UC Science Today

Imagine if you could help identify space dust brought back from outside the solar system? It’s possible – and it’s been done – by volunteers in a citizen scientist project called Stardust@Home. The project, managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, allows volunteers to use a web-based virtual microscope to interactively scan the tracks of dust collected by NASA’s Stardust mission.

"It would have taken us decades of effort to do it on our own. And so, we started the project called Stardust@Home and this is ongoing. More than 32,000 people now have participated and have collectively searched more than 100 million fields of view."

Project director Andrew Westphal says of the seven interstellar particles identified so far, two were discovered by volunteers.

"We feel very excited that this is an era in which people who are not professional scientists can really participate directly in science projects like this."

Growers working with University of California researchers are experimenting with more efficient ways to increase the pungency – or spicy heat – of jalapeno peppers. And while this may be welcome news for those with a taste for heat, the molecule that causes that fieriness, capsaicin, is very important to researchers studying pain.

"For many decades people used capsaicin as a way of functionally defining nerve fibers that are involved in pain sensation because they knew that if you wanted to identify a neuron as being likely to be involved in pain sensation, you would ask first whether it was excited by capsaicin."

Dr. David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco has identified a capsaicin receptor that regulates a signaling pathway involved in pain sensation.

"So, drugs that modulate the activity of these ion channels are potentially new therapeutics for dealing with pain hypersensitivity that’s associated with tissue injury, inflammation such as arthritis, in bone cancer-related pain and other types of situations like that."

The development of the brain’s white matter is a strong indicator for early reading difficulties in children. Those were the findings of a new study led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Lead author Chelsea Myers focused on white matter because of its important role in communication between brain regions.

"We measured children’s brain development over the course of three years, from five to six, to age eight and nine and what we found was that white matter development significantly predicted reading outcomes at age eight or nine when we assume that children are fully capable of reading. So, we are starting at a time when children haven’t started formal reading instruction to a time when they are fully immersed in reading instruction."

One goal of the study is to detect reading difficulties before disorders such as dyslexia are often diagnosed.

"If we can identify the fact that brain regions important to reading are developing at such a young age, it points to the importance of early intervention and diagnosis."

The death of the first patient diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. has sparked fears and has led to tighter screening at airports for people traveling from affected nations. Dr. Art Reingold, a renowned infectious diseases expert at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health, explains the basics about Ebola.

"It’s what we call a hemorraghic fever virus, so it causes high fever, bleeding and it’s a virus that’s found in Africa, usually in bats and then spreads to people. It’s a highly lethal virus when it gets into a person with fifty or sixty percent of such people dying once they develop symptoms."

The virus is spread through direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids. In the African countries where it’s spreading, a lack of even basic healthcare resources is a big factor.

"We as individuals here in the United States really can go about our normal business, unless someone is either traveling to the region or in direct contact with an ill individual from one of these countries, they’re really not at risk of Ebola and they don’t need to change their day-to-day activities."

Researchers have all but confirmed the interstellar origin of seven tiny space particles collected from NASA’s Stardust mission. Andrew Westphal of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley says that one of the final steps is isotope analysis, but it’s a process that could also result in the loss of samples.

"So in order to measure the isotopic abundances, you have to take the particles apart one atom at a time. And at the moment, there are no techniques that you can do it any other way. And so, that’s why we have to be so careful. We will have one shot. These are so tiny. It would be trivially easy to lose them. And when we have so few of them-- the bar is high."

In the meantime, Westphal says that his team will be practicing on analogs – particles similar in size and property to the actual samples.

"We’re going to be doing a lot of practicing and just to make absolutely sure that we will not lose the real thing when we finally get to doing these measurements."

Collaboration between different disciplines in the research setting can often lead to breakthroughs. And now buildings are even being designed to encourage greater interaction between researchers. The University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay Campus is no exception. Dr. Ari Green, an assistant clinical director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center, says it’s a big change from his previous office in a clinical setting.

"I was actually the only person in that group doing translational medicine, and I didn’t have the kind of time that I have to spend with laboratory neuroscientists and geneticists and immunologists that I have today. And so this is a complete transformation. It’s just an opportunity for not just me but my whole team. Everyone who works -- you know I have a team of about 10 people and the 10 people who work with me meet with the 10 people who work on another project and 10 other people who work on a different set of projects and all of them have conversations with each other that percolate back to our lab meetings and help to bring us all together for projects that are collaborative and conjoined and focused on a broader and larger goal."

Being honest, even when it may be advantageous to lie, takes more self-control. Those were the findings of a new study led by Ming Hsu of the University of California, Berkeley. They linked damage to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a region that controls impulses, to an inability to control self-interests. Hsu says the study involved a money-splitting game between participants with damage to their prefrontal region and those with healthy brains.

"So, you tell them either option A is better than option B for you or option B is better than option A for you. So essentially this will be like saying, car A is really good for you, even though when I know car B is really the better one for you. What we found is that people who don’t have damage to this brain region are willing to sacrifice quite a bit of material interest in order to not have to be dishonest."

Hsu says this research supports the hypothesis that humans are inherently self-interested.

"People like economists and behavioral ecologists have long argued that self-interest is the basic impulses of human behavior."

How can gliding snakes and lizards be studied to understand the origins of bird flight? Evolutionary biologist Robert Dudley of the University of California, Berkeley says that newborn birds exhibit the same types of asymmetric movement that these animals create to glide and maneuver in mid-air, which he says supports the hypothesis that birds developed flight by falling from trees.

"Gliding snakes in Southeast Asia, gliding lizards - they’re all highly maneuverable. These are not like paper airplane, launch and glide to target. No, they can take off and land on the same tree that they jumped off of. They can do 180s in midair. They can avoid things. So from day one, all of these gliders actually are highly maneuverable and they carry out those maneuvers by moving their aerodynamic structures asymmetrically, not symmetrically. So it’s another very important argument in support of aerial hypotheses for the origins of bird flight is that basically everything that’s going aerial is maneuverable from day one."

The West Coast of the United States has a very mature seismic network, as well as a large GPS infrastructure with hundreds of monitoring stations. But because they are two different systems many of them are not integrated. Geodesist Yehuda Bock of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is merging the technologies to quickly and accurately address public safety threats, like earthquakes, tsunamis and floods.

"What we’re doing is taking the existing GPS infrastructure and then plugging in low cost seismic sensors so that we can now have a network of co-located instruments, co-located sensors."

In the case of earthquakes, in the first few seconds of information, Bock says they can get a pretty good estimate of what the magnitude of the earthquake is going to be.

"We can then start a sequence of response, starting with early warning, then what areas are being affected and if there is a high probability of a tsunami event, to provide a tsunami forecast of what can be expected."

Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are using a hands-on approach to learn more about India’s harmful air pollution. The technique is called mobile monitoring, which involves driving in traffic with a mobile device to measure real-time data of air pollution.

"One of the great things about these mobile monitors is that they can tell you the level of air pollution every second, so that when you see a dirty bus go by, the levels go up and then they go down again and you can really see that happening in real time on the screen right in front of you whereas a typical government monitor will tell you a level on average over an hour. So you don’t get to see these individual spikes."

Study leader Josh Apte, who went to New Delhi, says that the standard air monitors used in cities around the world are typically placed on rooftops, which only give the background levels of air pollution.

"We took advantage of these very mobile instruments to make measurements of people’s exposure to air pollution in traffic, which had not really be done in a real-time way for air pollution in cities in India before."