UC Science Today

Do you have a tendency to crack a smile or burst into laughter a lot? Well, you may have what’s been come to be known as ‘the giggle gene’ – specifically a shortened version of the gene, or a short allele. Psychologist Robert Levenson of the University of California, Berkeley says this gene variant is involved in the regulation of serotonin and has been previously associated with depression or marital bliss – a subject he’s been studying for over two decades.

"We did a series of studies before we did this marriage study, where we just asked a simple question, and that is, "If you have the short allele, and we do something that's emotionally positive, will you have bigger positive emotions, too?" And it turned out that you do."

They found this out by videotaping study participants while watching funny movies or looking at humorous cartoons. But Levenson says that those with the short allele were more susceptible to emotions in general – positive or negative.

"So it didn't seem that the short allele produced a particular kind of emotional response, it just produced a bigger emotional response across the board."

Many parts of our nation’s infrastructure are aging and dams are no exception. And as troubling as that sounds, especially if there is an extreme event like a large earthquake, the good news is that the decades-old engineering was sound and is holding up to the test of time. Civil engineer Lee Glascoe of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was part of a team evaluating the design standards of soil filters used in embankment dams.

"The soil filters are coarser grained soils that are designed to withstand both large movements and to prevent the rapid erosion or the flushing of the finer earthen material that is constructed around the dam. So essentially, it’s there to provide the dam reinforcement."

The team was able to validate the effectiveness of soil filters using 3-D computer modeling and simulations.

"The earlier engineers had fairly straightforward but sound principles upon which they based their designs. The challenge for engineers today is how do we refresh that infrastructure?"

An innovative biological detection technology developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been getting quite a work out. Lab biologist Crystal Jaing says the Microbial Detection Array has been used in more than two dozen collaborations for a variety of applications, including testing vaccine safety, food safety, linking viruses to bladder cancer and there’s more to come.

"So, we are starting to use this technology to look at emerging pathogens because very often if there’s a new outbreak for a virus or a bacteria, some of the public health laboratories may not have a test already available for that pathogen. So, this is where this technology can really come in because we can analyze any of the known or any of the sequence pathogens and also to look at those emerging pathogens currently now circulating in the United States to really help predict an outbreak early."

For the first time, scientists have identified a link between specific deep sleep rhythms and beta amyloid, a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Postdoctoral fellow Bryce Mander of the University of California, Berkeley co-led the study. He says they also found that the buildup of beta amyloid disrupts the part of sleep that’s critical for promoting the retention of long-term memories.

"So the more of these Alzheimer’s disease toxins that were building up in certain parts of your brain, the more specific sleep rhythms were disrupted, and the more those sleep rhythms were disrupted, the worse people’s memory was."

Mander says these findings are promising because it can lead to new treatment opportunities.

"It’s promising because it suggests there may be specific places we can target, to develop new treatments, to intervene and help promote better more robust sleep, in people who are at risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, and perhaps even rescue some of the cognitive impairments associated with Alzheimer’s disease."

Want to brew beer or bake bread in your backyard using sunlight? It may soon be possible with a breakthrough artificial system of nanomaterials and living organisms that mimics photosynthesis. Professor Christopher Chang of the University of California, Berkeley co-led a team that developed the system, which is the size of a semiconductor chip.

"The interesting thing about the biological organisms that we're using for these studies is that they're essentially the same types of organisms that you would use to brew beer, bake bread, and so because you can do fermentation, it provides a very sustainable type of process instead of having to use an input that would be not sustainable or not renewable."

Chang says his team wants to target value added household products for now, but it can also be used to make biofuels and pharmaceuticals.

"So there are many, many different types of possibilities, but what we're thinking, is that it's much more practical to have in this case, high value types of materials or compounds."

A fully robotic telescope called the Automated Planet Finder, or APF, has made its first detection of two planets that could change the way we find planetary neighbors in the future. Graduate student Lauren Weiss leads the search at the University of California, Berkeley, and says her team has been able to catch up on sleep thanks to the fully automated APF.

"So, we decided to automate the telescope so we graduate students could get more sleep and work on other science and data analysis, instead of just staying awake all the time."

Weiss says that the APF will look for low-mass planets five to ten times the mass of Earth. And because it can search every night, the APF will significantly speed up the search for new planets.

"We estimate that within the next three to five years, we will have as much scientific data from the Automated Planet Finder, as we’ve gathered in the past twenty years, on the Keck telescope."

Our natural curiosity of how the world works leads us to study complex subjects such as particle physics and astrophysics. And while they don’t always have immediate benefits for everyday life, physics professor Marjorie Shapiro of the University of California, Berkeley says that learning more about how the world works will eventually lead to practical applications in the future, even if it’s unclear what those applications will be.

"The history has always been that when you probe things in a new way, you learn stuff that’s useful. In the 19th century, people who were doing experiments with electricity and magnetism never would have thought about transistors, and the Internet, and computers. It just would have been completely inconceivable, but they said, “I want to know how charged particles work,” and so all of us believe that sooner or later, we will find applications, if we understand the world better."

Fortunately, Shapiro’s curiosity is fed by having access to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

It seems there’s an app for everything these days – and a school lunch program is no exception. The San Francisco Unified School District is using such technology to boost healthier food choices and create less waste in the cafeteria. Researchers at the University of California are evaluating the program, which is funded by a USDA childhood obesity prevention grant.

"It’s all about you feeling like you have a choice in the matter – that you’re guided by messages that actually really ring true for you."

That’s study leader Kristine Madsen of the UC Berkeley-UC San Francisco Joint Medical Program, who says the Future Dining Experience really takes the students into account. In a pilot school, they had input in the design the cafeteria, and soon will participate in a smart meal app.

"What if you could preorder on that app? What if you could actually go through an express line and pick up your food? What if, ultimately, you could vote on the food and change what’s on the menu? So, student center design that they get to say “these are messages that make sense to us."

Kidney stones are a calcification that forms inside the kidney and are usually accompanied by severe pain and a trip to the emergency room. To better understand how they form, Dr. Thomas Chi of the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Urology says they modeled kidney stones using fruit flies, which have regulatory organs similar to a human kidney.

"And after a couple of different experiments, where we tried to expose flies to different things, it turns out that zinc seems to be a very important factor for the formation of stones. And probably, it just doesn't stretch to one type of kidney stone, but potentially all types of kidney stones."

Zinc is important for the body’s health, so Chi says they are not encouraging people to cut back, but the study could lead to new treatments in the future.

"It might be a new way to think about how to develop new drugs or new surgical treatments or new therapies, to try to prevent kidney stones for patients in the future."

Let’s say you give a hungry mouse some food – as it eats, you figure it would come satiated and scientists would assume the neurons in its brain would slowly change activity to dampen down the ‘hunger circuit’. Well, that’s not what a team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found. In fact, study leader Zachary Knight says no one would have predicted their findings.

"It was entirely, what we would call ‘anticipatory’, meaning that the mouse essentially looks at the food and then predicts the nutritional value of that food. We found that the response of these neurons to the sight and smell of food depends on how palatable the food is."

So, give a mouse “chow”, or ordinary rodent food, and there’s a strong response; but give a mouse chocolate or peanut butter, which they happen to really love, and there’s a very strong response.

"So it's clearly, these neurons are sensing something about what we would call the ‘hedonic’ value of the food, how rewarding it is to eat the food."

These unexpected findings have implications for anti-obesity therapies in humans.