UC Science Today

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."

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."

A healthy spine has disc tissue between the vertebrae, which has a swelling property that absorbs water and acts as a shock absorber. Bioengineering professor Grace O’Connell of the University of California, Berkeley says that herniated discs and other disc degenerative cases don’t re-swell as much, which can affect the nerves around them and trigger lower back and leg pain.

"So somebody with a herniated disc, the inner part of their disc squeezes out of the back, and either the body will care of it or a surgeon will go in and remove that material. And that material is actually very important for allowing the disc to re-swell. So if you lose that material, your disc can’t re-swell as much as it could before."

O’Connell’s says that understanding the biomechanics of healthy disc tissue can lead to new treatments that reduce physical stress.

"If we want to replace the tissue or design a total joint replacement for the intervertebral disc, we need to know how the healthy disc functions. So we’re moving towards understanding that a little bit better."

It’s well known that screening for mutations in certain breast cancer genes can help determine a woman’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Now, a new study led by John Witte of the University of California, San Francisco suggests that a similar test could be done for prostate cancer. Witte says that unlike other diseases, the test would be based on over 100 smaller, known genetic risk factors.

"Here we're in a situation, for most people, they don't carry that one really big mutation. Instead, they have this huge range of different mutations that each one by itself has a very small increase in risk. So what we showed in this study was that, if you actually combine a hundred of these different genetic factors together, then your risk is much higher."

Witte says that the test could provide clinical value as more genetic variants are discovered.

"You may be able to actually screen someone and look at their germ line DNA and determine who's at the highest risk of prostate cancer in a magnitude that's similar to those breast cancer genes, which are commonly tested for now in women."

Comets can tell us a lot about the earliest history of the solar system. Physicist Andrew Westphal of the University of California, Berkeley says that’s because they contain the primitive building blocks of the solar system.

"They tell us particularly about the first two million years or so of the solar system’s history. That was the time in which the sun and the planets and the asteroids and the comets were forming."

Westphal and his colleagues have been studying the very first samples of a comet brought back to Earth, which was collected during the Stardust mission. To do this, they’re using the Advanced Light Source at the Berkeley Lab, which is an x-ray microscope the size of shopping mall. The Stardust mission also captured specks of dust that may be the first material from outside the solar system ever brought back to Earth.

"And we’ve also been studying these samples using the Advanced Light Source. We recruited the help of about thirty thousand amateur scientists to help us to find these particles and this has been very, very successful."

Could robots someday do all of our chores? They will if a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley has their way. Computer scientist Pieter Abbeel says they’re developing an algorithm that enables their robot to master a variety of skills on its own through trial and error. The robot even has a name – BRETT.

"So BRETT stands for the Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks. One of the main things we’re interested in, is how can we get a robot to be smart enough to do our chores, organize laundry, load the dishwasher, unload a dishwasher, cook, set the table, clean up, and so forth."

For now, BRETT has mastered simpler tasks such as screwing a bottle cap and hanging a coat hanger. Abbeel says he’s optimistic the field of artificial intelligence will see continue to see significant improvements.

"If you had asked a year ago, “Do you think the robot would be able to learn to screw caps onto bottles,” which is such a hard task with so much interaction between the two objects. I would have said ‘wow’ that would surprise me, but now all of a sudden it’s something a robot can learn."

Researchers have discovered novel genetic risk factors for prostate cancer that could pave the way for earlier diagnosis. A new study led by John Witte of the University of California, San Francisco found that men with the highest combination of these genetic variants were four to five times more likely to develop prostate cancer than those with the lowest. Witte says that the findings add to a list of over a hundred previously discovered risk variants.

"We detected some new prostate cancer risk variants; that if a man carries these variants, they increase his risk of disease, that look like they're fairly important genetic changes. We also found that you with a combination of just over a hundred of these types of variants, that you can actually predict a fairly high risk for a man of being diagnosed with prostate cancer."

Witte adds that it could soon be possible to use these genetic variants to test for prostate cancer risk with an inexpensive blood test.

"It definitely would be a blood test, and you fairly inexpensively could measure these hundred-plus genetic variants for prostate cancer."

The spongy discs between each vertebra help absorb shock and allow for movement in the spine. Current treatment for damaged discs include implanting a metal disc as a total replacement. Now, a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley is engineering new, living disc tissue that could someday be used as a biological replacement. Study leader Grace O’Connell explains.

"We apply cell-based tissue engineering techniques, which means we take cells and we put them within a scaffold. And over a period of about six weeks, the cells will grow new tissue. And we’re looking to see if those cells can grow tissue that behaves like the healthy tissue."

O’Connell says that growing new disc tissue could eventually replace the need for implanting synthetic materials that can wear out over time.

"We know that the plastic and metal components, they wear over time. So they last about 15 to 20 years in a patient. But the idea is that an engineered tissue is a biological tissue. So it would behave like your native tissue does as well."

In an effort to speed up drug discovery and development, a team of scientists has developed a novel cardiac system that could soon be used to screen drugs in pre-clinical trials. Study leader Kevin Healy of the University of California, Berkeley says this microphysiological system is an inch-long device that houses human heart tissues and measures their beat rate in response to various drugs.

"We use common drugs that patients would take, like beta blockers, basically drugs to accelerate heart rate, drugs to decrease heart rate, and these are drugs that are prescribed by cardiologists to different patients for various clinical reasons."

Healy says as long as the drugs affect the heart, there are no limits to the types of drugs that can be tested with their system.

"We’re not limited by the types of drugs we test. So essentially anything that’s water soluble, their ability really to dissolve in water. Then our systems, our microphysiological systems are amendable to being targeted with these drugs, similar to how you would dissolve a drug in blood."

Accelerator mass spectrometry, or AMS, has been used for decades for radiocarbon dating and has since been used widely in biomedical research. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, medical scientist Mike Malfatti says they’re now using smaller AMS technology that’s dedicated to biomedical studies.

"The AMS technology has come a long way since when we first started. Before it was a very big instrument that took up a warehouse-size room. Well, the technology has changed where machines are shrinking. And we’re hoping as things develop further we can have AMS machines that can be used in the clinics."

The National Institutes of Health is funding biomedical AMS work, including developing a test to predict how people will respond to chemotherapeutic drugs.

"This particular collaboration that we’re doing with UC Davis, we’re looking at the different chemotherapeutic drugs, how people respond to them, why some people will respond and some people won’t respond."