UC Science Today

When you share a video on Facebook, in the background there are huge data centers storing this information and ready to retrieve whenever you, or one of your 1200 Facebook friends, click on it. And what if it’s a funny cat video that goes viral? Graduate student Janelle Shane of the University of California, San Diego’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, says it takes lots of storage and speed and that’s why most of these big data centers are using fiber optics.

"As we are sending higher and higher data rates between your computer, your graphics card or different parts of your computer, we want to try and use those same advantages that we got from fiber optics on a computer chip. So, for sending data not only between computers, but now within computers as well."

Shane specializes in photonics, the study of light, and says as computers get faster and faster, they’re going to want to send that data with light, not electricity.

"We are trying to figure out how to make lasers that are so small that they fit well on these computer chips."

Could helicopter parenting be effective for pets? In a nationwide survey analyzing the key personality traits of pet owners, those who expressed the greatest affection for their pets also rated among the most neurotic. Psychologist Mikel Delgado of the University of California, Berkeley explains that the positive association between neuroticism and affection suggests that the qualities of an overbearing parent might work better for pets than for kids.

"In human children, having a parent who scores high in neuroticism is not usually linked to good outcomes. They tend to have less consistent parenting, either overly permissive or maybe overly protective. And at some point, children grow up, and they need to be autonomous."

Delgado says that high levels of affection and dependence on their pets could be beneficial because pets require lifelong caregiving.

"This relationship to their pet may not be harmful to the pet because the pet never has to kind of graduate and leave home, right? The pet is always dependent on the owner."

For decades, physicians have assumed that cerebral aneurysms rarely undergo structural change and some earlier theories speculated that they grow at a constant rate. Now an international consortium of scientists has used radiocarbon dating to date samples of ruptured and unruptured cerebral aneurysm tissue.

"What we did was actually measure how old the collagen, or basically the structure of a aneurysm is, by measuring the carbon-14 content of the protein that makes up the aneurysm."

That’s physicist Bruce Buchholz of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who was part of the consortium. He says they found that cerebral aneurysms are significantly younger than once thought and that this type of research increases the knowledge of how the body works.

"We're looking at the intrinsic behavior of cells or proteins without adding any other trace of what's already there in nature. So we're not perturbing the system to look at it. We're seeing how the system behaves naturally, which I think is really important."

While it’s still a mystery how the brain hones into specific sounds in noisy environments, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a hearing aid algorithm that replicates how we processes sound. Neuroscientist Frederic Theunissen describes what he calls the “auditory spotlight”.

"If you're listening to the orchestra with your eyes closed, you can listen to the violin, and then you decide, "Oh, I'm going to listen to the flute," and then, "I'm going to, you know, listen to the cello" and so forth, and you can basically jump from one instrument to the other one so that you can just see your auditory spotlight going from one instrument to the other one. And when you focus on one of them, you don’t hear the other ones anymore."

To replicate this process, Thuenissen’s team studied songbird brain imagery and identified the exact neurons that tune into auditory signals.

"The idea is let’s make a set of these detectors, which are kind of like auditory neurons, that are specialized for different features, and then let’s see if we can use the response of these detectors to amplify the signal at the right time."

It’s one thing to have palliative care services in hospitals – and that’s taken over a decade to happen; but it’s another to recognize the importance of providing specialized medical care for patients with serious illnesses outside of the hospital in an office or clinic setting.

"We’re starting to develop those services, but they’re not available widely by any stretch. I mean, it’s really where hospital-based palliative care was 15 years ago is where outpatient-based palliative care is today."

Dr. Steve Pantilat of the University of California, San Francisco, started one of the first hospital-based palliative care centers in the nation almost 20 years ago. He admits there’s still a long way to go in this field.

"We’re recognizing this as an important area for training healthcare professionals, but we still don’t have enough. We need more experts, but we also need to make sure that all doctors and nurses and social workers and chaplains are trained in the basics of palliative care, what we in the field call primary palliative care or generalist palliative care."

At what point does pursuing power become unhealthy? Psychologist Sheri Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley says that while having power can be good and bad, too much focus on gaining power can lead to mental health problems including mania and psychopathy. She also says that those who don’t meet their goals of attaining power are at high risk for depression and anxiety.

"My worry would be about the people who start to put too much focus on wanting to be more powerful, more famous, more influential, that that’s a dangerous place for them to be in from a mental health perspective. It shouldn’t be their primary focus in life."

Johnson explains that there are benefits to having power if pursued in the right way.

"People in power tend to be a little bit more optimistic about whether they’re going to get their outcomes. They are a little bit more action-oriented because action is often helpful when you’re in power. So you could pursue power in a very socially connected way, where you’re basically building coalitions, and that can be really adaptive and a great way to achieve power."

About 92% of drug candidates make it through the initial Phase 1 testing, but then fail in the later stages of a trial. And the worst possible scenario is when a drug has already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, is on the market and then problems start to arise – like adverse drug reactions, or ADRs.

"There’s a figure, 100 thousand fatalities per year are caused by these undetected ADRs. You know, 177 billion dollars in medical costs. So, that’s comparable to the cost associated with chronic illnesses like diabetes."

Montiago LaBute is an applied statistician at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and he’s part of a team that’s discovered a high-tech method using supercomputers to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain adverse side effects.

"What this allows one to do is use all of the resources on a supercomputer and scale it up so you can do multiple drugs and multiple proteins all in parallel and it allows you to characterize how they interact together using a three-dimensional model that encapsulates the basic physics."

A single female sea urchin produces lots of eggs – like five to ten million of them. And sea urchin embryos are evolutionarily closely related to man* – more so than fruit flies or worms, which are typically used as model organisms. Because of this, sea urchins are being used to help scientists identify toxic chemicals in the environment.

"Chemical testing is an area of intensive investigation right now. One of the challenges is trying to determine whether a compound is going to be harmful when you don’t actually know what mechanisms it can interact with and how it can potentially cause harm."

So, biologist Amro Hamdoun and his colleagues at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography are systematically searching through the genes in the sea urchin genome to find those involved in drug transporters in humans.

"And by sorting through these genes and cataloging them and understanding what the functions of each of them is, we can begin to make these testable predictions about whether there are these common patterns of pollutant interaction."

*Quick fact: Sea urchins are echinoderms, marine animals that originated more than 540 million years ago. The reason for the great interest in sequencing the sea urchin genome is because it shares a common ancestor with humans. Sea urchins are closer to human and vertebrates from an evolutionary perspective than other more widely studied animal models, such as fruit fly or worms.

Image: fluorescent expression of transporters in sea urchin embryos

Can you fall in love after taking a quiz? This is Science Today. Psychologist Arthur Aron started studying the science of falling in love nearly 50 years ago as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Since then, he developed a set of 36 questions that he says can bring a close connection between two strangers.

"We’re confident that this procedure of answering 36 questions that gradually get more and more personal—that both people answer as well of a few other items in there like saying what you have in common, things you like about the other—that when you do these things you’re going to feel closer to the other person."

Aron tested the questions in his lab on two participants who ended up marrying each other six months later. But he says the questions were originally meant for accelerating intimacy rather than romance.

"We know these 36 questions get people closer. That can facilitate falling in love. Certainly if many other things are in place, and this happens, it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back."

Can understanding the way birds process sound help make better hearing aids? Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley think so, so they're currently developing a hearing aid that would be able to distinguish between the main signals, such as a person’s voice, and cluttered background noises. Study leader Frederic Theunissen explains that the idea was inspired by studying birds, which are adept at listening in noisy environments.

"So they have all these different calls that they produce, and they're often produced in the background of noise, just because they're outside and the natural environment is noisy, can be windy, there can be other animals and so forth, and they're often also produced with many other animals from the same species also speaking. And I think anybody who's seen, you know, The March of the Emperor knows about the emperor penguin that, where the female, you know, leaves the male for a couple of months while she goes feeding in, he’s sitting on the egg, and then at some point, she comes back to the colony that has millions of male penguins there, right, and finds the mate. And a lot of this is based on vocal signals, right? They're very good at basically listening for sounds in noisy environments and finding them."