Uc Science Today

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 t