UC Science Today

If you’re still clutching your smartphone as you hit the sheets at night you might deprive yourself of a good night’s sleep. That's according to a study by cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the University of California, San Francisco. So, why is a cardiologist looking into this? Marcus explains that a lack of sleep can cause high blood pressure, heart attacks, arrhythmia and strokes.

"Poor sleep quality is not simply an issue of feeling tired the next day, we recognize now that sleep is extremely important to mood, to brain function, cognition."

Almost 70 percent of Americans keep their phones on a bedside table at night and often scroll through content before falling asleep. Despite the health risks, Marcus says cell phones can still be our friends.

"It is important not to broadly demonize technology that in general I think has such a great capacity to help enhance health."

The key, Marcus says, is vigilance and putting the phone away at least an hour before sleep.

When it comes to teens, sometimes overparenting, or exerting too much influence, may interfere with their ability to learn from consequences.

"The brain is very responsive to the environment that it develops as based on feedback from the environment. So, if an adolescent is not experiencing consequences or decision-making on their own, or goal-setting on their own, then that is limiting how well the prefrontal cortex is developing in response to those activities or behaviors.

That’s Adrianna Galván, director of UCLA’s Developmental Neuroscience Lab. One of her studies found that the brain’s reward center is hyperactive during adolescence.

"And because we know that the reward center is also where learning occurs, we were interested in testing the hypothesis that teenagers would also show greater activation in this region in response to learning, and greater than adults."

Their study found this to be the case and underscores the value of adolescents learning from behaviors and associations.

What causes asthma and allergies? Scientists think it may very well stem from our own mothers. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has been studying the origin of these diseases and says it all starts with a woman's lifestyle when she is pregnant or right after she has given birth.

"Some of the risk factors for allergic asthma include very early life exposures, such as a lack of the mother's exposure to livestock or furred pets, while she is pregnant, formula feeding, cesarean section delivery and antibiotic use either during pregnancy or in the very early life postnatal period."

All these factors define the types of microbes that form in our bodies and could drive our immune system's dysfunction.

"In very early life, the gut microbiome changes very dramatically as it accumulates bacterial and fungal genomes and species from the environment."

So changing this environment even before women start thinking of having babies - might be one of the easiest ways to prevent asthma and allergies.

Immunotherapy can be effective in fighting cancer, but the immune system's killer T-cells sometimes make mistakes and attack normal cells instead. Wendell Lim, a molecular scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, believes he can change this by engineering T-cells.

"One of the things that has been a challenge is how we increase the precision of the cell that they are better at recognizing cancer cells and discriminating them from normal cells. We have successfully programmed the T-cells like robots that can search the body and then deliver various payloads there. So it is like a smart weapon for combatting cancer. "

In fact, Lim says, in just a couple of years the Food and Drug Administration might approve the engineered cells as a therapy to battle cancer. So, the scientists have geared up and are actively testing the technology now in labs.

"I think we can transform what cancer therapy is like. Some of these immune therapies really might give much longer extensions of life."

This is Science Today. What can leap into the air, spring off a wall and perform multiple jumps in a row? That would be Salto – the most vertically agile, wall-jumping robot ever built. Roboticist Duncan Haldane, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, led the work.

"The special thing about this robot is that it can jump higher and faster than any other robot that’s out there right now. Salto can jump better than a human; once it does that jump, Salto jumps again. So, we can do this really high-powered jumping behavior continuously and chain together these maneuvers made out of large leaps."

Salto’s design was based on a galago – the most vertically agile animal in nature. These creatures have a special ability to store energy in their tendons so they can jump to heights not possible by muscles alone. This is done while in a crouched position.

"So what we built into Salto the capability for a super crouch. What that allows is to have the motor be able to stretch out the spring and keep the robot crouched for longer."

Such novel locomotive abilities could be used in search and rescue efforts. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

How many times a day does your mind start to wander? Now, be honest; it probably happens a lot. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies what actually goes on when this occurs.

"There are three general categories of things we’ve looked at, in terms of mind wandering. The first is its costs. How does mind wandering interfere with peoples’ abilities in various different situations? And we find that it’s quite costly. That if people have mind wandering while reading, that it substantially interferes with their ability to process and remember what they’ve read."

If that’s the case, why do people do it so much? Schooler says one reason is it’s helpful for creativity.

"We’ve been looking at creative scientists and creative writers and looking to see when they have their creative ideas about a third of their ideas happened while they’re mind wandering."

So, if your mind wandered during this episode, hopefully it’s because you just had an ‘ah-ha!’ moment!

Access to good education might be the key to preventing dementia and other mental problems affecting memory and thinking. This, according to Kristine Yaffe, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. Yaffe conducted a study looking into how poverty affects our brain and says one of the most obvious connections is that people with higher income usually get a better education than those who struggle financially.

“Even if you have the same number of years of education, the quality of education may not be as good."

And that, Yaffe says, can have a snowball effect in other areas of our lives.

“Hobbies or access to other kinds of mentally-stimulating activities maybe less. Some of these things cost money, some are neighborhood-affiliated."

Yaffe says all of these factors, over time, may weaken our cognitive power.

“So Ideally we would have better programs to fight poverty and economic hardship.”

In the meantime, Yaffe says programs improving the quality of education – especially for children - are crucial.

Several American cities have approved ballot measures in favor of taxing sugar-sweetened beverages. Public health expert Kristine Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley explains how smoking and a subsequent tobacco tax set a precedent for the more recent sugar-sweetened beverage taxes.

"So, tobacco and the taxes on tobacco are a great analogy when we’re just talking about something like sugar-sweetened beverages because it’s a luxury. It’s a little bit like a luxury tax on alcohol or cigarettes. That’s your choice – that’s fine, but clearly it should only happen occasionally."

There’s also the public perception – smoking is not considered as ‘cool’ as it used to be in popular ads and culture. Currently, that’s not the case with many sugar-sweetened beverages.

"You’ve got all these athletes who are doing it and so it looks cool, so I think that would be a huge win if there was a shift in the population away from thinking that was a good drink."

Madsen’s preliminary research has found that a ‘soda tax’ could have a really big impact on consumption.

Every year, almost 800 thousand Americans have a stroke, but not all patients fully recover. Anthony Kim, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine says doctors should put more effort into helping stroke patients get better.

“Most of our interventions post-stroke are geared towards preventing the next stroke and we have relatively fewer interventions that are geared toward actually improving the recovery.”

One way to fix this is to focus on therapies, which, as Kim says, is a huge unmet need.

"That’s the question that patients ask after they have had the stroke. I mean they want to improve from the stroke that’s already occurred."

Kim says a way to address this is if more patients enrolled in clinical studies. Her says this would help doctors develop and choose the right treatments.

As we head off for a bit of a holiday break, here are a few stories to go with the season. First, not to put a damper on things – but in case you decide to channel your inner Bob Cratchit and “make rather merry” – you may want to take it a bit easy. Cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the University of California, San Francisco says that’s because tis the season for ‘holiday heart syndrome’. Marcus explains that this term was coined in the 1970s to describe patients who experience a common and potentially dangerous form of heart palpitation. This happens after excessive drinking and it usually occurs around the winter holiday season.

"Patients would present with their first episode of atrial fibrillation and these patients had no known underlying heart disease and it turned out that on further questioning, that they had quite a bit to drink prior to just coming in and prior to developing their palpitations."

So, if you’re planning to raise a glass, keep it in moderation. And what about those who have a more ‘bah humbug’ feeling around the holidays – or any day? Are some people just born to be happier than others? Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky of UC Riverside says even if there are genetic influences on happiness, that does not mean people can’t change.

"If we can’t really change our happiness set point, I believe you can change your happiness level. So, people can, with a lot of effort, become happier. And when it comes to something like slowing down adaptation – why is that hard? Well, probably because adaptation is so hardwired. It’s evolutionarily adaptive. It’s just something that all human beings experience and it’s hard to kind of fight a natural process."

Listen these and other episodes – including one from UCLA about the science of your pie crust. Tune into Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. And check us out on Facebook, too. I’m Larissa Branin – have a safe and happy holiday season.

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Stories mentioned in this roundup:

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/holiday_heart

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/happiness_setpoint

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/piemaking