UC Science Today

Stressful events, including caregiving or suffering a personal or professional loss, are linked to an increased shortening of telomeres. These are the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age. And when this happens, we’re prone to suffer from age-related illnesses, including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. But a University of California, San Francisco study, which followed hundreds of women for a year, found this may be staved off by a healthy lifestyle.

"In the women who actually remained physically active, who ate well, who slept well over that one-year period – that stress no longer impacted that shortening."

Lead author Eli Puterman hopes these findings may lead to better intervention strategies, including getting more exercise when stressed.

"I find it really exciting because I think exercise does everything from clear our minds, reduce our depression levels, fix our blood and really keeps us fit longer, as long as possible until we die."

What can the behavior of newborn birds reveal about the origins of flight? In a new study, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley observed how baby chukars, pheasant-like birds from Eurasia, reacted when they fell upside down. Study leader Robert Dudley, emphasizing that none of the birds were injured in the process, says that baby birds have the innate ability to right themselves in midair.

"One of the most basic aerial responses when things are falling is to not land on your head, so kind of if you’re falling upside-down, try to right yourself and land on your feet. And what’s really amazing is that from day one into day five, about 25 percent of dropped individuals could actually right themselves, even though they have these tiny wings. And as the birds aged and got older, the wings got relatively larger and they got better and better at doing this."

Dudley says that these observations offer clues to the origins of flight.

"It just shows us how baby bird are aerodynamically really effective from day one and so it tells us about the ontogeny, or the development of flapping flight."

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but for the California Breast Cancer Research Program, every month is devoted to awareness and education. Program director Mhel Kavanaugh of the University of California says they're a member of an international organization of cancer research funders.

"We categorize our grants using a scheme that all these funders came together to develop together, so that we can actually talk about what we are funding using similar language. We are required to be complimentary and not duplicative of other agencies. And being able to talk about what other agencies are funding makes that possible."

The California Breast Cancer Research Program has funded groundbreaking research on disparities in breast cancer, environment and breast cancer and now a new initiative on prevention.

"An area that all of these funders, and us included, have really failed to stimulate over the last 20 years. We intend to change that."

An international team of researchers has strong evidence that space dust collected from NASA’s Stardust mission originated outside of our solar system. Research physicist Andrew Westphal who leads the analysis at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, explains this exciting discovery.

"The Stardust mission also brought back the very first samples we think of material from outside the solar system. And that was using a collector that was exposed to the stream of interstellar dust that is coming into the solar system. It’s an extremely tenuous stream of dust, and so we didn’t get very many particles. And in fact, after many years of work, we think we've identified a total so far of seven."

The samples were analyzed using instruments such as synchrotrons and ion microscopes, cutting edge technology which he says has been crucial to the analysis.

"The instruments that we use to study these are on the cutting edge of what's available to microscopists. And so, that's been a very important part of this mission in fact is to use instruments that we really have not been available until now."

The field of biomimicry is the fairly new science of adapting designs from nature to engineer materials and machines to solve various human problems. And it all began with a materials scientist looking at an abalone shell.

"The abalone shell is made up of 95% chalk dust and when you look at a piece of chalk, you can snap that in half, it breaks very easily. So, how can an abalone shell be so extraordinarily tough compared to a piece of chalk?"

That’s materials scientist Joanna McKittrick of the University of California, San Diego. She began working in this field about a decade ago – also looking at the abalone shell as inspiration for better body armor and more advanced ceramic materials.

"It takes a lot of energy to break this thing and this is due to the nature of the way the little chalk dust particles are arranged like a brick wall. All this is happening down at the nanoscale, so it is our goal to try to duplicate that."

To learn more about air pollution in cities, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory traveled to New Dehli, India to measure the air quality during rush hour traffic. Lead author Josh Apte says that this approach has cleared a lot of ambiguities about the types and levels of pollutants that people are exposed to.

"One of the things we were looking at in particular is how the levels of air pollution compare in traffic to what you see at the official air pollution monitoring sites, which typically are not in traffic and instead on the roofs of buildings where they can sort of tell you more about what the background levels of air pollution are in a city. And what we found is the levels of air pollution were substantially higher in traffic than in urban background levels."

One of the goals of the study is to connect patterns of air pollution in New Dehli to our own cities in the U.S.

"So things that we’ve learned about how levels of air pollution are elevated in traffic in India actually give us useful insights about how the behavior of pollutants occurs in American cities."

Eating well, getting enough sleep and exercising may provide a buffer against stress-related cellular aging. Those were the findings of a new study led by Eli Puterman of the University of California, San Francisco. They measured how these healthy behaviors affected telomere length in hundreds of women. Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age.

"We found that a year’s worth of stressful events that occurred, whether it was a divorce or separation or loss of a job or even all of a sudden becoming a caregiver; these types of events that happened in this one year period, in just these average women, actually led to greater shortening over that one year period."

Shorter telomeres are associated with a variety of age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and many forms of cancer.

"So this is the first study in adult women really demonstrating that things that happen over time actually leads to shortening even more than you would expect based on where they were a year before."

Just how powerful is a supernova? We asked Senior Staff Scientist Peter Nugent of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to give us some perspective on the energy output of these dying stars.

"This is a violent explosion. I mean the light from a super nova for a month or so totals the entire light from the billion plus stars that are in the galaxy that it comes from. So that’s how bright it is. It rivals all the other stars in the galaxy. A typical, this super nova that went off, basically if you took the entire energy output of our sun over its 10 billion year lifetime this super nova let it out within one month."

Nugent’s team is still tracking a supernova that exploded last year. He says that they are powerful enough to follow for several years.

"The explosion takes place and we can follow the super nova for several years. But they continue to expand for 10, 20, 30,000 years until they’re so weak and spread out that they just mingle in with the other gas in the galaxy."

The AlloMap blood test is used to monitor heart transplant patients and serves as a ‘crystal ball’ in predicting which patients will reject their new organ. UCLA’s Dr. Mario Deng, who helped develop this blood test several years ago, says in studies they’ve found patient satisfaction was higher than with the biopsy-based monitoring. And to Deng, who practices a personalized medicine approach, this makes sense.

"If I’m a patient who has had a heart transplantation and if I know that I have to undergo over my entire lifetime with my new transplanted heart, rejection monitoring, then it is a very important matter to me how painful or how distressful this type of monitoring is."

The AlloMap blood test measures the expression levels of eleven genes from a patient’s blood sample that are known to be associated with rejection risk. It has also recently been found to predict potential rejection-related problems in the future.

How do Tibetans thrive in high altitudes when most other humans struggle? In the findings of a recent study at the University of California, Berkeley, scientists pinpointed the difference to a gene called EPAS1. Study leader Rasmus Nielsen explains that for most humans, the gene’s response is maladaptive because it can increases the risk of certain diseases.

"When you go into a high altitude, the normal response is to produce a lot of red blood cells. We produce so many red blood cells that our blood becomes very thick and we have increased risk of various diseases such as stroke. Tibetans avoid that by producing fewer red blood cells at high altitude because of this genetic variant in EPAS1. Might sound counter-intuitive but they do that to avoid these negative fitness consequences of having blood that’s too thick."

Nielsen’s team has been studying how the Tibetans manage with fewer red blood cells.

"What we think is that somehow the Tibetans are better at producing energy anaerobically than they are doing it aerobically, their muscle cells can better deal with being deprived of oxygen."