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A.
HIV Patients Have Higher Risk of Arterial Thickening
Narrator:
This is Science Today. In the last decade, antiretroviral
medication has helped HIV-infected patients live
much longer, but this increase in lifespan offers
more opportunity to develop chronic illnesses. Priscilla
Hsue, an assistant professor of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco says HIV-infected
patients are at higher risk of having a thicker
carotid artery, which is a strong predictor of heart
attack and stroke.
Hsue:
So I think from HIV doctors and primary care providers,
they need to realize that their patients can be
at risk for developing myocardial infarction and
other types of vascular disease and they need to
aggressively address all the risk factors that they
can.
Narrator:
Hsue has been studying if antiretroviral medications
enhance the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Hsue:
In my study, most of the patients had been on antiretroviral
medication for really only about three years, which
is not a very long time and so it's possible in
six years we'll see, oh, there was a direct link.
We need to follow them for a longer period of time.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Smart Buildings that Admit Their Faults
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Structural damage after
an earthquake may not be visible, but hidden cracks
in support beams could lead to disaster. Steve Glaser,
a civil engineer at the University of California,
Berkeley, says a building's true condition can only
be determined by tearing down sheetrock - a long and
expensive process. Instead, Glaser and his colleagues
are working on tiny sensor devices called 'Smart Dust
Motes', which use radio transceivers and have their
own TinyOS operating system.
Glaser:
What's special about the motes is they're made
by using the technology for making integrated circuits,
so they have the potential of being extremely cheap.
Narrator:
Glaser says traditional sensors are large, expensive
and only provide a 'big picture' view of a structure's
damage.
Glaser:
When the building's about ready to fall down, they'll
see some. However we can put in very localized instrumentation,
so we have an entire wall covered with sensors. And
that allows us to see very, very different things
than we've traditionally have seen.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
A System that May Lead to More Truth Telling on the
Internet
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Computer scientists are working
on a system that may lead to more truth telling on
the Internet. The Truthsayer project was created and
developed by Prem Devanbu and colleagues at the University
of California, Davis. The goal is to protect important
databases - such as those belonging to the military
or medical industry - from being falsified and made
available to the public on the Internet.
Devanbu:
The problem is, when you put any server for serving
information on the Internet, it's going to be under
attack. The attack could be coming from the outside
- like hackers or it could be somebody on the inside
who is falsifying information. So for example, a bad
guy might make sure the doctors get false information
about drug interactions, which would be disastrous.
Narrator:
Truthsayer uses an answer and proof system to compare
'signed' documents in the popular XML Web language.
If data has been falsified, the proof will automatically
be wrong.
Devanbu:
So the goal of the Truthsayer project is to guarantee
that a client using information will never accept
bad information - that they will always be able to
recognize information that's correct or not. Even
if the person or the server publishing the data is
a 'bad guy'.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
Understanding a Cell's Life or Death Switch
Narrator:
This is Science Today. There's a precarious balance
constantly going on within our bodies - the balance
of cellular life and death. Preprogrammed cell death,
or apoptosis, is essential for life, as it causes
the destruction of toxic cells like cancer, which
are being produced perpetually in our bodies. On the
other hand, Joel Rothman, a professor of molecular
biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
says sometimes cells trigger this process of cell
death when they shouldn't.
Rothman:
One very profound example is in heart attack or
stroke - apoptosis of the tissue occurs after the
heart attack or stroke has occurred. If we could block
that cell death that occurs after the event has occurred,
we would actually be ale to protect patients against
the widespread damage the occurs in the heart or the
brain after those diseases.
Narrator:
Rothman and his colleagues recently discovered the
major regulator of this cell death switch.
Rothman:
How is that switch controlled? How are all of
these events tightly orchestrated? And that's a major
focus of our work.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
Validating Darwin's Speculation About Pride
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Psychologists at the University
of California, Davis have found that the emotion of
pride has it's own distinct facial expression and
body language. Jessica Tracy, who led the study, says
this puts pride on the short list of recognizable
human emotions that have been scientifically identified.
Tracy:
From a scientific perspective, there's the fact
that Darwin speculated this in 1872. He said, of all
the complex emotions, pride is the most likely to
have an expression and yet, no one picked up on it
and so I think it's kind of a neat thing, that we're
sort of validating Darwin.
Narrator:
Tracy discovered that unlike other facial expressions,
such as happiness or anger, pride was not easily recognized
unless body language was included.
Tracy:
My hope is that it will sort of open things up a little
bit more - who knows what more can come out if we
look beyond the face. So my hope is that people will
explore the possibility of other expressions that
involve the body and see that the body can convey
a lot. Studies that want to measure pride can now
have a way of doing that.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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