UC Science Today

Walk into the self-help section of any bookstore and chances are you’ll see quite a collection of books about happiness and how to attain it. And while it may seem warm and fuzzy, there’s a whole area of economics focused on happiness, as well as neuroscience. Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, has been studying happiness for over two decades.

"I didn’t really set out to become a happiness expert, but I’ve always been fascinated with emotions and happiness. You know, happiness is like the Holy Grail. You know, everyone is interested in happiness and how to become happier and here I am, 24 years later, still doing research on happiness."

And yet, Lyubomirsky admits that it’s a luxury for a society to be examining their happiness.

"When you look at the general picture, Americans especially and Westerners are really preoccupied with happiness and one theory is that living in sort of this post-materialistic world that we live in, that we have the luxury to consider our happiness. Back in the day or in other cultures, when people were very busy just getting food on the table, worrying about shelter and safety and sort of basic needs, you know they didn’t have time to worry about, am I happy?"

If you’ve ever had trouble telling apart animal faces, it’s probably because you became attuned to recognizing human faces through a developmental process called perceptual narrowing. Behavioral ecologist Michael Sheehan of the University of California, Berkeley compares the process to infants learning a new language.

"You start out being able to learn any language possible, right? And over time you hear certain sounds and you kind of focus in on those sounds that make or you hear the most regularly. And then over time you sort of become specialized, you know, so to speak from learning one language. The same thing happens with faces so like human infants when they’re younger are actually better at sort of telling apart primate faces than adults are because of the fact that we become more specialized on looking at humans in particular."

Sheehan says perceptual narrowing also explains why people often think that individuals of other races look the same.

"We’re much better at telling apart individuals that look like the group of people we saw growing up than people that look a bit different. So even though every group of people is very diverse in their appearance, our brains just don’t process it in the same way."

Photo: © Dr. Chris Lalonde

Imagine an early diagnostic test for a variety of disease that doesn’t even require a pin prick to draw blood? New research from UCLA may mark the beginning of such early, non-invasive diagnostic testing. A team of researchers led by Dr. David Wong, completed the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted using RNA molecules in human saliva and found spittle contains the same disease-revealing details found in blood.

"Our task is to bring the science. What is this information that can mark someone that may come on with osteoporosis, that may have an early onset of pancreatic cancer? And those are the value that we will bring for early detection of high impact, human disease through this totally non-invasive fluid. So the day will come that you will go into a doctor’s office, a nurse office or a dentist’s office and before you see a physician or a dentist, and you can have you point-of-care, real-time, screening using a non-invasive fluid."

If you've ever been in a house or a car that belongs to a smoker, you're familiar with the acrid, lingering scent of tobacco. What you may not know is that the residue from cigarette smoke, called thirdhand smoke, remains in the fabrics and surfaces of indoor environments for several hours after the smoking ends.

"One of the things that we're going to do at Berkeley Lab is to try to understand how thirdhand smoke moves around in an actual room and the composition of thirdhand smoke residues in more detail."

Lab scientist Lara Gundel says she and her colleagues have been studying thirdhand smoke for years and their latest study focused on inhalation. And as Gundel noted in previous studies, this type of exposure may also include inhaling dust with noxious residues of thirdhand smoke.

"Ordinary house dust that our vacuums pick up can pick up thirdhand smoke from the air. So, that means the people most at risk of exposure are children. They tend to have more surface contact indoors because they crawl around on carpets."

We usually think of natural selection as acting to get rid of genetic variation, but for human faces, variation is actually favorable. Behavioral ecologist Michael Sheehan of the University of California, Berkeley explains that distinction in our faces is part of an evolutionary trend to make us recognizable in social environments.

"I think when we think about evolution and selection we usually think about things like some mutation that makes you a faster runner or something and so that’s really great and so therefore selection fixes it. But in this case we’re actually looking for a selection that maintains genetic variation. So we want -- it’s not good to have a big nose or a small nose in and of itself. But it’s good to have a nose that’s different from everyone else in the population is sort of the basic idea."

Sheehan says that while we may take recognition for granted, it’s still an issue today.

"If you go on Google and you type in "mistaken identity arrest" or "mistaken identity jail" you can find lots of cases of people that have gone to jail because of mistaken identity."

The mission of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis is to advance the health of animals, people and the environment. Executive Director, Jonna Mazet says as a wildlife epidemiologist, this mission has spanned the globe, but there’s also plenty of work closer to home.

"We’ve worked a great deal on coastal pathogen pollution and I’ve worked on toxoplasma and other land-to-sea kind of spillover and looking at sea otters and sea otter health because they’re a threatened species. But what we found was that they were really a great sentinel, the canary in the coal mine for our coastal system and they were starting to pick up things that they shouldn’t have been exposed to in evolutionary history. So, they were picking up pathogens from the land that we have or we brought with our pets that were running off to the sea often because of the way we build out communities and hardscapes and all of those things. So, we’ve had a great long-term partnership. Now, there are many faculty here that work on that problem and coastal pathogen pollution."

How do you deal with stress, drink a glass of wine? Maybe go for a run? For those who choose physical activity, a University of California, San Francisco study found that exercising was one of the ways to reduce the negative effects of stress-related cellular aging. This got study leader Eli Puterman curious as to what motivates different people in how they cope with stress.

"What are the types of people who under stress remain active and go for a run and what are the types of people that don’t and they sit at home and they’re more sedentary and physically inactive. And that’s the larger majority of people when they’re stressed is they’re physically inactive. But what that smaller minority of people that go for a run. Is there something about their personality, their genetics that is kind of making this difference between different types of people."

Even for those pressed for time, Puterman says there are things you can do..

"Go for a 20 minute brisk walk in the neighborhood – walking, pumping your arms and elevating your heart rate, where you’re sweating."

The key is moderate physical activity.

The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but saliva is a window to our body. Dr. David Wong of the UCLA School of Dentistry, led a study which found that saliva may reveal disease, such as diabetes, cancer and neurological disorders, at an early stage.

"When someone’s physiology is changed or altered or going through a disease process, the body reacts to it, these reactionary by-products come into our circulation, which is the blood and saliva. It’s a filtrate of our blood, it comes from our circulation. So saliva is a window to our body through its constituents of the circulation."

Their study was the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted using RNA molecules from human saliva and revealed that it contains many of the same disease-revealing molecules found in blood.

"We as scientists are capitalizing on these opportunities, building sensors, and now identifying the roadmaps and targets that we can utilize for screening and for diagnostics."

To analyze what could be the first confirmed samples of interstellar space particles, a team of scientists led by the University of California, Berkeley used cutting edge instruments developed by NASA. Andrew Westphal, who leads the analysis at the Space Sciences Laboratory, credits these advancements to NASA’s commitment to research and development.

"When the Apollo moon rocks were coming back, the analytical community recognized that there was a lot of room for improvement and a need to develop techniques that were really sensitive and precise. The result of that development over the decades has been the development of these amazing machines that now can do what the analysis what used to take 1 gram of material, lets say, now can be done with one millionth of a gram."

Westphal says that NASA’s technologies have also benefitted society as a whole.

"There are a lot of spinoffs in general for these kinds of instruments, for example, semiconductor manufacturing and all kinds of things. This has been a tremendously successful investment on the part of NASA."

When it comes to bio-inspired materials, it seems there would be no end to inspiration and that’s been the case with materials scientist Joanna McKittrick of the University of California, San Diego. McKittrick has looked at everything from Narwhal tusks to abalone shells and seahorses to get a better sense of their microstructures at a molecular level.

"We section them and we look at them under the optical microscope; we look at them under the scanning electron microscope and we look at them under the transmission electron microscope and so we can characterize their structure details and do mechanical tests on that."

McKittrick has been looking at feathers and porcupine quills, both made of keratin, and both of interest due to their bending resistance.

"So, we would like to try to make tubes, energy absorbent tubes based on the structure of the feathers and porcupine quills. So, these would be lightweight and they would be resistant to bending and resistant to crushing."