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A.
The History of Fingerprint Technology
Narrator: This is Science Today. The first trial in the United States to use fingerprint evidence was in 1910. By 1930, judges and juries in every state routinely accepted fingerprint evidence in criminal courts. Scott Cole, a professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, studies the use of forensic evidence and technology in the legal system.
Cole: And I was interested in how fingerprinting got accepted in the courts and what I found was that it was accepted pretty much on face value without being subjected to the sorts of demands for validation studies that we would ask of scientific evidence today. Essentially, I found that fingerprinting was accepted on trust early in the 20 th century and it's been living on that trust ever since.
Narrator: In recent years, courts challenged fingerprint technology, arguing it relied solely on the experience of experts and less on science. Since then, the bar has been raised on expert forensic testimony. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Improving Patient Safety in Hospitals
Narrator: This is Science Today. One of the goals of the University of California, San Francisco 's School of Nursing is to improve patient safety in hospitals. Mary Blegen, director of the school's Center for Patient Safety, says safety issues in hospitals includes medication and administration errors.
Blegen: To promote patient safety then, we want to study the factors around the nurse that actually facilitate a safe and accurate medication administration. One of the things that we found in research is that the nurse is distracted and interrupted frequently when they're trying to give their medications to the patients and so we would want to do research within the center here to try and figure out how you can minimize those distractions and interruptions and thereby improve the safety of patients.
Narrator: The center is combining expertise in research with education and student training to meet these goals.
Blegen: Partly it's just reminding people how important this is, so to make it visible. But also, to develop better research methods and teach students differently so that they're ready to perform in a safe climate in a hospital.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Mom Was Right About Eating Your Vegetables
Narrator: This is Science Today. A high vegetable diet has been associated with significantly cutting down the risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Epidemiologist Elizabeth Holly of the University of California, San Francisco led the study.
Holly: Some of the smaller studies that looked at the dietary factors that had shown somewhat of a protective effect with a higher intake of vegetables. So, that's something that we wanted to look at it very carefully. We found that if you examined types of vegetables, the most important looking at all the vegetables together were onions and garlic.
Narrator: Also found to be highly protective were beans, yellow vegetables including carrots, sweet potatoes, corn and yellow squash; dark, leafy vegetables and cruciferous veggies, such as broccoli and brussel sprouts.
Holly : It goes back to what your mother and your grandmother told you, which was eat your vegetables! And that actually turns out to be the right thing to do, not just for pancreatic cancer, but other cancers as well and other diseases.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D. A Study Looks into Causes of Fishery Collapse
Narrator: This is Science Today. The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations, or CalCOFI, was instituted in 1949 in response to the collapse of the Pacific sardine fishery off California and Mexico . Researcher George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, says the essential question was whether the collapse was due to fishing or to some environmental effects.
Sugihara: Problem is that those two things happened together. So they're tangled effects that can not be disentangled. And the CalCOFI surveys were intended to try to disentangle those effects.
Narrator: In a study based on CalCOFI data, Sugihara found that fishing not only leads to declining stock levels, but populations fluctuate more through time putting them at greater risk of collapse than previously thought. Sugihara says another thing that happens is the average age of fish gets younger.
Sugihara: And what this does is it basically takes away the buffering capacity of a population. Those older fish can weather environmental effects like El Nino, etc. Whereas the younger ones may be more prone to mortality or whatever it is that's associated with these environmental fluctuations.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
An Innovative Way to Test for Malabsorption in Vitamin B-12
Narrator: This is Science Today. An innovative test for conditions related to the poor absorption of vitamin B12 has been developed by a team of scientists at the University of California , Davis and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Bruce Buchholz, a nuclear physicist at the Lab, says they used micro-doses of carbon 14-labled vitamin B12 produced by a modified strain of Salmonella bacteria to measure the vitamin levels.
Buchholz: Carbon-14 dating is based on a decrease in the amount of carbon-14 after an organism dies. What we're doing is adding a very small amount of carbon-14, an amount actually less than what you already have in your body in a small dose of vitamin and looking for it in the blood seven to 12 hours after taking it orally.
Narrator: Current techniques for looking for vitamin B12 absorption problems use quite a bit of radioactivity.
Buchholz: The real power of the technique is that you have a very, very distinct, clear signal with the carbon-14 above what's naturally there and because it's not very radioactive, there's essentially no radiation dose from this material.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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