UC Science Today

Studies of alcohol abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, are mostly focused on male soldiers, while female military members are often excluded. Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco explains why.

“So you can imagine that female subjects that have alcohol use disorder and comorbid PTSD are individuals that have experienced rape or other forms of domestic abuse. And those individuals might respond very well to a drug like intranasal oxytocin, but it’s a very hard subject population for us to identify. ”

In a recent study, Mitchell used oxytocin to treat military personnel suffering from depression and anxiety. So far the experimental therapy has been successful, but the results were skewed as only male combat members participated.

‘’We’d love to have good access to that population because then we could perhaps study the effects of intranasal oxytocin in a group of female subjects that have alcohol or substance- use disorder and comorbid PTSD.”

In the 1990s, oxytocin, the so called love hormone that reduces stress and anxiety, used to be a popular treatment in America. But this changed a couple of years ago.

“Oxytocin used to be FDA approved for use in the United States. It wasn’t removed for any health related, or side effect related reason, it just sort of fell out of favor”.

That’s Jennifer Mitchell, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. She is conducting an oxytocin study to treat active military members suffering from PTSD and alcohol abuse. Mitchell says the hormone is practically side effect-free and should be put back on the market.

“That’s an interesting conundrum because the question is what’s the path to reapply through the FDA to make it available for everyone to use. And there are several drug companies now that are also developing intranasal oxytocin for other indications.”

Hey there, in today’s weekly roundup, we find out how a college dining hall makes a dent when it comes to climate change. Jill Horst, the director of residential dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says they stopped using trays in their dining hall.

"It just overall was this big, huge impact. The food waste per person, per tray, reduced by 50 percent. That’s a lot! That’s a significant impact to help with not only the food waste, but food cost."

Psychology was definitely at play here, as people naturally want to load up a large tray with food, so by removing it, people were carrying their food to the table and their portions adjusted accordingly. Next, as we’re about to hit the triple digits this weekend in parts of the Bay Area, we spoke to Ronnen Levinson, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has been studying how lighter, more reflective pavements lessen the phenomenon called ‘urban heat islands’, where dark-colored roads and buildings bring a city’s air temperature up. But in a new study, Levinson found there are some trade-offs.

"We found that in many cases, switching to a more reflective pavement technology for example, a light grey cement concrete pavement in place of a black asphalt concrete pavement, requires much more energy and carbon."

So Levinson suggests that city officials bear this in mind when choosing pavements. Meanwhile, at another national lab – this time, the Livermore Lab – computer scientists describe a tool they’ve developed to improve the computer network security of government agencies, along with state and local agencies. Domingo Colon says their network mapping system called NeMS, gives network managers a comprehensive view of their computer network environments.

"So there are a lot of tools out there that provide different vantage points of network security, but what we needed was something a lot more specific that told us behaviorially what’s happening on our network, and also structurally, how is the composition of our network put together at any point in time. These things provide what’s called “attack surface” for someone from the external world and what you want, as an enterprise, is to reduce that surface."

Well, that’s it for now. You can hear these full episodes and more by subscribing to Science Today on iTunes or following us on Soundcloud. Thanks for tuning in; I’m Larissa Branin.

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If you suffer from deficiencies in the bone marrow, a tissue in our body that produces blood cells, your lungs can come to the rescue. That’s according Mark Looney, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“It is curious that when patients get a bone marrow transplant or a stem cell transplant, those cells are given intravenously and the first place that they go is the lung. So it could be that the lung is part of a cycle here that is necessary for the maturation of these cells and their normal function”.

In his recent study Looney discovered that about 50 percent of platelets are produced directly in the lungs, inside the cells called megakaryocytes. So how will this finding help patients?

“Perhaps we can come up with a strategy where we give them megakaryocytes transfusions, and then we put them back in to the vein and they do their natural thing, they go back to the lung and there they produce platelets.”

That could be a new way of treatment for patients with a low level of platelets.

One way to fight what’s called ‘urban heat islands’ – a phenomenon in which dark-colored roads and buildings bring cities’ air temperature up – is to change the color of the pavement. That’s according to Ronnen Levinson, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“You can choose a more reflective pavement surface instead of a darker less reflective pavement surface. The more reflective pavement surface will stay cooler in the sun. It also won’t heat the air of the city as much as the darker, hotter pavement will.”

But there are trade-offs; Levinson was part of a team that found that the energy spent on manufacturing light-colored pavements can lead to increased carbon emissions.

“We found that in many cases switching to a more reflective pavement technology, for example, a light grey cement concrete pavement in place of a black asphalt concrete pavement, requires much more energy and carbon.”

So Levinson says city officials need to keep this in mind when they choose pavements.

How can a college dining hall make a difference when it comes to climate change? Get rid of the trays. That’s just what Jill Horst, director of residential dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara did in an effort to reduce the amount of food waste that the university produced.

"It, just overall, was this big huge impact. The food waste per person, per tray, reduced by 50 percent. That’s a lot! That's a significant impact to help with not only the food waste, but food cost."

Psychology played a part in this in that people naturally want to load up a large tray with food.

"So by removing - the trays, people are managing how to carry their food to the table. And by doing that they're not taking as much. They're taking you know smaller portions to start, and then they could get back up, and go have more food, but it really was about why do we want to reduce food waste, which reduced costs, which helps the environment."

To learn more about how the University of California is working to be carbon neutral by 2025, go to: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/climate-lab

Infertility could be linked to heart problems. That’s according to Nisha Parikh, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In a new study, the researcher is trying to find out how pregnancy loss, which is sometimes related to infertility, is connected to heart disease.

“There has been several studies that shown a link between pregnancy loss, including miscarriage and stillbirth with cardiovascular disease in the future. And we are very interested in our laboratory in studying the mechanisms that underlie this association. ”

Parikh says, it also might be a good idea for women and their doctors to follow these guidelines during medial check-ups.

“When practitioners, and by that I mean your primary care doctor or somebody’s cardiologist has a woman in their office and they are trying to figure out what their risk for developing heart disease and heart failure is, than reproductive factors and pregnancy factors are important to ask”.

Your mental state often affects the way you handle uncomfortable situations. Jennifer Mitchell, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco has recently tested what she calls stress reactivity of patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and alcohol abuse.

“We make people nervous in a social situation. And that induces really robust cortisol response, increase in heart rate, changes in respiration and blood pressure. And we administer either oxytocin or placebo and then we look to see whether oxytocin enables people to be less nervous and less apprehensive in that situation.”

The oxytocin therapy reduces stress and anxiety and also helps patients be more resilient to alcohol cravings.

“A lot of people who have troubles with alcohol use disorder and PTSD are self medicating. They are anxious, they are stressed, they are fearful and they find that drinking alcohol ameliorates some of those problems.”

The lungs don’t just pump air in and out of our bodies, they also make blood cells.

“A lung is quite sophisticated, not just respiring, moving oxygen. About 50 percent of platelets are produced directly in the lungs.”

That’s Mark Looney, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He says platelets are components that make our blood clot. Scientists used to think that they get formed only in the bone marrow. So this new finding will have an important clinical implication.

“The dogma in the field for patients with low platelets count is that it is a problem with the bone marrow. Now we have a more nuanced understanding that that is not just cells in that location, but lung is a significant contributor to that. Now with the more complete understanding hopefully we will be able to develop approaches that can more effectively treat these patients.”

Hi there – just catching up with the weekly roundup after a bit of a break. The show did go on, so here are some of the stories covered. First, did you know that heart disease is the leading cause of death among American women? Now, researcher Nisha Parikh of UC San Francisco has found that the age a woman is when she reaches menopause affects her risk of developing heart disease.

"We found that a longer reproductive period duration was actually associated with less of a risk of heart failure, and that was mostly driven by the age of menopause, so that having an earlier age at menopause was associated with a higher risk of heart failure."

But researchers still don’t know what causes it and are working on further studies to find answers. Meanwhile, across the Bay at UC Berkeley, physicist Jeffrey Neaton is looking to Mother Nature to improve energy production skills. In particular, he’s working on making photosynthesis more efficient.

"A leaf can convert the energy in sunlight into fuel with a one to two percent efficiency. A major Department of Energy program that I’m part of, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, recently developed a prototype material that is made of semiconductors that can go from sunlight to fuel at 10 percent efficiency. Much greater efficiency than plants, actually."

So, Neaton is working on creating an artificial leaf that could someday generate fuel and become a new alternative energy source. And finally, we learned something new about our lungs. They don’t just pump air in and out of our bodies – they make blood cells, too.

"The lung is quite sophisticated, not just respiring, moving oxygen. Around 50 percent or more of platelets are produced directly in the lung."

That’s Mark Looney, a professor of medicine at UCSF. He explains that since platelets are components that make our blood clot, and it used to be thought were formed only in the bone marrow, this new finding will have significant clinical implications. So, that’s it for now. But there’s plenty more research stories at the University of California, so please subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud to keep updated. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.