UC Science Today

One way to improve healthcare in America may be to change just how doctors take care of their patients. This, according to Dr. Anna Chang of the University of California, San Francisco. Chang helped develop a new curriculum called Bridges that aims to teach medical students an array of critical skills, including how to better communicate with patients.

"About 20 years ago, the Institute of Medicine stated that too many people die every year because the process of medicine is not perfect. Sometimes we think that maybe the most important decisions in medicine are - which medications to prescribe or which surgeries to perform, but that is actually not true. Our patients are a lot safer and a lot healthier, they are much more informed when we hear and speak with each other effectively”.

To achieve that, from the first days of school, physicians, nurses, social workers and even patients meet with students – to share their stories and give them advice on how to work together as a team.

Researchers may be a step closer to curing Alzheimer's disease. Robert Knight, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley discovered a new role of the hippocampus. This is the part of the brain where Alzheimer's often starts – and this new insight could bring new hope to patients.

"If you look at these patients with hippocampal damage, they have never been studied in what I would say, a sophisticated manner in terms of their language."

That’s because until now, the hippocampus was known only for storing new memories, but as Knight’s study found, it's also involved in generating language.

"It is not just being told what to do by the cortex and the language areas, they are both contributing to effective language capacities. It kind of elevates the hippocampus out of the memory field and puts it into a cognitive domain, in this case language."

With this knowledge, Knight says new treatment strategies can be developed to restore both memory and language functions that are damaged in Alzheimer's patients.

This week on Science Today. A new role of the brain’s hippocampus has been discovered. Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley explains this is the part of the brain where Alzheimer’s often starts. But until now, the hippocampus was only known for storing memories. But as Knight found, it’s also involved in generating language.

"It is not just being told what to do by the cortex and the language areas. They are both contributing to effective language capacities. It kind of elevates the hippocampus out of the memory field and puts it to a more global cognitive domain – in this case, language."

It just goes to show that researchers still have a lot to learn – and as we found out in our next story, one thing that’s been helpful are study cohorts. Epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki of the University of California, San Francisco says she’s been able to garner so much information beyond her original research following a Latina cohort recruited in pregnancy and followed a number of years.

"Our primary outcome was really to better understand factors that are related to obesity and development of chronic disease in early childhood, but we also measured telomeres, the protective cap of the DNA."

Shorter telomeres are associated with chronic disease development and Wojcicki found that in this cohort, early, exclusive breastfeeding of infants was linked to longer telomeres. And next, we visit the beautiful Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to talk to atmospheric scientist V. ‘Ram’ Ramanathan. He’s written countless studies, which he called “obituaries of the planet’ after successfully predicting a significant increase in global warming within the next two decades. And yet, he felt no one was listening. So, as a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he took his message to the Pope.

"So I told him basically to talk about climate change in his speeches and urge people to be better stewards of the planet. Ten days later, he made this major pronouncement and talked about climate change and warned people if you destroy nature, it will destroy you."

This later became known in climate change communication circles as ‘The Francis Effect’, but that’s a story for another time. You can catch up on all of Science Today’s episodes on iTunes or Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.

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Stories mentioned in this roundup:

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/hippocampus_language

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/research_cohorts

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Could it be that time is expanding because space is expanding? That’s a new theory of University of California, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller. And there’s actually a way to test this hypothesis using LIGO, the world’s largest gravitational wave observatory. LIGO recently saw two black holes, 30 times the mass of the sun, coming together in a collapsing event and making one huge, big black hole. This, Muller explains, makes gravitational waves and we can see these waves coming.

"When this happens, you are locally creating millions of square miles of new space. And so if you’re creating new space, you’re creating new time and I calculated how much this was and it turns out to be a thousandth of a second."

So if Muller and his collaborators at CalTech are right, when two black holes merge and create new space, they should also create new time and that would delay the gravitational wave signal that LIGO observes from Earth.

"I’m looking forward to getting a phone call from them saying, either Gee, Rich, your theory is wrong, sorry. Or congratulations, you’ve just explained the flow of time.”

One of the current limitations of commercial 3D printers on the market is the lack of material that’s being used. Mostly it’s thermoplastics, like ABS. So what researchers would like to do is expand the materials used to fabricate devices or functional materials. Engineer Chen Zhu of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says they teamed up with the University of California, Santa Cruz to do just that. What they came up with was a novel, ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel.

"Graphene is a very unique material, so first we developed the graphene aerogel ink that’s a printable ink. So, that means the material is easy to flow through the very small nozzle and after squeezing the printing, the material can maintain the shape and it’s not going to shrink or collapse or deform. It can maintain whatever shape we print it and then we can do the heat treatment to get very good performance of the graphene."

The team also modified the technique to minimize clogging during printing.

If everyone acknowledged that added sugars in our diet are one of the most significant contributors to diseases like diabetes and heart attacks, there would be a better chance that public health agencies and municipalities could partner with industry to produce healthier products for people to consume. At least that’s the hope of Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley. She recently found that a soda tax in Berkeley led to lower consumption or sugary drinks.

"I think some would say “sugar-sweetened beverages have been unfairly singled out. They are not the only problematic item in our diet.” This is true. There’s a few things about them that really make them stand out. They are the largest source of added sugars in the American’s diet. The other problem with sugar-sweetened beverages is that we don’t usually compensate for those calories."

Madsen’s study found a 21 percent drop in soda consumption in low-income communities a year after the city of Berkeley passed an excise tax. Now other cities are looking to do this, too.

"My hope is that there will be strong evaluations in place to see what’s the impact then as this spreads to other places."

WiFi networks are so ubiquitous and now researchers are working on novel ways to utilize existing signals – including figuring out how to optimize heating and cooling systems in homes or buildings. But how?

"You need to be able to estimate your occupancy with WiFi signals."

That’s Yasamin Mostofi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She runs a research lab there on mobile sensor networks.

"That’s something that we’ve been doing more recently – trying to count people with just WiFi signals. Over the whole building, you will have more WiFi links and so then you can extend it to larger areas. So basically the WiFi card is just recording its received power for a period of time and just from that signal, we want to figure out how many people were there, which areas are more crowded? Then the heating and cooling can be optimized accordingly."

Will doctors of the future and their patients learn to speak the same language? The University of California, San Francisco recently set this ambitious goal with a radically updated curriculum called Bridges. The idea is to get new students involved with clinical teams from the very start - something that traditionally trained doctors did not get to do until a decade into their practice. Dr. Anna Chang, who helped develop Bridges, says a big part of the training is about mindset: to put physicians in the patient's shoes.

"We allow first year medical students to work on things like decreasing unnecessary hospital readmissions, to improve patients' understanding of high risk medications or to decrease waiting times in emergency departments - devise strategists to help patients make their appointments."

So instead of just memorizing facts in their classrooms the way the old-school doctors did, Chang says, the Bridges' students get out there in the field and learn real-world skills.

This week on Science Today. We’ve all experienced spaces with uneven heating and cooling systems, so what if this can be optimized in novel ways? We spoke to electrical and computer engineer Yasamin Mostofi of UC Santa Barbara who is using existing WiFi signals to essentially conduct a headcount. But why?

"You need to be able to estimate your occupancy with WiFi signals. We want to figure out how many people were there, which areas are more crowded, then the heating and cooling can be optimized accordingly."

If counting calories is more your thing, you may want to know more about added sugars in your diet. This is the one of the most significant contributors to diseases like diabetes and heart attacks, so Kris Madsen of UC Berkeley says if everyone was aware of this, there would be a better chance that public health agencies and municipalities could partner with industry to produce healthier products for people to consume. Madsen recently found that a soda tax in Berkeley led to lower consumption of sugary drinks in low-income neighborhoods.

"I think some would say sugar-sweetened beverages have been unfairly singled out, they are not the only problematic item in our diet. This is true. There’s a few things about them that really makes them stand out – first of all, they are the largest source of added sugars in the American’s diet; the other problem is that we don’t usually compensate for those calories."

This week we also visit the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where engineers are looking to overcome one of the current limitations of commercial 3D printers on the market – that is, the lack of material that’s being used. Engineer Chen Zhu helped develop a novel, ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel to expand the fabrication of devices or functional materials.

"So first we developed the graphene aerogel ink that’s a printable ink, so that means the material is easy to flow through the very small nozzle and after squeezing the printing, the material can maintain the shape and it’s not going to shrink or collapse or deform."

There’s just so much research going on at the University of California – subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud or Stitcher to hear these and other episodes. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for listening.

Subscribe to Science Today:

iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD

Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today

Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday

Stories mentioned in this roundup:

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/wifi_systems

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/added_sugars

https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/print_material

One the objectives of a new physician training curriculum at the University of California, San Francisco is to ensure that future doctors can speak to their patients in an understandable way. Dr. Anna Chang of the University of California, San Francisco, who helped develop the Bridges curriculum, explains that doctors do need to translate everything the patients say into medical language.

"The patients will say, “I have a pain in my elbow and I’ve had a pain in my elbow for some weeks. We have to translate that to each other in order to diagnose that and treat that into something like, “This is a patient who has had an intermittent oligoarthritis for a subacute duration.” And that sounds nothing like what the patient told us."

Doctors often continue using this language with patients.

"So starting with day one, we are asking our students to practice what the world looks like from their patients’ perspectives."