UC Science Today

Cooling and energy technologies are usually installed on rooftops because of their direct exposure to sunlight. And while walls don’t receive the same amount of sunlight as roofs, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Heat Island Group say that walls can be just as important as roofs when it comes to cooling buildings and cities.

"One of the interesting things about walls, is while a wall, per unit area, gets less sunlight than a roof because it’s not in the sun all day, the insulation in a wall is usually only about half that as much in a roof. So per unit area, the benefit to making a wall cool, is about the same as the benefit of making a roof cool."

Lead scientist Ronnen Levinson says that the group will be assessing a variety of coatings that reflect sunlight and help cool buildings in China. He explains that cool walls could be an important factor for energy efficient buildings in cities with taller buildings.

"When you have a tall building, you just have much more wall area than you have roof area. So for walls, we also want to create some guidelines for use both in the U.S. and China."

How you view your social rank, such as financial status, may lead to a variety of mental health problems. These were the findings of a new study led by Sheri Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley. Johnson explains that there are mental health concerns for people on both sides of the spectrum.

"When people were experiencing very low levels of power and a sense of being subordinated, we saw that people were more vulnerable to depression and anxiety. Interestingly, though, being at the top of the hierarchy wasn’t always a good thing. People were a little more prone to manic-like behaviors when they had high power, including a little bit more of a tendency towards psychopathy."

Johnson adds that one way to deal with these issues is to pursue goals that are intrinsically meaningful.

"Pay a little bit more attention to those moments that are meaningful for you, that are quietly satisfying for you, that help you re-center. Sometimes that just means slowing down and striving a little else and paying a little more attention to your inner world."

Listen to our full interview with UCSF’s Dr. Steve Pantilat, founder of one of the nation’s first hospital-based palliative care programs. When one thinks about palliative care, it’s often within the context of “at the end-of-life”, but Pantilat says it should also be viewed as “through the end of life”. Pantilat discusses how societal perceptions about symptom management for those with serious or life-threatening disease has gained support and why there is still more work to be done.

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Researchers have long relied on experimentation in mice to study human diseases and assess therapeutics. But senior scientist and cancer researcher Martha Stampfer of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that the short lifespan of mice can make them difficult to translate to humans.

"A human lives a long time and that’s a long enough time for things to go wrong in your cells and to develop cancer. But a short-lived animal, the mice are going to get eaten by the hawks well before they have to worry about being around long enough to get cancer."

Stampfer explains that one of the differences between mice and humans is the enzyme telomerase, which maintains the ends of our chromosomes. It’s suppressed in human cells because too much can increase the risk of cancer. But in mice it’s not suppressed because the lifespan of a mouse is much shorter.

"Mice are not humans and humans are not mice and there are many, many, many molecular differences at almost every level between mice and humans."

Stampfer developed a novel method to study human cells in the lab that, like the mouse, are not suppressed by telomerase.

How do mice find food at the end of a maze? How about people just trying to find their parked cars? These tasks require what’s called spatial learning and memory. Faculty Fellow Saul Villeda of the University of California, San Francisco says that spatial memory governs how we navigate through the environment.

"The way I like to think about it in humans is sort of like when you park your car. Usually I try and find a parking spot with a great view of Golden Gate Bridge. Usually there’s some sort of electric car charger nearby and the elevators. So, I park it in the morning and I come back hours later, and then my brain is going to use those cues— Golden Gate, elevator, electric car charger—to guide me to the car."

Villeda says that as animals naturally age, it takes longer to process these spatial cues. His team has been working on ways to revitalize memory and cognitive ability by giving old mice young blood.

"We used this sort of behavioral maze, and then we injected the blood, and what we saw is a normal animal receiving old blood made more errors, but those animals that were given young blood got much, much better. They looked cognitively younger."

Oral cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the world and in the United States, it affects about 40 thousand Americans each year. Dr. David Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Oral/Head and Neck Oncology Research, says about half of those affected by oral cancer die within five years.

"The clinical survival of this disease hasn’t changed in the past thirty years. However, if this disease could be detected earlier, absolutely that would change that."

Wong led the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted of RNA molecules in human saliva and found it has many of the same disease-revealing molecules contained in blood. This can lead to non-invasive early detection of many diseases, and for oral cancer the benefits would be significant.

"If you catch this one person’s tumor instead of stage four and catching the tumor at stage 1, you immediately confer this individual a sixty percent improvement in survivability rate over five years, a dramatic improvement in the quality of life and a significant reduction in health care costs."

While millions of Americans benefit from new medications to alleviate the symptoms of a variety of ailments, the long and expensive drug creation process can miss many side effects. And this causes about 100 thousand deaths each year. Now researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered a high tech way to use supercomputers to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain adverse drug reactions.

"The whole goal of the project is to see if we can, basically using computational chemistry, which is used routinely to screen drugs to identify them as initial candidates, can we use those same tools and approaches to identify or red flag these problems up front."

That’s Montiago LaBute, an applied statistician at the Lab who is collaborating on this project.

"We kind of have this really nice environment where we’re sort of pushing the envelope in terms of computing in terms of new algorithmic techniques and then beyond that, take it to some place where pharmaceutical companies can use these approaches in order to expedite their development process."

Is it possible to cool an entire chunk of a city? Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are looking to China to conduct what they hope would be the world’s first large scale cool surface experiment. Staff scientist Ronnen Levinson says that the experiment could involve reflective roofs, walls, and pavements in an effort to cool cities with hot summers.

"What we hope to do in China is create a large scale—meaning covering at least a square kilometer— experiment where we have a region with cool surfaces that’s side by side with similar region that has conventional or warm surfaces. This provides an excellent opportunity for a real world demonstration and measurement to not just save energy in buildings, but to cool an entire chunk of city."

Levinson explains that the experiment is more practical in China because of its frequent building construction.

"China has a much higher rate of building construction and new buildings go up all the time; old buildings get replaced all the time."

When one thinks about palliative care, it’s often within the context of “at the end-of-life”, but Dr. Steve Pantilat, director of the Palliative Care Program at the University of California, San Francisco, says it should also be viewed as through the end of life.

"So, before and during and then with the family after. Our focus is how can you live well with serious illness? It is also about dying, but if all we think about is changing dying and how people die, it’s a little bit like saying, “we have to increase high school graduation rates and so we’re going to focus on 12th grade. You’ve got to go to preschool to really have an impact over time. And the same thing is true if we want the end of life to look better, We have to start way back, even before people get sick and begin to have these conversations about what’s important. So, what I see in the future is that this is just a normal part of our conversation."

The key to reversing the effects of aging may be in young blood. A collaborative study led by Saul Villeda at the University of California, San Francisco found that old mice showed signs of cognitive improvement and rejuvenation after being given injections from the blood of young mice.

"We looked at a particular region, which controls learning and memory, known as the hippocampus, and we found we could actually reverse signs of aging on the neurons themselves the structure, and also in learning and memory. So impairments that you see in an old animal were actually in part reversed, and they were much smarter after they received the young blood."

Villeda says that the old mice recognized spatial cues in a maze much faster with young blood than with old blood. He hopes the study will eventually translate to human therapeutics.

"I think it’s really important to do it in a controlled and appropriate way to make sure that the findings we have hold in a human, especially towards planning towards therapeutics."