UC Science Today

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.