UC Science Today

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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."