UC Science Today

One of the most important ecosystem functions that coral reefs provide is they build reefs. Coral reef ecologist Jennifer Smith of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography explains.

"If you’ve ever flown into the Hawaiian Islands or the Caribbean, you see these massive reef structures from the air and those are built by living corals that lay down calcium carbonate, it’s like limestone underneath their soft tissues. And so those reefs protect island ecosystems from erosion, from battering wave forces, from storms; they provide habitat and food and shelter; they provide tourism and fisheries. And so if the corals go away that reef building capacity is no longer there."

Smith and her colleagues produced a landmark report on the impact of fishing on a group of fish known to protect the health of coral reefs. Their findings offer key data for setting management and conservation targets to protect and preserve fragile coral reefs.

David Julius, professor and chair of the UC San Francisco Department of Physiology, describes how studying the molecular mechanisms in natural chemicals like capsaicin, which gives heat to hot chili peppers, has helped researchers advance the study of pain and may lead to new pain therapies.

How hot do you like your peppers? Researchers at the University of California are working the heat levels of the jalapeno pepper down to a science. Farm Advisor Aziz Baameur of the UC Cooperative Extension explains that they are experimenting with various field inputs such as nitrogen and water to produce hotter jalapenos.

"Nitrogen seems to be promising, high nitrogen because it allows also for high yields so in that combination that looks promising. Low nitrogen also is high pungency; it brings a lot of heat in the peppers. However, it is correlated with lower yields. Water by itself, so far has not shown what the common knowledge is that less water the hotter the pepper we have not seen that."

He says that one of the goals of growing hotter peppers is to reduce the amount of additional products added during processing in order to reach the optimal heat level.

"The goal is to increase that pungency to a level where it allows them to use less materials, that are expensive, to reach a certain maximum heat that they are looking for."

Can learning a new language actually change the way you think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky at the University of California, San Diego explains that finding that out is no simple task, as one needs to know whether it’s the language that’s influencing cognition or the other way around – and how do cultural differences enter into the equation?

"One way to disentangle this is to do experiments that specifically test whether language can have a causal power. And the way you can do that is by changing the way people talk and seeing if that changes how they think. So, one way you do that is by teaching people a new way of talking. So, we might bring English speakers into the lab and teach them new metaphors or other folks might bring in English speakers and teach them a new distinction in the color space and so on. And when people have done that, they’ve shown that that changes the way people think. So, just changing how people talk has power to change how people think. We used to think that there’s talking and then there’s thinking and they’re kind of separate, but it turns out that we’re using language a whole lot inside our minds without even knowing it."

Stress is an inevitable part of life; there's divorce, death of loved ones, job loss and caregiving. But a new study suggests that maintaining a healthy diet, exercising and sleeping well through the stressful times may buffer against the negative impacts of stress - on a cellular level. We chatted about this finding with the study's lead author Dr. Eli Puterman of UC San Francisco.

Is confidence really the key to success in life? This is Science Today. Laura Kray, a professor of management and leadership at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, explains that being confident in situations like job interviews and negotiations can often lead to better deals. And if you’re not naturally confident, you can at least prime yourself with the mindset.

"We should remind ourselves of a time in which we were powerful and which we had control over a situation. Remember what it felt like. We find that in doing that leads to behaviors that are consistent with actually being in a powerful position."

Even power poses, or putting oneself into an expansive body posture, can help project power and confidence – and this can deter any deception during face-to-face encounters.

"So, if you’re going in sort of hesitant and not really projecting 100 percent confidence, then people assume you don’t know what you’re doing and may take advantage of you."

The time it takes for light from a star to reach us is also how long ago it existed. So why do scientists talk as if cosmic discoveries happened recently? Senior staff scientist Peter Nugent of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory explains that’s because they’re referring to these events in real time and real time depends on when the events are perceived.

"I’m speaking to you right now and you’re hearing my words in what you think is real time but it’s not. The words left my mouth a few milliseconds before the sound waves make it to your ear. So, for you it’s real time because that’s as soon as you can get it. So, that’s what we’re doing even though these stars could be up to a billion light years away, it’s taken a billion years for that light to reach us, real time for us means well we can study that star every single second as the light reaches us, just meaning as the photons get to us. It’s no different than the fact that you think you’re talking to me in real time. But you’re not. It’s milliseconds after the fact."

This is Science Today. Oftentimes when researchers describe the myelin sheath, which is the protective fatty coating around nerve fibers in the central nervous system, they use the analogy of the rubber coating over electrical wires.

"I think that’s a very useful analogy both because it helps people understand what the nerve cell is doing, but it also highlights the differences in between conduction in a biological tissue and conduction in an electrical wire.

Dr. Ari Green of the University of California, San Francisco explains that in conduction in an electrical wire, electrons flow down the wire at extremely fast rate; in biological tissues, it’s a much graded response, is much slower and is the result of the flow of charged particles across the surface of an axon.

"And in that way, myelin is kind of like the rubber in that it’s an insulating substance and so that’s the essential function of myelin is to preserve the speedy conduction of that electrical signal."

Research can basically be divided into two different categories – hypothesis-driven and curiosity-based. Materials scientist Joanna McKittrick of the University of California, San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, has done her share of both.

"We had an NSF grant to study the abalone shell, different mechanical properties, and so naturally, we were curious about other shells and we looked at other shells and so that went off on a track that it was hypothesized, so we could go along in that way. And then there is just some curiosity-based research which is something like we had looked at feathers and I got interested in the woodpecker because the woodpecker drives its head into a piece of wood without brain injury…so the skull is a very nice impact-resistant shell and now we are looking at their skulls. If you like nature and you are curious about animals – almost everything you see you’d say, “why that?”

This is Science Today. The next time you go wine tasting in California, consider the amount of water it takes to produce that glass. Winery manager and instructor Chik Brenneman of the University of California, Davis’ Department of Viticulture and Enology explains that producing wine takes five times the amount of water. And with California’s lucrative wine industry, that can put a strain on the state’s fragile water situation.

"Within the industry and it’s pretty much the industry standard, it takes five to ten volumes of water to make one volume of wine. That can become a significant impact. Here, we’re a one hundred ton winery, but think of some of the larger wineries in California that are doing hundreds of thousands of tons."

Brenneman says that university-managed wineries have already begun taking measures to conserve water.

"We’re actually looking at capturing more water, cleaning the water up, and using that water as process water, then capturing the processed water and the waste stream, and actually cleaning up ther waste stream and being able to use that again."