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A.
Looking into Pesticide Use in Children
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Young children are more susceptible
than adults are to the harmful health effects of
pesticides. Because of this, many regulatory agencies
are taking a special interest in protecting children
from harmful pesticide exposure. Environmental health
scientist, Thomas McKone of the University of California,
Berkeley, is involved in a project looking into
the use of pesticides and the levels in people.
McKone: The overall goal of the project is
to look at health effects, but a key part of that
is to understand where it's coming from when you
see it in the children. So they're taking a lot
of blood samples and tissue samples to look at levels
of pesticides.
Narrator: In the past, McKone says researchers
have always looked at adults to understand the relationship
between intake of chemicals and levels in our environment.
McKone: And that doesn't help us when you
look at children because they interact in a much
more intimate and oral way with their environment.
So they have a lot more contact with surfaces and
of course, a lot of the pesticides - we find them
in the dust, we find them on surfaces inside of
homes.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa
Branin.
B.
3-D Animation Programs Boost Deaf Education
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Three-dimensional animation
programs have boosted efforts to help deaf and hard-of-hearing
children develop better language and reading skills.
Dominic Massaro, a professor of psychology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, has been working
on synthetic speech for years and is co-creator of
'Baldi' - a computerized talking head.
Massaro: What we hope to do
with our talking head is to tutor these children in
the spoken language so that they can become better
speakers of the language and obviously, you could
do that with natural faces, too and certainly people
have done this. There are a couple advantages that
our talking head has and one is that it's simply a
cyberhead - it doesn't get tired or bored or upset
and so on.
Narrator: More importantly, you can
do things with a cyberhead that you can't do with
a real person - namely, show the inside of the mouth
during speech.
Massaro:So
that the child can see these things and practice and
therefore, learn from them.
Narrator:
For
Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
When Three is Not a Crowd . . .
Narrator: This is Science Today. A new three-member
crew is now aboard the International Space Station
for a four-month stay. This crew consists of two American
astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut - a reversal
of the last crew of two Russians and one American.
Researcher Nicholas Kanas of the University of California,
San Francisco is conducting studies for NASA on the
psychosocial environment for space flight crews. And
one of his recommendations is sending more than three
crewmembers into space together.
Kanas: I think three is not a good number
for a crew, especially if one of those three is an
outsider of some kind. It can work because individuals
can make anything work, but it puts a certain added
stress, I think, on the person who is the outsider
- whether it's a different cultural group, a different
gender, a person who has a different background.
Narrator: But Kanas doesn't expect this practice
to change any time soon, as the current escape vessels
can only hold up to three people.
Kanas: In time they'll be additional escape
vessels up there and so the crews, the size of them
will expand.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.Understanding
Environmental Cues in Drug Addiction
Narrator:
This is Science Today. There have been a number of
studies in drug treatment suggesting a link between
environmental cues, or triggers, and drug craving.
Rosanna Camarini, a researcher at the University of
California, San Francisco, has been working on nerves
in the brain involved with learning that share a common
pathway with an early stage of addiction called sensitization.
Camarini: Sensitization is an increase in the
initial effect of a drug after repeated administration
of a given dose of these drugs of abuse.
Narrator: The hope is to develop a therapeutic
agent that can block the pathways associated with
a form of learning that links environmental cues with
responsive behavior.
Camarini: Basically, you associate the drug
with some environment cues. Then, when you paired
the environment cues with the drug use, this environment
stimuli can become a conditioned stimuli that elicit
compensatory response - as craving, for example.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
Increased Awareness about Women and Heart Disease
Narrator:
This is Science Today. A recent study has found women
under sixty who have had a heart attack are much more
likely to die in the two years after their attack
than men are. The reason was not clear, but there
were implications that behavioral and psychosocial
factors may have been involved. Meanwhile, at the
University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Rita
Redberg says it's encouraging that in the last five
to ten years, there have been more studies including
women as subjects.
Redberg:There
was always a concern that most of the studies have
been done in men and we weren't sure whether the same
therapies that would apply for men would also be equally
applicable for women.
Narrator: Because heart disease is the number
one killer for men and women in this country and women
have a higher mortality rate - Redberg says increased
awareness about prevention is crucial.
Redberg: Even though we don't see heart disease
in women 'til after age fifty, you can start preventing
heart disease, though, much younger than that - in
twenties and thirties because a lot of heart disease
prevention is life style behaviors.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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