
Glantz recommends policymakers shape marijuana laws that would minimize consumption.
Can economic hardship shape the way our brain works? For 25 years, Kristine Yaffe, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco followed more than three thousand adults with different income levels and found that poverty does affect cognitive function. She says this is due to a concept called ‘cognitive reserve’.
"And what that means is the more you can grow your brain, the more you have education -- the more it is stimulated, the more complex your occupation is, the more complex your lifestyle activities are - your leisure activities."
Yaffe says with that in mind, researchers can prevent cognitive diseases later in life.
"Using your brain in this way, we think may have a beneficial effect in terms of protecting against getting dementia and other kinds of processes that affect your memory and thinking."
As the years fly by, take heart – a University of California, San Diego study has found that despite physical ailments, older adults seem to consistently get happier over time. Dr. Dilip Jeste says the conventional wisdom about aging is it’s all gloom and doom.
"We associate aging with diseases, disabilities, degeneration, dementia and depression. All of the negative things, 2:14 which I find so insulting and degrading, and also it is wrong."
Jeste’s study focused on physical health, cognitive function and other measures of mental health in over 1500 adults, ages 21 to 103 years.
"We wanted to look at, not only the physical illnesses and cognitive problem, but also the positive characteristics – things like resilience, optimism, social engagement, compassion, wisdom. So, we got a much more comprehensive understanding of aging than many of the studies do."
Over the past few decades, the amount of carbon dioxide that trees and plants have been grabbing from the atmosphere has increased. Trevor Keenan, a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found that plants have been “inhaling” more carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. But they did not "exhale" more CO2 into the atmosphere through respiration.
"So this is called the CO2 fertilization effect - a widely known effect of how CO2 affects plants. During the last few decades, the concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere continue to go up and this means plants have more CO2 to use.”
This sounds like good news since less carbon dioxide is accumulated in the atmosphere, but Keenan says the threat of global warming is still there.
"And so even though the plants are helping us out, whether they will continue doing it is a big question. CO2 in the atmosphere is still going up and so climate change is getting more and more likely to be more extreme."
In the meantime, this research underscores the importance of protecting vital ecosystems.
Because of the recent holiday break, we didn’t run our usual line-up this past week; instead we gave you a hint of the some of the stories to come. This includes an interview with UC San Diego’s Dr. Dilip Jeste. He had some good news about aging and described how his study contradicts the conventional notions that aging is pretty much all ‘gloom and doom’. In this excerpt, Jeste describes what makes their study different.
“Usually, when people mention aging, they are thinking about physical aging, that's the only component that figures in ministries of aging, but aging is multidimensional. Physical health is one dimension. Another dimension is cognitive function, or cognitive health. So, that is what is being studied when we are looking at people with Alzheimer's Disease or other dementias. But the component of aging that is least studied is the psychosocial component of aging."
So, Jeste took a multidimensional approach , which you'll want to hear about next week. And in another upcoming episode, we’ll dial back the years to reflect upon adolescence. Adrianna Galvan of UCLA studies how changes in brain maturation during adolescence relate to adolescent behavior and decision-making. Here she describes why adolescence is often fraught with emotion.
"There is probably an evolutionary reason for why teenagers are more emotional. One reason is that emotions help us connect with other people. And during adolescence, it's really important that we establish good relationships, or understand the social rules of interacting with others, of having romantic partners, and so the emotional reactivity helps adolescents in that regard.”
Don’t miss these and many other stories about the latest research at the University of California. Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today:
iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/jeste_aging
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/emotional_teens
With so little room for a diagnostic lab, what happens when an astronaut gets ill in space? And what if we could even prevent a medical issue from happening? In this interview excerpt, Matthew Coleman, a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes a revolutionary, small handheld diagnostic device that can work with three different sample streams. Have a listen:
Transcript:
"So, one of the problems for space exploration is that there's limited room to take a lot of equipment in a diagnostic laboratory with you, and have it on, say the Space Station, or as you move to explore someplace like Mars. And so what we've been working on, is developing a small handheld diagnostic device that's kind of revolutionary in the fact that it can work with different types of sample streams to do both analytical diagnostics of health, and do differential blood cell counts because combined, those two things can give you a lot of information about your current health status; if you're pre-symptomatic to something, or if you're developing somewhere along your progression to a diseased state.
So, in our case, we're actually working on three different sample types. Two are non-invasive. So one is saliva, and the other one is actually breath. So, small volatiles in breath, can actually diagnose something about whether you have diabetes. It's much like a breathalyzer that the police use to know if you've been drinking. We can measure those small molecules in your breath, but also breath has a liquid component. It's called breath condensate. And that breath condensate can have some of the same proteins you find in blood and in saliva, that can also be used to diagnose health. So we can find proteins that are related to cancer or cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and even infection within that condensate. So then the third sample we're looking at is blood, because blood is the clinical standard, which all the doctors use. When you go to the doctor, you know they always take a small tube of 3 ml. to 5 ml. of blood and they're going to count your blood cells and be able to relate that to, whether you have anemia, even if you possibly have cancer, and your general health status based on measuring protein biomarkers or proteins in your blood as well. Right?
So you get your HDL measurement, that's done through a diagnostic kit called an ELISA to measure some specific proteins in your blood. And so we're going to provide one single device that can measure all three of those sample streams, and tell you something about proteins, your blood differentials, and what's in your breath."
Related content:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/biodetection_space
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/biodetection_device
Seven American cities have approved ballot measures in favor of soda taxes. Public health expert Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley explains how smoking and a subsequent tobacco tax set the precedent for the more recent sugar-sweetened beverage taxes.
Transcript:
"I think the tax that we saw on tobacco is really similar to the tax that you know supporting for sugar-sweetened beverages. So smoking is a great precedent. And in fact, this is one of the reasons that we think about why sugar-sweetened beverages as opposed to kind of anything that's out there that might fall into a junk food category. What we don't have in the U.S., anymore, and this is good news, we don't have a problem with people needing empty calories. I mean there have been times when hunger has been so severe that it would have been great to feed even empty calories, just calories on the table, right. That's not a problem now. There are still people who are hungry, but the solution is not giving them empty calories. It's getting healthier food into the emergency food system, for example. So tobacco and the taxes on tobacco are a great analogy when we're just talking about something like sugar-sweetened beverages because it's a luxury. It's something that you should - you know the American Heart Association just came out with new recommendations for kids, no more than six teaspoons of added sugar a day, and that kids shouldn't have more than one sugar-sweetened beverage a week, right? That's a huge recommendation and they're acknowledging, look, it's a little bit like a luxury tax on alcohol or cigarettes. That's your choice that's fine, but clearly it should only happen occasionally. "
Listen to a related episode:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/soda_public_health
Ah, teenagers! A time often described as an emotional, hormone-laden roller-coaster ride. We chatted with UCLA's Dr. Adriana Galván, whose research focuses on adolescent brain development. Specifically, her work examines how changes in brain maturation during adolescence relate to adolescent behavior and decision-making.
In this excerpt, she describes one reason why adolescence is often fraught with emotion:
"There is probably an evolutionary reason for why teenagers are more emotional. One reason is that emotions help us connect with other people. And during adolescence, it's really important that we establish good relationships, or understand the social rules of interacting with others, of having romantic partners, and so the emotional reactivity helps adolescents in that regard. Emotions also serve as an important learning tool. So when you feel a particular emotion, you're more likely to remember the event. So if an event was aversive, then those emotions will help you steer clear of those in the future. If an event is positive, similarly, you will also remember that in a way that is emotionally-based and more likely to re-engage in that behavior again. That emotional sensitivity can be really good for adolescents, but you can imagine how sometimes that can get them into trouble if they engage in a behavior they find very rewarding and emotional, but yet that behavior may not be good for them in the long run."
There’s some good news about aging. Next week, we’ll be featuring a story about a UC San Diego study, which found that despite physical ailments, older adults seem to consistently get happier over time. We interviewed Dr. Dilip Jeste about their work, which contradicts the conventional notions that aging is pretty much all ‘gloom and doom’. In this excerpt from our interview with Jeste, he describes what makes their study different.
“Usually, when people mention aging, they are thinking about physical aging, that's the only component that figures in ministries of aging, but aging is multidimensional. Physical health is one dimension. Another dimension is cognitive function, or cognitive health. So, that is what is being studied when we are looking at people with Alzheimer's Disease or other dementias. But the component of aging that is least studied is the psychosocial component of aging. In other words, what happens to the wellbeing, happiness, satisfaction, emotions, social activities, overall functioning? These things are not included in physical, and often in cognitive aspects of aging. So one of our goals was to look at all three components: physical, cognitive, and psychosocial, in the same study. So we got a much more comprehensive understanding of aging that many of the studies do.”
For decades, researchers have been struggling to understand why some children develop asthma and allergies and some don't. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has found that the microbes in a human gut may have some answers. While sampling newborn babies' stools, Lynch has discovered the same microbes that asthmatic adults have.
"And what we found is the children with highest risk type of microbiota they lacked a large range of bacteria and they include key organisms that we consider as biomarkers of healthy individuals. What we also found is that specific group that was at highest risk had quite a large expansion of two different types of fungi - rhodotorula and candida, and we know candida can be pro-allergic."
Lynch says that further studies of these microbes' effect on immune function may help prevent asthma and allergies.
When there’s an outbreak of West Nile virus in California or dengue in Florida, county vector control districts will set up traps all over the place to capture mosquitoes and then test which were infected by the viruses in question.
"That’s how they are able to do surveillance work and figure out where they can concentrate their effort in cleaning up the mosquitoes."
That’s Anandasankar Ray, director of the Center for Disease Vector Research at the University of California, Riverside. Ray and his colleagues are using environmentally-friendly volatile molecules that can be formulated in little bottles to create affordable traps that can be set up in backyards for people to use.
"At the moment, the traps that are available in the market that are successful usually have a big tank of propane or butane that it burns. They’re quite expensive. And so we feel that by using volatile odors that are safe and that can mimic carbon dioxide, we may be able to create low-cost traps, affordable ones that can be used by vector control in developing countries as well."
One of the most important developments in science in the last couple of years has been engineering immune cells to fight cancer. But so far, the technique has not always been successful. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are now trying to increase the power of immune white blood cells – called T-cells - to kill tumors. Molecular scientist Wendell Lim may have found a way.
"What we have been developing is a new ways of programming t-cells so we can actually flexibly change their behavior."
Lim says to achieve this, they have created microscopic robots that can move through the body and are now teaching them how to find cancer.
"We have developed a new type of sensor molecule called synthetic notch receptor that we can put in these T-cells and their receptors can be programed to recognize molecules that are unique to cancer."
The future of these molecules could not only help fight tumors, but also combat autoimmune diseases and other physical or mental disorders.
People who have lived in poverty through their youth and midlife – may be at greater risk of cognitive decline when they get older. That’s according to Kristine Yaffe, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. Yaffe has been following a group of young adults from 18 to 30 years old, until they reached their 50s and discovered a warning pattern.
"What we found is those people who, most of the time, or some of the time were in the poverty range, or in hardship did slightly worse on the cognitive testing at midlife."
The researchers tested memory, organizational skills and brain processing speed and are now working on interpreting these results.
"Does this mean this is just the way people are and it’ll stay this way? Does this mean it’s the beginning of something that If that’s the case, Yaffe says catching early signs of cognitive decline is very important for prevention and treatment later on."
It’s been another busy week for us here at Science Today. During a visit at the University of Calfornia, San Francisco, we learned that about 10 to 25 thousand cases of stroke, aneurysm or epilepsy may go undetected each year. Anthony Kim, director of UCSF’s Stroke Center has been studying misclassified cases of neurological death, which were erroneously thought to be sudden cardiac death.
"So, it has kind of implications on the public health estimates, it has implications on the interpretations of death outcomes, in large cardiovascular trials."
And it also has implications on diagnosis. And while on the subject of diagnosis – the rates of childhood asthma and allergies are on the rise in this country, so if you want to lessen your child’s risk, you may want to consider getting a dog. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at UCSF made this connection while studying microbes in newborn babies’ bodies.
"Exposure in early life to a greater breadth of organisms seems to be beneficial and allows the system to accumulate a greater diversity of organisms, which really means a greater diversity of the microbial functions."
In other words, a mixture of home dust and a dog’s dander can help a child become immune to asthma later in life, especially if the pet is brought home when a child is no older than one month. And finally, we crossed the bridge into Berkeley to speak with a cognitive neuroscientist there, who has found that language and memory are actually interconnected. Robert Knight says for decades linguists were ignoring this fact and studying these two brain functions separately.
"One of our areas of research is defining the degree of that connectivity; how the brain rhythms in one area, the hippocampus, are coherent with brain rhythms in the language area, like two people dancing. Are they in synch, right? Are they coherent?"
To hear these and other episodes about the latest University of California research, tune into Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Language and memory are actually interconnected. For decades, linguists were ignoring this fact, studying these two brain functions separately. Robert Knight, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has discovered the connection - now wants to know just how much memory and language interact.
"One of our areas of research is defining the degree of that connectivity, how the brain rhythms in one area, the hippocampus, are coherent with brain rhythms in the language area. It's like two people dancing; are they in sync, right? Are they coherent?"
These new findings will help scientists open up a whole new area of study with intracranial recordings.
“We might be able to use it as an early diagnostic tool, but more importantly it would open up the possibility that we could stimulate the brain to restore the proper brain rhythm."
Knight says this study might also shed new light on diseases affecting language and memory - like autism, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Marijuana may be a recreational drug for some, but it's a human carcinogen and adds to the risk of heart disease. This, according to Stanton Glanz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Glantz says that cannabis legalization gets so much positive attention from the media, that people forget about how bad it can be for their health.
"There should be a large general market media campaign like the media campaign that we run against tobacco."
Which means - no cannabis cartoon characters on TV, smoke-free laws and policies that would protect non-users.
"And if you look at the way that marijuana is being legalized, it’s generally prioritizing business interests and business development over public health. And the proper way to legalize marijuana would be to treat it the way we treat tobacco. We have a large demand reduction program, we have substantial taxes on it and we have a situation where people simply don't want to buy it."
About 10 to 25 thousand cases of stroke, aneurysm or epilepsy may go undetected each year in the United States. This, according to Anthony Kim, director of the University of California, San Francisco Stroke Center. Kim has been studying misclassified cases of neurological death, which were erroneously thought to be sudden cardiac death.
"If you think about the deaths that occur, for instance, in patients that are enrolled in clinical trials or patients that die out-of-hospital, before they can even make it to the hospital, it would account for a substantial proportion of those cases. So, it has kind of implications on the public health estimates. It has implications on the interpretations of death outcomes, in large cardiovascular trials."
Kim says it also has implications on diagnosis, as well as the way medical experts look at the risks and benefits of cardiovascular treatment, such as blood thinners. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
Want your children to be asthma and allergy free? You may want to consider getting a dog. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has discovered this connection while studying microbes in newborn babies’ bodies.
"Exposure in early life to a greater breadth of organisms seems to be beneficial and allows the system to accumulate a greater diversity of organisms, which really means a greater diversity of the microbial functions."
In other words, the mixture of home dust and dog’s dander, can help a child become immune to asthma later in life. This seems to contradict a well-known fact that pets can trigger allergies? But Lynch says timing is everything.
“In later life for example, if asthma or allergies have developed, then exposure to a dog will clearly will trigger allergies.”
So to prevent these immune diseases – a pet should be brought home when a child is no older than one month.
Editor's note: special thanks to Emma for taking the time out of her busy day to pose for the accompanying picture.
We interview a lot of researchers at the University of California, and one thing we hear about a lot is how beneficial it is for researchers to have students and interdisciplinary faculty at their fingertips. Biomedical scientist Gabriela Loots of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is no exception. Loots and her team found that a specific protein inhibits prostate cancer metastasis to the bone and says collaboration has been crucial in this work.
"Around 2005, I started interacting with scientists at UC Merced and then I was interested in having a more formal affiliation with them in the Qualitative Biology Program. And so now I have graduate students who will rotate in my laboratory. And it’s been working out great. So with the UC Davis Cancer Center, we have started interacting with some of the scientists there because of my interest in prostate cancer and now we’re growing to other types of cancer research. And so we just started communicating with some of these scientists and we started collaborating."
Their current research may lead to better prevention and treatment of aggressive forms of prostate cancer that spread to the bone.
Studies show that about 10 percent of Americans are diagnosed with asthma each year. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco studied the microbiome to hone in on why asthma and allergies are so widespread in Western nations.
"Some of the risk factors for allergic asthma include very early life exposure such as a lack of the mother's exposure to livestock or furred pets while she is pregnant, formula feeding, Cesarean section delivery and antibiotic use during pregnancy or very early life of post natal period. And so those risk factors suggest that these factors may influence the microbes in the community of microbes that exist in humans and particularly in very early life."
Knowing this, Lynch says to prevent these immune diseases, scientists and parents should focus on changing children's microbiological development very early in life.
Did you ever wonder what happens in the brain when we finish our friends' sentences or answer fill-in-the-blank questions? A University of California, Berkeley study has found that while looking for the right words, we engage our hippocampus, an area of the brain that stores our memories. Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight says that until now, linguists were not paying attention to this connection.
"What's happened historically is the language has operated independent of the memory field. We have the metaphor that two ships are sailing. You had a language ship sailing and a memory ship sailing. Turns out they are getting berthed at the same port."
This discovery allows scientists to take a closer look at abnormalities in the brain rhythms and this may help patients with different types of brain disorders.
"It might give us some insight as to whether your kid is going down a wrong language development path or it might give us some idea about the problems with accessing semantic knowledge in older person - either which is age- related cognitive decline or maybe something portending or having Alzheimer's disease."
Will marijuana become a "new version" of cigarettes? Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says public health experts need to be cautious about the negative effects of cannabis.
"The historical situation where tobacco was the gateway to marijuana where kids started with tobacco and then graduated to marijuana, that situation’s now totally reversed. Kids think marijuana is harmless and even good for you. They start with marijuana and then move on to tobacco. So the marijuana and tobacco epidemics are really inextricably tied to each other."
Glantz suggests that a better way to approach legalization of marijuana would be to focus on minimizing cannabis use and prioritizing public health over commercial interests and tax revenue generation.
This week on Science Today. Studies show that about 10 percent of Americans are diagnosed with asthma each year. We spoke to a gastroenterologist Susan Lynch of UC San Francisco and learned that they’ve been studying the microbiome to hone in on why asthma and allergies are so widespread in Western nations. She says some of the risk factors include a lack of a mother’s exposure to livestock or furred pets while pregnant.
"And so those risk factors suggest that these factors may influence the microbes and the communities of microbes that exist in humans and particularly in very early life."
This understanding could lead to focusing more on changing a child’s microbiological development very early in life. While at UCSF, we also chatted with Stanton Glantz a professor of medicine. Now that California has joined other states in the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana, Glantz suggests that public health experts be cautious about the negative effects of cannabis.
"Kids think marijuana is harmless and even good for you. They start with marijuana and then move on to tobacco, so the marijuana and tobacco epidemics are really inextricably tied to each other."
And finally, we reflect on the value of doing research within a university system – it’s something we hear about time and time again while interviewing researchers. Biomedical scientist Gabriela Loots of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says her team has greatly benefited from having students and interdisciplinary faculty at their fingertips.
"It’s been working out great. With the UC Davis Cancer Center, we have started interacting with some of the scientists there because of my interest in prostate cancer and now we’re growing to other types of cancer research and so we just started communicating with some of these scientists and we started collaborating."
Find out what other researchers are up to with the University of California system. Tune in to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud - you’re bound to learn a lot. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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After a ‘soda tax’ took effect in low-income neighborhoods in Berkeley, California, researchers discovered the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages took a steep dive in these communities. Study author Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley says instead, those surveyed in these neighborhoods, which often have high rates of obesity and diabetes, reported making healthier choices like drinking more water. Madsen says this is an encouraging sign from a public health perspective.
“Look, it is a little bit like a luxury tax on alcohol or cigarettes. It’s fine. It is your choice. But clearly it should only happen occasionally. We tried to reduce smoking in the United States for many years, and it really was only effective once the tax went into effect.”
Madsen adds that such taxes are successful examples of intervention since it has an impact on people’s health and generates revenue.
"I feel like we’ll continue to look for the tools that are the most effective tools to change, to improve population health.”
When epidemiologists study cohorts – or rather, a group of people who have commonalities such as age, ethnicity or social class – they can often garner information that’s beyond their original research. Janet Wojcicki of the University of California, San Francisco, has been following a Latina cohort that was recruited in pregnancy and followed for a number of years.
"Our primary outcome was really to better understand factors that are related to obesity and development of chronic disease in early childhood, but we also measured telomeres – the protective cap of the DNA."
Shorter telomeres are associated with chronic disease development. Wojcicki found in this cohort that early, exclusive breastfeeding of infants was linked to longer telomeres. She says they are now looking into why this particular cohort has a very high rate of asthma.
"So we’re trying to understand, is it because we have a lot of obesity in our cohort? Is it something about the neighborhoods that families are living in, where they have environmental exposure? So, that’s something else."
One way to improve healthcare in America may be to change just how doctors take care of their patients. This, according to Dr. Anna Chang of the University of California, San Francisco. Chang helped develop a new curriculum called Bridges that aims to teach medical students an array of critical skills, including how to better communicate with patients.
"About 20 years ago, the Institute of Medicine stated that too many people die every year because the process of medicine is not perfect. Sometimes we think that maybe the most important decisions in medicine are - which medications to prescribe or which surgeries to perform, but that is actually not true. Our patients are a lot safer and a lot healthier, they are much more informed when we hear and speak with each other effectively”.
To achieve that, from the first days of school, physicians, nurses, social workers and even patients meet with students – to share their stories and give them advice on how to work together as a team.
Researchers may be a step closer to curing Alzheimer's disease. Robert Knight, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley discovered a new role of the hippocampus. This is the part of the brain where Alzheimer's often starts – and this new insight could bring new hope to patients.
"If you look at these patients with hippocampal damage, they have never been studied in what I would say, a sophisticated manner in terms of their language."
That’s because until now, the hippocampus was known only for storing new memories, but as Knight’s study found, it's also involved in generating language.
"It is not just being told what to do by the cortex and the language areas, they are both contributing to effective language capacities. It kind of elevates the hippocampus out of the memory field and puts it into a cognitive domain, in this case language."
With this knowledge, Knight says new treatment strategies can be developed to restore both memory and language functions that are damaged in Alzheimer's patients.
This week on Science Today. A new role of the brain’s hippocampus has been discovered. Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley explains this is the part of the brain where Alzheimer’s often starts. But until now, the hippocampus was only known for storing memories. But as Knight found, it’s also involved in generating language.
"It is not just being told what to do by the cortex and the language areas. They are both contributing to effective language capacities. It kind of elevates the hippocampus out of the memory field and puts it to a more global cognitive domain – in this case, language."
It just goes to show that researchers still have a lot to learn – and as we found out in our next story, one thing that’s been helpful are study cohorts. Epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki of the University of California, San Francisco says she’s been able to garner so much information beyond her original research following a Latina cohort recruited in pregnancy and followed a number of years.
"Our primary outcome was really to better understand factors that are related to obesity and development of chronic disease in early childhood, but we also measured telomeres, the protective cap of the DNA."
Shorter telomeres are associated with chronic disease development and Wojcicki found that in this cohort, early, exclusive breastfeeding of infants was linked to longer telomeres. And next, we visit the beautiful Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to talk to atmospheric scientist V. ‘Ram’ Ramanathan. He’s written countless studies, which he called “obituaries of the planet’ after successfully predicting a significant increase in global warming within the next two decades. And yet, he felt no one was listening. So, as a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he took his message to the Pope.
"So I told him basically to talk about climate change in his speeches and urge people to be better stewards of the planet. Ten days later, he made this major pronouncement and talked about climate change and warned people if you destroy nature, it will destroy you."
This later became known in climate change communication circles as ‘The Francis Effect’, but that’s a story for another time. You can catch up on all of Science Today’s episodes on iTunes or Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Could it be that time is expanding because space is expanding? That’s a new theory of University of California, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller. And there’s actually a way to test this hypothesis using LIGO, the world’s largest gravitational wave observatory. LIGO recently saw two black holes, 30 times the mass of the sun, coming together in a collapsing event and making one huge, big black hole. This, Muller explains, makes gravitational waves and we can see these waves coming.
"When this happens, you are locally creating millions of square miles of new space. And so if you’re creating new space, you’re creating new time and I calculated how much this was and it turns out to be a thousandth of a second."
So if Muller and his collaborators at CalTech are right, when two black holes merge and create new space, they should also create new time and that would delay the gravitational wave signal that LIGO observes from Earth.
"I’m looking forward to getting a phone call from them saying, either Gee, Rich, your theory is wrong, sorry. Or congratulations, you’ve just explained the flow of time.”
One of the current limitations of commercial 3D printers on the market is the lack of material that’s being used. Mostly it’s thermoplastics, like ABS. So what researchers would like to do is expand the materials used to fabricate devices or functional materials. Engineer Chen Zhu of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says they teamed up with the University of California, Santa Cruz to do just that. What they came up with was a novel, ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel.
"Graphene is a very unique material, so first we developed the graphene aerogel ink that’s a printable ink. So, that means the material is easy to flow through the very small nozzle and after squeezing the printing, the material can maintain the shape and it’s not going to shrink or collapse or deform. It can maintain whatever shape we print it and then we can do the heat treatment to get very good performance of the graphene."
The team also modified the technique to minimize clogging during printing.
If everyone acknowledged that added sugars in our diet are one of the most significant contributors to diseases like diabetes and heart attacks, there would be a better chance that public health agencies and municipalities could partner with industry to produce healthier products for people to consume. At least that’s the hope of Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley. She recently found that a soda tax in Berkeley led to lower consumption or sugary drinks.
"I think some would say “sugar-sweetened beverages have been unfairly singled out. They are not the only problematic item in our diet.” This is true. There’s a few things about them that really make them stand out. They are the largest source of added sugars in the American’s diet. The other problem with sugar-sweetened beverages is that we don’t usually compensate for those calories."
Madsen’s study found a 21 percent drop in soda consumption in low-income communities a year after the city of Berkeley passed an excise tax. Now other cities are looking to do this, too.
"My hope is that there will be strong evaluations in place to see what’s the impact then as this spreads to other places."
WiFi networks are so ubiquitous and now researchers are working on novel ways to utilize existing signals – including figuring out how to optimize heating and cooling systems in homes or buildings. But how?
"You need to be able to estimate your occupancy with WiFi signals."
That’s Yasamin Mostofi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She runs a research lab there on mobile sensor networks.
"That’s something that we’ve been doing more recently – trying to count people with just WiFi signals. Over the whole building, you will have more WiFi links and so then you can extend it to larger areas. So basically the WiFi card is just recording its received power for a period of time and just from that signal, we want to figure out how many people were there, which areas are more crowded? Then the heating and cooling can be optimized accordingly."
Will doctors of the future and their patients learn to speak the same language? The University of California, San Francisco recently set this ambitious goal with a radically updated curriculum called Bridges. The idea is to get new students involved with clinical teams from the very start - something that traditionally trained doctors did not get to do until a decade into their practice. Dr. Anna Chang, who helped develop Bridges, says a big part of the training is about mindset: to put physicians in the patient's shoes.
"We allow first year medical students to work on things like decreasing unnecessary hospital readmissions, to improve patients' understanding of high risk medications or to decrease waiting times in emergency departments - devise strategists to help patients make their appointments."
So instead of just memorizing facts in their classrooms the way the old-school doctors did, Chang says, the Bridges' students get out there in the field and learn real-world skills.
This week on Science Today. We’ve all experienced spaces with uneven heating and cooling systems, so what if this can be optimized in novel ways? We spoke to electrical and computer engineer Yasamin Mostofi of UC Santa Barbara who is using existing WiFi signals to essentially conduct a headcount. But why?
"You need to be able to estimate your occupancy with WiFi signals. We want to figure out how many people were there, which areas are more crowded, then the heating and cooling can be optimized accordingly."
If counting calories is more your thing, you may want to know more about added sugars in your diet. This is the one of the most significant contributors to diseases like diabetes and heart attacks, so Kris Madsen of UC Berkeley says if everyone was aware of this, there would be a better chance that public health agencies and municipalities could partner with industry to produce healthier products for people to consume. Madsen recently found that a soda tax in Berkeley led to lower consumption of sugary drinks in low-income neighborhoods.
"I think some would say sugar-sweetened beverages have been unfairly singled out, they are not the only problematic item in our diet. This is true. There’s a few things about them that really makes them stand out – first of all, they are the largest source of added sugars in the American’s diet; the other problem is that we don’t usually compensate for those calories."
This week we also visit the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where engineers are looking to overcome one of the current limitations of commercial 3D printers on the market – that is, the lack of material that’s being used. Engineer Chen Zhu helped develop a novel, ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel to expand the fabrication of devices or functional materials.
"So first we developed the graphene aerogel ink that’s a printable ink, so that means the material is easy to flow through the very small nozzle and after squeezing the printing, the material can maintain the shape and it’s not going to shrink or collapse or deform."
There’s just so much research going on at the University of California – subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud or Stitcher to hear these and other episodes. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for listening.
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One the objectives of a new physician training curriculum at the University of California, San Francisco is to ensure that future doctors can speak to their patients in an understandable way. Dr. Anna Chang of the University of California, San Francisco, who helped develop the Bridges curriculum, explains that doctors do need to translate everything the patients say into medical language.
"The patients will say, “I have a pain in my elbow and I’ve had a pain in my elbow for some weeks. We have to translate that to each other in order to diagnose that and treat that into something like, “This is a patient who has had an intermittent oligoarthritis for a subacute duration.” And that sounds nothing like what the patient told us."
Doctors often continue using this language with patients.
"So starting with day one, we are asking our students to practice what the world looks like from their patients’ perspectives."
In recent months, we’ve learned a lot about mosquitoes due to the spread of the Zika virus. For one thing, they have an incredibly sensitive olfactory system. Entomologist Anandsankar Ray of the University of California, Riverside explains that when we exhale carbon dioxide, it gets carried downwind in the shape of plumes that can travel quite a distance.
"And the mosquito, when it comes across one such plume, it starts flying upwind tracking these plumes moving closer and closer towards us. And when it’s really close, it picks up on other odors that we emit from our skin and recognizes that “oh, this is a human being that is going to be a source of blood and makes a beeline for us.”
But there is a crack in their olfactory armor that Ray and his colleagues are taking advantage of; it’s so sensitive that they can interfere with the system using simple, natural molecules to disrupt how they hone in on us.
There’s nothing like a trip back home to visit family and friends – or attending a college reunion - to make you ponder the passage of time. And as we reported this past week on Science Today, University of California, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller has proposed a new theory about the flow of time.
"My theory postulates that space and time are so tightly linked in general relativity, that if you create more space, you’re creating more time. If the expansion of the universe, starting with the Big Bang and now coasting ahead is constantly creating more space, it must also be creating new time."
Muller theorizes that that space between the galaxies and the newly created time is what we call ‘now’. Muller is collaborating with CalTech on this and has proposed using LIGO, an experiment that detects gravitational waves created by merging black holes, to test the theory. So we’ll stay tuned on that one. And on the subject of space, we also spoke to radiobiologist Matt Coleman of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about his work developing a medical device that provides a comprehensive in-flight medical diagnostic system. This will help NASA in their push to better understand the long-tern effects of space travel.
"This tool we’re building, you know we think it’s going to have a huge health benefit, but it’s going to have a huge research benefit … and so getting this up into space and even on the International Space Station, it will have a huge benefit, just in the research that we can do."
And a new curriculum for medical students at the University of California, San Francisco will help with better treatment for patients here on terra firma. Dr. Anna Chang, who helped develop Bridges, says one aspect is to help doctors better communicate with their patients – including translating medical language commonly used into something patients, families and other care providers can comprehend.
"So, starting with day one, we are asking our students to practice what the world looks like from their patients’ perspectives."
These are just some of the University of California stories we covered this past week. Listen to these and other Science Today episodes on iTunes or Soundcloud. Thanks for listening - until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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There’s still a lot of the unknown when it comes to the long-term impacts of space travel, so there is a big push by NASA to better understand these effects. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, radiobiologist Matt Coleman is part of team that has developed a small medical device that provides a comprehensive in-flight medical diagnostic system. Coleman explains that it can detect diseases from long-term exposure to microgravity and exposure to radiation.
"This tool we’re building, you know we think it’s going to have a huge health benefit, but it’s going to have a huge research benefit because we don’t really know how do all of these things actually respond in space, in exploration, in research animals, let alone humans. And so getting this up into space and even on the International Space Station, it will have a huge benefit, just in the research that we can do."
The portable diagnostic device can also be used for battlefield medicine, in Third World countries or even in the case of a radiological event like Chernobyl or Fukishima.
The flow of time has been pondered by the likes of Aristotle, Augustine and Einstein. Now, physicist Richard Muller, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has proposed a new theory.
"My theory postulates that space and time are so tightly linked in general relativity that if create more space, you’re creating more time. If the expansion of time, starting with the Big Bang and now coasting ahead is constantly creating more space, it must also be creating new time and the newly creating space is the space between the galaxies and the newly created time is what we call ‘now’."
Muller’s theory of the flow of time led to a collaboration with Caltech that explains the theory in more detail – using mathematics – and proposes a way to test it using LIGO, an experiment that detects gravitational waves created by merging black holes. Stay tuned!
Your computer network at home or at the office probably has a list of things on them, like handsets, phones, tablets. Imagine now how that may look scaled up at a large government agency like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, administrators have to view an entire network system from a vantage point of security. Computer scientist Domingo Colon says because there are needs that are lacking in some commercial offerings, they developed their own tool to watch and probe a network. It’s called Network Mapping Systems or NeMS.
"One of the things that our tool does is it provides a visualization of exactly what you have just done to your environment and so it helps reduce the complexity by providing a way for you to actually understand and visualize your changes. Not just the configuration information, not just one piece of data, but really to look at the entire organization, how it’s behaving, how it’s structured. It’s been used inside the government and now with the work of commercializing the product, we’re looking to get it out there to help the private sector because we all have the same threats facing us and cyber security is extremely costly when things go wrong."
This week on Science Today. A recent UCLA study has found that diet and exercise can reduce protein build-ups linked to Alzheimer’s disease in those who have subtle memory loss, but have yet been diagnosed with dementia.
"A few years ago, nobody ever thought that you could measure a change with just an exercise intervention, so there are some big advances being made."
That’s Alzhiemer’s disease researcher Karen Gylys, who we interviewed recently at UCLA about her own novel work looking at Alzheimer’s disease progression in the synapses. Since the disease is so complicated, Gylys explains it will take more than just one solution to stave it off, but she is bolstered by her work and those of her colleagues’. And at the UC San Francisco, medical students and are excited to be part of a new curriculum called Bridges, gives us a glimpse into what doctors of the future may be like. Dr. Anna Chang, who helped develop the coursework, says they’re basically pioneering the way medical students are being taught.
"Never before have 150 first year medical students gone out to the clinical settings and been challenged to answer questions like, what do you see? What ideas do you have? And what can you do to improve the lives of patients? We are giving our medical students a chance to do so from the moment that they step in the door."
And materials scientists and mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudhu of UC Riverside describes how car manufacturers are striving to reduce carbon pollution and improve fuel efficiency by producing cars using lightweight materials without sacrificing strength. Mathaudhu says just the copper cabling alone in the average car, which is used for electrical conductivity, weighs about 300 pounds.
"If we could get a fraction of that conductivity in aluminum, it would not only be cheaper to implement, it would be lighter weight. So, one of the interesting things that we can do is we can use nanostructured features in aluminum to maintain the conductivity that it has while boosting the strength of the aluminum."
Learn more about University of California research – subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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In an effort to reduce carbon pollution and improve fuel economy, auto manufacturers are racing to produce cars using lightweight materials without sacrificing strength. The average car has about 300 pounds worth of cabling alone. This is for electrical conductivity. Materials scientist and mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudhu of the University of California, Riverside says most of it is made out of pricey, thick copper.
"If we could get a fraction of that conductivity in aluminum it would not only be cheaper to implement, it would be lighter weight even though it will never had the conductively that copper will inherently have – and so one of the interesting things that we can do is we can use nanostructured features in aluminum to maintain the conductivity that it has while boosting the strength of the aluminum. And that provides motivation for people to start using lighter weight conductive aluminum cable versus copper cable, which now comes at a cost premium and a weight premium as well, so you’re solving two problems at once."
Trying to influence behavior in public health campaigns can be tricky because education alone, while important, doesn't always change behavior. And so when it happens naturally, it's a big deal. In an encouraging sign in the fight against obesity, Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley, found a 21 percent drop in the consumption of sugary drinks after the city of Berkeley, California implemented a penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.
"Looking at the 21 percent drop to me is the most exciting finding of my career because it suggests that here's something that actually has a really big impact and it's incredibly simple and straightforward."
Overall, the results suggest that a general excise tax like this, coupled with a public-awareness campaign, can have major benefits.
"The other thing that we saw that was really promising in the study was people were drinking more water. So, it looks like people were switching from sugar-sweetened beverages to really what I would say is the healthiest alternative."
A recent UCLA study has found that diet and exercise can reduce protein build-ups linked to Alzheimer's disease in those who have subtle memory loss, but have yet been diagnosed with dementia.
"The data that lifestyle, that diet and exercise can impact cognition relatively quickly, that's pretty new data. A few years ago, nobody ever thought that you could measure a change with just an exercise intervention, so there are some big advances being made."
That's Alzheimer's disease researcher Karen Gylys of the UCLA School of Nursing. We interviewed Gylys recently about her own novel work looking at Alzheimer's disease progression in the synapses, where the brain cells transmit impulses. At the time, she explained how complicated Alzheimer's is and how it will take more than just one solution to stave it off, but she was bolstered by findings that exercise and a Mediterranean-rich diet were linked to lower levels of plaques in brain scans.
"Understanding the power of these lifestyle interventions makes me optimistic."
What will doctors of the future be like? The medical school at the University of California, San Francisco has launched a unique curriculum called Bridges, which may offer us a glimpse into how future physicians will be trained. Dr. Anna Chang, a professor of geriatric medicine, was involved in planning Bridges from the start.
"We are pioneering the way that we're teaching medical students and we are ahead of others in the country in the scope and depth of what we're doing."
Chang explains that doctors practicing today started medical school by just memorizing facts. So what makes Bridges so different?
"Never before have 150 first-year medical students gone out to the clinical settings and been challenged to answer questions like, what do you see? What ideas do you have? And what ca you do to improve the lives of patients? So, we are giving our medical students a chance to do so from the moment that they step in the door."
This week on Science Today. It’s been over a year since the city of Berkeley, California implemented a ‘soda tax’ and a team of UC Berkeley public health researchers took the opportunity to see how it has impacted consumption. Kris Madsen of the School of Public Health says they found a 21 percent drop in the consumption of soda and other sugary beverages in the Berkeley’s low-income neighborhoods, which is an encouraging sign in the fight against obesity, especially in areas hit hard by the consequences of obesity and diabetes.
"It’s the kind of evidence that we really want because what we’re trying to find are tools that can change people’s behaviors. Education alone has not been effective but if this is a really effective tool, then it’s a tool we need to use."
And on the subject of tools, UC San Francisco physicians are using holograms, or 3D images formed by the inference of light beams from a laser, in about 20 percent of their CT colonography cases. Dr. Judy Yee says the goal is to appeal to patients to prevent disease.
"But also, to make it easier for the radiologists who interpret these studies to make it engaging and easier and as accurate, if not more accurate."
Speaking of accurate studies, it’s been over 40 years since atmospheric scientist V. Ramanathan of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography predicted how the earth’s climate would change by 2010. And while his accurate model continued to show further warming, Ramanathan says we can still ‘bend the curve’ in this chart if we take collective measures now.
"We have the science and we have the technology. This is where the intitiatives taken in California could shine a brightest light possible on this problem … to mitigate climate change by using solar fuel cells and waste gas can provide like a beacon for the nation and for the planet to follow."
Learn more about these and other research findings at the University of California. Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also find us on Soundcloud and Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for tuning in.
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Over a year after the city of Berkeley, California implemented a ‘soda tax’, a team of researchers have reported a 21 percent drop in the consumption of soda and other sugary beverages in Berkeley’s low-income neighborhoods. Study author Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkley’s School of Public Health, says this is an encouraging sign in the fight against obesity.
"The initial results in Berkeley certainly suggest that soda taxes do exactly what we’re hoping they’ll do – and that’s reduce the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. And it’s the kind of evidence that we really want because what we’re trying to find are tools that can change people’s behaviors. Education alone has not been effective. But if this is a really effective tool, then it’s a tool we need to use."
Madsen adds that it was also encouraging to note the substantial decline was reported in low-income communities because they often bear the brunt of the health consequences of obesity and diabetes. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
You’ve most probably seen holograms in the media and in the movies – these are 3D images formed by the interference of light beams from a laser. Now, imagine it being applied to internal organs to detect disease, specifically in the colon. At the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Judy Yee is doing just that for about 20 percent of her CT colonography cases.
"I was first introduced to it by EchoPixel and was able to combine my knowledge of colonic pathology and disease and what I know about CT colonography to work with them, to develop sort of the next step in where to go with CT colonography."
The goal is to make this a study that’s appealing to patients to prevent disease.
"But also to make it easier for the radiologists who interpret these studies, to make it engaging and easier and as accurate, if not more accurate."
An older generation antibiotic that’s currently used in animals to reduce bacterial infections was found to block contemporary strains of Zika virus in human tissue in the lab. We met up with Dr. Lenore Pereira of UC San Francisco, who joined forces with colleagues at UC Berkeley to make this discovery.
"What’s interesting about this drug, it’s called Duramycin, it’s a small molecule inhibitor and it works directly against the virus envelope – it doesn’t work against the cell, so it’s very specific for Zika virus, Dengue, Ebola. We are thrilled about the finding."
And over at the Livermore Lab, computer scientists are excited their software-based network security tool is overcoming some of the limitations of commercial-based products. It’s called Network Mapping System, or NeMS and as Domingo Colon explains, it gives administrators and security personnel a better way to constantly assess what a user’s environment looks like.
"It provides them a pretty immediate feedback to figure out who’s doing what and is this a problem? Sometimes you need that immediacy and to determine from that information is it something that you need to take action on?"
Meanwhile, materials scientists at UC Riverside describe how their work with nanocrystalline metals can be used beyond automotive and transportation applications.
"Including things like biomedical implants. If we can make things like stents and facial implants out of lightweight materials like magnesium, the magnesium will also dissolve in the body over time and the implant may not have to be removed."
To hear these and other segments about the latest University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Nanocrystalline metals and alloys have been the subject of considerable research in recent years because of advances in computational materials science and the fact it’s properties can create lighter and stronger metals for automobiles. Materials scientist and mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudhu of the University of California, Riverside, says nanocrystalline metals can be used beyond automotive and transportation applications.
"Nanocrystalline metals can be used for a variety of different applications, including things like biomedical implants. If we can make things like stents and facial implants out of lightweight materials like magnesium, the magnesium will also dissolve in the body over time and the implant may not have to be removed."
It can also be used for electrical conduction.
"To be able to design wires and cables that can conduct energy in more efficient ways. There’s quite a variety of things that can be done using nanostructured metals and alloys that will open up once these materials are mature enough."
A team of computer scientists and engineers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a software-based tool called Network Mapping System, or NeMS, which improves network security. As computer scientist Domingo Colon explains, one of the limitations on current products is that they’re based on configuration.
"So, they want to validate that your configuration is as you think it is. And that’s fine – but what we found is that how something is configured is not necessarily the same thing as how it’s used. Meaning, you might have configured it within a given intent, but someone might be using it for a different type of intent."
And it’s not often nefarious. For instance, people may add products or devices to their computer that they think will be helpful to them. What NeMs does is allow network administrators and security personnel to keep a constant assessment of what that environment looks like.
"It provides them a pretty immediate feedback to figure out who’s doing what and is this a problem. Sometimes you need that immediacy and to determine from that information is it something that you need to take action on."
An older generation antibiotic currently used in animals to reduce bacterial infections was found to block contemporary strains of Zika virus in human tissue in the lab. Dr. Lenore Pereira of the University of California, San Francisco joined forces with UC Berkeley to make this discovery.
"What’s interesting about this drug, it’s called Duramycin, it’s a small molecule inhibitor. And it works directly against the virus envelope – it doesn’t work against the cell. So it’s very specific for Zika virus, Dengue, Ebola; I mean, we are thrilled about the finding."
The drug blocked the transmission of Zika virus from mother to fetus from the two routes of infection Pereira helped discover; the placenta in the first trimester and the amniotic sac in the second.
"Just this basic knowledge helps us now to ask other questions about what is the best way to reduce infection in a pregnant woman."
This week on Science Today. It’s been 20 years since two UC San Francisco physicians proposed a new kind of doctor – a hospitalist – which is basically a generalist who specializes in inpatient care. Dr. Steve Pantilat was hired at UCSF as a hospitalist in 1996. And while I may be dating myself, I first interviewed Pantilat not long after. Then, about three years after his hire, he founded one of the nation’s first hospital-based palliative care programs at UCSF. Recently, I asked what motivated him at the time.
"I had this longstanding interest in ethics and what I liked about palliative care is that it took the ethics and really brought it to the care of patients in a very real way."
Palliative care has been the focus of Pantilat’s career ever since. Meanwhile, at the Berkeley Lab, physical chemist Kevin Wilson has been focused on the clouds – his lab simulated the microphysics of how cloud droplets form.
"We hope that we can develop more accurate predictions that ultimately can go into models, climate models, that hopefully long term, will give us more accurate predictions of the kinds of climate change processing we might expect in the future."
And have you heard of the American Gut Project? This is a crowdcsourced, crowdfunded citizen science project co-founded by Rob Knight of UC San Diego. The project allows anyone to see what their microbiome looks like.
"At the moment, I should point out that the benefit is primarily in terms of scientific knowledge and just understanding what makes a difference to your microbiome and what doesn’t. But as an increasing number of diseases get linked to the microbiome, it’s possible that in the future, we’ll be able to develop tests for particular diseases that are based on the microbiome."
Don’t miss these and other episodes about University of California research – subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening. I’m Larissa Branin.
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The meteorology of cloud formation is relatively well understood. Physical chemist Kevin Wilson of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory explains that’s because it's pretty easy to predict when and where clouds will form in the atmosphere.
"Conditions have the right temperature, the right amount of water vapor, but what's more uncertain, has been a challenge for models, for example, is to understand what I would call the microphysics, which is how do individual cloud droplets form."
Wilson and his colleagues simulated the microphysics in the lab, using custom-built equipment to model cloud droplet formation. This gave them a much better understanding of what's going on at the microscopic level, which may improve the accuracy of climate change models.
"We hope that we can develop more accurate predictions that ultimately can go into models, climate models, that hopefully long term, will give us more accurate predictions of the kinds of climate change processing we might expect in the future."
A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are bioinspired – that is, they’re finding inspiration from nature and biology to create synthetic materials for a range of problems. Bioengineer Phil Messersmith says while there’s particular interest in the medical field, it’s not exclusive. In fact, their work creating super-strong mollusk-inspired adhesives for fetal surgery, is also of interest to a group of battery technology scientists at the Berkeley Lab.
"For lithium ion batteries, they need better binders for the particles – there’s huge swelling/de-swelling that happens when you charge and discharge one of these batteries and you have to have effective adhesion between the binder and these particles, otherwise they form cracks and the electrical pathway is interrupted. So, some of the adhesion from our mussel research can be implemented into this battery technology, so we’re doing that as well."
Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men and women combined in the United States. And yet, only about 50 percent of individuals who are recommended to get screened, do so. Dr. Judy Yee of the University of California, San Francisco is a pioneer of the use of CT colonography, or virtual colonoscopy. This less-invasive technology recently scored high marks.
"On June 15, the U.S. Preventative Service Task Force released their final recommendation for colorectal screening and they included CT colonography under their A rating. That means that every insurance company in this country will have to cover CT colonography for screening. And this is great news for patients. I think it will really provide improved access to patients who have been hesitant to come in for colorectal cancer screening because they don't want an invasive technique."
This will hopefully lead to Medicare reimubursement, too.
It’s been twenty years since two University of California, San Francisco physicians proposed a new kind of a doctor – the hospitalist. This is basically a generalist who specializes in inpatient care. Dr. Steve Pantilat was hired as a UCSF hospitalist in 1996, and three years later founded one of the nation’s first hospital-based palliative care programs at UCSF. We asked what motivated him.
"I had this longstanding interest in ethics and what I liked about palliative care is that it took the ethics and really brought it to the care of patients in a very real way."
Pantilat explains that physicians caring for the very sick were often not trained to talk to their patients and their families about what decisions they wanted to make.
"In palliative care, what we say is “let’s help you do that”; we have expertise in this. I didn’t even know that it was called palliative care, but then I realized it actually has a name, what I liked to do and ever since then, that’s been the focus of my career."
Astrophysicist Richard Klein of the University of California, Berkeley has spent years developing code for a massive simulation that covers 700,000 years of star formation. The simulation was so large that it had to be run on NASA’s most powerful supercomputer. And now, Klein plans to create an even bigger program.
"To develop a comprehensive theory of star formation, which is our ultimate goal, you have to start at large scales. And so over the last several years, we’ve been extending the calculations to start at much larger gas clouds within the galaxy, and then evolving those simulations to the gravitational collapse of these huge clouds, all the way down to the point where they actually can form stars."
The major theme of the last few years has been to bring in more relevant physics in larger scale simulations. The hope is that their expansion will more accurately reflect the initial conditions of star formation.
Doctors at the University of California, San Francisco have observed that colonoscopies performed with CT scans and viewed as holograms are just as accurate as the traditional exam. But can this virtual holography be used for other purposes? Physician Judy Yee says the technology could be applied to other parts of the body, from the brain to the liver. It could also help surgeons prepare for procedures.
"Pre-surgical planning is going to be, I think, a large part of this. It will allow surgeons to get a sense of the size of lesions, the proximity to key structures like vessels and to potentially practice the approach to a tumor, for example. What’s the best and safest approach to a tumor? And that can be performed really, any part of the body."
The goal is to make the images as easy to interpret and precise as possible.
"This is extremely new. We are in the validation phase now for looking at accuracy, and after that we should see increasing use of the product."
Did you know that researchers are developing new materials that can soak up excess drugs inside your body? Engineer Chelsea Chen of the University of California, Berkeley is building a polymer membrane that can absorb circulating chemotherapy drugs after treatment. The membrane is known as a ChemoFilter, and how it absorbs drugs depends on the materials inside it.
"We study the structure-property relationship of the polymer membranes. So basically by establishing the structure-property relationships, we can predict what kind of structure would work best, so we could design the optimal performance membrane. That’s our goal."
When it comes to testing the filter, Chen is trying to create an environment similar to what the membrane would be exposed to within the body.
"We are trying to improve the design to mimic body environment more closely, instead of just doing a simple benchtop experiment. So we’re working on both a more real environment in vitro experiment and also the next step is the in vivo."
This week on Science Today. Did you know that nearly 40 percent of worldwide agricultural crops are destroyed by insects – in particular, fruit flies such as the spotted-wing Drosophila. These pests feed on ripening fruits, laying eggs inside berries and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural damage. According to UC Riverside entomologist Anandasankar Ray, most flies go for rotting fruits that have fallen off plants.
"But these flies will go after the ripening fruit. So this is of particular concern because when you have fruit or produce that is close to harvest, you really do not want to spray toxic chemicals on them."
Ray describes a safe repellent they’ve developed, which successfully warded off hungry flies in the lab. Also in the lab, this one at UC Berkeley, we talk to engineer Chelsea Chen who is testing how their ChemoFilter works in a natural environment. This is a polymer membrane that can absorb excess, circulating chemotherapy drugs in one’s body after treatment.
"We are trying to improve the design to mimic body environment more closely instead of just doing a simple benchtop experiment. So, we’re working on both a more real environment in vitro experiment and also the next step is the in vivo."
And at UC San Francisco, doctors are seeing things in a whole new way – literally. Dr. Judy Yee describes how they’re using virtual holography to perform colonoscopies and how this technology may also be applied to other parts of the body and help surgeons prepare for procedures.
"It will allow surgeons to get a sense of the size of lesions, the proximity to key structures like vessels and to potentially practice the approach to a tumor, for example."
There’s just so much going on at the University of California – keep on top of all the latest discoveries and breakthroughs. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also follow us on Soundcloud or Facebook. Be well, and until next time I’m Larissa Branin.
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How do researchers test new glues for fetal surgery? Bioengineer Phillip Messersmith of the University of California, Berkeley is synthesizing bio-inspired glues to seal the delicate amniotic sac during a procedure. The glues are based off an adhesive used by mussels, the hard-shelled mollusks, to stick to wet surfaces. And it takes multiple rounds of testing to make sure such a product does in fact work.
"The entry level testing would involve some mimic of a tissue. We could use, for example, and do routinely use, sausage casing, which actually has relatively similar mechanical properties to the fetal membranes."
If some of these formulations look promising, the next step is to test them on fetal membrane tissues like discarded placentas from births.
"For formulations that work well in that situation, then we can advance to a third stage which would be pre-clinical animal studies."
Messersmith and his team are currently working to strengthen their second generation of glues.
Nearly 40 percent of worldwide agricultural crops are destroyed by insects. Take the small invasive fruit fly known as the spotted wing Drosophila. It feeds on ripening fruits, laying eggs inside berries, causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural damage. Entomologist Anandasankar Ray of the University of California, Riverside says most flies go for rotting fruits that have fallen off plants.
"But these flies will go after the ripening fruit. And so this is of particular concern because when you have fruit or produce that is close to harvest, you really do not want to spray toxic chemical on them."
Ray helped identify a safe repellent that uses a grape-smelling chemical compound that’s produced naturally in fruits in small amounts. In the lab, ripe blueberries coated with it warded off the hungry flies.
"We will continually improve upon these active ingredients that we found. It’s not a stagnant process, it is technology-driven and innovation-driven."
This week on Science Today. It’s been over three decades since Dr. Michael Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco performed the first fetal surgery – and now Harrison is teaming up with bioengineers at UC Berkeley to develop a better glue for fetal surgery. We met with engineer Phillip Messersmith to learn about this super adhesive, which is inspired by mussels. That’s right, the edible ocean dwellers.
"The idea that we could borrow ideas from the mussel and use them in a synthetic material is something that we embraced. And so if you want to do that, you have to at least have some basic level of understanding of how this glue works in nature."
Meanwhile, in another collaboration between UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, researchers have joined forces to help the scientific community get a better understanding of how mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus can infect isolated placental cells. UCSF virologist Lenore Pereira explains how they did this.
"We infected these cells with both the prototype African strain and the Nicaraguan strain from the new epidemics that have been associated with microcephaly. Somehow, cells were more susceptible to the Nicaraguan strains."
Preventing the chain of infection from mother to fetus remains a challenge, but we’re glad to know scientists like Pereira and Dr. Eva Harris at UC Berkeley are on the case. It’s also great to learn that researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are leading an international study to conduct the first comprehensive study of cool roofs in China. Staff scientist Ronnen Levinson says these are the white coatings that provide energy cost savings by reflecting more sunlight than an ordinary dark roof.
"We were taking something that was well understood elsewhere in the world and extending it to a very important country with a very large population that’s actively seeking to save energy and reduce its carbon footprint."
Listen to this and other episodes. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Stay tuned for more great discoveries by University of California researchers. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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How do you test a new theory on how cephalopods see color? Creatures like octopuses only have one type of light receptor in their eyes, meaning they have black and white vision. But graduate student Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley teamed up with his father, Harvard astrophysicist Christopher Stubbs, to design a computer model simulating how cephalopods might be able to use their strangely shaped pupils to detect color.
"There’ve been a number of studies studying the physical optical properties of cephalopod eyes, and then a really rich history of behavioral experiments on cephalopods. So we used the measured optical properties of cephalopod eyes, and then we were able to complete our computer simulation to be able to look at the refractive properties of cephalopod eyes with real spectra that they might encounter in their natural habitat. And I’d say we sort of show, as a proof of concept, that this could work for those organisms and that it’s consistent with prior behavioral data."
It turns out that contrast was particularly important for picking out colors.
Can you expect a colonoscopy performed via CT scan to be as accurate as a conventional colonoscopy? Physician Judy Yee of the University of California, San Francisco says innovative CT colonographies, or CTCs, are becoming a good alternative.
"CT colonography is an imaging test that we would like to use for not only diagnosis of colorectal cancer, but for screening for colorectal cancer. There are many peer-reviewed papers and research that’s been done, including here, comparing the traditional CT colonography method to colonoscopy and have found that they’re pretty much equivalent for the clinically significant polyps. The true 3D, or the virtual holographic version of CT colonography is expected to be as accurate, if not more accurate."
Yee is currently conducting larger studies on the procedure, which has proven to have multiple benefits.
"So that’s another advantage, actually, of the CTC, is that you don’t need sedation at all."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a historic travel alert for pregnant women going to Florida, where over a dozen cases of the Zika virus have been reported. This makes the outbreak in South America now a lot closer to home. At the University of California, San Francisco, researcher Lenore Pereira discovered how the Zika virus can infect isolated placental cells.
"We infected these cells with both the prototype African strain and the Nicaraguan strain from the new epidemics that have been associated with microcephaly."
The first human cases of Zika were reported in Uganda in the 1950s.
"We realized that it was an interesting comparison because the Ugandan strain required more virus to infect placental cells than the Nicaraguan strains. Somehow, cells were more susceptible to the Nicaraguan strains."
But preventing the chain of infection from mother to fetus still remains a challenge.
It’s been 35 years since the first fetal surgery was performed by Dr. Michael Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco . And now engineers at the University of California, Berkeley are teaming up with Harrison to develop a fetal surgery glue that’s inspired by mussels – yes, the edible ocean dwellers. UC Berkeley engineer Phillip Messersmith says they’re synthesizing a glue that’s based on the tough adhesive that mussels produce to stick to rocks.
"The idea that we could borrow ideas from the mussel and use them in a synthetic material is something that we embraced. And so if you want to do that, you have to at least have some basic level of understanding of how this glue works in nature."
Mussels secrete a series of protein threads to anchor to a wet surface, so Messersmith and his team have created synthetic polymers that mimic the glue. The hope is that this glue may alleviate current risks of rupturing the protective membrane of the amniotic sac.
"Now we’re embarking on a four-year project for fetal surgery glues."
One of the big issues in the field of renewable energy is coming up with better energy storage methods. The goal is to have systems with what’s called ‘high energy density’, so it holds a lot of energy, but can be discharged and charged quickly. To this end, staff scientist Marcus Worsley of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says their team has joined forces with researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz to create the first 3D-printed supercapacitor using an ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel.
"That’s one of the big efforts here is to make some of these holy grail sort of devices. And the expertise that we have here in materials synthesis, as well as 3D printing, and additive manufacturing, we’d like to kind of join those things together, which is why we have this collaboration going on between engineering and physical and life science to really try to take on some of these very big challenges that face us today."
The graphene-based inks used in their 3D printed supercapacitors opens the door to a whole host of novel designs of highly efficient energy storage systems.
Compared to the rest of the body, the brain has higher levels of mineral nutrients like copper, zinc, and iron. This observation led chemist Chris Chang of the University of California, Berkeley to probe down to the level of the neurons, where he found copper was mediating conversations between cells.
"So we ended up studying the interface between metals and neuroscience for a while, and the thing that we ended up finding was that copper is important for having brain cells communicate with each other normally."
Chang discovered that copper can essentially turn off signals between cells.
"The idea is that when two brain cells talk to each other and store and transfer information, there’s a movement of copper that occurs between the cells. And so if two cells talk to each other, the copper moves to tell the cells that the signal now can be sort of turned off. So you’re almost, like telling them to hang up the telephone."
This was the first study directly observing the communication role of copper in the brain.
This week on Science Today. University of California researchers are on the front lines when it comes to figuring out how the Zika virus makes its way to a fetus. Dr. Lenore Pereira of UC San Francisco, worked with UC Berkeley researchers, to show there are two routes used by Zika to make its way to a developing baby.
"We were able to isolate human cells from the placenta and infect them with Zika virus and show that the virus could replicate in cells that came from the placenta itself or from the fetal membranes."
The team also discovered that an existing antibiotic may be able to limit the damage wreaked by the virus. Meanwhile, UCSF researchers are also looking to keep healthy babies healthier later in life. Epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki discovered a link between breastfeeding and longer telomere length. Telomeres are the protective caps on our DNA and the shorter they are, the more risk of chronic disease.
"We know from other studies that breastfeeding has a whole array of benefits, but we don’t really know in all cases what that mechanism is and so the fact that it’s impacting at the cellular level was very exciting."
UC Berkeley chemists are also getting down to the level of neurons to find out just how the nutrient copper mediates conversations between cells. Chris Chang says they’ve been studying the interface between metals and neuroscience for a while.
"And the thing that we ended up finding was that copper is important for having brain cells communicate with each other normally."
Don’t miss the latest University of California research news. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. And don’t forget to look us up on Facebook. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today
Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/zika_infection
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/breastfeeding_benefits
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/copper_brain
From colonizing microbiomes to lowering the risk of allergies, breastfeeding is well known to have many health benefits in children. But what’s happening on the cellular level is a little more uncertain. According to epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki of the University of California, San Francisco, early breastfeeding may in fact be linked to longer telomeres. These are the protective caps on our DNA. Shorter telomeres are known to increase the risk of chronic disease later on in life.
"Early exclusive breastfeeding and breastfeeding to 6 months of age were associated with longer telomeres when children entered kindergarten/elementary school. Cause we know from other studies that breastfeeding has a whole array of benefits – immunological, protective against respiratory illnesses, protective against obesity. But we don’t really know in all cases what the mechanism is. And so the fact that it’s impacting at the cellular level was very exciting."
Colonoscopies are beginning to take a more futuristic form, thanks to radiologist Judy Yee of the University of California, San Francisco. Yee has pioneered the use of CT colonographies to examine the colon using graphical software and images from a CT scan. And the sci-fi part? The scans can also be viewed as holograms.
"I have combined my interest in CT colonography with this novel visualization platform to be able to view the data in ways that allow us to pick up certain lesions of the colon easier. I started working on this holographic version because I thought it was a more intuitive way for radiologists and physicians to view anatomy of the body. It pulls the 2D data into what we call true-3D space, so that we could use not only visual cues but manual cues to manipulate the data in 360 degrees. And this is without any additional radiation to the patient."
That would cut down a routine colonoscopy from an all-day affair to just a few hours.
When the world realized that the Zika virus could cause birth defects, the mechanism was mystery to both the public and scientists. But researchers like Lenore Pereira of the University of California, San Francisco, in a joint effort with the University of California, Berkeley, sought answers and found two routes used by Zika to make its way to a fetus.
"So we were able to isolate human cells from the placenta, and infect them with Zika virus, and show that the virus could replicate in cells that came from the placenta itself or from the fetal membranes. And the virus was very competent in growing and producing more of itself, which means that it could spread inside a placenta and across fetal membranes to infect the baby – either directly through the blood or maybe through the skin."
Pereira and her team also discovered a protein common to the placental cells that Zika could infect, as well as an antibiotic that could block this interaction. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
For the first time, a team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, Santa Cruz have successfully 3D-printed ultralight supercapacitors using an aerogel made out of graphene. Lab engineer Chen Zhu explains that this breakthrough opens the door to new, highly efficient energy storage systems for a range of applications, including smartphones, electric cars and implantable devices to name a few.
"If you have iPhone in the future, it can store the energy very quickly and release the energy very fast. So it has very wide applications. That’s why we are working on this because we want to use a new fabrication technique to fabricate the architectural design of the supercapacitor because currently most of the supercapacitor is a very thin film, just a 2D pattern. So, for the 3D, printing, that will improve the performance of the supercapacitor." Narrator: It will also create unique electronics that are currently difficult or even impossible to make using other synthetic methods.
Despite their amazing ability to change color and camouflage, cephalopods like octopus and cuttlefish only have one type of light receptor in their eyes, giving them black and white vision. But a new theory proposed by graduate student Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley explains how cephalopods might still have the ability to detect color through the manipulation of light.
"There’s a variety of pupil shapes in organisms in general. So you can have a vertical slit pupil, a dot pupil, like you or I might have, and that’s generally speaking the best for overall image sharpness. If you have a pupil that has more off-axis distance, so a bigger aperture in photographic terms, then that narrows your depth of field. You have to really pay attention to what’s going to be in focus and what’s going to be out of focus. Now, with cephalopods, when you have that off-axis pupil, it actually splits the image colors into constituent wavelengths, much like a prism. They could use this to be able to effectively focus through colors instead of focusing through distance."
If you or a loved one are putting off that colonoscopy because the thought of the procedure is off-putting, there’s a less invasive one that University of California, San Francisco’s Dr. Judy Yee helped pioneer. It’s called the virtual colonoscopy.
"This is a new test that employs low radiation dose CT scan to acquire data that we can then view on advanced graphical workstations to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional views of the colon, to help physicians screen for colorectal cancer."
And while we’re on the subject of three-dimensional work, we also meet up with lab engineer Chen Zhu of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Zhu was part of a team of scientists at the Livermore Lab and the University of California, Santa Cruz who successfully 3D-printed ultralight supercapacitors using an aerogel made out of the ‘miracle material’, graphene. So what does this breakthrough mean for you in the future? Well, how about a highly efficient energy storage system for your smartphone?
"If you have iPhone in the future, it can store the energy very quickly and release the energy very fast. So it has very wide applications."
Finally, we head back to UCSF to chat with epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki . In an obesity study that focused on Latino children, she found a connection between breastfeeding and telomere length. These are the protective caps on your DNA that are linked to a higher risk of health problems like heart disease and diabetes later in life.
"Exclusive breastfeeding at 4 to 6 weeks of age and breastfeeding at six months were associated with longer telomere length in children at 4 to 5 years age."
This study may open up a whole new way to predict and prevent conditions early in a child’s life. Hear these and other stories about University of California research by subscribing to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today
Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/virtual_colonoscopy
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/energy_storage
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/telomere_breastfeeding
Can exclusively breastfeeding a baby lengthen their telomeres, or the protective caps on their DNA? Shorter telomeres are linked to a higher risk of health problems like heart disease and diabetes later on in life. While studying obesity in a group of Latino children, epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki of the University of California, San Francisco noticed a connection between telomere length and breastfeeding habits.
"Exclusive breastfeeding at 4 to 6 weeks of age and breastfeeding at 6 months were associated with longer telomere length in children at 4 to 5 years of age."
Telomeres protect our cells as they divide and help prevent chronic disease. This is the first study linking breastfeeding and diet to early telomere shortening, and may help researchers predict and work to prevent conditions early in a child’s life.
"This can be seen as in the realm of precision medicine – how do we use this particular tool, maybe, to help the risk prediction for future development of metabolic disease?"
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have created a novel simulation visualizing over 700,000 years of star formation. The project took several months on NASA’s supercomputer, for a total of 1 million hours across thousands of processors. Since this sort of simulation is so computationally intensive, astrophysicist Richard Klein used a mathematical technique called “adaptive mesh refinement” to focus in on certain aspects of the evolving stars.
"This enables you to select what regions of a large-scale computational domain you want to focus on in a simulation, and enable you in a dynamic way to have high resolution in those areas that are critically important for understanding the astrophysical phenomenon, while letting other regions of the computation be at much lower resolution and therefore lower cost."
Before this technique, Klein says this type of simulation would have been computationally impossible.
Have you been putting off that colonoscopy? The prospect of abstaining from food, drinking a gallon of laxative, then taking a day off work can be a deterrent. But Dr. Judy Yee of the University of California, San Francisco is working towards a less invasive option – virtual colonoscopies. These are scans that can be viewed as holograms, allowing doctors to digitally zoom in on parts of the colon and detect issues without the traditional scope.
"This is a new test that employs low radiation dose CT scan to acquire data that we can then view on advanced graphical workstations to create 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional views of the colon, to help physicians screen for colorectal cancer."
Yee says this technique could be used to image other parts of the body as well.
"I think the wonderful part of the virtual holography method is that you can apply it to pretty much any part of the body – the brain, the liver, the musculoskeletal system, the heart. And I think that it’s really limitless."
Climate change models include many complex factors, from the Earth’s natural cycles to wind patterns. Even clouds must be considered when forecasting things like weather and temperature. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, physical chemist Kevin Wilson found a way to better predict the size of cloud droplets, which form on aerosolized particles like salt from sea spray. Wilson says the next step is to simplify their findings for these climate change models.
"We’ve studied this cloud droplet formation in our laboratory under very controlled conditions, and so the kinds of models we’ve developed are much too complicated to actually implement in climate models. And so one next step is to be able to distill all of the molecular information to more simple parameterizations that accurately reflect the underlying physics and chemistry, but could be used in the climate model in a computationally efficient way. It’s trying to bridge the gap between simple laboratory experiments and the real complexity of the atmosphere."
This week on Science Today: Astrophysicist Richard Klein of the University of California, Berkeley gives us a glimpse at his new supercomputer simulation that covers 700,000 years of star formation.
"So we start with these turbulent magnetized clouds. Follow the cloud for up to a million years of evolution, all the way to the point where stars can form in clusters."
Klein is currently working on an even larger simulation and hopes they will lead to a comprehensive theory of star formation. With this next piece, we pull our heads out of the clouds and dive into the world of cephalopods – creatures like squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. Although these animals lead strikingly colorful lives, they’re thought to be colorblind. But UC Berkeley graduate student Alexander Stubbs theorizes that their bizarre pupil shape can in fact help them detect color.
"And what we showed in this paper is that their fairly unique pupil shape – with a U-shaped pupil in cuttlefish and squid or a dumbbell shaped bar pupil in octopus – means that they blur their image, but in a color dependent way."
To test his theory, Stubbs had to get creative. His father, Christopher Stubbs of Harvard University, programmed a computer simulation to model this type of eyesight, showing how this color blurring may help explain the paradox of cephalopod vision. We then visit UCLA, where we speak with professor Karen Gylys about how she creatively studies the brain to better understand Alzheimer’s disease. Gylys can essentially isolate synapses - the space between two neurons.
"It’s cryopreserved so that we can get these little spherical, they’re called ‘synaptosomes.’ And so that gives us the ability to sort of see into the synapse – to study what’s happening. We actually purify thousands and thousands synapses."
If you want learn more about research at the University of California, subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening. I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today
Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/supercomputer_stars
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/octopus_eye
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/synapse_brain
A rare disease that causes copper buildup in the liver has revealed how our bodies use the metal nutrient. To learn more about the link between copper and fat metabolism, researcher Chris Chang of the University of California, Berkeley studied mice suffering from a disorder also seen in humans.
"The disease model that we used for the mouse studies is called Wilson’s disease, and it’s a rare genetic disorder that’s directly related to the inability to handle copper in the body. So people who have this type of disease, they have a buildup of copper in the liver. It means that there’s copper deficiency in other organs and tissues throughout the body."
Chang hypothesized that this deficiency would have an impact on fat tissue and its metabolism as well.
"And what we identified in the mice is that if you have too much copper in the liver, then you don’t have enough copper in the fat tissue, then those fat tissues don’t burn fat as well. And so there is a correlation between a rare, but real human disorder."
Since there are high levels of metal nutrients in the brain, the next step is to look at copper and obesity in a neurological context.
A synapse is the point of communication between two neurons and researchers can actually study them in great detail.
"It turns out that we can isolate synapses. They’re about a micron and they reseal themselves into little circles, into little spheres that we can study biochemically."
That’s Karen Gylys, a professor at the UCLA School of Nursing, who has been studying Alzheimer’s disease using cryopreserved tissue.
"It’s cryopreserved so that we can get these little spherical, they’re called ‘synaptosomes’. And so that gives us this ability to sort of see into the synapse – to study what’s happening. We actually purify thousands and thousands of synapses."
Gylys explains that they do this by using a laser-based technology called flow cytometry, which suspends cells in a stream of fluid and passes them one at a time, through an electronic detection apparatus.
"In addition to having the cryopreserved tissue that makes the synaptosomes by use of flow cytometry, we can ask the questions we want to ask with very great precision."
It looks like octopuses may be able to detect color thanks to their bizarrely shaped pupils. Cephalopods, as colorful as they are, have long been thought to be colorblind. But graduate student Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley has a new theory explaining how color vision may still be possible through the chromatic blurring of objects.
"Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish are widely regarded as some of the must colorfully dynamic creatures on planet Earth. But this was somewhat of a mystery because they had no normally known mechanism of sensing the wavelength of light or the color of objects. And what we showed in this paper is that their fairly unique pupil shape – with a U-shaped pupil in cuttlefish and squid or a dumbbell shaped bar pupil in octopus – means that they blur their image, but in a color dependent way. So they’re effectively able to focus through colors, rather than focusing beyond a certain distance."
A new supercomputer simulation is helping scientists visualize the evolution of stars. The NASA-funded project is based on code written by astrophysicist Richard Klein of the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. According to Klein, this simulation is one step towards a comprehensive theory of star formation, which begins when a cloud of interstellar gas collapses under gravity.
"So we start with these turbulent magnetized clouds. Follow the cloud for up to a million years of evolution, all the way to the point where stars can form in clusters."
Klein turns to observations of real stars to check the results.
"We begin to calculate what the properties of those stellar clusters are in great detail and then compare the properties that we get from the large scale simulations with what the observations are actually telling us."
The team is currently working towards even larger-scale simulations.
This week on Science Today. Your brain is a precious organ, and one way your body protects it is by using the blood-brain barrier. This is basically a filter set up between the blood in your circulatory system and your brain. The barrier determines which things will or will not pass through. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, bioengineer Monica Moya is hoping their 3D bioprinting technology can help recreate the structure.
"So we’re trying to build the blood-brain barrier, which is the blood vessels in your brain that are responsible for making sure that not just anything gets across, but that’s an interesting field because sometimes you do want things to get across."
A 3D printed blood-brain barrier would be helpful for something like drug research, because you actually want certain medications to pass through. We also speak with UC Berkeley chemist Chris Chang about another surprising feature of the brain – the metal nutrient copper. Chang explains how copper helps your body metabolize fat.
"There’s a process which stops normal fat burning, and what we found was that copper stops or blocks what normally blocks fat burning. And so by blocking the block, then you actually allow fat burning to proceed."
And did you know that NSAIDs, a common type of anti-inflammatory, can be bad for your heart? Researcher Aldrin Gomes of the University of California, Davis found that vitamin C might prevent this toxicity.
"We pretreated the cells with vitamin C before we gave NSAIDs, and this prevented cell death."
If you want to keep on top of the latest University of California research. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also follow us on Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for listening.
Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today
Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/blood_brain_barrier
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/copper_fat
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/vitamin_c
While tarantula venom contains many different toxins, recent research at the University of California, San Francisco has identified two that can activate pain-sensing neurons. To prove their effectiveness, researcher Jeremiah Osteen synthesized the toxins individually.
"Having access to a synthetic toxin, you’re able to make it in very large quantities, whereas you would otherwise have to milk lots of spiders, and that’s both labor intensive and these spiders aren’t always easy to come by. So once you identify what you think is the toxin that’s causing your activity, you want to go and synthesize that and be able to show that you can recapitulate the activity without having to purify it directly from the venom."
These two toxins can selectively manipulate pain fibers. One of them targeted nerve fibers not previously linked to any pain pathways.
"How might these fibers be involved in different types of chronic pain disorders, and ultimately, can we tweak the chemistry of the toxin to be able to manipulate these fibers differently?"
Opposites attract even in your blood stream. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have teamed up with the University of California, San Francisco to develop a new device that soaks up excess chemotherapy drugs after treatment. The goal is to reduce the toxicity of these treatments and prevent unpleasant side effects. According to engineer Chelsea Chen, the key is electric charge. Chen, who designed the materials for the device, says since certain cancer drugs have a positive charge, she used a negatively charged material in the membrane.
"One block is mechanically strong. It keeps the membrane together. It’s made of polyethylene. It’s just like garbage bags, also made of polyethylene. And the other block is the active block. It’s the drug capture block. So it contains sulfonic acid groups, and this group is negatively charged."
The device is simply inserted into a vein during a chemotherapy session, then removed afterwards. Chen says the focus is to create a membrane that picks up as much of the drug as quickly as possible, so it doesn’t circulate to the rest of the body.
We’ve all heard that vitamin C is good for the immune system, but can it also protect our hearts from damaging drugs? Associate Professor Aldrin Gomes of the University of California, Davis says the antioxidant might in fact buffer the heart from NSAIDs, or common pain relievers like Ibuprofen. Their chronic use is known to cause side effects such as heart problems, even cardiac cell death. So to learn more, Gomes turned to the lab.
"Vitamin C is readily available, and it’s easy to test and easy to understand the mechanism. We pre-treated the cells with vitamin C before we gave NSAIDs, and this prevented cell death."
Gomes explains NSAIDs can reduce the ability of cardiac cells to make energy and cause a toxic buildup of cells. But on top of this protective effect, vitamin C also has mild pain relieving properties.
"So together, it would actually be pretty useful for pain relief. We don’t know if this will work in humans, but our longer term goal is to see if taking vitamin C together with the NSAID will prevent the side effects."
It looks like you can thank copper for your body’s ability to burn fat. According to chemist Chris Chang of the University of California, Berkeley, the metal nutrient acts as what’s called a “brake on a brake,” using a somewhat counterintuitive process to metabolize fat.
"There’s a process that stops normal fat burning, and what we found was that copper stops or blocks what normally blocks fat burning. And so by blocking the block, then you actually allow fat burning to proceed."
Chang found that tissue could not burn fat as well without copper, which you take in normally through your diet.
"It’s mainly found in green leafy vegetables, different sorts of fruit, nuts, mushrooms, and seafood/shellfish. The biochemical mechanisms that we identified in fat tissue turn out to be conserved in other parts of the body. And so it might have some implications for other diseases or normal behavior and function."
Similar interactions with copper are also found in the brain, heart, and pancreas.
Now that researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have created a 3-D bioprint of living blood vessels, they’re moving towards making more tissue-specific vasculature. Bioengineer Monica Moya says she’s particularly interested in the brain.
"So, we’re trying to build the blood-brain barrier, which is the blood vessels in your brain that are responsible for making sure that not just anything gets across, but that’s an interesting field because sometimes you do want things to get across."
For example, you’d want certain drugs to get across that barrier to treat a tumor, but they don’t always make it.
"And that’s actually one of the challenges of people that end up with brain tumors, is that it’s hard to treat and it’s hard to deliver across the blood-brain barrier and then there’s cases where there’s stuff that goes across the blood-brain barrier and you want to prevent it from getting across the barrier. So, having a model that you can test is beneficial."
Moya and her team have successfully 3D printed structures with living cells and biomaterials using ‘bio-inks’, which enabled human capillaries to develop on their own.
This week on Science Today. If you look on the back of a bottle of multivitamins, you might recognize some metal nutrients like zinc and iron. But would you recognize copper as a major contributor to human health? We speak with chemist Chris Chang of the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered that copper actually helps mice burn fat.
"And so what happens is that if the mice don’t have enough copper in their fat cells, then they can’t undergo this process of fat burning, the act of breaking larger pieces of fat into smaller pieces of fat for energy."
And it turns out that this lack of copper can set the stage for obesity. Our bodies require many nutrients to thrive, but other compounds might be outright harmful. Consider chemotherapy drugs, which can be toxic to the body and cause brutal side effects. That’s why researcher Chelsea Chen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory created a small device called the ChemoFilter. This acts as chemical sponge to absorb the excess drug before it spreads to the rest of the body.
"It is used to capture the chemotherapy drug, that’s past the tumor, before it enters the body’s circulation."
The device can then be removed from the body after treatment. We also chat with bioinformatics scientist Jonathan Allen of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about a new national panel that will study how microbial communities affect human health in “built environments” like an office building or even a hospital.
"How can we apply the current technologies that are being used to study the microbiome in a broad array of research areas and apply them to really advance the field in building design and interactions with people?"
Listen to this and other episodes about the University of California research. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening and until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today
Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/copper_obesity
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/chemo_filter
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/office_microbiome
NASA’s Juno space probe has arrived at Jupiter, which will give astronomer Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley the opportunity to expand upon her already detailed maps of the giant planet. de Pater’s maps documented Jupiter’s global circulation patterns, or the movement of gases through the atmosphere. This also occurs on Earth, where the circulation of air distributes heat across the planet.
"When you just look at Jupiter, you see clouds, you see brownish and whitish bands. The whitish ones are called zones and the brown ones are called the belts. The ammonia gas will condense out and form clouds. And so above that cloud deck, ammonia is basically dry air. And that dry air will then descend back down into neighboring belt regions. So that’s sort of a circulation pattern of air rising, then condensing out, and dry air sinking down. In a way, global circulations on Jupiter may help understand global circulations on the Earth."
Chemotherapy drugs can have brutal side effects, impacting everything from digestion to the nervous system. But what if these drugs could be localized at the site of a tumor to reduce these harms? This is what researcher Chelsea Chen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is working towards: new drug-capture materials that are essentially chemical sponges. The polymer devices are called ChemoFilters.
"We insert this ChemoFilter through a tiny tube into the body, and the device would be placed right next to the tumor. It is used to capture the chemotherapy drug, and that’s past the tumor, before it enters the body’s circulation. That way it decreases the systemic toxicities."
While the device was conceived with liver cancer in mind, Chen is working on ChemoFilters that can absorb other chemotherapy drugs as well.
"The ChemoFilter will have broad use, but on the other hand, it’s not applicable to all types of cancers."
To be used on humans, the device will require additional testing for federal approval.
Every hour, one person can shed about 37 million microbes into the air. That’s something to consider while spending 8 hours in windowless office buildings, not to mention any time spent on an airplane! Jonathan Allen, a bioinformatics scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is part of a new, national panel that will study how microbial communities of organisms (or microbiomes) can affect human health in 'built environments'.
"How can we apply the current technologies that are being used to study the microbiome in a broad array of research areas and apply them, to really advance the field in building design and interactions with people? What are the open challenges, where do the research efforts need to go to actually develop the practical information that’s going to really impact building design?"
The panel plans to assess the current base of knowledge in this field and identify research gaps to improve future building design. They will also look into other built environments like cars, subways and hospitals, where the aim will be to limit the spread of infectious disease
When we think about what sustains our bodies, copper isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind. But according to chemist Chris Chang of the University of California, Berkeley, it’s vital to many biological functions, from nutrition to signaling in the nervous system. After learning that copper is given to cows to control weight gain, Chang looked into its role in fat metabolism and obesity. His team started with plates of cultured fat cells, then moved on to a mouse model.
"What we ended up finding was that copper was a necessary component for the mice to be able to burn fat. And so what happens is if the mice don’t have enough copper in their fat cells, then they can’t undergo this process of fat burning, the act of breaking larger pieces of fat into smaller pieces of fat for energy. Then it predisposes you to having larger buildup of fat and of hence of obesity."
Since a copper imbalance can lead to metabolic issues and other diseases, Chang plans to further study how the element might be used as a therapy or possible treatment.
Editorial note: Please don't eat pennies!
When it comes to research on the Zika virus, how well can a brain grown in a laboratory represent the real thing? In his recent studies, neuroscientist Arnold Kriegstein of the University of California, San Francisco realized that laboratories needed a model system to emulate the developing brain. These artificial models, or organoids, had to express a receptor known as A-X-L, which allows Zika to enter a baby’s brain from the blood.
"We were looking at what other model systems could be used to study how the Zika virus infects cells and we found that those organoids also express AXL, and in the exact same place as they do in the normally developing brain."
Although the model has some limitations, it is able to reproduce much of the physiology involved in Zika infection. The cells in these organoids can essentially self-organize into a 3-dimensional structure.
"So that encouraged us that this model, which people all over the world are now using, can be studied to understand more about how the virus enters the cell, the consequences of infection, and so on."
Researchers are now able to turn one cell type into another within the body of a mouse. But how can they make sure these changes happen in the right spot? To track the transformation of diseased liver cells into healthy ones, study leader Milad Rezvani of the University of California, San Francisco used a special kind of transgenic, or genetically altered, mouse model.
"We focused primarily on one transgenic model that labels this cell type that is the main culprit in liver cirrhosis. So when we reprogrammed this cirrhosis-causing cell type into liver cells, it would maintain this label. We really knew where this cell was coming from."
Although the cell transformation materials sent into the mouse ended up in some other places, like a few muscle cells, Rezvani says the amounts were negligible. More importantly, the mice revealed new patches of healthy liver tissue.
"That’s why mice are extremely important, still, to not only understand disease, but to find new therapeutic approaches."
When it comes to the neuroscience of pain, toxins are a surprisingly handy research tool. Much of the nervous system uses what’s called sodium channels to carry signals to your brain. But if a pathway is problematic, the sheer diversity of these channels can make treatment a challenge. In a recent step towards more selective pain drugs, researcher Jeremiah Steen of the University of California, San Francisco found that a toxin in tarantula venom attaches to one type of these sodium channels that’s associated with sharp, biting pain.
"These sodium channels are expressed all over the nervous system, and they have very subtle differences. And so, when you’re trying to design a drug, it’s just very hard to find a molecule that will recognize one of these subtypes and not others."
And so, getting back to the tarantula toxin…
"What was very interesting and serendipitous for us was that it was selective for a certain subtype of sodium channel. And that’s really what allowed us to study that sodium channel using the toxin."
Wherever you are in the world, you receive a daily dose of radiation from the natural environment. That may sound intimidating if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of background radioactivity. So to make the subject more tangible for the public, nuclear physicist Kai Vetter and his team at the University of California, Berkeley developed the DoseNet program, which uses a network of radiation sensors distributed to schools around the world. The DoseNet website displays real time measurements from these sensors that double as educational tools in the classroom.
"Because it turns out, with nuclear radiation, even those we can’t sense it, it’s very easy to measure. Each of these sensor packages not only have the silicon sensor, which senses nuclear radiation, but it has a little computer on that to process the data and make the data ultimately available through our network."
DoseNet’s goal is to engage students in science and engineering through lessons on radiation. In fact, students can even analyze data and practice programming on these sensors, which Vetter hopes will someday form a sustainable, global network to monitor radiation.
This week on Science Today. Our bodies naturally produce byproducts that may not be too healthy for us but are usually adept at maintaining balance. So, when a medication leads to an excess of molecules that are harsh on the body, we should probably be concerned, right? Researcher Aldrin Gomes of the University of California, Davis says common pain relievers known as NSAIDs, like ibuprofen, do just this.
"These NSAIDs were actually inducing something called reactive oxygen species – stuff that our body produces naturally but in small amounts."
Aldrin explains how these molecules can stress heart cells and are even linked to disease. We then go from the heart to the skeletal system and hear from biomedical scientist Gabriela Loots of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She's investigating the tendency of aggressive cancers to metastasize to bone.
"There are certain molecules, for examples, that once secreted by the bone they seem to create this environment that’s very attractive to the cancer cells to go there and to grow."
So Loots and her team are now trying to understand how to manipulate the environment of a tumor to prevent this spread. Also on the cellular scale, UCSF researcher Jeremiah Osteen is studying how a specific toxin in tarantula venom can very selectively target what’s known as a sodium channel, which much of the nervous system uses to carry signals to your brain."
"What was very interesting and serendipitous for us was that it was selective for a certain subtype of sodium channel. And that’s really what allowed us to study that sodium channel using the toxin."
Osteen says this toxin will help give insight into a particular pain pathway. Listen to this and other episodes about the University of California research. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/pain_relief
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/cancer_bone
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/pain_pathway
A lot of very aggressive forms of cancer seem to metastasize to the bone. Now, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California campuses at Merced and Davis have joined forces to figure out what’s going on in the bone microenvironment between cancer cells and bone cells. Gabriela Loots, a biomedical scientist at the Livermore Lab, says they’re onto something.
"There are certain molecules, for example, that once secreted by the bone they seem to create this environment that’s very attractive to the cancer cells to go there and to grow."
Loots and her team are studying prostate cancer in particular because the aggressive form of the disease spreads primarily to the skeleton. They’ve identified a bone protein called Sclerostin, which had an inhibitory effect on prostate cancer invasion.
"So, basically our next step now is really trying to understand how we can manipulate the environment of the tumor, so we can prevent it from forming bone metastases."
If you’re suffering from a fever or arthritis pain, anti-inflammatories can provide welcome relief. But this might not be entirely true for your heart. Researcher Aldrin Gomes of the University of California, Davis found that the chronic use of the anti-inflammatories known as NSAIDs can actually damage heart cells by producing chemically reactive molecules.
"These NSAIDs were actually inducing something called reactive oxygen species, stuff that our body produces naturally but in small amounts."
An excess of molecules can prevent the breakdown of harmful proteins that can build up and cause cardiac cell death. While not all NSAIDs may harm heart tissue, Gomes encourages seeking natural alternatives, like turmeric paste or tart cherries.
"Part of what we’re doing is outreach– trying to get the word out to people that they shouldn’t be using NSAIDs as a regular treatment unless it’s really, absolutely necessary. NSAIDs also has very well-known gastrointestinal problems. So we have to be careful how much we take, when we take it."
Our genes may be the blueprint that defines us, but environmental factors can also shape the expression of our genes. This process is known as epigenetics, and according to biologist Andrew Dillin of the University of California, Berkeley, a person’s metabolism early on in life might be able to activate certain genes and influence longevity.
"What we hypothesize is that, during these developmental stages when the metabolic status is registered, there’s an epigenetic switch that turns sets of genes on and off."
When these genes were turned on, Dillin discovered they extended the lifespan of mice and worms known as nematodes.
"And so if you disrupt these epigenetic genes in adulthood, you will erase the signal and then the animals will not live long. And in fact, there are mutations in these genes that are linked to disease in humans. So knowing the basic science behind how these genes work, to epigenetically turn gene sets on and off, we now have the tools to go forward and say, can we find a drug that mimics exactly what we see in our nematode and mouse experiments?"
A tool to improve the computer network security of government agencies, along with state and local governments, has been developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Computer scientist Domingo Colon says their network mapping system, called NeMS, gives network managers a comprehensive view of their computer network environments.
"So there are a lot of tools out there that provide different vantage points of network security, but what we needed was something a lot more specific that told us behaviorally what’s happening on our network, and also structurally, how is the composition of our network put together at any point in time. These things provide what’s called “attack surface” for someone from the external world and what you want, as an enterprise, is to reduce that surface."
Colon says the next step is to provide this type of capability to a larger pool of people.
"We’re hoping through our commercial partner, that they will be able to have that level of reachability into other segments of the general public, particularly the commercial entities out there that can also make use of this technology."
After a five-year voyage, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has arrived at Jupiter this month, prepared to orbit the planet 32 times over the next year. But before Juno’s approach, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley worked hard to map the gas giant from the Earth. Astronomer Imke de Pater and her team used radio emissions from Jupiter’s ammonia-filled atmosphere to create these maps, and says they will complement the data collected by Juno.
"We essentially can provide context images for the Juno data."
de Pater’s detailed maps can help explain features like the ammonia abundance at different locations on the planet. The Juno spacecraft will fly inside what’s known as radiation belts to collect data.
"Everything on Jupiter changes. And so we will get a lot of data at different wavelengths. And since they’re all now taken at the same time we can interpret all the data together and really get a good understanding of Jupiter’s atmosphere."
Researchers will probe at different levels of the atmosphere, from below the cloud layers to the stratosphere.
This week on Science Today. Pain isn’t just one sensation: we can ache, burn or sting. And these experiences often involve different pathways, some of which remain a mystery. So to learn more, researcher Jeremiah Osteen of the University of California, San Francisco looked to tarantula venom, and discovered two toxins that can target highly specific pain pathways.
"And so what the toxins have given us the ability to do is to look very specifically at this particular type of pain pathway, to have a better understanding of what types of neurons are involved, what types of molecules are involved, in order to design better pain drugs."
We also tackle the subject of pain-relief, and hear from UC Davis professor Aldrin Gomes, who studies a common type anti-inflammatory drug know as NSAIDs. Because the chronic use of pain relievers can actually increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems and stroke, Gomes decided to investigate further.
"So we first did a screen of different NSAIDs to see if any of them would affect cardiac cells. And to our surprise, all the NSAIDs we tested affected the heart cells."
From these topics in life sciences, we move on to learn about computer network security. Domingo Colon of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory tells us about a new comprehensive tool called NeMS that’s built to improve the digital security at government agencies.
"So there are a lot of tools out there that provide different vantage points of network security, but what we needed was something a lot more specific that told us behaviorally what’s happening on our network, and also structurally, how is the composition of our network put together at any point in time."
Don't miss these and other episodes about the latest University of California research. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. And don't forget to follow us on Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin. Thanks so much for listening.
Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/venom_pain
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/nsaids
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/computer_networks
Many of us might assume a drug is safe if it’s available over-the-counter, but that’s not always the case. Biochemist Aldrin Gomes of the University of California, Davis studies NSAIDs, a category of drugs that includes familiar anti-inflammatories like Ibuprofen. Up to 20% of the population use these pain relievers at any given time, but their chronic use may be harsher on the body than expected.
"Most people are not aware that NSAIDs have a known history of causing heart problems. NSAIDs actually increase the risk of stroke, cardiovascular disease. So we first did a screen of different NSAIDs to see if any of them would affect cardiac cells. And to our surprise, all the NSAIDs we tested affected the heart cells."
Some of the NSAIDs had a profound effect, causing rapid cardiac cell death. But now, Gomes hopes to study the side effects of other NSAIDs and see if certain protective factors, like antioxidants, can relieve them.
What can tarantulas teach us about human pain, other than an unpleasant lesson? Researcher Jeremiah Osteen of the University of California, San Francisco discovered two toxins in tarantula venom that are surprisingly selective in the ways they trigger the sensation of pain. This suggests new avenues of research and possible drug treatments.
"We look into the venom of the spider and find toxins that will activate certain pain pathways. That gives us a better sense of how those pain pathways work in other contexts, like when you cut yourself or fall down. And so what the toxins have given us the ability to do is to look very specifically at this particular type of pain pathway, to have a better understanding of what types of neurons are involved, what types of molecules are involved, in order to design better pain drugs."
And these pathways have also been linked to certain neurological disorders, like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease .
Wi-fi has become ubiquitous in our world as a wireless way to get access to the Internet, but what if radio waves could be used to sense the environment? Yasamin Mostofi, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara has been using wi-fi signals to basically give x-ray vision to robots and unmanned vehicles.
"Can they image objects? Can they see through walls? Can they count people? Can they localize people?"
Such technology could be used in security, search and rescue scenarios, ‘smart homes’ and even at archeological sites.
"The robots basically have everyday wi-fi cards that we all have in our laptops and a directional antenna. So, one robot transmits and that transmission goes through the object and the objects interact with it, depending on their material property, their location. And in a sense we can see they leave a signature on a signal and that signature is what we’re trying to use to figure out something about the object."
You’ve probably heard about the human microbiome. But what about microbiomes growing in “built environments”? Jonathan Allen, a bioinformatics scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been tapped to serve on a national panel to study these microbial communities to get a better sense of the design of buildings and how that may affect human health.
"So, everywhere we go, our skin is contacting surfaces and shedding bacteria on building surfaces and then also it’s coming from the natural environment, so you know plants and the outdoor environment. As the wind is blowing, it’s actually bringing in bacteria, microbes and also fungi. You know, fungi has a big part in the human microbiome too, potentially. It’s not nearly as pronounced as it is in building environments, where fungus can grow and actually become a major health issue for people."
The panel will be conducting its study over the next 18 months.
When you hear the word ‘radioactivity’, what do you think of? It might bring to mind nuclear disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl. But it does exist naturally in our environment. So, physicist Kai Vetter of the University of California, Berkeley wants to change the way we think about radiation.
"We have established what we call the Berkeley DoseNet program, aiming at providing simple radiation sensors to communities and to high schools, to enable the broader public to learn about the world we’re living in."
And speaking of radiation, astronomer Imke de Pater of UC Berkeley has released the most detailed radio maps yet of Jupiter’s surface.
"We could see just all kinds of different features. For example, the Great Red Spot, and other little ovals and storm systems on Jupiter."
The maps are just in time for the arrival of NASA’s Juno space probe, which has begun its trip around the gas planet. Meanwhile, back here on terra firma, we meet the Livermore Lab’s Jonathan Allen – a bioinformatics scientist who has been tapped to join a national panel to study the relationship between ‘built environments’ and the microbiome.
"So, everywhere we go, our skin is contacting surfaces and shedding bacteria on building surfaces and then also it’s coming from the natural environment, plants and the outdoor environment."
To hear these and other episodes about the latest University of California research, subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday
Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/radiation_education
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/jupiter_map
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/built_environment
What if researchers could turn a diseased cell into a healthy one by simply reprogramming its genes? Using a type of adeno-associated virus, a popular tool in gene therapies, a team at the University of California, San Francisco was able to transform cirrhosis-causing liver cells into normal ones within the body of a mouse. Study leader Milad Rezvani says that adding healthy cells to a diseased liver is not an easy task, so the prospect of gene therapy offers a safe and possibly more efficient alternative.
"Diseased livers are actually not a good target for cells to be transplanted – they don’t engraft well."
A gene delivery vehicle like a virus provided a way to do this without surgery or cell transplantation.
"They can be used because they are safe. These are so-called adeno-associated viruses, which are gene vehicles packaged in viruses that do not integrate into the host genome. As a matter of fact, there are ongoing clinical trials using the kind of virus that we used."
By probing down into Jupiter’s cloudy atmosphere, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have created the most detailed radio map of the largest planet in our Solar System. Astronomer Imke de Pater and her team used an observatory in New Mexico to take the images.
"So we were able to produce this map at radio wavelengths because the Very Large Array in New Mexico had undergone upgrades and improved by a factor of 10 in sensitivity."
Since the planet rotates every 10 hours, past radio maps would end up smeared. But thanks to the upgrade, this new map shows detailed layers of ammonia gas welling up and sinking down in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
"We could see just all kinds of different features. For example, the Great Red Spot, and other little ovals and storm systems on Jupiter."
de Pater says the next step is to collect more data and probe deeper into the cloud layers. Researchers hope these findings will help explain the atmospheres of other planets as well.
There are still many misconceptions about radiation. While radioactivity exists naturally in the background of our daily lives, it’s also a topic of fear since it’s linked to nuclear disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl. But nuclear physicist Kai Vetter and his team at the University of California, Berkeley are trying to change that.
"We have established what we call the Berkeley DoseNet program, aiming at providing simple radiation sensors to communities and to high schools, to enable the broader public to learn about the world we’re living in. Because what they measure is naturally occurring radioactivity, and can use that to apply science and engineering concepts."
Currently, DoseNet is a network of high schools across Northern California.
"We’re also reaching out to other places across the world, because what we envision is to establish a global sensor network."
For those curious to learn more, these radiation measurements are now available online at https://radwatch.berkeley.edu/
This week on Science Today. The liver is a resilient organ with the magical ability to regenerate itself, but when it’s damaged by liver cirrhosis, it can be pushed past the point of no return. Researcher Milad Rezvani of the University of California, San Francisco says that gene therapy could help restore patches of healthy tissue on a struggling liver. The successful experiments were run on a mouse model.
"Right now we have shown that we can turn this one cirrhosis causing cell type into normal liver cells that function."
And of course, we’d always prefer to prevent damage to our bodies before its irreparable. That’s why Dr. Cindy Leung of the University of California, San Francisco warns against giving children too much soda. She says that sugary drinks can actually accelerate aging by shortening our telomeres. These are the protective caps on our chromosomes that protect our DNA and if shortened, can lead to a range of maladies.
"Drinking less sugary beverages would be one way to either halt or slow down their telomere shortening process. We need to promote other health behaviors that would help to lengthen our telomeres."
We also venture into the physics realm this week with chemist Kevin Wilson of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He’s been working on predicting the size of cloud droplets.
"We were absolutely thrilled to be able to, from a physical chemistry perspective and a surface chemistry perspective, provide some insight into a process that is quite important for understanding cloud droplet formation and climate change in particular."
To hear these and other episodes about the latest University of California research, subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
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How do researchers study the transient phenomenon of a cloud? In a recent experiment, physical chemist Kevin Wilson of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used a kind of chamber to simulate cloud conditions in nature, which meant that cloud droplets could form on aerosolized particles.
"We have an instrument in our lab that creates the atmospheric conditions that a cloud would form. And so the experiments are rather straightforward. With the right amount of relative humidity or water vapor in the gas phase and the right temperature, we just put in a known size of aerosol and then we measure the droplet that’s formed on the other end of this instrument."
Wilson and his team used different types of particles, from simple salts to complex mixtures of molecules, to see if they could predict the size of the resulting droplets.
"We were absolutely thrilled to be able to, from a physical chemistry perspective and a surface chemistry perspective, provide some insight into a process that is quite important for understanding cloud droplet formation and climate change in particular."
Why are the majority of male infertility cases a mystery? While 80% of female infertility cases can be diagnosed and dealt with, the same percentage of male infertility cases are untreatable. Biologist Polina Lishko of the University of California, Berkeley says the key might be at the molecular level of the sperm. In a recent project, Lishko documented the proteins in a human sperm cell hoping to provide a starting point for research in this field.
"The current situation with male fertility is quite dramatic. And part of the reason why we are so low on our good diagnostics of male infertility is that we don’t know what makes the human sperm cell fertile. So that’s why it’s absolutely important to understand what’s going on, how they work, then we can help to design better diagnostics, and we can help infertile couples boost sperm fertility, if you understand why they’re infertile."
By unraveling the molecular nuances of fertilization, Lishko hopes researchers can finally explain the technicalities of human reproduction.
The brain is a mysterious organ, but it might not be as unpredictable as scientists once thought. Alexander Huth of the University of California, Berkeley recently ran an experiment measuring the brain activity of subjects while they listened to podcasts. Huth expected the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for some higher-order functions like personality and decision making, to register words in a mish mash of locations. Instead, the brain region seemed to respond in a very structured manner, displaying distinct patches of activity for similar words.
"One thing I was honestly surprised by was the degree of involvement in the prefrontal context. Sure, neuroscientists see things in the prefrontal cortex, but usually in specific areas that are very tied to language production and language comprehension. We saw responses everywhere. We also saw organization everywhere."
His next steps will involve building more of these connections.
"One thing I really want to do now is look at the relationship between the visual representations and the linguistic representations, seeing a thing and hearing the word for that thing. So sort of, where do these two things collide?"
Parents, the next time your child picks up a can of soda, tell them they're at risk of shortening their telomeres. These are the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes and they affect how quickly our cells age. And when our telomeres are shortened, this puts us at risk of age-related maladies like heart disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer. Dr. Cindy Leung of the University of California, San Francisco, says that while their study surveyed healthy adults, it's also possible that soda consumption is associated with telomere shortening in kids.
"We know that childhood is a really critical window for our telomeres to develop. If we're marketing sugary beverages to children and they're drinking them at such high levels, it could really put them on this accelerated aging trajectory before they even hit adolescence."
The good news - Leung says that telomere shortening is reversible.
"Drinking less sugary beverages would be one way to either halt or slow down their telomere shortening process. We should promote other health behaviors that would help to lengthen our telomeres."
Currently, the best known cure for liver cirrhosis is an organ transplant. But in a mouse model, University of California, San Francisco researchers have found a way to transform the diseased cells that drive this progressive scarring into healthy cells. Postdoctoral scholar Milad Rezvani says a big question is whether this technique will prove to be clinically relevant and safe to treat damaged livers in humans.
"Liver cirrhosis is still a huge public health burden. Right now we have shown that we can turn this one cirrhosis causing cell type into normal liver cells that function. So the obvious question after a successful mouse in vivo study is, can we do this in human patients?"
The technique used a virus to shuttle the desirable genes into diseased cells, and also proved successful on plates of cirrhosis-causing human cells. Rezvani’s team is now working to refine this virus so it only targets the liver and avoids infecting other cells in the body.
This week on Science Today. Is there anything one can’t make with 3D printing technology? How about living blood vessels? We visit Monica Moya at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to find out more about how she created 3D bioprints of a vasculature system using natural ‘bioinks'.
"So one of our inks is made out of the same stuff that you find in a blood clot. And we intentionally do this because we are in a sense, are co-engineering with the cells."
Given this this ability to print vasculature, the feasibility of 3D printable organs doesn’t seem so farfetched anymore. On a somewhat related note, we next take a look at organoids, or miniature lab models that mimic the physiology of real organs.
These systems are helping researchers in their quest to learn as much as possible about Zika virus. Finding a good lab model has been challenging, so UC San Francisco's Arnold Kriegstein and his colleagues are stepping in to examine the options.
"We were looking at what other model systems could be used to study how the Zika virus infects cells".
And we sort of went out on a limb for this last one. Nadav Ahituv of UCSF tells us about how novel genes associated with limb development in bats may help us understand how our own arms and legs grow.
"So when our limbs grow, we basically have webbing between them, and then that webbing sort of dies, but in the bat forelimbs, that webbing remains and makes part of the wing."
To listen to these and other episodes about University of California research, subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin. Thanks for listening.
More information:
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https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/organoid_lab
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A recent collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco and international researchers has revealed some surprising genes linked to limb development in bats. Associate professor Nadav Ahituv studies human limb malformations and says these are novel genes that were not previously associated with limb development at all.
"For example, one gene that we see is expressed specifically in elongating digits three to five in the developing bat, but in mice, they’re not expressed in that location. And so it looks like bats adopted that gene to work in that location, and making it an important gene for wing development. We found genes that are involved in apoptosis and cell death. So when our limbs grow, we basically have webbing between them, and then that webbing sort of dies, but in the bat forelimbs, that webbing remains and makes part of the wing."
Ahituv says their work offers insight into the unique growth of arms and legs in other mammals such as ourselves.
A new study from the University of California, San Francisco may help physicians treat inflammation in diabetic patients without causing complete suppression of the immune system. Endocrinologist Suneil Koliwad recently discovered the mechanism behind the inflammation that occurs when particular immune cells known as macrophages are exposed to excess saturated fats.
"We might have uncovered an inroad into a way that we could alleviate the form of inflammation that goes on in the fat tissue where lipids may serve as a trigger, but still allow the macrophages in the tissue to remain responsive to triggers of inflammation that might represent infection or injury. To stimuli that we would want to maintain responsiveness against."
Immune suppression drugs may often keep over-the-top immune reactions in check, but they can also put the person at risk of other conditions. Koliwad says the next step is to hone in even more on this pathway to see how it may help scientists develop better diabetes drugs.
Photo by Steve Gschmeissner.
In the emerging field of 3D bioprinting, there are those who work with synthetic materials, and others who use materials that come from nature. Bioengineer Monica Moya of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has used a 3D printer and a ‘bio-ink’ made of materials compatible with the human body to create living blood vessels.
"So one of our inks is made out of the same stuff that you find in a blood clot. And we intentionally do this because we are in a sense, are co-engineering with the cells. So, we’re using materials that the cells recognize and understand what they’re supposed to do. So that kind of takes the pressure off of us because then the cells are going to do the things that they already know how to do without us having to tell them, because you know, they are the original engineers of life. They already know how to build blood vessels – and so what we do is we kind of orchestrate that whole process."
Their bioprinted vasculature system could be used for toxicology studies, medical treatment testing and provide a test bed for the ultimate goal in the field - printing implantable organs.
Can you trick your genes into extending your life? Biologist Andrew Dillin of the University of California, Berkeley recently found two genes in the worm C.elegans that are affected by their diet during early development. Changes in the expression of these genes can actually alter the worms’ metabolism later on in life and sometimes even double their lifespan.
"And that was very exciting, that basic finding that these genes do actually exist, and when we manipulate them, we could block this event. Or if we could turn them on, we could trick the system into thinking that they were metabolically stressed or metabolically altered, and they would end up living twice as long, for example."
Dillin says future studies are needed to determine the relationship between these genes and longevity in humans. "If that correlation existed, it may actually predict if you could make a drug that could activate these genes. For example, a person that is predicted to be short-lived, maybe we could actually increase their life span so they would have a healthy normal life span, you know, grow up and be able to see their grandkids."
Birdsong is like a dialect – birds in one area may sing a different tune than those elsewhere. But at the level of physiology, it gets much more complicated. Researcher Hamish Mehaffey and his team at the University of California, San Francisco took a look at how two parts of a zebra finch brain not only enable song learning but interact to allow a bird to change its song.
"So you can put electrodes in the pathways and then record in the area where they interact and look at the strengths of those inputs, after different patterns of stimulation. So what we did was we took the patterns of stimulation that we knew that the birds used when they were singing, and used those as, kind of, templates in order to probe what the mechanism might be."
Mehaffey compares such a disturbance to a stroke, which can disturb a person’s language area. "The interesting part was that there was always some balance between these two pathways. If something happens to it, the bird will sing a horrible, messed-up song."
These regions are analogous to parts of the human brain and are implicated for aspects of learning and adaptation.
What qualities spell academic success in schoolchildren? To answer this question, neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft of the University of California, San Francisco is looking at a mentoring program for children with learning disabilities such as ADHD, and how certain traits may play into the educational process. The program’s goal is to develop resilience and better learning practices in its students.
"We’re doing a study validating these mentoring programs, and see which aspects of resilience might we be able to promote. Motivation, grit, mindset – these are all concepts that are very popular in education right now, on how to raise a successful child. So people have focused largely on academic achievement – reading, language arts, science. math. But now there’s an increased awareness that without motivation or without resilience and perseverance that your child is not going to succeed, even though their IQ might be high or their test scores might be initially high."
The hope is to inspire a nation-wide evaluation of these types of mentoring programs and their impact on learning.
Nature always manages to surprise us, and the diversity of life is no exception. At the University of California, Berkeley, microbiologist Karthik Anantharaman recently helped construct biology’s new tree of life, but he also knows what scientists are up against when it comes to documenting every living organism.
"Now with regard to finding more and more organisms that we didn’t think exist or we didn’t have a good understanding, I think it has to do with complexity of the environment. By complexity, I mean how many different organisms live in a particular environment at the same time and can thrive. Now when you look at something like, say, a human environment, it’s a relatively simple environment . There aren’t a lot of microbes that live on us. When you look at something like water, it’s a little more complex, but we can still understand it. And finally, the most complex environments are soils and sediments. There are thousands of microorganisms that are coexisting. There are a lot of extreme environments. But I think slowly but steadily, we are uncovering a lot of it."
This is Science Today. Low calorie diets in the early lives of some animals have long been associated with metabolic changes that increase lifespan. In experiments on mice and worms known as C.elegans, biologist Andrew Dillin of the University of California, Berkeley and his team uncovered two critical genes responsible for these striking changes. Dillin’s laboratory also discovered that these metabolic shifts are caused by genetic switches, or enzymes that can control these genes and be manipulated by the researchers as well.
"These genes are the number one correlation of extreme longevity. So the ones that are long-lived have these two genes very highly upregulated, and the animals that are short-lived have these two genes downregulated."
Basically, the long-lived organisms express these genes more than the short-lived ones. These observations may also reflect aging in humans.
"The next step is, can we begin to look at super centenarians, people that are living well into their hundreds. Do they have alterations in these genes that people that are only living to be 80 or 70 don’t have?"
For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.
This week on Science Today. The oldest documented person lived to 122. Was it luck, or was it genetics? Researchers at UC Berkeley recently found two genes in mice and worms that may explain why some humans can live past one hundred.
"These genes are the number one correlation of extreme longevity."
And while UC Berkeley scientists study aging at the molecular level, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Davis are looking to prevent the wear and tear our bodies experience over a lifetime. For instance, when a person suffers a traumatic joint injury, it often leads to damaged cartilage and this results in the development of osteoarthritis.
"We try to understand what happens at the joint level, what are all the factors that contribute to post traumatic osteoarthritis."
We’ll also check in with a UC San Francisco study exploring resilience in the classroom, and how mentoring programs may be tailored to encourage these qualities in young students.
"Motivation, grit, mindset – these are all concepts that are very popular in education right now, on how to raise a successful child."
To listen to these and other episodes about University of California research, subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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More than half of people who suffer traumatic injury to their knee by tearing ligaments in their joint will eventually develop osteoarthritis within ten to fifteen years post-injury. This has huge quality of life issues, as well as the economic burden of medical costs. So researchers are trying to see if they can prevent cartilage degeneration immediately post-injury as a potential therapy. Biomedical scientist Gabriela Loots of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says there are strains of mice that are not as susceptible to cartilage degeneration.
"So, we’re trying to understand what is it about the resistant strains that prevents them from having this cartilage degradation because if we can understand why they don’t degrade, maybe we can understand what molecules we can target to prevent degradation."
Loots is working on this study in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, Davis.
"We try to understand what happens at the joint level, what are all the factors that contribute to post traumatic osteoarthritis."
From a dolphin’s mouth to the Atacama desert in Chile, microbes can turn up where scientists least expect them. Using DNA sequencing technology, a team of researchers recently published a new version of biology’s tree of life to include many of these elusive microbes. Microbiologist Karthik Anantharaman of the University of California, Berkeley says that these organisms just didn’t fit many of biology’s definitions.
"There’s a particular group of bacteria that we are calling the CPRs, or the candidate phyla radiation. And the common thread through all of these organisms is that they’re extremely tiny. So if we opened up any microbiology textbook today, they would tell you that the average size of a bacteria is about one micron. But these organisms are smaller than .1 microns. So they’re ten times smaller in diameter and a thousand times smaller in volume. And over the last 15 years, we have deciphered that biology can be very unpredictable."
With the ongoing epidemic, Zika virus remains an ominous diagnosis for pregnant mothers. Since little was known about this disease prior to the outbreak, scientists are working quickly to close the research gap. Neurologist Arnold Kriegstein of the University of California, San Francisco recently identified a molecular bridge that could allow Zika to enter a baby’s brain from the bloodstream. Before, Zika’s use of this channel was mainly hypothetical.
"But now, we do have access to the virus from Brazil, and we are actually doing these experiments. We’re taking these live cells and we’re exposing them to the virus."
Kriegstein and his team will look at a variety of cell types, including developing neurons known as radial glial cells.
"We’re also looking not just at the radial glial cells, which we expect will be infected, but other cell types, some of which we don’t expect to be infected. If we can understand the mechanism of how the virus is invading the brain, how it’s causing microcephaly that may provide some therapeutic targets that you could use to block the infection at some level."
A 3D bioprint of ‘living’ blood vessels may change the way researchers do biology. This, according to bioengineer Monica Moya of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Moya led a project that used a 3D printer and a ‘bio-ink’ to successfully print structures with living cells and biomaterials.
"We use the word ‘ink’, but it’s not quite an ink. It’s really just kind of a gel-like material that the cells are inside of. The challenge with what we’re doing is we’re actually printing the cells with the material, this gel-like substance. Other people will print just the scaffolding and they’ll use just the material and then they’ll add the cells later on. The difference is that when you don’t print he cells with the material, you’re losing that ability to control where the cells are going to be spatially."
The hope is that their ‘living blood vessels’ may someday literally feed the end goal of 3D bioprinting – that is, the ability to print organs and tissues.
"So what you need in order to really make these 3D strucgtures, is a vasculature."
It turns out that clouds can’t be explained by your typical school science fair experiment. Recent research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has identified a new mechanism behind the not-so-fluffy science of cloud droplet formation. Cloud droplets in the atmosphere never form from pure water but require a seed, or a small aerosolized particle that may originate anywhere from ocean sea spray to diesel combustion. Physical chemist Kevin Wilson and his team found that the size of a droplet depends on the particle’s interaction with water, rather than its ability to dissolve.
"What we found is that, unlike conventional thinking, organic molecules are actually, rather than dissolving in the bulk of the droplet to facilitate droplet formation, they reside at the surface of the cloud droplet. And their main mechanism for forming cloud droplets is lowering of surface tension."
Given the important effects of clouds on the atmosphere, Wilson hopes these findings will improve the accuracy of climate change models.
How might your brain respond to a word spoken in a sentence, rather than alone or without meaningful context? Rather than looking at how the brain responds to single words, neuroscientist Alexander Huth of the University of California, Berkeley wanted to create a more natural environment to study semantics, or the meaning of language.
"We call this a “naturalistic” approach to this kind of experiment, where instead of…showing people single words or single sentences, we’re just showing them a continuous narrative, a full story, as language is used. And that has certain advantages in that we see sort of how the brain actually works when you’re understanding language."
With these conditions, the researchers then built models able to predict brain activity, and tested them by playing unfamiliar radio stories for the subjects.
"It turns out that our models, based on semantics, predict really really well in a bunch of brain areas."
Huth and his team are currently looking into other nuances of language and the human brain, such as whether the response is different when it comes to speaking versus hearing.
A new version of biology’s tree of life will likely make it into the science textbooks. Microbiologist Karthik Anantharaman of the University of California, Berkeley helped put together an updated version containing over one thousand newly discovered microscopic organisms.
"Over the last 15 years, we have collected greater than a thousand genomes of organisms that have never been cultured or, say, studied in the lab."
Narrator: The last big revolution of the tree of life took place about 30 years ago, when scientists declared 3 main categories of life. This included bacteria and archaea, which are single celled organisms, and eukaryote, which includes organisms like animals and plants. But despite this clarification, many microbes remained mysterious.
"When you look at, say, all of these normal microbes that say we have discovered, we don’t know what about 50% of their genes do. Now imagine the potential that's there to understand what these guys can do and then harness that for the future. So be it helping us treat diseases, digest food better, looking at our own microbiome and harnessing its potential."
A portable biodetection device that’s bound for space so astronauts can easily give themselves health check-ups, has several terrestrial applications, too. Radiobiologist Matthew Coleman of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory explains.
"We’re really looking at science and technology impact with our handheld diagnostic device and providing really a generic platform for space travel, field medicine, in the clinic and in the environment. And I think this is also going to help to really push this idea of telemedicine and actually being able to do things like epidemiology. We could really get a lot of information about how we’re really treating people and who’s benefiting the most from which treatment."
And this includes cancer patients.
"To understand how people are responding to chemotherapy treatments throughout their whole process of being treated, so that we could quickly catch those relapsed or refractory cancers."
Do specific words activate certain regions of the brain? In a study funded by the National Science Foundation, neuroscientist Alexander Huth of the University of California, Berkeley imaged the brains of subjects while they listened to a radio show, then created a language map from the results. While playing a second episode of the show, the researchers were often able to predict which areas of the brain would respond to particular words.
"The aspect of language that we've been investigating is mostly semantics, which is the sort of meaning of language. And it turns out that different topics or different groups of meanings seem to be represented in different parts of the brain."
Although language maps can vary by person, Huth was surprised to see similar maps across different participants.
"Certainly, we want to scan more people. We want to see how this generalizes to other people."
Huth hopes this concept can someday be reversed, allowing us to predict words from brain activity, such as in the case of stroke patients.
A specific protein has been found to inhibit prostate cancer metastasis to the bone, which is where aggressive forms of the disease primarily spread. Study leader Gabriela Loots, a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, collaborated with researchers from University of California campuses at Merced and Davis.
"We were curious about what is it about the bone and what kinds of signals may the bone be sending out that may attract cancer cells to migrate to the bone and then form very aggressive tumors."
The team found that bone cells that were deficient in a secreted bone protein called sclerostin tended to create an environment that’s attractive to cancer cells to go there and grow.
One of the things that we’re interested in now is if we were to combine the antibody as a therapy, if that would potentially have some kind of beneficial outcome to these aggressive cancers that may be highly metastatic. So that would be something we’re interested in further investigating – to see can we can block metastasis?"
Have you ever overheard people talking about a major plot twist in a movie and end up running out of the room to avoid hearing a spoiler? Well, psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld of the University of California, San Diego says you may want to stick around next time. He led a study in which participants were divided into two groups – one read short stories and rated how well they liked them at the end, and the other group read stories that were “spoiled” by having the endings given away.
"The name itself, ‘spoiler’, of course suggests that knowing the ending ruins the stories. Do they live up to their name? And what we found, remarkably, was if you spoil stories, they actually enjoy them more. That is, people reading these stories knowing the ending, with the ending completely given away, report greater pleasure reading them."
So, what’s going on? Christenfeld thinks that spoilers allow people to pay less attention to the plot, and focus more on other, richer aspects of the book, film, or TV show. So you may want to think about this the next time you’re about to hear who was the latest casualty on ‘Game of Thrones’.
What can the genetic material of sperm teach us about its function? Researcher Polina Lishko of the University of California, Berkeley is trying to better understand the cell’s physiology by documenting the RNA transcripts. These are essentially the instructions from which a protein is built based on a person’s DNA.
"So transcripts is like a template from which protein will be synthesized. They’re important for the sperm function, for the sperm structure, for the sperm identity."
Basically, Lishko and her team put together a reference manual for sperm research, which can help researchers predict what proteins a sperm cell might produce and why.
"We created a database of what proteins are present in the human sperm cell. This will provide a roadmap for other researchers to understand exactly what is there, and how human sperm cells are different from other cells."
Have you heard of organoids? These are mini 3D models made to mimic the physiology of various organs, from the stomach to the brain. A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley recently created an organoid system for the heart using heart cells grown from human stem cells. Bioengineering professor Kevin Healy says their small cardiac chip can be used for drug screening and studies on early heart development.
"We have of course, the cells derived from the heart. But we don't have blood vessels from the heart. We don't have other aspects like heart valve tissue."
To show how different organs can affect each other, Healy suggests linking up the different organoids in the lab.
"We start to couple different organs on a chip. Let's say the heart, liver, lung, GI tract; whatever. We see this integration of the different organs critical for understanding drugs affecting the heart, but metabolites of that drug that also may be affecting the liver and other tissues."
The simulated heart is expected to help streamline the testing of cardiac drugs.
Saturated fats do more than just make a person pack on calories. Endocrinologist Suneil Koliwad of the University of California, San Francisco found that saturated fats essentially short-circuit immune cells called macrophages, preventing them from cleaning up overwhelmed fat storage cells when a person is obese.
"Obesity is fundamentally the manifestation of the enlargement of fat cells in the body that expand as they fill up with fats that are taken in from the diet. And we’ve become interested in how macrophages change their activation state, when confronted by lipids that are present at high levels, most notably, in the context of obesity."
Koliwad looked at both mouse and human macrophages, and found that saturated fats triggered a pathway to inflammation different than that activated by an infection. There may be something worth studying in terms of how obesity produces inflammation that might be able to get at the mechanism of how diabetes takes root.
How does the Zika virus enter a developing baby’s brain? Neurologist Arnold Kriegstein and his team at the University of California, San Francisco recently found that the receptor protein used by Zika to cause a skin rash also sits on the surface of some developing neurons. The protein acts as a channel into what’s known as radial glial cells.
"This is a cell type that actually produces most of the nerve cells, the neurons, and also the associated cells in the developing brain, and it’s also the cell type that’s been implicated in genetic causes of microcephaly."
The team grew brain tissue in petri dishes and sent fluorescently labeled proteins into the samples. The glowing proteins then honed in on the these radial glial cells, pinpointing the receptors.
"Whether the virus is going through the bloodstream in the fetus, or if it’s going through the cerebral spinal fluid, it can directly access these radial glial cells. So it looked as though this receptor was a smoking gun. It seems to be in the right place at the right time, to explain the symptoms that we’ve been hearing about in Brazil."
One of the problems with space exploration is that there’s limited room for astronauts to take a lot of medical diagnostic equipment with them. But now, thanks to scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA astronauts journeying deep into space may be able to give themselves a health check-up with a small, handheld diagnostic device. Senior research scientist Matthew Coleman says it’s revolutionary in that it can work with different types of sample streams.
"We’re actually working on three different sample types. Two are non-invasive. So, one is saliva and the other one is actually breath. Then the third sample we’re looking at is blood."
Coleman says their goal is to validate a workable prototype on the ground and then for space flight testing.
"We have a patent filed and now we’re seeking funding to actually put it all together and develop the workable, clinically testable prototype."
What can our pets tell us about our own quirks? Researcher Mikel Delgado of the University of California, Berkeley recently looked at how our personality traits align with our relationships with our pets, particularly cats and dogs.
So, we basically did a massive survey of pet owners online. So someone who identifies as a cat person is probably going to score higher on the neuroticism scale, which is a measure of things like anxiety and depression and hostility, and also the openness scale, which is kind of your creativity and artistic bent, maybe openness to new ideas, whereas dog people tend to score lower on those scales. On the other hand, dog people tend to score higher on extroversion and agreeableness. So we found, consistent with previous studies, those results, but we also found that people who said they were both a cat and a dog person fell somewhere in between."
This was also the first time a survey like this focused solely on the personalities of pet owners, rather than the general population.
Disturbances like fires and clear cutting can leave forests devoid of vegetation, but not quite lifeless. By simulating these disturbances, ecologist Sydney Glassman of the University of California, Berkeley found types of fungi that could survive these catastrophic conditions. The fungi known as ectomycorrhizal, which pine trees rely on for nutrients, could in fact remain in the soil as dormant spores, even if its actively growing companions are destroyed.
"I was sampling in pine forests across North America. I was working in a collaborative group, most of the people were taking soil and sampling what was the active ectomycorrhizal fungi. And then what I did was, at those exact same locations, I simulated disturbance. So I dried out the soil, left it hanging out for several months, and then I planted seedlings in it and determined what ectomycorrhizal fungi were able to survive this disturbance and colonize plant seedlings. So I could pretty much tell you with at least 80-90 percent probability, which fungi are going to survive in any given pine forest in North America."
In the last two decades, one of the most rapidly growing areas in research is the quest to understand how the brain works – and the severe consequences when the brain goes awry. The biggest challenge, according to neurobiologist Jack Feldman of UCLA, is that the brain is probably the most complex object in the universe.
"I realize that other people have said that, but it’s probably true. There are 80 billion neurons, they’re all connected to each other, so by the time you go through the combinatorial, the numbers just get to be totally out of hand. We need to be able to solve, to understand things. One way of doing it is to try to tackle the simpler problems first to provide a foundation for the more complex problems."
Feldman and his colleagues are working on just that by pinpointing the brain’s ‘sighing reflex’. Their findings will help in the understanding of the neural control of breathing, which has broader implications for lung function.
"We would like to understand what the mechanisms are to be able to find therapies for things like SIDS and sleep apnea and Rett syndrome and so on and so forth."
How do genes properly distinguish an arm from a leg during development? In a recent study on bats, researcher Nadav Ahituv of the University of California, San Francisco found that a total of 7000 genes were expressed differently in the wing versus the hind leg. His team did this by sequencing the bat’s entire genome, and found that switches known as “enhancers” control these wing formation genes.
"So we made a fully annotated genome so we can find where the switches are, near what genes they are, and what genes they might be regulating. Enhancers are sort of the on switch, they tell the gene when to turn on, and at what level, and at what location. Most genes have what's called a promoter, right next to them. And so the enhancers are sort of the promoter of the promoter, they tell the promoter when to turn on the gene."
But not all genes expressed in either the wing or the leg may be directly involved in their development.
"More functional studies will need to be done to prove that but at least, in terms of the number of genes that we saw that are different, it’s quite high."
It turns out that remote coral reefs can thrive despite threats posed by climate change. This is great news for advocates for coral reef preservation since a decade-long study found that those surrounding remote islands were dramatically healthier than those in populated areas subject to a variety of human impacts, including overfishing and coastal development. Study leader Jennifer Smith of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography led the study.
"Coral reefs are home to more species than any other marine ecosystem on the planet. And they’re characteristically different than most ecosystems on the planet because they are dominated by animals, these corals that grow on the bottom. And so in a healthy coral reef, you have a landscape that is dominated by these beautiful reef building corals that are really the ecosystem engineers - that provides food and shelter for all the other organisms that live in that ecosystem."
Their new study shows that preservation efforts can buy researchers time as they figure out how to deal with the threat posed by ocean warming.
One of the challenges facing materials scientists is how to match new materials to the properties of existing materials. Take metals, for instance. Suveen Mathaudhu of the University of California, Riverside is working on developing lighter weight materials, like aluminum, and making them as strong as steel.
"We have to use new ways of processing the materials and designing the materials to bringing their properties up to those closer to conventional materials . The way that we choose to do that is we take the grain structures and grains are small crystals that make up a metal, and refine them down to the naonoscale, generally below what the eye can see. And when you take the grain size below one hundred nanometers, the physics change. And one of the more interesting ways that it changes is that they get very, very, very, very strong. The main goal of our research is nanostructuring of these metals, to be able to boost the properties closer to applications or maybe even beyond the materials used for existing applications."
The carbon-based "miracle" material graphene has unique molecular qualities that make it useful for microscopic tasks like water filtration. But the nanomaterial’s fragility can limit its effectiveness. Recent research lead by Baoxia Mi at the University of California, Berkeley found ways to strengthen the bonds between thin layers of graphene and improve the material’s durability as a water filter.
"We found that we have to glue these layers of graphene oxide together, which means that we have to create some forces between them, and that's how we overcome this challenge. We just use some chemical approaches to bond the layers of graphene oxide."
Mi has used two methods to bond the material. There’s a more complicated technique, which involves reacting the graphene with chemicals, and a simpler approach.
"We just sandwich some positive charged materials between the graphene oxide. The graphene oxide themselves are negatively charged. So by this sandwiching approach, we can make the membrane filter very stable."
What can the development of bat wings tell us about the structure of own limbs? According to researcher Nadav Ahituv of the University of California, San Francisco, the genetic expression behind bat wing formation may help explain limb development that has gone awry in mammals like ourselves.
"What we do see is that a lot of…the same genes and the same pathways are used. There are no humans with wings or so forth, but there are a lot of humans that have longer fingers and also webbing. And so by understanding how this happens in bats, we can go back to the human patients and try to understand how that happens in the human patients."
To observe this process of wing formation, Ahituv looked at gene expression during three stages of embryonic development in the Natal long-fingered bat.
"We figured out all the genes that are expressed in the forelimb, and all the genes that are expressed in the hind limb, at these three different stages, and then basically compared them to see what was different in terms of the genes."
Risperidone, a drug used to reduce irritability in people with autism, was not as effective as estrogens in correcting autism-like behavior in a study on zebrafish. Matthew State of the University of California, San Francisco and a team of international scientists introduced a gene known to cause autism in humans into these fish. They found that estrogens completely stopped their nighttime hyperactivity, which is a symptom of autism. Risperidone also prevented this behavior, but it made the fish less active during the day.
"It doesn't explain why risperidone works. What it did do, was say, that of the medications that we know are FDA-approved for autism, they also will correct some of the abnormalities that are a consequence of these mutations in zebrafish. What we’re hoping for is that if we find a point of biological convergence, that will help narrow in on really the critical aspect of biology that is potentially, a target for therapeutics."
Breakthroughs and discoveries in the field of Alzheimer’s disease are advancing all of the time. The only limiting factor has been funding.
"The cost to the country and to individuals and to the world is so enormous. People are beginning to realize that."
That’s Karen Gylys, a researcher at the UCLA School of Nursing, who adds that between Congressional bi-partisan support and even a University of California Alzheimer’s disease initiative, she’s hopeful that funding will improve and more discoveries will be made.
"When we pumped money into understanding heart disease, look at the changes that were able to be made in terms of death rates from heart attack and hypertension rates. Look at what’s happened with HIV, which was formerly a death sentence and now is completely controlled by drugs, because of a massive injection of research funding that was put into those diseases. I mean, that’s what needs to happen for Alzheimer’s disease and hopefully, it will continue. It’s been shown to work for other diseases and it will work for Alzheimer’s disease as well."
Paternal age has long been associated with autism in children, but could it lead to other health problems as well? Recent studies have found that mood disorders and reading disabilities like dyslexia may also be linked to older dads. Neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft of the University of California, San Francisco is further unraveling the effects of paternal age on a child’s brain development.
"What we’re adding to this, in this new study that we’re writing up right now, is a brain imaging piece and a genetic piece, looking at the mechanism in which older dads impact the child negatively."
In addition to measuring the reading abilities of these children, Hoeft is looking at de novo mutations in both parents. These are the genetic changes first seen in an egg or sperm.
"And then we can look at brain scans to see whether these de novo mutations and these brain structures are functions of paternal age, older dads having a negative impact on the offspring."
Hoeft hopes to identity risks when it comes to mood disorders or learning disabilities.
How can the group of chemicals known as steroid hormones cause almost instantaneous changes in your body, like hydrocortisone inhalers with asthma? Researcher Polina Lishko of the University of California, Berkeley mapped out the rapid route taken by progesterone, a female sex hormone, to trigger what’s called the “power kick” in sperm that leads to fertilization. This pathway may explain how similar hormones act everywhere from the brain to the lungs.
"Basically, we uncovered the universal pathway, how steroid hormones can alter the function of our organisms in quite a fast and efficient way. So the classical mechanism of how a steroid hormone functions implies that they should alter the function of our genomes, which would result in the cell changing, how the cell produces proteins. It’s a very slow mechanism."
But Lishko found that steroid hormones can change the physiology of the cell within milliseconds to seconds. They’re hoping a similar approach will shed more light on the pathways of other common steroid hormones, like estrogen and testosterone.
When we heave a deep sigh, there can be many reasons and interpretations, but an unconscious sigh is actually a life-sustaining reflex that helps preserve lung function. Now for the first time, a team of researchers at UCLA and Stanford have pinpointed the origin of the sighing reflex in the brain. Neurobiologist Jack Feldman of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute says this study gave researchers an opportunity to identify a circuit that’s responsible for an easily identifiable behavior.
"And this is one of the holy grails now of neuroscience – is to try and understand how circuits are organized. And the problem that most scientists face is that most of the problems that we’re interested in are just too complicated. With breathing, we have a direct readout of what the brain is doing, so we have a great system for interrogating what’s going on inside the brain. And the number of neurons we had identified were about 200 per side, which is not a lot of neurons, so it was tractable."
This discovery may also help doctors treat patients with breathing disorders.
It turns out that remote coral reefs can thrive despite climate change.
The new findings, published by UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, particularly underscore previous calls for coral reef preservation because the report revealed that despite threats posed by ocean warming, reefs surrounding remote islands were dramatically healthier than those in populated areas exposed to a variety of human impacts, including overfishing and coastal development.
In this full-length interview, study leader Jennifer Smith describes their landmark report on the impact of fishing on a group of fish known to protect the health of coral reef ecosystems.
Original photo: Eduardo Contreras
Diagnosing cancers and detecting recurrences can be difficult when tumors are deeply embedded within a persons’ tissues. And even then, the cells within a tumor can be diverse. Researcher John Witte of the University of California, San Francisco says that liquid biopsies may offer a less invasive and more accurate technique to pick up this complexity, or the heterogeneity of tumors.
"Certain places are very difficult to biopsy. The second issue is whether or not you actually get the particular cancer while you’re biopsying. Depending on the cancer, you can have different foci of the disease, so it kind of depends where you stick your needle, what you pick up."
The blood tests will pick up tumor DNA floating in a person’s bloodstream.
"Looking at cell-free DNA in the blood is also going to pick up kind of this heterogeneity of the cancer, because presumably the cells are coming out from all different parts of the tumor. But the hope is that you’ll be able to actually kind of reconstruct the tumor heterogeneity from the liquid biopsy."
One way researchers can track the spread of Zika virus is by closely monitoring mosquito populations. As part of a NASA-funded study, epidemiologist Chris Barker of the University of California, Davis is using surveillance data to help estimate the risk of Zika spread in the United States. Researchers are already doing this for West Nile Virus.
"I think with Zika it will be similar, except that we’ll rely a lot on detection of human cases. We do a lot here with translating our research results into tools online. So we provide risk calculators that combine the temperature data from NASA, with the surveillance estimates to give overall estimates of risk for West Nile virus. And the NASA project is really aiming to develop tools that are very similar for Zika, Dengue, and Chikungunya viruses."
NASA technology may also contribute to this large-scale surveillance.
"So that will involve pairing that lab work with data from satellites; to try to figure out what we can estimate at broad scales, in terms of risk."
Understanding what’s involved in the onset Alzheimer’s disease is complicated. But it turns out that lifestyle changes can make a huge difference, even in patients who are already impaired. Karen Gylys of the UCLA School of Nursing says this suggests that people can start making choices earlier and possibly lessen their risk of developing the neurodegenerative disease.
"So things like exercise, things like Mediterranean diet, fish oil, there’s evidence that that these things can move the dial on neuropsychiatric tests in elderly subjects and in some studies in elderly subjects who are beginning to be impaired."
And these studies have an added benefit.
"One of the things that goes along with this - lifestyle changes and lifestyle benefits - is that the evidence is beginning to lie up with things that are good for your heart is also good for your brain. So ti makes a lot of sense."
While Gylys admits that one solution is not enough, understanding these results is encouraging for those working in this field.
How close are researchers to a male birth control? By preventing what is called a sperm’s “power kick,” which allows them to penetrate the egg, fertilization cannot happen. Polina Lishko of the University of California, Berkeley says that to activate this power kick, the female hormone progesterone binds to a specific protein on the sperm’s surface. If researchers could block this protein, it would essentially make a man infertile.
"The ideal target for a contraceptive, whether it is male or female, would be a protein which is uniquely-expressed."
For a male contraceptive, the protein it would target would be expressed only in a sperm cell. The idea behind this is that it would reduce the risk of side effects. In the male body, progesterone levels are low, so blocking the protein responsible for this power kick would likely not cause unwanted effects.
"If you block the activity of this protein, it would be the same as the absence of the protein."
Lishko says that additional studies will be needed to confirm this.
Can climate patterns help us predict where Zika virus will spread next? Epidemiologist Chris Barker of the University of California, Davis focuses his research on the ecology and epidemiology of mosquito-borne viruses. He says that weather does in fact affect mosquito behavior, and this can help researchers gauge Zika risk in different regions.
"Part of our estimates of risk for mosquito-borne viruses, which includes West Nile virus, and Zika as well, comes from the data we gather from surveillance. And then the other piece of information…is really what the weather is doing, and a large part of that is how warm it is."
Barker is also looking at other environmental risk factors that might increase Zika transmission.
"And we're interested in how the structure of the urban environment affects the spread, as well as, how seasonality affects the rate of spread, and that helps guide surveillance, and control decisions, to try to limit the spread of these mosquitoes."
Studies on a family with a rare sleep disorder have strengthened the genetic tie between sleep and depression. The family carried the condition known as Familial Advanced Sleep Phase, or FASP. Researcher Louis Ptacek of the University of California, San Francisco says FASP causes people to chronically fall asleep and wake up early.
"We began this work focused exclusively on the circadian phenotype, the morning lark, or FASP phenotype."
But three members of the family with FASP also had seasonal affective disorder, and carried a gene mutation that appeared to link their depression to their sleep schedules.
"For all the work in drosophila and fungi and mice, what we understand about circadian clock genetics is not accounting for even one half of FASP. So, these families then provide a huge resource for identifying novel clock genes."
Does being bilingual make you smarter, or even healthier? Neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft of the University of California, San Francisco says this question has stirred up a great deal of debate. To get some answers, Hoeft is turning to language immersion programs at elementary schools to see what is the impact of bilingualism on a child’s cognitive development.
"We’re studying a number of Spanish/English bilingual children, and Chinese/English bilingual children….going into this program and learning two languages at the same time, and how that impacts the brain."
While some researchers say bilingualism may delay the onset of dementia by 10 years, others say there are no advantages. The kids Hoeft will study start speaking a second language in kindergarten 80 percent of the time. Once they become fourth graders, they switch to spending half their time speaking English.
"And they believe that by teaching it this way, then they are more likely to be fluent bilinguals."
Hoeft’s large-scale neuroimaging bilingualism study is being conducted at UCSF’s Laboratory for Educational NeuroScience.
Why do some people develop Alzheimer’s disease and other do not? UCLA researchers have found a possible answer. Study leader Karen Gylys says they analyzed cryopreserved human tissue samples from cognitively normal patients and those with dementia. This was to get a snapshot of the synapse – that’s the brain’s point of communication between two neurons.
"Hopefully, if we understand what’s happening in synapses, we can understand better how to protect synapses because it’s when the synapses go that the cognitive deficits appear."
In their samples, Gylys and her colleagues looked at one measure in particular – amyloid beta oligomers. These are clumps of amyloid beta protein before they become actual plaques. Patients with early stage dementia had high levels of oligomers.
"Somehow there’s a threshold level of synaptic oligomers that once it’s crossed, that’s when you start getting dementia symptoms. What that suggests is that if you’re able to keep your level of synaptic oligomers low, then maybe you can escape the symptoms."
A new smartphone app called MyShake designed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley is creating a global seismic network that is expanding by the day. Graduate student Qingkai Kong says the new Android app is a crowd sourcing project to improve the speed and accuracy of current earthquake detection.
Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle
"If there’s an earthquake occurring, somewhere in the world… the phones nearby will first detect it, and then they will send the trigger message back to our server, and we will see, like a cluster of triggers from the phones nearby the center of the earthquake, both in time and place."
The current version of the app runs 24 hours a day and provides interactive features like a map of past historical earthquakes and a list of items needed to prepare for a quake, such as an emergency kit.
"We hope that in the future, with everyone’s help, we will have a public earthquake early warning system from these smartphones."
Autism is five times more common in boys than girls, and a recent study at the University of California, San Francisco suggests a possible explanation for what’s called the Female Protective Effect. Using zebrafish carrying a gene known to lead to autism in humans, researcher Matthew State found that estrogens, an important hormone in females, reversed autism-like behavior.
"From our genetic studies, we’ve identified that genetic changes that lead to autism in girls, as a general proposition, are more numerous and carry larger effects than they do in boys. And what that suggests is that you need more of a disturbance in girls, in order to get the same outcome as you do in boys. If you knew what the protective factor was, you would understand not only something about the biology of autism, but you would also understand something about the biology of resilience to autism risk."
State hopes these insights will eventually lead to ways to treat or prevent autism.
Researchers have never identified a biological process linking sleep and depression – until now. Study leader Louis Ptacek and his team at the University of California, San Francisco found a gene mutation in a family suffering from both a chronic sleep disorder and seasonal depression. The team engineered mice and fly models with the genetic mutation to see how changes in light exposure, or the length of daylight, affected behavior.
"And since we had generated the animal models of the human mutation and showed that they have a circadian phenotype, we tested whether they had a depression-like phenotype."
It turns out that extreme changes in light exposure, such as that caused by very short days, elicited depression-like behavior in mice. Although animal models cannot be directly extended to humans, Ptacek says the study suggests a mechanism behind these disorders in people.
"Part of our mission moving forward is to really push the notion that we can improve health through better sleep."
The University of California launched the UC Cures for Alzheimer’s Disease Initiative to accelerate the development of promising Alzheimer’s disease research by scientists throughout the university system. UC President Janet Napolitano says the university is already playing a critical role in the field by conducting basic research and clinical trials.
"We want to focus our research efforts in part because we can see the future that there is progress to be made here, and we have the laboratories, the scientists, the post-docs, the students, the resources available to put mass on target for this disease, which is terrible for anyone who has a loved one or has experience being in contact with someone suffering from Alzheimer’s, but also because of the aging of the U.S. population, we know it’s only going to grow in prevalence."
The goal of the initiative is to move research for potential treatments into early proof-of-concept clinical trials.
Developing clean, renewable energy sources is a global challenge. But through advances in semiconductor nanowire technology, University of California, Berkeley chemist Peidong Yang has a potential game-changer in the field of artificial photosynthesis. Yang and his colleagues are developing a way to capture carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into a sustainable transportation fuel. Yang says the whole system looks like a semiconductor chip.
"They look like a forest of nanowires. And underneath these forests basically, we culture these bacteria. So the bacteria basically is directly attached to the semiconductor surface."
This artificial forest of nanowires could reduce carbon dioxide from the air in part by generating enough energy from sunlight.
Basically it provides the capability to capture as much as possible, the solar spectrum, because that’s the energy input to these carbon dioxide reduction reactions. Second, it provides interface with these bacteria so that the bacteria can take the energy and the electron from the whole process and do the next step, which is the CO2 reduction.
Do your genetics or your environment determine whether you will develop a mood disorder? By comparing the brain structures of family members, neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft from the University of California, San Francisco discovered that the region of the brain responsible for emotion is passed down from mother to daughter. But teasing out the impacts of nature versus nurture is a different story. To resolve this issue, Hoeft will study the brain structures in families that have used in-vitro fertilization, or IVF.
"So what this allows us to do is to dissociate genetic, prenatal and postnatal environmental influence for the very first time in humans."
Basically, if a surrogate mother keeps the child she carries, she’s not passing along her genetics, but she does affect the child’s prenatal and postnatal environments. This scenario differs from a surrogate mom who doesn’t raise the child, because in this case, she just influences the prenatal environment.
"And so you can compare these different groups to try to dissociate these different pieces."
Zika isn’t the only mosquito-borne disease that has confounded scientists. Epidemiologist Chris Barker of the University of California, Davis is currently looking at dengue transmission in Peru, where infected individuals may not display symptoms. To spread the disease, a mosquito must bite an infected human and become infected itself. Barker is looking at this person-to-mosquito disease transmission.
"What we really want to know is across that full spectrum of disease, from before you even show any symptoms, during symptoms, and afterward, how infectious are people to mosquitoes?"
Barker’s team is also providing surveys to people suspected of being infected. These questionnaires gather information on their symptoms and movement, or where they may go.
"The third part of the project really uses models to tie all of that information together, to have a more complete understanding of Dengue transmission over the full range of disease. Dengue’s caused millions of cases outside our border for many years."
Estrogen, the primary female hormone, may be an important player in the prevention of autism, and might explain why girls are less likely than boys to develop the disorder. Researcher Matthew State of the University of California, San Francisco found in zebrafish that estrogen compounds could reverse abnormal behaviors caused by a specific gene mutation.
"The only way that you’re going to know what autism looks like in a zebrafish is to take a gene that you absolutely know leads to autism in humans, and then put that into a zebrafish, and figure out what does it do. Then we could take hundreds of compounds that might have an influence on brain function and expose the zebrafish and see whether or not any of the compounds correct the abnormality."
When the zebrafish were exposed to estrogens, the autism-like behavior disappeared, but State says there is much more work to be done before this can be extended to humans.
"To really know what it is that is causing someone to develop a social disability is a much more complicated question."
What if you could find out within minutes how you or a loved one will respond to certain therapeutic drugs, including chemotherapy? Well, biomedical scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are teaming up with medical oncologists at UC Davis to see if they can do just that. In this full-length interview, learn how the Lab's biological accelerator mass spectrometer is making this possible.
Bioinspired components are a big part of materials science. Mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudhu of the University of California, Riverside explains that the concept is to use the principles of a particular organism to design something synthetic that can work in a similar way.
"One example that I’ll give is nacre, which is also known as mother of pearl, so you see these in shells and you see them in the ocean. And they have to be able to get bashed around against hard rocks and hard surfaces and when you look at the microstructure, at the fundamental features of nacre, you find platelets of calcium carbonate, hard ceramic shells with glue-like material in the middle that can absorb energy."
Using these principles, engineers are able to extract a way of making composites for applications like car bumpers that can survive crashes, or for a soldier’s armor.
"And in very similar ways, we can look at other things within nature and design based on the way they’re designed, to meet some modern application."
What do cats and humans have in common? Heart disease probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, but recent discoveries at the University of California, Davis have revealed how a genetic mutation can affect feline hearts. Researcher Mark Kittleson helped discover this mutation, which is linked to a type of heart disease seen in Maine coon and ragdoll cats as well as in humans.
"So when you have a mutation in a gene, it produces an abnormal protein. That protein then is in the cell and gets incorporated into the area where it should be."
The mutation affects the part of the heart cell that contracts known as the sarcomere. But since the protein is dysfunctional, its addition disrupts this function of the cell.
"We just came out with paper showing that the protein does get incorporated into the sarcomere. So if you could block it from actually forming, you could then… hopefully cure the disease, maybe even reverse it. We are working…to look at how this mutation actually causes the disease in cats, and using that as a model for the disease in humans."
What if your smartphone could double as a seismometer? Thanks to your phone’s sensors and a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, now it can. The app is called MyShake, and it can quickly issue a warning to those in danger zones when the shaking starts. Graduate student Qingkai Kong developed the algorithm, which works by gathering information from a worldwide network of phones.
"We can identify the location, magnitude, and also the origin and time of the earthquake. The benefit is that at places where we don’t have a traditional seismic network…we can monitor the earthquake, and we can issue the earthquake early warning to reduce the earthquake hazard."
MyShake’s algorithm can distinguish natural human activity from earthquake movement. The app is currently available for Android, but Kong hopes iPhones will be next.
"So we are now considering we expand it to iPhones and other platforms very soon in the future."
Clinical and animal studies have long suggested a link between depression in mothers and their daughters. Now, cognitive neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft from the University of California, San Francisco has found that mothers do in fact pass down the brain region associated with emotion to their daughters.
"In general, it’s very difficult to do an in vivo study, or studying how brain networks are passed on from parent to offspring… so that’s where neuroimaging came in. We decided to scan everyone in the family, which no one has done, or published in the past."
In each of these family members, Hoeft looked at the volume of the corticolimbic system, which is believed to govern emotions and has been implicated in mood disorders.
"We looked at how they’re similar between mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters. And what we found was that mothers and daughters had very similar amounts of corticolimbic system."
This study has paved the way for future brain imaging studies on inheritance patterns.
Photo: Tang Ming Tung via Getty Images
What time did you eat last night, ladies? A team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego have found that fasting at least 12 hours overnight may reduce a woman’s breast cancer risk.
"There’s a lot of recent literature in popular press on various fasting regimens in human health. And many of these aren’t backed by rigorous scientific evidence, so this is kind of building on that knowledge base – or adding to that knowledge base."
That’s study leader Catherine Marinac, who adds that women who fasted longer had better control over their blood sugar concentrations. So, what’s the connection?
"We know that it influences inflammation. And many of these metabolic factors are related, so you’ll typically see abnormal glucose with inflammation. We know it influences some parameters related to Circadian rhythms and Circadian misalignment and all of these things are on the same cascade. So we don’t know the exact mechanisms, but that’s currently being investigated in animals."
Can the mutations found in tumors help unravel the mystery of cancer? Researcher John Witte of the University of California, San Francisco is using liquid biopsies to pick up a tumor’s DNA circulating in a cancer patient’s bloodstream.
"Tumors grow and they evolve. And to get a sense of the natural history of a tumor evolving, you’d have to take repeat biopsies and sequence that. But now with a liquid biopsy, you could go in and just draw blood every week, and sequence that, and see how things are changing with their tumor. So I think we’ll learn a lot more about…what drives cancer, the evolution of tumors."
Collecting the right amount of this DNA from the bloodstream is still a challenge, but liquid biopsies have shown promise with pancreatic, ovarian, and colorectal cancers.
"The next question is, well, if you’ve picked up the cancer, and you know what the mutations are, can that tell you, for example, whether or not someone should be treated immediately and how they should be treated?"
In a new astronomical survey, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory aim to catalogue the sky. Astrophysicist David Schlegel is helping to generate the Legacy Survey with the end goal of what is called a “forward model” of all the objects in the universe.
"This is what we aspire to, to really have a mathematical description of however many billions of objects that we see in the sky, stars and galaxies: their positions, their shapes, how bright they are, all of the measurables of these objects. And once we have this then it really makes future data from any telescope more interpretable, more quickly. Meaning that if you take some other image of the sky and we’ve already imaged it… You don’t have to look and say, hmm, I wonder what’s in that image? You’ll know right away.
This project will result in the largest and most data-rich sky survey ever done, helping scientists collect information on over 30 million galaxies. This map is publicly available online as a Sky Viewer tool.
The sudden outbreak of Zika virus in the Americas has scientists baffled. By studying mosquito behavior, epidemiologist Chris Barker of the University of California, Davis is looking for possible explanations behind the spread, and where Zika might or might not go next.
"I tend to focus on the processes that drive transmission and that includes climate; it includes interactions between people and vectors. There are a lot of models for vector-borne diseases that sort of ignore the vector component. I have mosquitoes from Puerto Rico, for example, and that’s right in the middle of where Zika is active right now. So we’re going to compare the vector competence, which is the ability of the mosquitoes to transmit the virus here, versus Puerto Rico."
Prior to the recent outbreak, Zika occurred in areas of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands.
"We’re interested in doing some work comparing viral strains as well, to look at pre-epidemic strains versus the ones we’re seeing now, to see if there’s been a change that could have caused this explosive transmission across the Americas."
Fungal spores that had survived a devastating forest fire left researchers to wonder if the original diversity of fungi could ever recover. Ecologist Sydney Glassman of the University of California, Berkeley says that actively growing fungi died during the Rim Fire in California’s Sierra Nevada region, but heat-resistant spores remained.
"One of the reasons I was interested in studying what fungi are going to survive disturbances was because I know that disturbances are becoming even more common due to climate change."
To track recovery, Glassman is studying fungal dispersal. This happens through factors like animals, wind, and rain. Glassman is looking at both spores and actively growing fungi, which can grow as masses known as mycelium.
"We put bags in the soil, and let mycelium grow through them, and sequence sample that. And then we also use Mason jars to sample the rain, and see what spores are coming in via the rain. So we’ve been using a multitude of methods to determine what fungi are coming in, so we can determine the succession."
Researchers are looking to develop materials that are lighter and stronger for a variety of applications – including vehicles. Materials scientist Suveen Mathaudhu of the University of California, Riverside studies the underlying mechanisms that will make metallic materials and composites lighter and stronger. Mathaudhu says this quest for different materials has a real world example – the Ford F-150 truck.
"Last year’s Ford model shifted from using a steel frame to an aluminum frame, which saves a lot of mileage and increases the fuel economy of the vehicle by taking over 700 pounds out of the frame of the vehicle. As we continue to do this, our vehicles should become more and more efficient, but we have to design materials that are able to fit into where the heavier materials lie to be able to do this more efficiently."
To do this, researchers can use computational tools, but Mathaudhu says one of the current challenges is to accelerate the design and application of materials.
If you live long enough, chances are you’ll develop cataracts, an age-related eye disease in which the lens of the eye becomes clouded and impairs vision. And it doesn’t just affect humans…
"Most people in the United States, they know cataract as that milky white appearance in their dog’s eye. It’s incredibly prevalent – 100 percent of dogs have vision impairment from cataracts by age 13."
That’s Jason Gestwicki of the University of California, San Francisco. His lab is working on a way to reverse cataracts using eye drops. Having such a topical treatment would not only be a boon to those in developing countries who can’t afford the very successful surgical treatment, but it could also help our nation’s pets.
"There just aren’t very many places in the United States that do the surgeries for companion animals. And there’s a lot of opportunities, a lot of interesting patients – human and animals – who we might be able to help. And that’s what got us really excited to start this project."
If it weren’t for multi-disciplinary studies and translational research, the development of a potential eye drop that can reverse cataracts may not have happened. University of California, San Francisco researcher Jason Gestwicki explains that his lab was initially interested in coming up with small molecule treatments for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
"They had some features in common with cataracts and frankly, I didn’t know much about the cause of cataract. I didn’t know that cataract involved this protein aggregation."
When the process of validating their technologies did not move fast enough for the treatment of neurodegenerative disease, Gestwicki’s lab tackled the cataract since one of the amyloid proteins involved in its formation is similar to those involved in Alzheimer’s disease.
"I want to emphasize, though, that the process in Alzheimer’s disease is much more complicated than the process in cataract, but I think it gives our team satisfaction and motivation and let’s us know that we’re on the right track and that’s another satisfying thing."
In the midst of an outbreak, where do scientists even begin to study the Zika virus? As part of a NASA-funded study, epidemiologist Chris Barker of the University of California, Davis is working to shed some light on patterns of Zika spread and its vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito. By using models for other mosquito-borne diseases like Dengue, Barker is able to predict how Zika might spread in the United States, if at all.
"The NASA project is right at that interface between real-world field-collected data and models. So what we’re trying to do is actually put viruses, Zika virus in particular, in mosquitoes. Look at how long they take to transmit it at different temperatures and how well our California mosquitoes and different species would transmit it."
For years, Dengue has caused millions of infections outside of the U.S. and like Zika, people who are infected may not show symptoms.
"So I think there will be a lot of research forthcoming. Because Zika wasn’t on anyone’s radar until recently, no one’s really done that work."
For the first time, a team of scientists has shown that PET scans can reveal details of proteins in the brain that can track the progressive stages of Alzheimer’s disease in cognitively normal adults.
"We can now very reliably and with a great deal of accuracy say that there are changes in the brain during life that are very highly predictive that a person’s going to have Alzheimer’s."
That’s study leader Dr. William Jagust of the University of California, Berkeley. He explains that aside from tracking beta-amyloid deposits, which for years has been known as a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, they can see the build-up of tau protein, which has emerged within the last decade as a major player in the development of symptoms. Before, this was only measured through post-mortem analysis.
"If we can look at people, say before they have dementia, and we know how much amyloid in the brain and how much tau is in the brain, we might be able to get a sense of their stage or their progression towards Alzheimer’s disease and that may be crucially important for when we give them certain kinds of medications."
Filters used to purify drinking water or treat wastewater have a lifespan, usually because contaminants clog them over time. Researcher Baoxia Mi of the University of California, Berkeley is taking on this issue by developing a regenerative membrane filter made from the carbon nanomaterial graphene. This would combat the gradual wearing of filters known as membrane fouling.
"Membrane fouling means that when we use the membrane to filter water, something that we have in the water, could attach to the membrane and decrease the performance."
This lead Mi to compare these systems to the natural filtration processes found in the human body.
"For example, for our kidney, or human skin. They don't get fouled. Not because things don't attach to them, but because they can regenerate themselves. With time, the old cells will die and then go away, and then new layers will be there, right?"
The hope is to create a filter where new layers of membrane can replace the fouled ones.
Mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudhu of the University of California, Riverside is an unabashed fan of comics – he’s even called an expert on the science of superheroes. Take his favorite, Spiderman, for example.
"In the original Spiderman comics, he did not have webs shooting out of any specific glands or any powers that let him make web inside his body. As a chemistry student, he was forced to experiment and make his own super-strong web-like material. What’s very interesting about it is there’s a lot of research that’s now showing that real spider web is extremely strong. So in a way, Spiderman was ahead of his time in designing some of the these materials that just now we’re trying to duplicate with carbon nanotube wires and other high-strength fiber-like materials."
Mathaudhu explains that these types of materials are lighter, too and that can benefit transportation applications.
"If we can get lighter and stronger, then we get more fuel-efficient as we move to a more energy sustainable economy."
Did you know we can produce an energy-burning ‘good fat’? It’s called brown fat and the catch is, adults don’t have a lot of it because it’s an adaptive process that’s related to exposure to cold temperatures. Kevin Tharp, a Ph.D student at the University of California, Berkeley explains that this ‘browning’ process occurs when white fat-derived cells evolve to become brown-fat-like, or beige fat cells.
"This occurs for humans when they experience prolonged periods of cold. But when summer comes around, that beige fat that you had generated to survive through winter will actually dissipate because you have no need for it anymore."
Tharp and his colleagues created a synthetic implant that can ‘brown’ for a short period of time. The hope is that this could someday be used therapeutically for obesity disorders. So far, it’s been tested in mice.
"The implant lasts about three to four weeks and over that period of time, you can clearly see that there’s a reduction in terms of weight gain for the mice that received the implant and were fed the high fat diet."
When California’s catastrophic Rim Fire destroyed her study plots in the Sierra Nevada region, graduate student Sydney Glassman of the University of California, Berkeley found a nutrient-rich layer of fungi, known as ectomycorrhizal, had survived beneath the soil.
"All of North America is covered with trees that are associated with ectomycorhizzal fungi. This is an obligate symbiosis, meaning that the fungus needs the plant and the plant needs the fungus, and neither will survive in nature without each other."
Glassman had a rare opportunity to document this symbiotic relationship in the aftermath of a fire.
"Fires are obviously really important to study but they’re just really difficult to study, because you don’t know when a fire’s going to occur. Some fungi can make spores, and they can persist in the soil and survive. Once water comes and once a plant comes for them to colonize, then they’ll germinate. We were able to actually access our plots and resample the exact same locations that we had sampled before the fire, within 3 weeks of the fire. And that was really remarkable. The fungi that I thought were going to survive the disturbance, did. I think that there’s a lot of natural resilience built into forests."
Imagine if the sound of a vacuum cleaner or blender caused your child to cover his or her ears and run out of the room. Or if the mere sensation of your touch were so uncomfortable that your child avoided physical contact completely.
These are just some of the distressful symptoms of Sensory Processing Disorder, or SPD. Now, if you’ve never heard SPD, you’re probably not alone. It hasn’t been until fairly recently that the condition has gained recognition as a distinct brain-based disorder, and that’s thanks in part to a team of University of California, San Francisco researchers, including child neurologist Elysa Marco.
In this interview, Marco describes SPD in depth and explains how their groundbreaking research may lead to a greater understanding of the condition, as well as better diagnosis and treatment.
Additional information: http://anp.ucsf.edu/overview/spd
Citizen science initiatives, in which members of the public contribute to a particular study, have become a very valuable asset to researchers. Dr. Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego is one of them. Knight co-founded the American Gut Project, a crowdsourced, crowdfunded initiative in which anyone can contribute mouth, skin or gut samples from themselves, family members and dogs – all for microbiome sequencing.
"The biggest value of these kinds of Citizen Science initiatives is that only with thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, can we get a full idea of what range of microbes and what range of microbiomes are out there. And in particular, what’s fascinating about this type of study, this is more traditional than NIH-funded studies, where you’re looking at a very specific population, with very specific criteria. And so we’re finding all kinds of configurations of the microbiome, out there in health people and also out there in people with different diseases that we would have had no idea existed. So we’re getting this tremendously expanded view of what kinds of microbiomes are out there."
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley are designing a water filter made of a material so thin it’s 2-dimensional. Researcher Baoxia Mi makes these membrane filters by organizing the nanomaterial graphene oxide into single layers of carbon, then stacking those together.
"This material has a lot of properties that are suitable for membrane filtration, especially for water purification – disinfection, absorption, or some other properties that can help us enhance the removal of water contaminants."
Unlike current membrane filters, Mi’s design does not require as much energy to push the water through the membrane since water passes quickly across the graphene. So there could be several applications for use as a water filter.
"We can use it for wastewater reuse, for typical drinking water treatment. We’re still trying to see if we can make a desalination membrane from this material – that would be very exciting."
How related is breast cancer to say, prostate cancer? Researcher John Witte of the University of California San Francisco is looking at the shared genetic basis among different cancers with the hope that it will lead to more targeted treatment. This project ties in with President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative by personalizing treatment based on genetics.
"All of cancer is a genetic disease. And I don’t mean that it’s all inherited, but even cancers that are caused by say, smoking or sun exposure, arise because there’s been DNA damage."
Witte and his lab are looking for the genetic mutations that different types of tumors share, no matter where in the body they’re located.
"For example, are hormonally based tumors, like breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer, are those arising from similar genetic mutations? And if so, maybe we could use similar treatments across different cancers."
Children with a condition called Sensory Processing Disorder, or SPD, struggle with how to process stimulation – and this includes a whole host of symptoms such as hypersensitivity to auditory and tactile sensations, poor fine motor skills and easy distractibility. So there’s a lot of misunderstanding about SPD and clinicians have even debated whether it constitutes its own disorder.
"We need more research, we need a lot more awareness and education in our community so that these kids get the help that they need without it being such a struggle, both for the kids and their parents."
That’s child neurologist Elysa Marco of the University of California, San Francisco. She’s part of a team of researchers who have found that there are measurable brain-based differences in affected children.
"I’m hoping that some of our earlier work is helping people to grasp. So I’m hoping in another couple years, there will be other labs who have replicated the work that we’ve done – we’ll be a bit more clear on both the structure and the function in our kids with sensory processing differences."
New funding is boosting efforts to develop an artificial kidney. The Kidney Project has been identified as a campus priority by the University of California, San Francisco because of its potential to develop a breakthrough therapy that would make a worldwide health impact. Bioengineer Shuvo Roy is leading the Kidney Project.
"We been working on this over the last ten years or so, to test that the individual technology components and we’re at the state where we feel that we can now bring this into a unit that can be scaled up ultimately for human use. When we are successful, our device will provide therapy 24/7 to allow the patient to be mobile. They don’t have to be tethered to a machine. Third, you’ll also get many of the benefits of a kidney, so you do not have to feel as bad as many people on dialysis do."
The goal is to have the artificial kidney in clinical trial by 2017.
**UPDATE: The National Institutes of Health has just provided more funding to this project. http://abc7news.com/health/artificial-kidney-could-free-thousands-from-dialysis/1231408/
In the last two decades, astrophysicist David Schlegel of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has explored the uncharted universe via space mapping. Using special imaging cameras, his team is creating the largest possible map of the sky to study a mysterious force called dark energy.
"I like to call myself one of the world leading experts on dark energy, which is – it’s easy to be because we know so little about it. We’re not just mapping dark energy directly, but we’re really just mapping its effects on the size of the universe."
Einstein’s theory of gravity suggests the universe’s expansion should gradually decelerate. But it seems that dark energy is beating out dark matter, a particle believed to slow this expansion. Schlegel’s team will use their map for the DESI project, or Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument.
"And what DESI will be doing is it will be taking these two-dimensional maps of the sky and then turning that into a three-dimensional map."
Could liquid biopsies for cancer be the end of invasive needle biopsies? This is Science Today. Researcher John Witte of the University of California San Francisco says this might become a reality. By detecting tumor cells or mutated DNA circulating in the blood stream, liquid biopsies would indicate the presence, type, and possibly even the location of the cancer. The basis is similar to prenatal tests, which screen for genetic disorders by examining fetal DNA in a mother’s blood.
"So the hope would be for kind of screening, you’d be able to find that someone has a cancer based on the tumor DNA that’s picked up in their liquid biopsy, in their blood, or in their urine."
Liquid biopsies could also be used for cancer patients who are having a recurrence. There’s still more work to be done, but so far, Witte says these tests are promising.
"We’re able to pick up tumor in blood. There’s no question about that. The sensitivity, and the specificity, and how valuable it will really be, is the wide open question."
To get a better sense of how the brain is organized to allow us to make successful movements, cognitive neuroscientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Action Lab are using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Graduate student Deborah Barany studies the brain dynamics of goal-directed action.
"A goal-directed action is basically anything that involves the brain when you move. And so you can think of this in contrast to an involuntary movement or a reflex, where these can happen just with your spinal cord’s involvement."
Using fMRI, Barany says they can get a better sense of this whole network of brain regions and how they’re involved in movements.
"If my goal is to try to see how the brain differentially represents say, a right movement from a left movement. I can’t answer that question with a standard analysis because you would see the same amount of brain activation in both cases. So we can use these more advanced techniques to try and parse that out and figure out exactly what’s going on in these underlying patterns of brain activity."
One thing we love covering on Science Today is anything and everything to do with the human brain – how it develops, how it works and of course, what happens when things go wrong.
A while ago, we interviewed neuroscientist Steve Finkbeiner of UC San Francisco about his work studying the brain’s role in learning, memory and neurodegeneration. It was a great conversation, but we took advantage of the opportunity to ask him some basic questions about memory. Here’s that memorable conversation.
Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley made headlines when they developed a “heart-on-a-chip”. This silicone device, which houses human heart tissue derived from adult stem cells, could someday replace animal models as a drug safety screening tool. But how does something like this actually work? We asked bioengineer Kevin Healy, who led the research.
"The chip is made similarly to how one makes a computer chip and that’s called microfabrication. So, we use microfabrication technology to make a small portion that’s like a chamber to hold cells; and then another portion that’s like a blood vessel to allow fluid to bathe the cells and deliver the drug and also nutrients and removal of waste."
The team has tested about six or seven cardiac drugs using their chip.
"Now it’s starting to look at a much wider array of drugs that would be known to cause a clinical failure and seeing if we can pick that up with the cardiac chip."
The universe is expanding at a rate faster than expected, possibly due to an invisible force in space called dark energy. Astrophysicist David Schlegel of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says they’re looking to the sky for answers using a new sky mapping survey.
"This is a project that’s designed to try to understand the nature of dark energy. We can look at a small patch of the sky and count how many galaxies that we see. And then assuming that every place that you look in the sky is approximately the same, then you just add up."
The team is mapping one third of the visible sky by stitching together images taken by a telescope fit with a new wide-view camera. The data will eventually be used for what’s called the DESI project. The goal is to create the largest and most detailed 3D map of the universe. Until then, the public can view a current online collection of 400,000 galaxies, stars, and quasars at Legacysurvey.org.
Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness for over half of the world’s population. And while it can be successfully reversed with surgery, what if this age-related eye disease could be treated simply using eye drops? A team of scientists led by the University of California, San Francisco’s Jason Gestwicki is working on just that. They’ve isolated a compound in a chemical class known as sterols that’s more soluble than previously-identified chemicals. So far, it’s reversed cataracts topically in a mouse model.
"But we are currently trying to improve that formulation, use fewer drops that last longer periods of time and to really make sure this is an incredibly safe procedure. And only then will you be able to test the molecule in humans and pet animals to see if it can reverse cataract."
Cataracts are a major source of blindness in developing countries because surgery is often not an option.
"If we could come up with a non-surgical solution to this problem, maybe we’d have a better time accessing rural parts of the world."
Have you ever heard the term ‘perceptual narrowing’? It basically refers to the phenomenon where one’s perception is broad from birth, but narrows in time due to experience. Michael Sheehan, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says it’s been previously tested with primate faces.
"Primates in general when they’re infants, they are really interested in anything that’s vaguely primate-like face and over time, they become more and more attuned and sort of specialized for learning the feature that are relevant to the particular face of their species. And even so to their population."
Sheehan says a similar process happens when humans learn language.
"So you start out being able to learn any language possible, right? And over time, you focus in on those sounds that you hear the most regularly. And then you become specialized learning one language. The same thing happens with faces – human infants are better at telling apart primate faces than adults are because of the fact that we become more specialized looking at humans in particular."
A potential way to prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like the Zika virus and malaria might be by manipulating receptors in a mosquito’s ‘nose’.* Entomologist Anandasankar Ray of the University of California, Riverside says his lab is working to make humans essentially invisible to a mosquito’ sense of smell.
"Mosquitos use carbon dioxide to navigate towards human beings from a distance. So the idea always has been that perhaps, if we could find small odors that could block the carbon dioxide machinery in the mosquito we may be able to reduce their ability to find us."
Ray’s lab did find such odors. And now, their research has led to the development of a wearable patch that is currently being tested for consumer use.
"And so I am hopeful that this approach will perhaps not only help protect us in our backyard barbeques, but also help have an impact on malaria, in Africa."
- in this case, 'nose' = antennae
UC San Francisco’s Jason Gestwicki describes his lab’s work developing eye drops to reverse cataracts. This would be a boon to the millions of people who go blind every year in developing countries because they can't afford (or have access to) the current, successful surgical treatment. Gestwicki’s work has won a UCSF ‘Catalyst Award’ and led to the launch of ViewPoint Therapeutics, an “incubator” program at the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3).
In this conversational and informative interview, Gestwicki walks us through the ‘Eureka!’ moments of the study, underscores the value of translational research at the university and discusses the many implications their finding may have on other diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Gestwicki joined the UCSF faculty in 2013. While he has continued his work on cataracts at UCSF, much of the work was undertaken in his lab at the University of Michigan (U-M). The former graduate student that Gestwicki mentions in this interview, Leah Makely, was a member of the U-M team and is now the chief scientific officer at ViewPoint Therapeutics.
Music: "Rainbow Street" by Scott Holmes freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/
Kids who struggle with processing certain sounds and tactile sensations may have sensory processing disorder, or SPD. While the condition is not as well-known as other neurodevelopmental disorders, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have found measurable neurological differences in the brains of kids with SPD and those of typically developing children. Child neurologist Elysa Marco says their work was the largest imaging study ever done in children with SPD and the first to compare brain wiring.
"I think the big issue is that with SPD being sort of the new kid on the block, it is very difficult to get big-ticket support for it. And so we’re hoping to try and get more national support for the work that we’re doing and other labs are doing around the country, to makes sure that it’s targeted not just to understanding the underlying brain-based differences, but the treatments that might be able to make a difference for our kids’ lives."
Wearable health monitors are not new to consumers, but engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have taken the trend a step further by developing a ‘smart’ wrist- or headband that can continually monitor the chemicals in your sweat. And since human sweat is rich in physiological chemicals, this device could be used to assess and monitor a user’s state of health. Engineer Ali Javey describes how it works.
"There is the flexible, printed electronic component. This is where we have the sensors to detect the different chemicals in sweat. And then there is a second component, and that’s where we can process the information, we can analyze the data and we can also transmit the signal to a wireless cell phone."
Their prototype would offer a non-invasive, real-time way to alert users to health problems such as fatigue, dehydration and dangerously high body temperatures.
"And it’s all done using a platform that is just on the back of the watch."
People may be in a sweat to use this now, but more testing still needs to be done.
When it comes to the mechanisms behind our sense of smell, there’s so much we still don’t understand. Psychologist Lucia Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley is a pioneer in odor mapping and will be using National Science Foundation funding to help crack the olfactory code in humans and animals. Part of her lab will be looking into the brain’s role in smell navigation in human mental health.
"One of the first symptoms of an illness, and that includes major depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and sociopathy. All of these medical illnesses have in common, and dementias, that you lose your sense of smell; you have an impaired sense of smell. And really, no one understands why that is."
Jacobs says her new lab will study human olfaction, specifically what’s going on with the olfactory navigation system in people with dementia.
"And see if we can add to a new diagnostic tool or help people with their day-to-day lives. How does the impaired olfaction impact that? Maybe if we understand that we can help that."
The microbiome may be the key to dealing with allergic diseases such as asthma and eczema. Dr. Susan Lynch of the University of California, San Francisco, was part of a multi-institutional study that found that infants who had a diverse mix of bacteria in the gut during the first six months of life, were at less risk of developing allergies and asthma later in life. At a recent conference, Lynch said their findings could lead to new microbiome-related treatments in humans.
"And it may be a combination of microbial supplementation with appropriate dietary interventions, that really re-engineers the microbial communities in the gastrointestinal tract to produce a broad spectrum of anti-inflammatory metabolic products that influence the tone of host-immune response."
Lynch added that the next step for researchers is to figure out how to recognize microbiome abnormalities, who to test for them, and then how to treat them.
Insects destroy billions of dollars of agriculture each year, which can result in heavy insecticide use on crops. But University of California, Riverside entomologist Anandasankar Ray hopes that practice might soon be weeded out.
"And what we are trying to develop now, is a sort of strategy to see whether we can impact agriculture so that they can reduce their dependency on toxic chemicals."
Ray’s lab is seeking healthy, natural alternatives to insecticides and bug repellants like DEET.
"That would be kind of a dream come true, if we could create a product that is affordable, washable, safe, that smells nice and yet protects the fruit, and we are not worried about consuming."
The lab has identified various substitutes that repel insects based on odors - basically creating a disgust factor for pests.
"We will continually improve upon these active ingredients that we found. It’s not a stagnant process."
Sensory Processing Disorder, or SPD, is a condition that makes it hard for people to process sensory input, like sounds and tactile sensations. This happens because parts of the brain can’t interpret sensory information correctly. Child neurologist Elysa Marco of the University of California, San Francisco describes a common scenario in a child with this disorder.
"Usually it’s an auditory input, a sound. So the top three are vacuum cleaners, blenders, automatic-flushing toilets. Kids between the age of six months and five years will, as soon as they can move themselves, run screaming from the room, hands over their ears when one these kinds of sounds gets into their world. I do think there probably is something about the low pitch hum that seems to hit a particular neural frequency, but we have no idea. The research in this field, really in some ways is just beginning."
Marco was part of a groundbreaking study showing that kids with SPD have measurable brain differences that were distinct from other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Learn more about the UCSF team conducting this research: http://anp.ucsf.edu/overview/spd
The average American consumes 13 percent of their daily calories from added sugars. And almost half of that comes from sources like sodas, sports drinks or flavored sweetened coffees. Earlier this year, the USDA released new dietary guidelines that, for the first time, advises Americans to consume no more than 10 percent of their calories from added sugars. This is good news to nutritional biologist, Dr. Kimber Stanhope of the University of California, Davis, but she admits it may take some behavior modification.
"Undoubtedly we are all in situations where we need to eat sugar – you know, the social pressures – it’s fine, but what we all need to do is get to the point where sugar is a special occasion food, it’s not a staple. We are eating it at the levels as if it’s a staple and that’s where we need to think very carefully about our foods and where they come from and what they can be doing to our health."
Educators looking for a way to get kids interested in materials science and engineering may want to bring some superheroes into the mix. That’s what mechanical engineer Suveen Mathaudhu of the University of California, Riverside has been doing – and it seems to be working. He’s now regarded as an expert on the science of superheroes.
"The science portrayed in comic books is fairly diverse. From the metals work that you see in Captain America’s shield and in Thor’s metal hammer and in Wolverine’s claws; to bio-inspired materials, like Spiderman’s web; to magnetic materials and energy materials as manipulated by Magneto."
Mathaudhu, who studies how to make metallic materials lighter and stronger, started making connections between the superpowers of superheroes and real science.
"I started using these in my technical talks as an interest grabber and then slowly, I saw more and more connections to research, to STEM outreach, and to the kind of work that I’m doing. So, it’s been a fantastic outreach tool and continues to be interesting to me."
Wi-Fi signals are predominantly used for communication, but a team of engineers at the University of California, Santa Barbara are working to use Wi-Fi signals as a sensing mechanism. Yasamin Mostofi and her team have shown that a Wifi signal can be used to count the number of people in a given space, which can someday be used for energy efficiency.
"For instance, the current smart speakers, they have Wi-Fi cards, so we have a very rich environment in a smart home for Wi-Fi links. And so we can imagine they could be used in figuring out which areas are more crowded and optimizing all sorts of things, like heating and cooling based on where people are. We think of it as an additional way of sensing."
Mostofi’s lab is also working on other uses for Wi-Fi, including using at archeological sites.
"Where sometimes there’s part of a structure that’s, you know, you just don’t want to break and you want to sense something behind it and you just simply can’t use cameras – it’s not visible."
Almost all animals with vocalizations have pretty innate ones. In other words, if a dog never met another dog, he will still bark exactly the same. But no so with birds. Hamish Mehaffey, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, studies how birds learn to sing.
"In birds, if they don’t hear other birds sing, they will sing a terrible, nonsensical song that will make them very unpopular when they finally meet other birds and they usually try to mimic the songs that they hear around them. So, even within the exact same species, there are differences in the songs."
Mehaffey and his colleagues have discovered the specific neurological mechanism by which songbirds can experiment and refine their songs as they become adults.
"We were looking at how two different pathways interact in order to allow birds to sing; one is required for the bird to sing a normal adult song and the other one was required for any kind of changes."
Understanding this mechanism in birds can help explain how the human brain learns complex motor skills and may even someday help treat neurological conditions like Parkinson’s disease.
When it comes to movement, there’s still a lot that’s unknown about what’s actually being mapped in the brain, but researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Action Lab are working to decode the cognitive architecture that underlies what’s called goal-directed movement. Graduate student Deborah Barany is part of the team.
"My research broadly focuses on the neuromechanisms that underlie our goal directed action. So, basically anything that involves the brain when you move – your brain is planning in some way, whether you know it or not. So I’m basically trying to ask the question, “how is the brain organized so that we can make these successful movements?”
Barany developed a new analysis tool that allows researchers to zoom in on active regions of the brain during specific movements. This understanding may help advance neural prosthetics or even enhance the field of robotics.
"Being able to adapt through the environment and move around obstacles and make these fast changes."
How does the brain of a schizophrenic patient differ, functionally, from others? Researchers at the University of California, San Diego’s Multimodal Imaging Lab are able to use computational modeling and brain imaging methods to investigate neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia. For graduate student Chun Chieh Fan working in this lab has been especially enlightening.
"I was always interested in how human brain work. Back in my hometown, I’m a psychiatrist. I can only talk; I can only try to understand where the problem come from. I hope with the advance of brain imaging technology, we can actually begin to understand what happened to human’s mind and human’s brain. And with better resolution instead of only talk."
Fan recently used the labs imaging techniques to discover that the three-dimensional shape of the cerebral cortex strongly correlates with one’s ancestral background. And this may lead to a more personalized medicine approach for diagnosing and treating brain diseases.
Researchers at UCLA conducted a proof-of-concept study to see if gut bacteria could affect brain function. Dr. Emeran Mayer says their 4-week study looked at healthy women who regularly ate probiotics in yogurt.
"We saw an extensive network of brain regions that differed from the beginning of the study to the end of the study. This network included sensory regions, as well as pain modulatory regions. And what was most interesting is that the intervention showed a change in the connectivity of this network. So the individuals that consumed the probiotic mix had a decrease in this network, so they showed a decreased response to negative emotional recognition tests, as opposed to the control group that got non-fermented milk product that did not show change or the group that had no intervention at all, which should a slight increase during that time."
These findings could have significant implications for future dietary or drug interventions to improve brain function.
Sometime this year, consumers will be able to buy a first-generation version of a wearable patch that can serve as a protective shield against bloodthirsty mosquitoes. The Kite Patch works by rendering the user seemingly invisible to mosquitoes by emitting odors that block their ability to detect the carbon dioxide that humans exhale. The technology is based on University of California, Riverside research and as Anandasankar Ray, who led the project, explains, it will hit the market soon because it uses ingredients that are considered safe by the EPA.
"Most of the chemicals we are using are actually classified as ‘generally regarded as safe – GRAS’, so a very special classification for the food and flavor industry. That means that there’s a lot of testing that has already occurred with those chemicals."
Nearly a billion people worldwide are affected by mosquito-borne diseases and half a million people die each year from malaria – many are young children.
"So there are immediate needs to try and find ways to prevent the spread of these diseases."
http://www.kitepatch.com/
Planning to make some carrot cake this winter? It turns out carrots grow sweeter in the colder weather, so it may be great timing for your sweet tooth. Science educator and UCLA fellow, Liz Roth-Johnson, says because plants are immobile, they need to adapt to the cold and in the case of carrots, these protective measures make them sweeter.
"So, they’ve developed all these amazing adaptations to deal with their environment, to deal with things that want to eat them, to deal with the cold. And so a vegetable like a carrot that’s growing in the ground in the cold weather, in order to defend itself against the cold, it’s developed all these amazing physiologic responses, including increasing the sugar content."
This defends the carrot against ice crystal formation …
"Which can do all kinds of terrible things to cells like dehydrate them, crush them and rupture them and so along with many other responses, this increase in sugar content helps defend the carrot against frost and cold. And the great benefit of that is when we harvest those carrots in colder weather, they taste much sweeter."
Concussion rates in young adults have been on the rise, but thanks to new laws and media attention, this has led to more treatment. Dr. Khizer Khaderi of the University of California, Davis started a sports division lab on campus and developed a device that uses a mobile solution to quickly test if an athlete has just suffered a concussion. Khaderi says the sooner you know you have a concussion, the better – and he should know as he suffered one while snowboarding.
"With my concussion, I had this feeling of – I wasn’t quite myself. I had this kind of fogginess and I’ve heard other people describe it this way as well. And it took about two to three days for it to clear out. The current guidelines is it can take up to two weeks with treatment. So, basically that means mental rest and physical rest as well. But there’s a lot of people where you don’t quite feel right, but you feel that you can continue doing whatever activities, but you might be at a danger to yourself or even to others by doing those activities without getting the proper treatment."
Poor sleep – specifically the deep slumber needed to restore memories – has been linked to a toxic build-up of beta-amyloid, the protein believed to trigger Alzheimer’s disease. Neuroscientist Bryce Mander, who co-led this University of California, Berkeley study, explains.
"So sleep actually not only helps preserve memory, but it actually also helps remove toxins from the brain and one of those toxins happens to be beta amyloid. We don’t think that this is the only reason that those toxins are associated with Alzheimer’s relating to memory impairment; we just think this is a new mechanism by which those toxins affect memory and an important one because we can actually do something about it potentially, which is get more sleep or use devices to enhance sleep or basically promote exercise in older people who are at risk for Alzheimer’s so that they get deeper sleep because exercise promotes more deep sleep."
The team has received a major National Institutes of Health grant to further test their hypothesis that sleep is an early warning sign or biomarker of Alzheimer’s.
When you simply reach for glass of water, it’s actually not so ‘simple’ – there’s a lot of coordination going on between your visual cortex, brain and motor skills. But it all happens so fast, it seems like an involuntary movement that doesn’t involve actual planning by the brain. Understanding how the brain plans for such ‘goal-directed’ action is what interests graduate student Deborah Barany of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"What are the brain maps that are involved during planning reaches or different complex skills? We use both functional imaging and structural imaging to really be able to understand the brain dynamics and structural changes that underlie both normal actions, as well as neurological disorders of movements or concussions, things like that – what’s going on in the brain."
Barany hopes their research may someday advance neural prosthetics.
"By looking at human behavior and human movement with an FMRI and these other techniques, we’re able to parse out the information that might be useful to use in this neural decoding."
It used to be thought that all germs and microbes in the gut were bad for us. Trying to eliminate such microbes with disinfectants and antibiotics over the years led to the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, which states that a lack of early childhood exposure to germs, microorganisms and even dirt, can suppress the natural development of the immune system.
"There does seem to be a consistent benefit of being exposed to a more diverse microbial community, regardless of the source of that diversity."
That’s Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego. He’s one of the world’s leading experts in microbiome research.
"Many different studies linking microbes to health have found that if you have a low diversity microbial community in your gut, you’re more at risk for a range of different diseases. That doesn’t necessarily mean that having a high diversity community is good, but it does point to an association between microbial diversity. And so the goal of a lot of studies going forward is to figure out, if you do something that increases the diversity of microbes, will that have a health benefit?"
Have you ever wondered about the amazing variety of human faces? And why this variety is far greater than that of most other animals? According to behavioral ecologist Michael Sheehan of the University of California, Berkeley, our highly visual social interactions are one of the main drivers of this evolutionary trend of individually unique faces.
"Recognition is a really important part of our social lives, so therefore there may have been selection for individuals to be more recognizable and make recognition a little bit easier."
The researchers used a U.S. Army database of body measurements and found that, as predicted, facial traits are much more variable than other parts of the body, like the length of the hand, and that facial traits are independent of other facial traits, unlike most body measures.
"And this would be one way to create lots of different variation in the overall phenotype and make individuals more distinctive. So one thing I think this research highlights is an interesting question for people to begin pursuing further about the importance of identity in different types of contexts, what is the benefit of being individual and distinctive under different situations."
A research team led by NASA Ames and the University of California, Berkeley is designing new shape-shifting robots that could make traditional robots on wheels a thing of the past. Mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino says that these robots are based on tensegrity structures that allow them to compress and easily maneuver around rough environments. This makes them ideal for not only space exploration, but also Earth-based applications.
"These might be used for home health care because a lot of people live in a very cluttered, messy home with stairs. And we see that search-and-rescue has a lot of potential of being able to drop a tensegrity robot on Planet Earth and then have it walk away and try to find some kind of target, or deliver a payload of supplies for refugees, or something else."
Agogino says that tensegrity robots are also safer.
"These are soft robots that wouldn't injure the person they're trying to help as well."
There are three basic types of fat tissue in our bodies – there’s the energy-storing white fat; and two energy-burning fats – a brown fat that arises during fetal development and a beige fat. This is a brown-like fat that’s formed within white fat tissue after exposure to cold temperatures. Kevin Tharp at the University of California, Berkeley, is studying how energy-burning fats can affect overall physiological health.
"Brown fat is an essential organ for maintaining your core body temperature. It’s more essential for infants and small mammals because they can’t shiver as well as more developed creatures like adults. And ultimately what that means is that it actually wastes energy to produce heat and that energy wasting is exactly what the metabolic benefit is."
To tap into this therapeutic concept, Tharp and his colleagues created a novel technique to engineer the growth and expansion of a brown-like fat, which could lead to new approaches to combat obesity, diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
Imagine using Wi-Fi signals to see through concrete walls? Electrical and computer engineer Yasamin Mostofi of the University of California, Santa Barbara is doing just that.
"We wanted to see if we can give this X-ray vision to our unmanned vehicles with only Wi-Fi. So they move around, they gather their measurements and then based on those measurements and the mathematical foundations we’ve developed, then they’re going to process it, to extract that image and build that image."
This type of sensing could be used in smart homes for heating and cooling, or for home security. Mostofi is also interested in using this for search-and-rescue.
"Imagine the Japan tsunami in 2011. In such a scenario there was a nuclear spill and it’s too dangerous for humans to go in. It would be great if we can have unmanned vehicles that from outside can assess the situation inside and figure out what’s going on behind the walls and then help guide humans to safe areas."
The field of neuro-ophthalmology delves into the eye-brain connection and the diseases that affect it. Dr. Khizer Khaderi directs the neuro-ophthalmology service at the University of California, Davis Eye Center.
"So I deal a lot with patients that have diseases that affect how the eye communicates with the brain. The eye is connected to the brain via a cable that we call the optic nerve and a lot of conditions that injure the optic nerve can present with decreased vision, even changes in your peripheral vision."
These conditions include multiple sclerosis, tumors, or trauma. In the case of trauma Khaderi started a sports division lab. This has led to the development of low-cost mobile tools that can determine the likelihood of a concussion by measuring how an athlete’s eyes react to specific tests.
"We’re really at an exciting time in terms of all these new technologies and ways to answer these questions, but I think that’s going to evolve more and more even with the use of tools like the ones that we’ve created here."
Who hasn’t gotten into a political argument? Emotions can run high during such debates and judgments are often made. It’s this dynamic that social psychologist Peter Ditto of the University of California, Irvine studies at his Hot Cognition Lab. The aim is to understand the passionate side of human judgment.
"I was trained as an experimental social psychologist – I do work on human judgment and decision making, particularly the errors and biases that people show when they make judgments that are kind of emotionally-based. What really changed my research was this sort of new hyper polarized, hyper partisan political environment."
Ditto’s research group helped develop the Moral Foundations Theory.
"The basic idea is there are five things that people care about – harming other people, particularly weak people; fairness; loyalty, authority and purity. 35:16 But different groups differ in how much they weight each of these different kinds of factors is what our research has shown, again and again."
Ditto’s interest is to use this research to foster a better understanding – and lower the temperature – of political conflict.
As the planet heats up, economies around the world may be cooling down. A new study at the University of California, Berkeley has found that, if left unmitigated, climate change could reduce average income by as much as 23 percent by the end of the century. The results are based on the finding that economies perform optimally at a temperature of 13 degrees Celsius, or 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Lead author Solomon Hsiang explains that rising temperatures could even widen global inequality.
"Most of the countries that are harmed the most are the countries that are already hot. And the countries that are already hot in the present world are the countries that tend to be poorer, on average, than cooler countries. And you have a lot of countries in the north, particularly in northern Europe, places like Germany and Norway, which are already quite cold and they in fact benefit a small amount from warming. And so what you have is an image of the world going forward where the global economy has been completely reshaped by climate change in a way that makes it relatively poorer and more unequal."
Healthy infants come in a range of sizes, but since growth tends to follow a fairly predictable path, physicians and new parents often refer to a growth chart to determine what’s normal. Now, researchers at the University of California, San Diego are looking to do something similar with the brain. Graduate student Chun Chieh Fan says they can use 3D imaging techniques to determine brain anatomy based on genetic heritage.
"We can have a normal trajectory, given your ancestral background and we can really look at when we should feel concerned when you deviate away from this norm. So the beauty of our current result is that it can go both ways. If you give us your brain imaging, we can calculate how similar your brain to a given proportion of your ancestral background, or you can give your ancestral information and then we can predict what is the expected brain shape, given your ancestral background."
It’s not easy landing a 1-ton robot on Mars. The Curiosity rover’s landing, famously nicknamed “Seven Minutes of Terror,” involved using large parachutes and jet propulsion technology to guide the delicate payload onto the Martian surface. Now, a team led by NASA and the University of California, Berkeley is working on a new prototype of robots made of rods and elastomers that would allow them to be dropped safely from a spacecraft and walk away. Mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino explains.
"The idea is it could be dropped from a spacecraft or possibly from a satellite, deployed. And that it absorbs energy through these elastomers. It's a particular structure. And would protect the payload in the center. So not only can it be dropped and not be damaged, it can also contain, in the middle of it, a payload that would not be damaged."
Agogino says that the design makes the robots much more robust for space exploration.
"It could be under harsher conditions, harsher terrains, much, much lighter and orders of magnitude less expensive."
In the last 15 years, DNA sequencing has literally gotten a million times cheaper. This, according to the University of California, San Diego’s Rob Knight, who is a world leader in the study of the microbiome, which is the collection of microorganisms and their genetic material in or on the human body or in another environment.
"Part of the reason that we’re finding so much out about the microbiome at the moment, is the cost of DNA sequencing dropped by about a fraction of a million in the last 15 years. And you probably wouldn’t pay $100 million to find out what was in your own gut, or the gut of your dog, or your cat – but you might well pay $100."
Knight says this has led to a large number of studies, including one he cofounded called The American Gut Project, which is a crowdsourced, crowdfunded initiative in which anyone can contribute mouth, skin or gut samples from themselves, family members or even their dogs.
"What’s going to be really exciting is when it gets to the point where every middleschooler, instead of doing a project where they just look at the mold growing in their fridge, they can sequence the DNA of that mold and find out what it really is."
A nationwide survey of physicians found that almost all young doctors under 40 have had exposure to palliative care, an approach to improve the lives of those with serious illness. But the exact opposite was the case for doctors 60 and older. Dr. Steve Pantilat, founder and director of one of the nation’s first hospital-based palliative care programs at the University of California, San Francisco, says this generational difference is in part because such services were not available in the past.
"When I was a student here at UCSF – and it’s not that long ago – we had no palliative care. Today, it’s one of the most popular electives in the medical school, we have a fellowship. And so the landscape has completely changed and you can’t leave medical school today without having exposure to palliative care."
Pantilat adds that palliative care used to be considered end of life care, but that’s changing, too.
"People live for years, decades sometimes, with their serious illness. We’re going to miss this huge opportunity to make people’s lives better because we’re waiting for something that we don’t have to wait for."
While this year’s predicted El Niño event may bring much-needed rain to California and other parts of the country, it could potentially lead to devastating costs for those in the tropics. Solomon Hsiang, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says that previous El Niño’s triggered droughts, wildfires, floods, and outbreaks of diseases that severely impacted societies and economies in the tropical regions.
"El Niño causes the tropical regions to become hotter and drier for the better part of the El Niño year. And what we found is consistent with these other findings that leads to both a decline in economic productivity throughout the tropics as well as an almost doubling in the rate of many patterns of violence throughout the tropics."
Hsiang is hoping to raise awareness to those in less affected areas that El Niño’s are serious events.
"In the United States and in California we’re very aware of what’s going on. It changes our rainfall patterns, but the things we experience here are nowhere near as extreme as the things that the 3 billion people in the tropics will be experiencing over the coming months."
Researchers from 50 institutions are coming together to form the Unified Microbiome Initiative – an ambitious effort that aims to develop next-generation technologies to delve into microbiomes, which are the complex ecosystems of microorganisms. One of the nation’s leading experts in the field is Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego. He says one of the most exciting aspects of the microbiome is how interdisciplinary it is.
"You’re always learning new things, always having to come up with new concepts. Just within my lab, for example, we have people from computer science backgrounds, from ecology backgrounds, from molecular biology, from microbiology, from electrical engineering – and bringing all of those talents together and then having them interface with people at companies to end users of the technology, there is really a tremendous potential to transform how we think about our microbes, how we think of ourselves as humans in general given how so many of our genes are not what we would traditionally think of as human in origin."
In an effort to advance STEM research and education, the National Science Foundation is hosting new workshops called the Ideas Lab, which bring together diverse groups of scientists to form innovative research projects. A recent workshop awarded a total of 15 million dollars to three teams of scientists to crack the olfactory code. Psychologist Lucia Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley is part of a team of seven principle investigators that received 6.3 million dollars.
"So it's a very diverse group. I mean it’s not just throwing out individual grants, which would be wonderful, but it’s actually creating three teams who are going to be working together synergistically across disciplines."
Jacobs says the team, which includes mathematicians and cell neuroscientists, will study how humans and animals navigate using smell.
"We've got one goal and we're doing it from seven different perspectives. So that's really exciting. That could not have happened under any other grant mechanism."
Atmospheric scientist V. ‘Ram’ Ramanathan of the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography was part of the California contingency in Paris during the UN Climate Change Summit. Ramanathan has predicted a significant increase in global warming within the next two decades, but says there’s plenty that can be done now to ‘bend the curve’ – including practical solutions that are already being implemented at UC San Diego.
"We generate our own power by solar, fuel cells and using methane from water treatment plants. They are off-the-shelf technologies. There is no reason these cannot be deployed by the rest of the nation and for the planet."
Ramanathan, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, had a quick audience with Pope Francis in the parking lot of the Vatican last year.
"So, I told him basically to talk about climate change in his speeches and urge people to be better stewards of the planet. Ten days later he made this major pronouncement and talked about climate change and warned people if you destroy nature, it will destroy you."
A new study at the University of California, Berkeley found that, if left alone, climate change could severely reshape the global economy by the end of the century. The researchers based their results on the finding that economies grow more slowly above or below an optimal productivity temperature of 13 degrees Celsius, or 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Study leader Solomon Hsiang (Sh-i-ahng) explains.
"Given the finding that there’s this optimum temperature and that many countries are warmer than it, we simulate the world going forward and we ask how economies will evolve as the planet heats up. And what we find it that economic productivity for most of the temperate countries and the tropical and subtropical countries declines relative to what it otherwise would be in a world where we allow climate change to occur unmitigated."
Hsiang says he hopes the study reveals the cost of climate change when making investments for global energy solutions.
"So we might have been undervaluing the climate which would make us not as willing to spend on it but what we’re finding is that actually we should probably be willing to spend more on it today."
Osteoarthritis is the aging and wearing of cartilage in the joints of your hands, knees, hips and spine. If severe enough in the knee, it may even require replacement surgery. While current techniques typically use metal or plastic replacement joints, Dr. Grace O’Connell’s biomechanics lab at the University of California, Berkeley is growing cartilage tissue in hopes of developing a biological solution.
"We’ve been able to grow very small discs of cartilage, about four millimeters in diameter. But your knee is a lot bigger than that. So if you want something that’s clinically relevant, at the minimum, you want something that’s about an inch in diameter. And so we’ve developed a way of growing smaller pieces and then, in a sense gluing them together with native matrix to make a larger surface."
O’Connell says that being able to engineer larger cartilage tissue holds promise for future clinical application.
"Instead of replacing the entire knee joint with metal and plastic components, you could then replace just the damaged cartilage with a biological replace strategy."
Back in 1975, climate scientist V. ‘Ram’ Ramanathan of the University of California, San Diego accurately predicted how the earth’s climate would change by 2010. And while his climate model chart continued to show further warming, Ramanathan says we can ‘bend the curve’ in this chart if we take collective measures now.
"We have the science and we have the technology. This is where the intitiatives taken in California could shine a brightest light possible on this problem. The Carbon Neutrality Initiative of the University of California, through which we would go to nearly zero emissions another ten years and then combine that with the state of California’s aggressive actions to mitigate climate change by using solar fuel cells and waste gas can provide like a beacon for the nation and for the planet to follow."
Could shape-shifting rovers lead the next generation of space exploring robots? A collaborative team led by NASA Ames and the University of California, Berkeley is designing a spherical prototype modeled after tensegrity structures, in which isolated rods are held together by elastomers that allow them to easily change shape and absorb forces after impact. Study leader Alice Agogino explains.
"So these robots are spherical, and so they are amazing little walking spheres. And none of the compressive elements or the rods touch each other, so it gives us a structure that can take a lot of impact. We can make it have shape-shifting motion, which allows us to change the center of gravity to make it flop over and walk, basically."
Agogino says that the tensegrity prototype would be cheaper and more efficient than traditional rovers.
"We want rovers that are so small that could be packed so we could put multiple rovers in a space ship, and reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of space exploration."
Could flipping a molecular switch in human fat cells prevent metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes? A research team led by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco is getting closer after identifying a similar pathway in mice that converts unhealthy white fat into calorie-burning brown fat. PhD student Kevin Tharp of the University of California, Berkeley recently studied brown fat’s role in reduced weight gain and describes this process as the “browning” of white fat.
"Which is where white fat cells basically evolve to become more brown fat-like. And that’s exactly what occurs when you’re exposed to cold for long periods of time."
Although browning is a natural process, researchers are looking to actively harness brown fat’s energy-burning capability by developing drugs and other therapeutic procedures to eventually combat obesity and diabetes.
"The expansion of brown-fat tissues could be used as a preventative measure or a treatment measure."
Despite being Earth’s most abundant and diverse form of life, we still know very little about microbes. Now, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is leading a new national research effort called the Unified Microbiome Initiative, which is aimed at understanding and harnessing the planet’s microbial ecosystems. Postdoctoral scholar Amor Menezes has been studying how microbes can aid future space missions by producing food, fuels, and pharmaceuticals from limited resources.
"You can think of them as bacteria, so they’re really small organisms. They’re singled-celled. And we have them essentially all around us. And so these microbes will take kind of these available resources, and they will produce this chemical of interest, and then the idea is that either we leverage this chemical of interest to produce other things, again using microbes, or maybe that chemical is interesting in and of itself. Maybe it’s food, maybe it’s fuel because we can combine with something else."
Menezes says this can lead to innovations in agriculture, energy, health, and the environment.
Photo caption: A colorized microscopy image hints at the complexity of microbial life. It shows two bacterial cells in soil. The bacteria glue clay particles together and protect themselves from predators. This also stabilizes soil and stores carbon that could otherwise enter the atmosphere. (Credit: Manfred Auer, Berkeley Lab)
The human gut microbiome alone has been linked to allergies, obesity and inflammatory bowel disease to name a few. Now, to advance studies of the microbiomes found in the gut and everywhere else, the University of California, San Diego has announced the Microbiome and Microbial Sciences Initiative. Chancellor Pradeep Khosla says this interdisciplinary effort is a bold new research project.
"We will further our understanding of the communities of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that live on our bodies and everywhere around us and we will find new ways to manipulate the microbiomes for the benefit of human and environmental health. We at UC San Diego are uniquely positioned to meet this challenge."
Khosla says that’s because the initiative will draw from the expertise of many different disciplines and resources on the campus.
"They will unite to advance our microbiome research and create educational opportunities for our students. We are excited about this new initiative and we know it will transform lives."
Low-cost mobile tools developed by the University of California, Davis may soon take the guesswork out of current tests for sports-related concussions. Khizer Khaderi, the director of neuro-ophthalmology at the UC Davis Eye Center, found a way to more objectively measure for concussions by assessing the eye-brain connection.
"Over a third of the brain is dedicated to your vision. So given my expertise and the study and measurement of vision, so we came up with a device that uses a mobile solution that involves biometrics around different types of eye movements, pupil response and brainwave activity."
Current cognitive tests compare results to previous baseline measurements. But players who want to stay in the game can deliberately fudge those baseline tests so if an injury does occur, their results are not too different from their baseline scores.
"The current screening that's going on with cognitive testing is great, I mean it’s better than having nothing and what we’re trying to do is just continue to improve that process with this solution that we’re proposing and we’re going to be testing this fall."
If you were outside on a clear June day in 2012, you may have seen Venus’s silhouette as it passed exactly between Earth and the Sun. This phenomenon is called a “transit”, and it’s also a method that planet hunters like Lauren Weiss of the University of California, Berkeley use to find exoplanets.
"So we can see this phenomenon with exoplanets, too. We don’t actually see the picture of the silhouette of the planet, but we can measure how much the starlight dims as the planet passes in front. And this very characteristic dimming tells us where the planet is, and how big it is compared to the star. And we see this transit happen multiple times before we declare that there’s a planet there."
Weiss says that thousands of exoplanets have been discovered with Kepler, a NASA space telescope designed to find habitable Earth-like planets in the Milky Way.
"Although its primary mission has ended, it has been revived in a mission called “K2” and is still finding new planets around other stars."
Whether you’re grateful for a walk in nature, your good health or the comfort of family and friends – this is the season to give thanks. But it’s also a time of year that can trigger the ‘holiday blues’ – when feelings of stress and anxiety can be overwhelming and can cause even those who are usually content to experience loneliness and a lack of fulfillment. One ‘happiness strategy’ is to adopt an ‘attitude for gratitude’ – that is, to count one’s blessings. We spoke to UC Riverside’s Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the nation’s leading experts on the topic of happiness. She describes a study they conducted in which people were directed to record what they were grateful for in their daily lives. Have a listen.
Anyone who’s ever had kidney stones will tell you that the excruciating flank pain was not a pleasant experience. And once you’ve had a first stone, about half of people are at risk of developing another stone within five years. Dr. Thomas Chi of the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Urology says that diet can play a big role in preventing kidney stones.
"Three things that really do change people’s kidney stones risks are your hydration, so drinking enough fluids. Not eating too much salt, and then people that eat a lot of animal protein or meat, all at one time, they tend to be at a higher risk. So commonly, when people have their first kidney stone, we’ll tell them, instead of eating a whole steak at dinnertime, eat half at lunch and half at dinner, and that tends to do better for your body."
Chi’s recent study found that zinc may be what drives stone formation, which he hopes will open new windows for treating kidney stones.
"Either new drugs, or new therapies, maybe even new surgical approaches that might focus on these heavy metals that may help us to prevent kidney stones."
The microbial communities, or microbiomes, that account for 90 percent of our body’s cells can greatly influence human and environmental health. To get a better understanding of this microbial world and manipulate them to our benefit, the University of California, San Diego has established the Microbiome and Microbial Sciences Initiative. Robert Knight, one of the world’s experts on the microbiome will lead a research-focused Center for Microbiome Innovation. He says so much has been learned about this field in the last several years due to the dramatic drop in cost of DNA sequencing. Knight is also part of the very successful American Gut Project.
"Basically the idea was to figure out how to structure the project so it could be self-supporting, so it’s one of the largest crowd-sourced, crowd-funded citizen science projects that we’re aware of. We’ve currently sequenced over six thousand kits and released the DNA sequence publicly so that any interested member of the public can just look at all of that data and see what the microbiomes look like."
In a relatively short period of time, there’s been increasing research supporting what many health care providers have long known – that comprehensive, palliative care that treats both symptoms and a person’s emotional needs during a serious illness or at the end of life, can not only vastly improve quality of life, but in many cases prolong it. Dr. Steve Pantilat, Director of the Palliative Care Program at the University of California, San Francisco says while palliative care has risen, it’s not high enough.
"Getting palliative care still depends largely on your doctor offering it to you or making it available. Where we need to go is to have public demand."
Pantilat likens it to the way we are born now in America – not too long ago, it used to be Mom in an operating room and Dad in a waiting room. But there was a demand from patients for the birthing rooms of today.
"End of life is changing, but it will change faster and it will change better, if the public is engaged in this process as well and demands it."
Could understanding smell lead to odor-detecting robots? That’s what a multi-university research team is hoping to accomplish. Study leader Lucia Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley explains.
"Our goal is to identify the common algorithm that all these animals are using to find odors. If we can do that, then we can use that to build robotic devices that can find odors. And then that will finally be able to replace dogs and other mammals – we use pigs to find truffles, we use giant Gambian rats to find land mines in Africa. So just providing the science behind that, that’s got to be valuable."
Jacobs and her team, were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to identify the mechanisms behind odor navigation. They will compare the behavioral and cognitive differences of a variety of animals during odor navigation, including humans, dogs, cockroaches, and slugs.
"So what we are hoping to do is to find the secret that we can give to engineers who can then build a robot who could do that."
Overfishing is often cited as having a large negative impact on coral reefs. But until a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography looked into it, there was no global snapshot of key coral reef fishes and their ecological role in maintaining the balance of coral reef health.
"There was this missing link, you know overfishing of what and what’s the current status of overfishing of these important species that we know have a really important ecological role in maintaining that balance between corals and their seaweed competitors?"
That’s Jennifer Smith, a marine ecologist who led the effort to compile the global data.
"We complied this global data set that allowed us to ask what the current status of coral reef herbivorous or grazing fishes was. We found that in fact, in fished areas these herbivorous fishes were reduced by greater than 50% in comparison to unfished areas or remote islands that don’t have any local human populations."
The Multimodal Imaging Lab at the University of California, San Diego is comprised of an interdisciplinary group who study the human brain using a variety of imaging, recording and computational techniques. Chun Chieh Fan, a graduate student in UCSD’s Cognitive Sciences Department, explains the benefits of studying brain function non-invasively.
"To study human brain in vivo is quite a difficult question because we want to know how brain function, but we don’t want to dissect everybody’s brain while they are alive. Now we can allow different techniques to look into human’s brain in vivo to see how they work."
Fan was part of a team that recently used techniques at their lab to discover that the three-dimensional shape of the brain’s cerebral cortex correlates with one’s genetic heritage, yet has no bearing on functional or cognitive abilities.
"So, that’s the main purpose of doing the multimodal because we can combine all the different technique together to really know how human brain function."
A man’s risk of prostate cancer increases with elevated blood levels of prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. But PSA screenings can sometimes lead to false-positives or false-negatives, and even invasive procedures like biopsies or surgeries. Epidemiologist John Witte of the University of California, San Francisco says that his team is looking to improve the accuracy of PSA tests by examining the genes that affect PSA levels.
"Everyone has a different constitutive level of their PSA, kind of like we have different levels of cholesterol that are somewhat genetically determined. Right now, every PSA is treated the same. But if we knew, "Oh, this person is just a high PSA producer genetically," then they would have to cross a higher threshold to go to the next step in being screened for prostate cancer. Or if someone is a low PSA producer, then maybe they would have a lower level instead of just using a single cut off for all men. So this actually I could see actually having really near-term value."
A new study by the University of California, San Diego is building upon previous research that has linked high blood sugar levels to an increased risk of breast cancer. In their study, Catherine Marinac says they found a connection in women between nighttime fasting and a decrease in blood glucose levels, which has been previously discovered in mice.
"Our studies are leaning from these animal models, including some unpublished work here at UCSD that have shown the same favorable effects between fasting and glucose control parameters and these epidemiologic studies are kind of the first step in humans – like, does this trend hold up?"
The researchers found that women who reported fasting for longer periods of time overnight had significantly better control of their blood glucose concentrations.
"We don’t know the exact mechanisms, but hopefully randomized trials in humans will be able to give us a little more insight into the actual mechanism. Then, how can we figure out how that might influence health outcomes."
Although excess white fat is linked to conditions like obesity and diabetes, we could all benefit from a little extra brown fat. PhD student Kevin Tharp of the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology says that compared to the energy storing white fat, brown fat releases energy and can even provide metabolic benefits including weight loss.
"White fat is a storage organ that doesn’t necessarily provide a metabolic benefit to someone with a whole lot of white fat. Brown fat is thermoregulatory organ that when activated by cold stress will produce incredible amounts of core body temperature through high metabolic rates."
Tharp’s team synthetically created a similar brown fat tissue without the temperature drop, which he says could eventually provide therapeutic solutions to conditions like obesity and diabetes.
"We have generated a metabolically functional synthetic tissue that does have a therapeutic application."
Implantable microdevices have been used to develop cochlear implants and artificial retinas – and now researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working to develop the world’s first neural device to help restore memory. Research engineer Angela Tooker says what makes their devices different is the use of microfabrication.
"There are a number of commercially available neural implants out there, but they’re not microfabricated. So we’re getting small, able to access all portions of the brain. That’s another limitation of kind of commercially-available technology – you can’t go everywhere in the brain with it."
Tooker says with microfabrication, engineers can put thousands of electrodes on these devices and access thousands of neurons within the brain.
"Essentially, what that means is that we’re making devices in the micron scale. You know, to put that in a size perspective, a hair is generally considered to be about a hundred microns wide, so our devices are smaller than that."
The Lab’s Neural Technology group is collaborating on their implantable neural device with UCLA and private industry.
The microbiome is fast becoming an exciting new frontier in human health. That’s because it’s made up of a staggering amount of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes that make you, well, you. In fact, you’re only 10% human, the rest is this microbial system that lives on your skin, in your mouth, nose, throat, lungs, guts….you get the picture. And it varies from person to person based on diet, health history, ancestry, geographic location and climate. Even those you live with, including your pets, can influence your microbiome.
Now, researchers are turning their attention to how the microbiome affects our health. At the University of California, San Diego, Chancellor Pradeep Khosla announced a new interdisciplinary initiative to advance the study of microbiomes found in the gut and everywhere else on earth.
In this short podcast, we chat with one of the leaders of this new intiative, Dr. Rob Knight (pictured inset), who is a pioneer in the microbiome field.
Of the five senses, smell is the least understood. Now, the National Science Foundation has awarded 6.4 million dollars to an interdisciplinary team of scientists to crack the olfactory code and unravel how humans and animals navigate using smell. Psychologist Lucia Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley explains that animals are experts at converting odors into spatial information.
"It’s a very simple question. There is an odor out there and it’s being carried by the wind. How do you find it? There is no, right now, model of how animals can do this. It seems like an impossible problem. However, we know that animals from the size of ants to probably elephant, they all are able to orient to odors being carried on the wind even far, far away."
Jacobs is part of a diverse team of seven researchers who received the grant, including mathematicians and cell neuroscientists. They will create various computational and mathematical models of odor navigation.
"So, I’m very excited to be doing this as a team. I think that’s just going to be transformational."
If you were told you could reduce your cancer risk by lowering your glucose levels by simply not eating past 7PM, would you be willing and able to fast that long? Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center have found that increasing the duration of overnight fasting could be a novel strategy to reduce the risk of developing breast cancer. Lead author Catherine Marinac says they’re planning to look more into the feasibility and effectiveness.
"We’re hoping to do a larger, randomized trial. And we have done a number of pilot studies just to look at the feasibility in broad populations of women. So, we’ve shown that it’s generally easy and feasible for women to achieve at least a twelve to fourteen-hour fast."
But Marinac adds there may be a behavioral response.
"Attempting to achieve a long overnight fast, say stopping eating at 7PM, that may force people to go to bed earlier or initiate the behavior change process."
You’ve probably heard of the common sleep hygiene tips like no caffeine or exercise before bed. But there are also a few less common behavioral changes that you can make to get a better night’s rest. Dr. Aric Prather of the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry explains.
"Maintaining a regular wake up time, so seven days a week setting alarm and getting up every day at that time. So if your body knows what to expect it seems to work better and this is the case for sleep as well. Not watching television in the bedroom, not doing things that get your mind racing. And if you find that it’s clear to you that you’re not going to be able to sleep, remove yourself from that active environment. Go somewhere quiet, do something that’s low activity like read or even watch even watch television under low light until you feel sleepy again and then try again."
Prather’s team has been studying the effects of chronic sleep loss, including being at increased risk of getting sick.
"We know that cold season is around the corner, people are not getting enough sleep, and so it’s those people that we imagine might be at increased risk."
Imagine not having to stand in long checkout lines every time you go to the store. It could soon be possible with the help of Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, which uses radio waves to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects like packaging. Mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin of the University of California, Berkeley says that cheaper production of RFID technology could someday allow it to be used ubiquitously.
"Currently, if you go to the supermarket and check out food, or anything else, there is a barcode. And there's a laser scanner at the checkout and the barcode is pretty much just different lines, and it's pretty much free. And the RFID technology is competing with the barcode technology today, such that they have been made extremely cheap, maybe below five cents."
Lin says that RFID could eventually replace the need for laser scanners and barcodes.
"So one day, if you go out of the grocery store, you don’t need to scan everything you’re buying. Once you go to the checkpoint, they already know what you are buying, and give you the price. "
The American Gut Project is one of the largest crowdsourced and crowdfunded citizen science projects. Co-founder Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego says the project allows anyone to see what their microbiome looks like. There’s even a project looking into how dog owners share similar microbial populations with their pets, which may offer insight into how one’s dog may affect one's health.
"Our work on dogs has been in some ways, citizen science, based from the beginning.12:10 Because even the initial project looking at families, including families with pets, we made sure that we got approval to return the data back to the people who were participating in the project so that they could understand something about their microbes and get some sort of benefit out of seeing the microbes that were in their bodies and in the bodies of their families. At the moment, I should point out that benefit is primarily in terms of scientific knowledge and just understanding what makes a difference to your microbiome and what doesn’t. But as an increasing number of diseases get linked to the microbiome, it’s possible that in the future, we’ll be able to develop tests for particular diseases th
For the first time, scientists have developed a novel way to increase the body’s supply of energy-burning brown fat, which promotes weight loss and other metabolic benefits. Lead author Kevin Tharp of the University of California, Berkeley says the team grew brown-like beige fat in the lab from white-fat stem cells and implanted them into mice.
"Beige fat, which is basically what we have created in our lab synthetically is converted white fat cells and so when we take these beige fat implants and put them into mice, their overall metabolic health improved. And this is in terms of the amount of weight that they gained on a high fat diet and this is in terms of their general glucose homeostasis."
Tharp says that adult humans have a naturally low supply of brown fat in their bodies, and so artificially increasing that amount could lead to new ways to combat obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders.
"You could theoretically improve someone’s metabolic health by creating an increase in the amount of brown fat mass in an individual."
When and how often women eat may play a role in breast cancer risk. Those were the findings of a new study published by researchers at the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center. Lead author Catherine Marinac says they found that an increase in overnight fasting reduced a woman’s glucose levels and that may reduce the overall risk of breast cancer.
"There’s a lot of recent literature on various fasting regimens in human health and many of these aren’t backed by rigorous scientific evidence, so this is building on that knowledge base."
Now, Marinac says they’re working on a study looking into how the length of the nighttime fasting may affect cancer outcomes in a population of breast cancer survivors.
"So, we have a cohort of women that were followed longitudinally that had breast cancer at one time point and we’re looking at whether fasting might improve their cancer outcomes, so reduced risk of breast cancer or improved mortality."
Nutrition and exercise are often among the nation’s leading public health concerns. But a growing body of research suggests that sleep is just as important. Dr. Aric Prather of the University of California, San Francisco says that insufficient sleep can affect both short-term and long-term health.
"Chronically, this seems to put people at risk for things like coronary heart disease, the metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, obesity, as well as premature mortality. Of course it also puts people at risk for things like automobile accidents, things that can have incredible consequences. And then there’s even some growing literature suggesting that short sleep may even put people at risk for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than a quarter of Americans are not getting enough sleep, while nearly 10 percent experience chronic insomnia. Prather says it’s an issue we can all address.
"Sleep is a very tractable health behavior, and it could have an incredible effect on population health beyond just the individual."
With a quick flip of the carton, you soon may be able to detect the freshness of milk using a 3D-printed “smart cap.” An international study led by the University of California, Berkeley produced the wireless smart cap by printing basic electrical components including inductors and capacitors. Senior author Liwei Lin says that the circuit detects changes in the electrical signals that accompany increased levels of bacteria.
"This inductor and capacitor forms an electrical circuitry that actually could detect the electrical property of milk. So if the milk is, say spoiled, after you place it in room temperature for, in our case, 36 hours, we can actually see the electrical signal change from the output."
Lin says this technology could eventually be made cheap enough to provide food safety alerts in grocery stores.
"We envision in the future, you can use, potentially, your cell phone to read out the signal."
Those of us who use personal hand sanitizers may not want to hear this, but no matter how much you use, you’re still going to be covered in bacteria. In fact, Rob Knight, a leading expert of the study of microbes at the University of California, San Diego, says we have more bacterial cells and bacterial genes than we have human cells and genes.
"So, sometimes it freaks people out to think, oh, I’m covered in bacteria or that I have bacteria inside me. But the good news is that the vast majority of the bacterial that are associated with us are harmless or beneficial."
Knight, who co-founded the American Gut Project, says dog owners share similar microbial populations with their pooches, which raises questions about how one’s dog may affect their health.
"Can you see consistent microbial changes that are involved with things like improvements in cardiovascular properties? Improvements in stress levels, mental health? Where surprisingly, all of those things have been linked to the microbiome, so there might be some direct microbial mediators of some of those effects. It’s not that we think that microbes do everything, but it would be very interesting if we could find that microbes play a specific role in some of those health benefits, of having a pet."
Like musicians, songbirds must practice and refine the songs they learn to become consistent performers and, yes, to even impress potential mates. But how birds learn to sing has remained a mystery until a team of researchers led by Hamish Mehaffey of the University of California, San Francisco identified how two well-known brain pathways interact during song learning.
"So we found a mechanism, by which two of the pathways that we knew were really important for song learning, were able to interact and change each other. And were able to show that they changed in an unusual way, but a way that's consistent with what we know about song learning, where effectively, a part of the brain that controls and conducts the song, is able to interact with the part of the brain that is actively, perturbing it and kicking it around, and making it change a little bit, from trial-to-trial."
Mehaffey says that this all happens in a specialized portion of the brain that’s similar to the human basal ganglia. He says the findings could help explain how humans learn complex motor skills such as playing an instrument or driving a car.
"One of the things we've learned is that this part of the brain is also really important for learning new things and adapting over the course of your life."
There’s a new wrinkle in the study of brain anatomy. It turns out that the three-dimensional shape of the cerebral cortex – the wrinkled outer layer of the brain that controls many functions of thinking and sensation – strongly correlates with one’s ancestral background. Study author Chun Chieh Fan of the University of California, San Diego, says they’d noticed that different populations had very different brain shapes. So they paired a sophisticated algorithm tool with neuroimaging data.
"When you do this, we realize even though the shape is very different across the ancestral lineage, we cannot find evidence to suggest there is a functional difference based on those brain shapes."
Fan explains that one’s brain anatomy could eventually lead to more personalized medicine approaches for diagnosing and treating brain diseases.
"We can actually predict, what is a normal trajectory, given your genetic background. Anything deviate away from your normal trajectory, there might be a hint suggesting there’s a problem."
For the first time, an international team of engineers led by the University of California, Berkeley has used 3D printing to produce working electrical components, including resistors, inductors, and capacitors. Mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin says that came with some challenges since current 3D printers cannot print metal parts.
"So what we have done, is actually just do 3D printing of plastic material, together with wax. And then we remove the wax and add these silver particles as our metal. So it’s almost like liquid before you cure it. So you can actually put this one into any shape and cure it with time. The solvent will actually evaporate and then will solidify and has a good property like metal."
They tested the new technology by printing a wireless smart cap that was able to detect spoiled milk using embedded sensors.
"This is the first time we demonstrate a working device like a sensor out of this 3D printing process."
How do sea urchin embryos develop while defending against so many environmental stressors? To find out, PhD student Lauren Shipp of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is using a confocal microscope to generate a 3-D recreation of embryos.
"Sea urchin embryos develop out in the open ocean where they are exposed to a whole variety of chemicals, some of which are naturally occurring and some of which are human generated. And so using this model system to study embryonic development, there is an evolved suite of protective proteins that occur in nature as a result of millions of years of these embryos developing in the face of chemicals. And now with our industrialized society, we are pouring more and more chemicals into the environment that these embryos aren’t used to encountering and so these evolved protective capacities are potentially being overwhelmed. And so this is a good system to study the interaction of those chemicals with the developmental processes of the embryo."
Have you ever wondered how scientists date evolutionary events such as when two populations diverged from a common ancestor? Computational biologist Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley says that one method is to use what’s called a molecular clock, which involves counting the mutations in DNA between ancient and living individuals.
"If we take some DNA from you and some DNA from me that DNA will not be identical to each other. It will differ a little bit because there will be mutations that have accumulated in time since we had our most recent common ancestor. Since in the past thousands of years ago, there was some individual that is the ancestor of both of us. By counting mutations, we can figure out something about how long ago since we had our most recent common ancestor. By doing that we can then put dates on these different events, as for example, when did Native Americans start to split up from each other?"
By counting mutations, Nielsen’s team estimated that the first Native Americans split into northern and southern populations around 13,000 years ago.
"And that helped us quite a lot, to distinguish between different hypotheses about how the American continents were peopled."
It’s no secret that getting enough sleep is important for our health. But now, a new study at the University of California, San Francisco has found that sleep affects how susceptible we are to viruses like the common cold. Study leader Aric Prather explains that volunteers were given the cold virus via nasal drops and were then monitored over one week.
"People who slept less were more likely to get the cold, but then when we broke it down by hours we actually saw what seemed like a threshold effect. So it turned out that people who sleep less than six hours are about four times the odds of getting the cold than people who sleep seven hours or more. So compared to people who sleep seven hours or more, people who sleep less than six are at four times the risk."
Prather says that the researchers measured subjects’ normal daily sleep habits to study the effects of chronic sleep loss. "To do that we had to measure people’s fluctuation in their sleep, because we think it’s not just a night of missed sleep but this chronic experience of lack of sleep that might put people at risk."
With all the new discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider, it’s hard to imagine that the particle accelerator once created quite a stir over its potential doomsday scenarios, including the creation of microscopic black holes. Particle physicist Marjorie Shapiro of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that the concern was significant enough to have a group of independent scientists review the scenarios.
"I would say most people thought it didn’t make much sense, but it's an important enough issue that you don't want to go by your gut. It’s easy to say, “Oh, come on,” but if you’re talking about the fate of the world, it’s not an appropriate way to respond. In fact, because there was so much concern in the general public, the Director General of CERN put together a blue ribbon panel of extremely well-known physicists, to really go through all the arguments and convince everybody that there was no chance that this would be the accelerator that ate the universe."
At UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, researcher Amro Hamdoun is studying the effects of environmental chemicals like flame retardants and pesticides, and trying to figure out how they get into our bodies in the first place. To do this, they’re looking to the sea urchin to better understand the role of drug transporters, which are important determinants of drug absorption, excretion and how compounds enter target organs.
"We’ve been looking at the biological properties of how these compounds interact with cells and how cells decide whether these are foreign compounds or not, and whether they can eliminate them."
By understanding this process in sea urchins, researchers hope to extend this knowledge to humans and create a rule book of sorts.
"Once you have that rule book you can then begin to design compounds around those rules. And you can even test existing compounds for their likelihood to interact with these drug transporters."
Women who are midnight snackers may want to listen up: a University of California, San Diego study has found that overnight fasting may reduce breast cancer risk. Catherine Marinac, a doctoral candidate at the Moores Cancer Center says their study measured women who fasted a little over twelve hours a night.
"We found that in general, women who fasted for longer nighttime intervals had better blood- sugar control and the effects were independent of how many calories women ate, what their body composition was, their BMI, their age and other factors that we think might influence that association."
While Marinac says larger studies are necessary, these findings do correlate with previous research with animal models – and the message she says, is a simple one.
"We think that a long nighttime fasting interval is a simple, feasible and effective strategy that could reach broad populations of women."
Using DNA samples from ancient and living Native Americans, an international team of researchers led by the University of California, Berkeley found that the original Americans split off into North and South America around 13,000 years ago. Computational biologist Rasmus Nielsen says that the findings support previous evidence found in the archeological record.
"The diversity in the Americas today, originated maybe around 13,000 years ago. So that's about the same time, as you get the first spread of unique Native American cultures in the American continent. If we look at the oldest divergence between different Native American populations, how old is that, that dates back to that time? So the time at which in the archeological record you see the first big spread of Native American cultures, you also get the genetic diversity dating back to that time."
Nielsen says that a single group diversified in the Americas as opposed to the idea that multiple different waves produced the diversity that we see today.
"And that explained almost all of the genetic diversity we see in Native Americans to date."
How does designing a voice recognition program like Siri compare to creating artificially intelligent robots? Computer science professor Pieter Abbeel of the University of California, Berkeley says that although both use similar deep learning algorithms, applying them to robots is far more challenging because the task goes beyond passively recognizing the sound of a voice.
"So recognizing a pattern and then making a prediction, is very different than a robot taking an action, which then in turn, results in the world changing around the robot. And then taking an action that changed the world and that, then keeps going, right? So it's very different because for a robot, every action has consequences, whereas if you do something like image recognition or sound recognition, you just kind of output your prediction and then the next request comes in, to recognize something."
Abbeel’s team has developed an algorithm that enables robots to learn on their own without preprogrammed solutions like those in voice recognition programs.
"And learn that all in one learning process while it’s trying things out."
The arrival of the first Americans has been one of the oldest and most debated questions in anthropology. Now, an international study led by the University of California, Berkeley has concluded that the first Americans arrived in a single wave less than 23,000 years ago. Study leader Rasmus Nielsen explains.
"So, we sequenced the genomes of a number of different Native Americans and also ancient DNA, so DNA from ancient individuals, people that have been dead for thousands of years, to try to resolve many of these issues. One of the things we focused on was trying to estimate, what is the date at which Native Americans split off from East Asians and people that now live in the Northeastern Siberia. So when did these two populations have common ancestral populations?"
Nielsen says that the findings confirm the popular theory that the original Americans followed a land bridge between Asia and Alaska during the height of the last Ice Age.
"Everything we see is in accordance with that, that the migrations of the first people into the Americas likely followed that land bridge."
Could altering brain chemistry someday treat mental illnesses like addiction? A new study at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco has found that participants were more willing to engage in prosocial behaviors, such as fairness, after they were given a dopamine-increasing drug called tolcapone. Study leader Andrew Kayser says the findings may help future research on treating diseases like addiction, which can often disrupt an individual’s social relationships.
"Whatever the substance or even whether it’s a behavioral addiction like gambling, people can often, because of the focus on their addiction, whether that’s witting or unwitting, basically, not treat other people like they should be treated. The reason we think about that as having social dysfunction, is that it's a well-known story that as people get deeper and deeper into their addictions that they disrupt their family relationships."
The next step is to understand precisely how tolcapone affects the brain.
"The mechanism, by understanding it, may suggest which patients would benefit and also, importantly, which ones might not."
A five million dollar gift will go towards creating a new interdisciplinary center to fight climate change at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla says the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation will be a game-changer.
"This name is very carefully chosen – this is not only understanding the impact of climate change, but also understanding that while some of this change is happening, how do we adapt to this change? So for example, one of the possible outcomes of climate change is going to be sea level rise. Disruption of commerce, disruption of real estate properties, disruption of coastal land. This is where SIO, working with engineering, working with GPS, our new school of global policy and strategy, working with social scientists, physical scientists – all scientists and engineers, social scientists coming together to look at problems in ways that has not happened before."
Upwelling in the ocean, in which the deep, cold water rises to the surface, provides a very nutrient-rich environment for the marine ecosystem. But there are detrimental effects related to the upwelling system, too. As Tessa Hill of the University of California, Davis explains, when this water gets pulled back up to the surface, it’s also bringing up very carbon dioxide-rich water, which is increasing due to human activities and changing the chemistry of the water itself.
"We call this ocean acidification because when you add that carbon dioxide into the sea water, it changes the acidity of the water. The ocean soaks up that carbon from the atmosphere, so about 30 percent of what we put into the atmosphere ends up in the ocean. And so on top of all the cycling of carbon that would normally happen in the ocean, including things related to that upwelling system, there’s now a human fingerprint on top of that."
Acidic waters are affecting how oysters and mussels build their shell, so Hill is helping to monitor conditions off the Pacific coast, which helps hatcheries decide when to spawn.
If you’ve ever wanted to be taller, you may want to consider living in space. It turns out that astronauts can grow as much as two inches taller under microgravity conditions because the lighter load causes the soft discs in their spines to expand. Biomechanics professor Grace O’Connell of the University of California, Berkeley says that under Earth’s gravity, the discs compress and squeeze out water.
"So just having gravity pull down on you all day long, the water flows out of the disc. We see the reverse with astronauts and patients that are bedridden for a very long period of time. Astronauts are actually taller when they come back because they have low loading and their disc continues to expand."
Narrator: But O’Connell says that astronauts are also at greater risk of back injury, which is what inspired her lab to study the properties of spinal discs.
"Astronauts have a significant problem with bone loss when they're in space. And that can cause other problems they have a higher rate of herniation, which causes significant back and leg pain."
If you thought NASA’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto was impressive, you may want to mark your calendars for Juno, a Jupiter-bound spacecraft that launched in August 2011 and is set to arrive in July 2016. Research fellow Lauren Weiss of the University of California, Berkeley’s Astronomy Department says that instead of flying by, Juno will orbit the gas giant for a full Earth year.
"The Juno Mission will try to determine whether Jupiter, our own gas giant, indeed has a rocky core because we’ve never actually made a conclusive detection of the rocky core of Jupiter yet. And it will take very careful measurements of the gravitational field, with changing heights, from Jupiter and positions around Jupiter."
Weiss says that the mission will hopefully reveal whether all planets have a rocky core.
"We think that all planets have a rocky interior. And so that will hopefully reveal whether the core is rocky."