UC Science Today

When it comes to composting, there are different phases. There is pre-consumer waste, like scraps from prepping food, and then there’s post-consumer waste, or table scrap refuse, which needs to be separated from the other trash. Jill Horst, director of dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says composting on their campus has evolved over the years.

"We started small and we just did pre-consumer waste to compost and we really wanted to do post-consumer because we were trying to divert as much as possible from the landfill."

By partnering with a local company, Horst says the campus now has a compost compactor to scrap everything in the dining hall.

"So right now, we divert 90 percent of our waste from the landfill, so 90 percent of our waste is going to this composting company up that street. It is huge."

And it’s in keeping with the University of California’s efforts to be carbon neutral by 2025.

We can lose our sense of smell because of a disease, injury, or simply - aging, but doctors don’t pay a lot of attention to this problem, according to neuroscientist John Ngai at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Most people that write to me or call me, and say I've lost a sense of smell and I would ask them, what does your doctor say? And the doctor says no big deal don't worry about it, right? In fact, there aren't even any good, widely-used standardized tests for smell.”

That’s because scientists still don’t really know how to repair the olfactory cells responsible for the sense of smell. But Ngai hopes his new research on stem cells could help find answers.

“Now the challenge is to really start digging in to see, can we actually alter what these cells do. We've identified some pathways and manipulated them genetically, and shown that this can affect how the stem cell behaves in terms of, do I make a neuron? Do I not make a neuron? And then the question is, if I actually do, for example, increase the production of neurons from these stem cells, could it actually overcome an olfactory deficit that's caused by a loss of neurons?”

If you have a good stereovision, you could be a perfect fit for jobs that require action, speed and precision, according to neuroscientist of the University of California, Berkeley, Adrian Chopin.

“If you are part of a baseball team or a basketball team, it will be easier if you had stereovision. If you already have a good stereovision but that you want to be better, one way to go there is to be a military person."

But in his study Chopin mainly targets people with a condition called amblyopia – when vision in one of the eyes is reduced. This often leads to a loss of stereoscopic vision.

“When we train people to have a better stereoscopic vision, we put them in front of a computer. We project on a screen lines of different depth. The task is just to say do you see the line in front or behind the other line, for example."

Chopin says, over 10 percent of people around the world are stereo-impaired, but the rest of us see the world in 3-dimensions and can benefit from improved stereoscopic vision.

Should you enroll your children in preschool if you can provide a good early education for them at home? Parents struggling with this choice can find useful tips in a new study by Bruce Fuller, professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We have known over the last half century that quality preschools can boost the early learning of children from poor families, but much less is known about the long-term effects of preschool on children from middle class families.”

For four years, Fuller tracked the academic performance of over six thousand children up to 5 years of age and found that kids from middle-class families did benefit from preschool.

“Those benefits tended to come from exposure to more academically intense preschool programs."

Especially, in classes focused on developing verbal communication and early math skills. So maybe parents who prefer home education before their children hit elementary school age, should give pre-K a second thought?

When it comes to getting the message out about climate change, it’s one thing to get political leaders onboard, but you also need public support. In fact, atmospheric scientist Veerabadhran Ramanathan of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography says he’s hoping for ‘climate warriors’.

"These are not just flag bearing, which is important, but people who can roll up their sleeves and try to solve the problem. So, I’m on my own pathway to create those million climate warriors in the UC system."

Ramanathan has teamed up with 50 systemwide academics in disciplines like engineering, technology, social science and humanities – to propose a hybrid course taught by about 20 faculty that combines videotaped lectures in a classroom devoted to discussing solutions. The goal would be to pilot it first on nine UC campuses, and then expand the coursework to other colleges.

"We are thinking of ‘cradle to grave’ approach; getting people to understand the scientific method and the need to protect nature."

Over 40 million liters of donor blood are collected annually all over the world, but it is not enough to meet blood transfusion demands. On top of that, these donations don’t last long. Blood cannot be stored for more than just a couple of days. So blood centers are in constant demand for new donors. But according to Mark Looney, a professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco this is not the only problem with donated blood.

“It seems like we are in an antiquated era of collecting blood from strangers, collecting mature cells from strangers and giving them as a transfusion."

According to Looney, foreign blood can bring along viruses and bacteria to a recipient’s body. That’s a big risk. And that’s why researchers are looking for new ways of getting blood to patients.

“So if we could come up with a more effective approach, maybe something that is cell based, than maybe it is going to be the way of the future.”

Looney says engineered blood cells from patients’ own bodies could be a better solution in modern medicine when it comes to blood transfusion or cell transplants.

If you had to guess who has the sharpest vision, you may think of a surgeon or a dentist, but probably not a dressmaker. But according to University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist Adrian Chopin, it’s dressmakers who have the best stereoscopic vision.

“In general we see in 3D. In our mind the environment is in 3D. However, it does not necessarily feel in 3D. So that’s feeling of depth that we call stereopsis is very strongly coming from stereoscopic vision, which means a difference of viewpoint between these two eyes.”

But how do we use it in our daily lives?

“It is very important in grasping objects, that’s because you need high precision when you put your finger on an object, not to crash it or not to miss it. We also need it for driving, especially when you are at night.

Chopin and his team are working on developing tools, like computer games, that could help people with sight disorders to improve their stereoscopic vision skills.

If you are a parent and a smoker, your children’s DNA may be affected, even if you quit smoking before conception. Adam de Smith an associate researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has found that prenatal smoking by either parent can cause what’s called a genetic deletion in their children.

De Smith: 7:40 It is a chunk of DNA that’s missing from a chromosome. The health effects are really to do with a particular area or region of DNA that is deleted. If this region includes important genes, than it usually lead to a health effect.”

The researchers looked at the gene deletions in the immune system, which can cause acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of childhood cancer.

“Thankfully, nowadays cure rates are upwards of 85-90 percent. Even though they have survived the cancers, they go on to health issues in later life. For example, increase risks of heart disease, pulmonary disease and also increased secondary cancer rates. Ideally, we would like to prevent childhood leukemia in the first place.”

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New ways of studying stem cells allow scientists to better understand how they turn into other types of cells. Neuroscientist John Ngai at the University of California, Berkeley, has discovered a revolutionary method to look at stem cells. He explains that studying these in the past was limited to looking at the entire population of cells at once.

“My analogy would be if you come to Memorial Stadium on a big game day and you want to get an idea of how many Stanford fans there are and how many Cal fans there are and where they are sitting. The old way would only allow us to look at the entire stadium and to get an average of red hats and blue hats, and you might get an idea of what fraction of people are wearing read versus blue, but you wouldn’t have a precise definition of numbers, locations or anything like that. So the revolution for us has been the ability to interrogate what genes are being expressed not in the entire tissue but on a cell-by-cell basis.”

The longer a woman is able to reproduce, before she reaches menopause, the less her risk to have heart failure. That, according to a study by Nisha Parikh, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“This is a very interesting study and a very important study."

It is based on medical records of over 160 thousand women gathered by the Women’s Health Initiative in the 1990s – up until 2014. The initiative was set up to address major heath issues causing morbidity and mortality in postmenopausal women.

“Over the years the Women’s Health Initiative has been funded by NIH as well as the national Heart Lung and Blood institute. There was a lack of studies on women’s health. And it really represented the first systematic study of women.”

Parikh is now planning to expand this research and hopes to discover what exactly drives the association between the menstrual cycle and heart disease.