A.
The Immune-Boosting Affects of Broccoli
Narrator: This is Science Today. If you needed even more reasons to eat your broccoli, researchers at the University of California , Berkeley have found that when chewed and digested, Brassica vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage and kale, produce a chemical that may help boost the immune system. Study leader Len Bjeldanes says they fed mice with viral infections a solution containing this chemical called diindolylmethane, or DIM.
Bjeldanes: What we found, we were really surprised to see that we've got about an 80% reduction in the amount of virus that could proliferate in those animals once we gave it to them, when we gave them the combination with DIM, so this is really a very strong indication that this is helping the body deal with these immune insults, like in this case a virus.
Narrator: Broccoli is already known to have anti-cancer effects.
Bjeldanes: So we think that very likely – we haven't proven this yet and this is something we want to do – is that this immune activation system is probably playing a role in the anticancer effects of that too.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Gamma Ray Imaging Used to Improve Radiation Detection
Narrator: This is Science Today. Practically everything around us is radioactive to some extent. So, when scientists and engineers develop radiation detectors for national security, they need to know what's benign and what's not. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is working on a system using gamma ray imaging to improve detection.
Valentine: If you can focus only on gamma rays coming from a particular direction and ignore the gamma rays coming from all other directions, including the ground and potential nuisance sources, like medical patients or industrial sources, then you have a much better chance of pulling a very weak signal out of this background of natural radiation.
Narrator: John Valentine, program leader of the Lab's Detection Technologies division helped develop the Larger Area Imager, a mobile instrument that can be used up to speeds of 25 miles per hour.
Valentine: It would be mounted in a vehicle and driven potentially through the streets or cargo container yard in order to search and do surveillance of large areas in a much shorter time than would be available in the currently available mobile systems.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C. A Real-Time Pollution Warning System for the Coastal Ocean
Narrator: This is Science Today. Imagine a real-time pollution warning system for the coastal ocean? Such a breakthrough could help public health officials know immediately when pollution moves into the surf zone, where it can put bathers at risk of gastrointestinal disease, as well as eye and ear infections.
Grant: Ideally, we'd have these sensors detecting pathogens, for example. So, there's Hepatitis A in the water and the detection would say – there's Hepatitis A in the water and we'd all run out of the water. But unfortunately, that's still science fiction.
Narrator: But scientists may be getting closer to such a scenario. Stanley Grant, a professor of chemical engineering and material sciences at the University of California, Irvine, discovered that changes in temperature and salinity collected by current sensor data along the coastal ocean correlates with changes in water quality as soon as they occur.
Grant: And so part of the whole issue of translating that in-situ sensor data into something that's useful to the public really boils down to trying to understand what the connection is between measurements of salinity and temperature and say, pathogens.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
How Agricultural Practices Can Affect Climate Models
Narrator: This is Science Today. Nearly all the models used to predict climate change either do not factor in agricultural regions or assume that farmers behave the same way through time. But when climate scientist David Lobell of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory created models that included recent changes in agricultural practices, such as more irrigation, less tillage and higher yielding crops, he found that these models predicted lower temperatures than previous ones did.
Lobell: The effects were strongest for irrigation and we found that it could actually cool locally the temperatures by up to six degrees. And so it's a very significant effect, if you talk about greenhouse warming, that's on the order of that temperature change or even bigger.
Narrator: While this may not amount to a big effect on a global scale, in agricultural areas such as California , it's a big effect.
Lobell: The key message is if we want to be able to adapt agriculture to climate change, then we're going to have to do a better job of incorporating what farmers are doing into climate models.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. The Future of Synthetic Biology
Narrator: This is Science Today. Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline that essentially puts engineering to biology in order to create new biological systems or redesign existing ones. Jay Keasling, a chemical and bio-engineer at the University of California , Berkeley , says once the standards for synthetic biology are set, it will make biology easier to do.
Keasling: Once we've set these standards and we understand how to put components together in a very reliable way, much as you can assemble components to build a computer right now or a radio, it will be easier to predict how to develop drugs and how to engineer microbes to produce those drugs. We might be able to produce fuels using biology that will compete strongly with petroleum. We'll be able to build sensing devices that will sense pathogens and might even sense tumors and other diseases within our bodies and then come up with a remedy that will be biology-based.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
