UC Science Today

Researchers at the University of California, Berkley, are competing with Mother Nature to improve energy production skills. In particular, physicist Jeffrey Neaton is working on making photosynthesis more efficient.

“A leaf can convert the energy in sun light into fuel with a one to two percent efficiency. A major Department of Energy program that I’m part of, the joint center for artificial photosynthesis, has recently developed a prototype material that is made of semiconductors that can go from sunlight to fuel at 10 percent efficiency. Much greater efficiency than plants, actually”.

Neaton is working on an artificial leaf that could generate fuel and can someday become a new alternative energy source.

“Right now the artificial leaf prototypes are not made of materials that are cheap enough or abandoned enough to be saleable to a level where they will impact society yet.”

But technology moves forward fast. Take solar panels, for example. In just 10 years, the price of this energy source has fallen by over 60 percent. So, we may want to use an artificial leaf sooner than we think. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

Time: a little over. The 1st bite can be trimmed I think. Last sentence, in Italic.

Oxytocin is most commonly called the “love” hormone, but it has also been referred to as the "mama bear" hormone. Jennifer Mitchel, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, describes why.

“I love my baby, I love my baby so much, that if you get anywhere close to my baby, I will rip you to shreds. So when we administer oxytocin to our populations, we are trying to keep these darker behaviors in mind as well."

In a new study Mitchell is also testing oxytocin as a therapy for military personnel who suffer from PTSD and alcohol abuse. She says it is an effective way to keep stress and anxiety in check.

"Oxytocin can make one feel more pair-bonded, it is important for maternal attachment, for breastfeeding, for child birth, perhaps falling in love or those feelings associated with falling in love, but it also contributes to sort of non-group behavior. Believing there is an enemy or feeling that you have to protect yourself against others."

But so far - Mitchell says - she hasn’t seen any signs of "mama bear"- type behavior in her study group.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among American women, killing 1 in 3 of them each year. A study by Nisha Parikh, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that the age a woman is when she reaches menopause affects her risk of developing a heart disease.

“We found that a longer reproductive period duration was actually associated with less of a risk of heart failure. And that was mostly driven by the age of menopause, so that having an early age at menopause was associated with a higher risk of heart failure”.

But researchers still don’t know what causes it and are working on further studies to find the answers.

“We need to understand what it is about sort of an increased reproductive period that protects a woman from heart failure. Is it something biologic or is it something related to sociodemographic factors or lifestyle choices. I think all of that will be really interesting to explore in the future.”

Will genetic sequencing become standard procedure for diagnosing disease? by University of California

Obsessive thoughts, nightmares and alcohol addiction are often associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In a quest to ease these symptoms, neuroscientist Jennifer Mitchell, of the University of California, San Francisco, is testing the power of oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone”. This could be a new therapy for combat veterans and active military personnel.

“We are interested in general in developing novel therapeutics for alcohol use disorder and co-morbid PTSD, because it is a population that is very difficult to treat and there are not a lot of treatments currently prescribed for. One of the therapeutics that we are looking at is oxytocin.”

This 'love hormone', also called the “moral molecule” and the “cuddle chemical” - makes people feel bonded. It helps us manage stress and anxiety, be more social, trusting and empathetic.

“Perhaps the oxytocin could ameliorate some of the signs and symptoms of the alcohol use disorder, the craving and some of the emotional reactivity and the signs and symptoms of PTSD as well.”

Solar panels have become a popular and efficient way to make electricity, but they are not as good when it comes to storing it. Now, physicist Jeffrey Neaton of the University of California, Berkeley has found a better way to preserve energy.

Neaton: “What we are doing here is thinking about harnessing that energy and not turning it into electricity, but into fuel, much like gasoline. Fuel is a very compact, energy-dense way of storing of energy”

Neaton and his colleagues consider photosynthesis as a model to generate fuel and are working on building an artificial leaf that could become a new alternative energy source.

“This artificial leaf is a set of inorganic materials that one combined does what a leaf does, which is take sunlight and carbon dioxide and generate a fuel, chemical fuel, and oxygen.”

Neaton says it’s still a long way before the artificial leaf become a technology like solar panels, but step-by-step, the idea is turning into reality.

A 3D mammogram could be more effective for women with dense breasts than a regular mammography test. That’s because a three-dimensional scan is easier to detect abnormalities in dense tissue. This according to breast cancer researcher Karla Kerlikowske of University of California, San Francisco.

But the technology has not been widely used yet. While the FDA approved the devises 5 years ago, only 30 percent of clinics across the country purchased them. Kerlikowske says more studies are needed to prove how reliable 3D scanners are.

“The technology often, in particular for devices - not for drugs, for drugs there is always randomized trials - they don’t say you can use this drug for such and such until the FDA approves it. But when it comes to devices, they often get released before there is evidence to show that they are really better than what exists.”

But Kerlikowske hopes she will soon have the data.

“That’s actually grants we are working on now to try and figure that out who benefits the most from that technology".

When it comes to the future of medicine, think digital! That’s what researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, along with tech giants like Google and Intel - are doing. UCSF pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee is converting troves of medical records into digital format and storing them in a unified online database.

“We do have collaborations through our digital center for health innovation. When we are able to get a power of what I would argue at UCSF, the singular world’s leading research medical institution, and as an aggregate the UC system, really the world’s leading system of academic medical centers, partnering up with the leading companies that make processors that can do machine learning and can do deep learning like Intel, have companies like Cisco and GE that are interface between devices and data, I think it is such a powerful combination, I think that’s exactly where medicine is heading.”

Lee says the digital era of medicine will open new doors for experimental studies and the quality of treatment.

The human brain has been studied for several centuries, but there is still a lot we don’t understand about it. And according to radiologist Pratik Mukherjee of the University of California, San Francisco, this includes how concussions affect the brain.

“There is a controversy with soldiers that were repeatedly exposed to blasts in the battlefield, about whether they may get dementia in earlier ages and it’s been actively investigated.”

Mukherjee says new technology, like higher quality images from MRI scanners, might be an answer that doctors, researchers and injured patients have long been looking for.

"The brain is harder than other organs, even other important organs like the heart and so while it’s been recognized that this is a big problem for centuries and even if you look at prior wars, where they talk about shell shock in WWI where they had a lot of artillery explosion for the first time. They are basically describing these repetitive blast injuries, their concussions, but they just didn’t have the tools to understand any of that at that time."

Hi there! It’s been a busy week here at Science Today. We learned that diagnosing brain disorders can often be a challenge for doctors because some psychological diseases have overlapping symptoms. These include memory loss in patients with depression and suppressed mood in people suffering from dementia. But radiologist Cyrus Raji of UC San Francisco led a study, which found that neuroimaging and machine learning can help improve diagnosis.

"Each individual had a perfusion neuroimaging, where this is a nuclear tracer injected into them and that allowed the mapping of the blood flow in the brain and that allows us to quantify blood flow in 128 regions and use machine learning analysis to separate who had depression or cognitive disorders or both."

Raji explains that machine learning is often used to quickly process and analyze patient’s data in digital format – and it may be used in the future to find new biomarkers that can help in deciphering if one has a brain disorder vs. another issue. While on campus, we also visited pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee, who is working to get more pediatric grants to provide devices and therapeutics for children. Right now, Lee says when it comes to spending on research and innovation, adults get the lion’s share of benefits.

"The market for most drugs and devices is significantly better and bigger and more robust in the adult world. I think we just need to be staunch advocates for children. I firmly believe that that is the best investment that you could make, is in the health of our children."

And finally, some great news for advocates for coral reef preservation. A decade-long study led by Jennifer Smith of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography has found that remote coral reefs can thrive despite threats posed by climate change. Smith says coral reefs surrounding remote islands were dramatically healthier than those in populated areas subject to a variety of human impacts, including overfishing and coastal development.

"In a healthy coral reef, you have a landscape that is dominated by these beautiful reef building corals that are really the ecosystem engineers - that provides food and shelter for all the other organisms that live in that ecosystem."

This shows that preservation efforts can buy researchers time as they figure out how to deal with the threat posed by ocean warming. That’s it for the weekly update – to hear more episodes about University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. I’m Larissa Branin – have a great Mother’s Day weekend.