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A.
Stroke Center Receives National Stamp of Approval
Narrator: This is Science Today. The UCLA Stroke Center has received a national stamp of approval by becoming a certified Primary Stroke Center. Dr. David Liebeskind, an associate neurology director at the Stroke Center, says this prestigious certification is based on the highest quality of care and national guidelines that can significantly improve the outcomes for stroke patients.
Liebeskind: It's important for us to take note of the quality of the care we do provide. There are a lot of places that have been considering themselves stroke centers, providing this type of care, except for the fact that an accreditation process is necessary to make sure that everybody is keeping up to par.
Narrator: UCLA has a history of changing stroke care and strives to continue doing so in the future. Currently, UCLA is conducting the first study of its kind that looks into paramedic-delivered stroke care.
Liebeskind: So, paramedics have been trained to recognize stroke in the field, they call our investigators at that point where the patient is just initially being evaluated, immediately after their stroke. So that a treatment can be given and hopefully improve patient outcomes overall.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
The Ingenious 'Waggle Dance' of the Honeybee
Narrator: This is Science Today. For nearly half a century, there's been scientific controversy about the meaning of the honeybee's ‘waggle dance'. Is it actually a coded message used to guide other bees to new food sources? New experiments by a team of British researchers support this famous theory. But what exactly happens during this ‘waggle dance'? James Nieh, who studies bee communication at the University of California, San Diego, explains.
Nieh: The waggle dance has this waggle phase, where she's moving her abdomen back and forth in a fairly straight line. And then she goes back and makes the figure eight and loops around again and then she does the waggle phase.
Narrator: If the honeybee is waggling and her head is pointed straight up, that's telling the other bees in the nest to go in the direction of the sun. Straight down means go in the opposite direction.
Nieh: And if she is waggling at 90 degrees to the left, it means go 90 degrees to the left of the sun. The distance to the food source is encoded in the duration of the waggle run. So, the longer that she spends doing the waggle, the further away the food source is.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Great Strides Made in Countering Biological & 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.
D.
The Screening and Diagnostic Potential of Saliva
Narrator: This is Science Today. Every day, we produce one and a half liters of saliva through our circulation to constantly filter elements, informative molecules and information from the circulation into the mouth. Dr. David Wong, director of the UCLA School of Dentistry says scientists are now capitalizing on screening and diagnostic opportunities using saliva.
Wong: The potential are enormous. We are beginning this journey, this journey is merely a year and a half, primarily because of the technology for detection is just beginning to come on into the scientific community and hopefully soon, into the commercial world, where doctors and dentists and healthcare providers can begin to use them.
Narrator: Wong, who is also a cancer researcher at UCLA, successfully used saliva to detect head and neck cancer.
Wong: What remains to be seen is what human diseases reflect itself in saliva. Does diabetic type II, does breast cancer, does prostate cancer have a disease signature in saliva? Those are the work that needs to be done.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
A Molecular Link Between Inflammation & Cancer
Narrator: This is Science Today. A positive link between cancer and inflammation has long been suggested, but researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine discovered the first evidence of a direct molecular link between inflammation and cancer. Michael Karin, a professor of pharmacology, notes that in their study, acute inflammation resulted in the production of two different kinds of substances.
Karin: Both of which are cytokines, which are sort of hormones that are produced in response to infection or inflammation and so on. And one cytokine was responsible for stimulation of the growth of the tumors and another one had the potential to kill the tumor and they were both produced at the same time.
Narrator: The ultimate goal is to develop new drugs that can block tumor growth proteins and stimulate the cancer killing ones.
Karin: There's still a lot of things which we don't understand, but I think now the pace of getting new knowledge is really accelerated.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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