UC Science Today

Nutrition and exercise are often among the nation’s leading public health concerns. But a growing body of research suggests that sleep is just as important. Dr. Aric Prather of the University of California, San Francisco says that insufficient sleep can affect both short-term and long-term health.

"Chronically, this seems to put people at risk for things like coronary heart disease, the metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, obesity, as well as premature mortality. Of course it also puts people at risk for things like automobile accidents, things that can have incredible consequences. And then there’s even some growing literature suggesting that short sleep may even put people at risk for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than a quarter of Americans are not getting enough sleep, while nearly 10 percent experience chronic insomnia. Prather says it’s an issue we can all address.

"Sleep is a very tractable health behavior, and it could have an incredible effect on population health beyond just the individual."

With a quick flip of the carton, you soon may be able to detect the freshness of milk using a 3D-printed “smart cap.” An international study led by the University of California, Berkeley produced the wireless smart cap by printing basic electrical components including inductors and capacitors. Senior author Liwei Lin says that the circuit detects changes in the electrical signals that accompany increased levels of bacteria.

"This inductor and capacitor forms an electrical circuitry that actually could detect the electrical property of milk. So if the milk is, say spoiled, after you place it in room temperature for, in our case, 36 hours, we can actually see the electrical signal change from the output."

Lin says this technology could eventually be made cheap enough to provide food safety alerts in grocery stores.

"We envision in the future, you can use, potentially, your cell phone to read out the signal."

With a quick flip of the carton, you soon may be able to detect the freshness of milk using a 3D-printed “smart cap.” An international study led by the University of California, Berkeley produced the wireless smart cap by printing basic electrical components including inductors and capacitors. Senior author Liwei Lin says that the circuit detects changes in the electrical signals that accompany increased levels of bacteria.

"This inductor and capacitor forms an electrical circuitry that actually could detect the electrical property of milk. So if the milk is, say spoiled, after you place it in room temperature for, in our case, 36 hours, we can actually see the electrical signal change from the output."

Lin says this technology could eventually be made cheap enough to provide food safety alerts in grocery stores.

"We envision in the future, you can use, potentially, your cell phone to read out the signal."

With a quick flip of the carton, you soon may be able to detect the freshness of milk using a 3D-printed “smart cap.” An international study led by the University of California, Berkeley produced the wireless smart cap by printing basic electrical components including inductors and capacitors. Senior author Liwei Lin says that the circuit detects changes in the electrical signals that accompany increased levels of bacteria.

"This inductor and capacitor forms an electrical circuitry that actually could detect the electrical property of milk. So if the milk is, say spoiled, after you place it in room temperature for, in our case, 36 hours, we can actually see the electrical signal change from the output."

Lin says this technology could eventually be made cheap enough to provide food safety alerts in grocery stores.

"We envision in the future, you can use, potentially, your cell phone to read out the signal."

With a quick flip of the carton, you soon may be able to detect the freshness of milk using a 3D-printed “smart cap.” An international study led by the University of California, Berkeley produced the wireless smart cap by printing basic electrical components including inductors and capacitors. Senior author Liwei Lin says that the circuit detects changes in the electrical signals that accompany increased levels of bacteria.

"This inductor and capacitor forms an electrical circuitry that actually could detect the electrical property of milk. So if the milk is, say spoiled, after you place it in room temperature for, in our case, 36 hours, we can actually see the electrical signal change from the output."

Lin says this technology could eventually be made cheap enough to provide food safety alerts in grocery stores.

"We envision in the future, you can use, potentially, your cell phone to read out the signal."

Those of us who use personal hand sanitizers may not want to hear this, but no matter how much you use, you’re still going to be covered in bacteria. In fact, Rob Knight, a leading expert of the study of microbes at the University of California, San Diego, says we have more bacterial cells and bacterial genes than we have human cells and genes.

"So, sometimes it freaks people out to think, oh, I’m covered in bacteria or that I have bacteria inside me. But the good news is that the vast majority of the bacterial that are associated with us are harmless or beneficial."

Knight, who co-founded the American Gut Project, says dog owners share similar microbial populations with their pooches, which raises questions about how one’s dog may affect their health.

"Can you see consistent microbial changes that are involved with things like improvements in cardiovascular properties? Improvements in stress levels, mental health? Where surprisingly, all of those things have been linked to the microbiome, so there might be some direct microbial mediators of some of those effects. It’s not that we think that microbes do everything, but it would be very interesting if we could find that microbes play a specific role in some of those health benefits, of having a pet."

Those of us who use personal hand sanitizers may not want to hear this, but no matter how much you use, you’re still going to be covered in bacteria. In fact, Rob Knight, a leading expert of the study of microbes at the University of California, San Diego, says we have more bacterial cells and bacterial genes than we have human cells and genes.

"So, sometimes it freaks people out to think, oh, I’m covered in bacteria or that I have bacteria inside me. But the good news is that the vast majority of the bacterial that are associated with us are harmless or beneficial."

Knight, who co-founded the American Gut Project, says dog owners share similar microbial populations with their pooches, which raises questions about how one’s dog may affect their health.

"Can you see consistent microbial changes that are involved with things like improvements in cardiovascular properties? Improvements in stress levels, mental health? Where surprisingly, all of those things have been linked to the microbiome, so there might be some direct microbial mediators of some of those effects. It’s not that we think that microbes do everything, but it would be very interesting if we could find that microbes play a specific role in some of those health benefits, of having a pet."

Those of us who use personal hand sanitizers may not want to hear this, but no matter how much you use, you’re still going to be covered in bacteria. In fact, Rob Knight, a leading expert of the study of microbes at the University of California, San Diego, says we have more bacterial cells and bacterial genes than we have human cells and genes.

"So, sometimes it freaks people out to think, oh, I’m covered in bacteria or that I have bacteria inside me. But the good news is that the vast majority of the bacterial that are associated with us are harmless or beneficial."

Knight, who co-founded the American Gut Project, says dog owners share similar microbial populations with their pooches, which raises questions about how one’s dog may affect their health.

"Can you see consistent microbial changes that are involved with things like improvements in cardiovascular properties? Improvements in stress levels, mental health? Where surprisingly, all of those things have been linked to the microbiome, so there might be some direct microbial mediators of some of those effects. It’s not that we think that microbes do everything, but it would be very interesting if we could find that microbes play a specific role in some of those health benefits, of having a pet."

Like musicians, songbirds must practice and refine the songs they learn to become consistent performers and, yes, to even impress potential mates. But how birds learn to sing has remained a mystery until a team of researchers led by Hamish Mehaffey of the University of California, San Francisco identified how two well-known brain pathways interact during song learning.

"So we found a mechanism, by which two of the pathways that we knew were really important for song learning, were able to interact and change each other. And were able to show that they changed in an unusual way, but a way that's consistent with what we know about song learning, where effectively, a part of the brain that controls and conducts the song, is able to interact with the part of the brain that is actively, perturbing it and kicking it around, and making it change a little bit, from trial-to-trial."

Mehaffey says that this all happens in a specialized portion of the brain that’s similar to the human basal ganglia. He says the findings could help explain how humans learn complex motor skills such as playing an instrument or driving a car.

"One of the things we've learned is that this part of the brain is also really important for learning new things and adapting over the course of your life."

There’s a new wrinkle in the study of brain anatomy. It turns out that the three-dimensional shape of the cerebral cortex – the wrinkled outer layer of the brain that controls many functions of thinking and sensation – strongly correlates with one’s ancestral background. Study author Chun Chieh Fan of the University of California, San Diego, says they’d noticed that different populations had very different brain shapes. So they paired a sophisticated algorithm tool with neuroimaging data.

"When you do this, we realize even though the shape is very different across the ancestral lineage, we cannot find evidence to suggest there is a functional difference based on those brain shapes."

Fan explains that one’s brain anatomy could eventually lead to more personalized medicine approaches for diagnosing and treating brain diseases.

"We can actually predict, what is a normal trajectory, given your genetic background. Anything deviate away from your normal trajectory, there might be a hint suggesting there’s a problem."