|
A.
Cloned Gene from Sea Animal May Prove Key in Cancer Drug Development
Narrator: This is Science Today. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography have cloned a gene that's associated with anticancer agents from a sea animal. Scientist Margo Haygood says cloning this gene helps solve one of the dilemmas faced when developing drugs from the sea.
Haygood: Sometimes the drug is present at a very low level, sometimes the animal is very rare or difficult to collect, so it's not practical to be able to develop the drug from the wild population of the animals.
Narrator: Instead, the researchers developed a gene from a bryozoan, which is a marine invertebrate that commonly lives on the bottoms of boats or grows on piers and rocks under water. Yet, these organisms produce bryostatins a family of chemical compounds that have potential as anticancer drugs.
Haygood: We are cloning out the whole biosynthetic pathway to make the compound and then put it into bacteria that are easy to use in industrial settings to be able to make lots and lots of it, so that we can have as much as we need for being able to treat disease.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Organic Agriculture: The Fastest Growing Segment of Farming
Narrator: This is Science Today. Organic agriculture is the fastest growing segment of farming today and in the United States consumer spending on organic produce is on the rise as the organic industry branches out to more conventional channels. Julie Guthman, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says another major trend is the growth of the super natural' supermarkets, like Whole Foods.
Guthman: If you're in the business of having a major, square footage natural foods store, you have to have product in the market all the time. So that drives the need for processors to make those salsas and those cereals and those crackers and those tortilla chips, that are really the mainstay in those sorts of stores.
Narrator: Guthman led the first comprehensive study of organic farming in California.
Guthman: There was several studies on the science of organics, but no real social science studies on this and certainly none in California, which is arguably the center of organic production and consumption, at least in the United States.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Studying Human Attraction to Shiny Surfaces from an Evolutionary Perspective
Narrator: This is Science Today. There's a large industry involved in making reflective paints and even computer graphics with very reflective surfaces, in part because people seem to respond to shiny surfaces. Richard Coss, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis decided to look into this phenomenon.
Coss: Some of the oldest art work involves polishing stone tools and so this is something that led to thinking there might be something very basic perhaps a natural property of our species.
Narrator: Coss studied infants and toddlers' responses to shiny surfaces after observing them placing their heads on mirrors and other shiny surfaces and making sucking motions with their mouths as if drinking water.
Coss: The source for this attraction looks like it's involving detecting glistening surfaces at a distance probably sparkling effects of water. You know ancestral humans and even going back further, once there were conditions where we were living in environments that were drier we required a drink every day. So that was sort of the fundamental point about looking at it from an evolutionary perspective.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
Using Fossil Records and Technology to Understand Cause of Mass Extinctions
Narrator: This is Science Today. For a century, there's been debate which heated up in the 1960s about whether people caused much of the large animals to go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene era. Tony Barnosky, a professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, says using the fossil records, there are many different ways one can approach finding out the cause.
Barnosky: You can come at it from looking at the biology of the species involved, looking at the chronology of extinction versus the chronology of climate change versus the chronology of human arrival. You can come at it from more of an archeological perspective, in which you're trying to figure out how the people were using the animals or if they were.
Narrator: And thanks to sophisticated technology, researchers can also use computer simulation modeling.
Barnosky: Technology does play a great part and now we can actually do things that we couldn't do forty years ago. We have much better paleoclimate models now and paleoclimate data and the simulation studies can be much more sophisticated.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
Scientists Strive to Understand the Origins of Life in the Solar System
Narrator: This is Science Today. Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using electron microscopes and ion microprobes capable of studying, at close to atomic scale resolution, the composition and structures of very small grains of cosmic dust. John Bradley, director of the Lab's Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, says interplanetary dust particles are pervasive throughout the galaxy.
Bradley: We were looking at a particular class of interplanetary dust particles that we believe to come from comets and since comets spend most of their lifetimes at extreme heliocentric distances from the sun, any material that's risen in a comet is essentially been frozen solid for the age of the solar system. So comet samples are in effect, a time capsule from the very beginning of the solar system. So what we're interested in finding out is what are the kinds of materials that were here at the very birth of the solar system and in particular, we're interested in organic materials and whether these could be relevant to the origins of life in the inner solar system.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
|
