UC Science Today

What exactly are scientists looking for by using the world’s largest particle accelerator? As it turns out, they’re looking for anything. Marjorie Shapiro is a collaborator at the Large Hadron Collider and physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She says that aside from the high profile experiments like the Higgs boson and dark matter, there’s a lot of other physics going on as well.

"In some sense, it’s like a telescope. You build a telescope and then you decide what are you going to point it at and you can do lots of different science depending on what you point it at. We collect a lot of data from these proton collisions, and we can look at the data in different ways in order to understand different things about physics."

Shapiro explains that the protons are smashed together in order to create particles that existed in the early universe. But she also says that you never know what you might find.

"I hope that in a couple of years, we’ll be able to come back and say, we found something that none of us expected to see."

A team of researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have detailed how supercomputers can be used to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain side effects. Montiago LaBute, an applied statistician at the Lab, says having a high tech process like this in place early on could not only save lives, it would save billions of dollars.

"The whole basis of the project was to address the need to predict the occurrence of adverse side effects in novel drugs. So, to provide some context for that – in order to develop a new drug, a pharmaceutical company has to expend about four billion dollars and it takes a decade to develop. And so that’s a huge number; and it’s sort of buried. So, each of the individual components that you need to bring a drug to market is in itself pretty expensive. For instance, a clinical trial that you need to test it in humans costs 100 million dollars. To manufacture and get a drug ready for market, that can be easily a billion."

The field of artificial photosynthesis has taken a major leap forward, thanks to the development of a hybrid system that could one day reduce our dependence on nonrenewable energy. Christopher Chang of the University of California, Berkeley was part of a team that developed this breakthrough hybrid system. It combines nanotechnology and living organisms to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into valuable chemical products.

"What we've done is we've replaced the concept of a leaf, with two things. One is a nanotechnology platform that will allow us to do the light harvesting. And then, instead of using the rest of the infrastructure of the leaf to carry out the chemical reactions that form biomass, what we've done is we've invented an integrated system in which we can replace that leaf with fermentable bacteria, in this case, that will allow you to produce, not biomass, but any sort of chemical product that you would want …".

Including, Chang says, biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

There’s no doubt that receiving the first message from an extraterrestrial civilization will be historic. But what would be the next step? Dan Werthimer directs the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, at the University of California, Berkeley. He says that if humans ever receive a message, we should just keep listening.

"The course of action for now would be not to transmit a message back to another civilization. We think Earthling's are a primitive civilization. We're an emerging civilization. We've only had radio a hundred years, laser just for fifty years. We're just getting in the game. Our civilization, we're still killing each other, and we think that it's a good idea to just listen for now, just see what's out there. Listen for radio signals, or listen if you will, for laser signals and not do any kind of deliberate transmitting."

And if we do send response, Werthimer says it should be a group decision.

"We think that should be, not a decision by a few scientists, but it should be a decision for all of humanity, by people in many countries and it should be a big discussion about whether or not we transmit a message back."

With childhood obesity rising at alarming rates, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is funding an evaluation of a project developed by the San Francisco Unified School District that aims to make school food an enjoyable experience for all students. Kristine Madsen, a pediatrician and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and UC San Francisco Joint Medical Program is evaluating the multi-year program. It’s currently in one pilot school and includes mobile food carts, lounges in dining halls and a smart meal app where kids will be able to provide feedback for meals, and even order food.

"So, those are things that SFUSD is trying to do that we think are really innovative and forward thinking and ultimately we think other schools would want to do the same thing, but other schools won’t do it unless they know that it works. 4:00 So, we come in and we overlay a scientific evaluation that will hold water with other schools, other districts, both locally and across the state and even across the nation."

If you’re still unsure about whether electric vehicles can meet your daily driving needs, you’ll soon be able to get personalized answers based on your own individual driving patterns. Research scientist Samveg Saxena of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that the app, called MyGreenCar, uses a vehicle-to-grid simulator to provide fuel economy estimates for drivers in any vehicle.

"If you were making exactly the same trips that you wanted to make that you were making in your current vehicle, what would happen if you were driving an electric vehicle instead? And through the "MyGreenCar" tool that we have coming up soon, we'll be able to give people the individual ability using their smartphones to record how they're driving, how they're using whatever vehicle they have right now. And then give them a personalized answer, would whatever vehicle they're looking at buying for their next vehicle meet their needs?"

Saxena says that one of the goals of the app is to help drivers to understand the benefits of clean vehicles.

"Electric vehicles go a long way in mitigating these global challenges and these urban challenges."

In the first study of its kind, researchers have shown that using a drug called tolcapone can make us more sensitive to inequality. The FDA-approved drug increases the brain’s dopamine levels, a chemical that is believed to play an important role in social decision-making. Study leader Dr. Andrew Kayser of the University of California, San Francisco says that findings may lead to better treatment for mental illnesses such as addiction or schizophrenia.

"In a disease like schizophrenia, we know that dopamine metabolism is altered. And there's some controversy over exactly how, but we think that it is altered. And we know that schizophrenic patients often make poor financial decisions. Believe it or not, they're often overly generous. They often don't consider their own welfare as much as they should. They make poorer decisions than other people might make with their money, and so a long-term goal, years off, but a hope of ours, is that if this drug turns out to be useful in other studies, that maybe it would be helpful for a patient population like that."

Improving school meals and addressing social inequities to healthful food access is at the heart of a childhood obesity prevention grant that’s funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dr. Kristine Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health is helping evaluate a two-year school meal technology and design innovation project by the San Francisco Unified School District.

"They’re trying to change the dining experience for kids and really encourage kids to eat school food. And some of the practical steps are what we’re calling 'distributing points of sale', so creating places that kids can purchase their food that’s not at the end of a long line in the cafeteria. So, what if you could get your food in a hallway, what if you could go to a mobile cart that sold hot food and you could pick it up and eat with your friends out in the quad? So, we do very rigorous scientific research to support them as they roll out this very innovative project. And we look to see, well what really happens? Do kids change their dietary habits, do they actually eat more fruits and vegetables? Does their diet improve?"

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. And after two years of maintenance and upgrading, the LHC is ready again to explore some of the unsolved questions in physics. Marjorie Shapiro, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a collaborator at the LHC, says it's now capable of smashing protons at almost twice the energy as before.

"The purpose of the two-year shutdown was to go back in and retrofit the magnets, making the corrections that they needed to make in the power lines, so that they could safely increase the current, in those magnets to get more magnetic field, which will allow us to accelerate the protons to higher energy."

Shapiro says that they will be able to produce new particles made in the early universe that were not possible until the upgrades.

"So if you have higher energy protons that means, you can create heavier stuff. So we’re going to be able to look for particles that we couldn’t create in the last run because they were too heavy to make."

We have hundreds of millions of neurons in our brain and thousands of those can be accessed by electrodes using microfabrication technology, which is also used to make computer chips. According to research engineer Angela Tooker of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, microfabrication technology allow neural implants to get very small and able to access all portions of the brain.

"The brain is very specialized, so different regions control different things – there’s a visual cortex that controls all things related to vision; there’s an auditory cortex; there’s sensory regions as well. And depending upon what you want to do, if you want to get to some of the regions which are very deep, you need technology that can get in there, but also want the technology that’s not limited to one electrode. So, with microfabrication technology, we can do thousands of electrodes to be able to access tens of thousands of neurons and we’re starting to be able to then get a real ability to manipulate the brain."

In particular, researchers are working to develop the world’s first neural device to restore memory loss from disease or traumatic brain injury.