A.
Great Strides Made in Countering Biological and
Chemical Terrorism
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory scientists have made great strides in
countering biological and chemical terrorism. Pat
Fitch, leader of the Lab's Chemical and Biological
National Security Program, says they've already
helped develop monitoring tools such as BASIS, used
during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City,
and are now developing ways to improve such monitoring
systems.
Fitch:
We've been developing a system that takes people
as much out of the loop as you can. And the current
system we have that's in pilot studies is called
the Autonomous Pathogen Detector System, or APDS.
APDS is about the size of a podium or an ATM machine
and it does everything that BASIS does, but it does
it automatically.
Narrator:
With APDS, air is blown into a cyclone of water
and when dirty, it flushes down into a detector
system that automatically processes it and does
a series of tests.
Fitch:
The APDS runs about a week and then someone shows
up and changes reagents. We think we've gotten a
lot of the people cost out of the system.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Entomologists Devise a New Way to Deal with Cotton
Pests
Narrator:
This is Science Today. The nation's cotton industry
has long been trying to alleviate the devastating
effects of a pest called the pink bollworm, a picky
critter that doesn't visit or infest any other plant
- just commercial cotton. Entomologist Thomas Miller
of the University of California, Riverside has been
working on the pink bollworm for several years and
says 25% of the cotton grown in the United States
is produced in California.
Miller:
Since 1965 when it arrived in California, the California
cotton growers have been supporting a sterile insect
program. That means, you mass rear pink bollworms,
sterilize them with radiation and then release them
in the affected areas.
Narrator:
But Miller says radiation used to sterilize the
insects causes side effects, so they've devised
a way to genetically alter the pink bollworm.
Miller:
These tests were all done under federal permits
in enclosed field cages with several layers of confinement.
Based on that experience, we now know that you can
improve the fitness of transgenic pink bollworms
and improve their performance compared to non-transgenics.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Sleeping Eight Hours Per Night May Not Be Ideal
Narrator:
This is Science Today. It's a common belief that
getting 8 hours of sleep per night is required for
optimal health. But sleep specialist Daniel Kripke
of the University of California, San Diego's School
of Medicine, conducted a six-year study of more
than a million adults and found those who slept
8 hours or more per night had an increased death
rate compared to those who only slept 6 to 7 hours.
Kripke:
I don't want to scare people. The person who sleeps
8 hours instead of 7 isn't going to die much sooner
- on average, only a couple of months. So it isn't
something to worry about very much. These data are
simply a guidance for us - that we don't need to
try to sleep more than about 7 hours. And that's
good news because the average in the population
today is about 6 ½ hours sleep on weekdays.
So really, these studies show that what the average
American is doing is close to ideal.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.Stem
Cells Provide Hope for Regeneration of the Human
Brain
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Stem cells are providing
new hope for the treatment of neurodegenerative
diseases. A recent University of California, San
Francisco study demonstrates the existence of adult
neural stem cells in the human brain, proving that
the brain has the potential for self-regeneration.
According to Nader Sanai, who led the study, these
findings may one day revolutionize clinical neuroscience
as we know it.
Sanai: Up until now the field of the clinical
neurosciences and neurosurgery has predominantly
been a field where one attempts to eliminate and
restrict damaging disease processes. After that
initial intervention there aren't many tools at
our disposal for actually reconstituting what was
lost. So, here we have perhaps the first tool in
a new line of therapies where one would have the
possibility of reforming systems or cells that were
damaged or lost in a disease process.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
Scientists Show Prion Shape Affects the Nature of
Infection
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Under normal conditions proteins
fold up to form complex 3-D structures, but errors
in protein folding can turn a normal healthy protein
into an infectious agent known as a prion. Jonathon
Weissman, a professor of cellular and molecular
biology at the University of California San Francisco
explains how protein misfolding can result in disease.
Weissman:
A prion is an infectious protein, and unlike
a virus that people are more familiar with, where
you have DNA and genes that encode the virus, Prions
are infectious on the basis of their shape.
Narrator:
Weissman's group has been studying prion shapes,
and has been able to demonstrate that different
shapes are responsible for different strains of
prion disease, the same way mutations in viral DNA
cause different viral strains.
Weissman:
These differences are encoded in the conformation
of the prion, so that the same protein can misfold
not only into an infectious form, a prion form,
but in more than one type of infectious form.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
