UC Science Today

Could reversing aging be the key to preventing age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s? In a University of California, San Francisco study, scientists found that old mice showed significant improvement in learning and memory after receiving blood from younger mice. Study leader Saul Villeda says that although human application is still far off, the idea of reversing aging could be a game changer.

"We’re keeping you healthier for a longer period of your life. I think that is huge because it’ll have a huge impact on things like healthcare, and even the way that we really think about just disease—not targeting it, but merely reversing aging to prevent it from happening."

Villeda explains that the changes that occur naturally with aging are what allow the brain to become susceptible to age-related diseases.

"So the idea is that the young environment, the young brain, has a natural way of counteracting these effects. Even if you have predispositions for some of these diseases, you don’t have the hallmarks of these diseases. So a 20-year-old is fine, even if you will develop Alzheimer’s later in life."

As computers get faster and faster, researchers are looking to use tiny lasers to send data and fit them onto a computer chip. Janelle Shane of the University of California, San Diego’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, describes just how tiny these lasers need to be.

"We want to make lasers that are about 100 times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair, so these lasers need to be microscopic to fit in well, size-wise, among all the other microscopic components on a chip."

One of the issues working on this in the lab is that these particles are basically a hundred times smaller than your typical dust particle.

"In every breath of air that we take, there is about a million particles of dust. And so if you can imagine you are trying to build something that is that small where there’s all these giant things floating around in the room. And so if one of these blimps lands on your chemistry experiment, your experiment is ruined."

Thankfully, Shane and her colleagues work in a clean room that filters out most of the dust.

"So, that is a huge improvement!"

Highly anxious people are more likely to make bad decisions when feeling uncertain. Those were the findings of an international study that may lead to better treatment for anxiety disorders. Study leader Sonia Bishop of the University of California, Berkeley explains that those prone to high anxiety have trouble picking up environmental cues.

"Basically when you look at how people learn, they are able to adjust how rapidly they change their behavior according to whether the context is currently stable or is volatile and highly changing. And it’s trying to parse out the reasons for why things happen which we don’t expect, which seems to be the issue which anxious individuals are having."

Bishop says their findings can help the anxious better navigate around unpredictability.

"Our understanding of these kinds of issues could give a good framework for explaining why it might be worth not just jumping to conclusions based on one bad interaction."

Pressure ulcers, or bedsores, affect about 2.5 million Americans every year at an annual cost of $11 billion. Now, engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have teamed up with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco to develop a smart bandage that can detect early tissue damage. Electrical engineer Michel Maharbiz says each bandage is fabricated with tiny electrodes on a thin, flexible film.

"What all these little electrodes do is they’re running lots of little bits of current through, between themselves. And so when you take all that information you can build a map of the state of the bed sore underneath where the bandage is."

Maharbiz says this flexible electronic technology can be easily carried around by a nurse to spot-check target areas on a patient – or even used for wound dressing.

"So you can imagine a future, which is very close, where the bandage that you put on or the dressing that a surgeon or a physician might put on would actually be able to report a lot of interesting information about the progress of that wound."

The body receives most of its essential substances through the circulation of blood. That’s what got University of California, San Francisco researchers curious about testing the rejuvenating capabilities of young blood in old animals. Study leader Saul Villeda compares the role of blood to a highway.

"If you really think about blood, it has different exits to different tissues, but it connects every tissue in your body. So how are tissues going to communicate? How is the liver going to tell, maybe the muscle, or how is the brain going to communicate, then, with the liver? It's going to be through the highway, and that highway is blood. We're taking sort of the communication that's occurring in a young animal and then putting it into the communication that's occurring into the old animal."

Villeda says that the old mice that received young blood showed improved cognitive performance such as responding quicker to environmental stimuli.

"By introducing these players from the young blood, all of a sudden, we're changing the entire sort of systemic environment, and that's causing an effect on multiple organs within the body."

Since 1999, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey has been the nation’s largest ongoing health survey for children and adults. It examines a nationally representative sample of about 5,000 people each year. Cindy Leung, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, says it collects a whole host of demographic and socioeconomic information.

"And it collects nutrition information from those dietary recalls where you asked someone to tell you everything they ate in the past 24 hours. It asks about their comprehensive health history. And then there is also a mobile examination center, where the participants can actually go in and get their blood drawn. They have their height and weight measures so we can have their BMI. It’s a very comprehensive health survey."

Leung says the findings are used to determine the prevalence of major diseases and risk factors for diseases. It’s also one of the most popular surveys to do research on.

"One, it’s nationally representative; two, it is a very large sample; and, three, they have great measurements of pretty much all health behaviors, very complete dietary information, and also a comprehensive medical screens."

How our brain’s so-called ‘hunger circuit’ governs our eating has been redefined in an unexpected finding, which may have implications for anti-obesity therapies. Physiologist Zachary Knight of the University of California, San Francisco says that using new fiber optic technology that can record brain activity in real time, they found that hungry mice given food became satiated even before they took a bite.

"As soon as the mouse saw or smelled the food, the hunger neurons would shut off, and usually the mouse would look at the food for a few seconds and start eating, but by the time the mouse actually started eating, the entire response was over – so it was as if these hunger neurons were responding to the sensory detection of food alone, and not to its consumption, which was what people would have predicted."

So, how can this someday translate to humans?

"There are a number of drugs that are currently in late-stage clinical trials for the treatment of obesity and we don’t really understand at the neural circuit level, how any of these drugs work. And so the methods that we use to watch the activity of specific neurons is going to allow us to start to understand where these drugs that do work, are acting."

When one thinks of the application of ceramic materials, it’s often within the context of how it’s been used for thousands of years – for food storage and décor. But what about making engines? Materials scientist Robert Ritchie of the University of California, Berkeley explains how the properties of ceramic make it a surprising choice to make plane engines.

"People have always wanted to use ceramics because they are much lighter. They have much higher temperature capability. General Electric plans to put an engine on the Boeing Triple 7 plane, it’s called the Triple 7X, by the end of this decade with ceramic components in it. And that is huge. I mean it’s going to run hotter which is much better for the efficiency of the engine. It is going to be lighter that is better for the whole fuel consumption of the engines. By running hotter and there is less emissions and so forth."

Ritchie says one of the challenges is to create a tougher ceramic.

"They are very, very brittle and so one of the big approaches in material science is to try to make ceramics more resistant to fracture."

It may sound like science fiction, but engineers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working with neurosurgeons at UCLA to develop an implantable neural device that has the ability to record and stimulate neurons within the brain to help restore memory. From the biology side, Lab research engineer Angela Tooker says they’re not yet certain if they can distinguish between restoring short-term memory or long-term memory.

"But since injuries in the brain are region-specific, generally most of these people are losing both. I mean, the ultimate goal would be to restore all of it so that all of the memories that you’ve had, you can now get back, because most of the times the memories themselves are not damaged. It’s just the pathways to access them that have been damaged and if we can bridge those, we can get them all back."

Tooker says these devices may one day help patients who lose memory due to traumatic brain injury, epilepsy or Alzheimer’s disease.

"Implanting these in humans is going to be the ultimate test of does it work; there’s a lot of strong evidence right now that says, yes, it does work. But when you’re talking memory, that’s the ultimate test. "

In social groups, dominant mammals generally have the easiest access to resources that garner survival and reproductive success. Psychologist Sheri Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley describes that humans and other mammals respond accordingly to their place in these social hierarchies.

"Many of us are used to thinking about hierarchy in the animal world. Wolf packs have a hierarchy of who’s the chief wolf pack leader and on down from there. But in human context, we also have a hierarchy, and where you are in that hierarchy may even shift across different contexts. You might be the high-ranking person in one area of your life, like you might be captain of your sports team, but then you go to work, and maybe you’re not captain there."

Johnson says that feeling subordinated in these hierarchies is linked to poor mental health. Recent studies have found that people living in developed countries with the highest income inequality are three times as likely to develop depression.

"There are tons of studies out there showing that poverty is very bad for mental health."