Uc Science Today

  • Author: Vários
  • Narrator: Vários
  • Publisher: Podcast
  • Duration: 2:50:20
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Synopsis

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.

Episodes

  • What we can learn from the "dinosaurs of marriage"

    10/02/2018 Duration: 02min

    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

  • Why nutrition studies can't be one-size-fits-all

    05/02/2018 Duration: 01min

    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

  • There are benefits to letting your mind wander

    28/01/2018 Duration: 04min

    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.

  • Are we close to curing glaucoma?

    24/01/2018 Duration: 01min

    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.

  • Cataloging the brain to make sense of functionality and cure disease

    18/01/2018 Duration: 01min

    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.

  • An over-the-counter drug that may help in the fight against MS

    12/01/2018 Duration: 01min

    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."

  • Mapping the great unknown of our brain

    10/01/2018 Duration: 01min

    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 ther

  • How exposure to PBDEs affect a child's IQ

    10/01/2018 Duration: 01min

    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 ma

  • Could the progression of glaucoma be halted?

    09/01/2018 Duration: 01min

    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 da

  • The ambition Brain Atlas Project

    02/01/2018 Duration: 58s

    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.

  • How to improve your social connections and boost happiness

    05/12/2017 Duration: 58s

    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!

  • A new approach to figuring out which diets are pro or anti-inflammatory

    27/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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."

  • Will software engineers ever completely outsmart hackers?

    27/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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.

  • The pros and cons of anatomy class in virtual reality

    26/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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 un

  • Dealing with moody people starts with your attitude

    20/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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.

  • How to protect artificial intelligence technology from hackers

    20/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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 sta

  • A digital intervention program to help moms-to-be get better sleep

    16/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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

    11/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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 experi

  • Anatomy students use virtual reality to get a different view of the human body

    02/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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

  • Toxic flame retardants are still ubiquitous in our homes

    02/11/2017 Duration: 01min

    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.

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