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A. The Important Role of the Pharmacist in Our Health Care System
Narrator: This is Science Today. According to a new study, the role pharmacists play as health care providers is unclear, especially to the people who need them most – elderly Americans who regularly take multiple medications for chronic diseases. Sharon Youmans, a professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco, led the study.
Youmans: I think that people may not feel that they understand what they do. Like there was one woman who said, “I didn't know I could ask a pharmacist about over the counter drug medication recommendation”, which is another huge area because people can come in and buy things and they have no idea what they're buying and if it's an appropriate drug for them.
Narrator: In one of the first studies of its kind, Youmans interviewed elderly African Americans about their perceptions of their community pharmacist.
Youmans: The group that I talked to, they took on average about four to six medications that have several chronic diseases and so they're at high risk of having a bad outcome if they're not aware of what they should mix and not mix.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B. Is Biotechnology Key to the Future of Agriculture?
Narrator: This is Science Today. Is biotechnology – or genetically engineered crops – the key to the future of agriculture? Plant pathologist Pamela Ronald of the University of California , Davis thinks so. Ronald, who leads the Plant Genome Project, explains that genetic engineering is a form of crop modification.
Ronald: But it differs from standard breeding techniques that we've been using for many years. Genetic engineering has been around for about thirty years and the major difference is that with genetic engineering, you can introduce the gene from any species so it introduces this idea that you have this vast potential for genetic alteration of a plant.
Narrator: And what are some of the potential uses?
Ronald: There's a couple traits out there and one of the most important I think is for reducing the use of pesticides, so there's a pest-resistant crop that's available and in the future, there's hope that we'll be able to engineer plants to withstand diverse environmental stresses.
Narrator: Such as flood or salt-tolerant rice. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Primate Reproductive Competition: Speed Matters
Narrator: This is Science Today. A University of California study supports the theory that reproductive competition during the evolution of primate species occurred at the level of sperm cell motility. Bioengineer Michael Berns of the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine, says the significant point of their paper is that the data fits very precisely with what people have suggested …
Berns: That you have high level of sperm competition in rhesus monkeys and chimps and a lower level of sperm competition in humans and in gorillas. We have the chimps at one end, which are promiscuous with many partners, whereas they have the gorillas at the other end where they're strictly monogamous and the humans fall somewhere in between, which really raises some interesting questions about the evolution of human beings and their mating habits – is there some historical reason for this?
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
A New, Cost-Effective Instrument to Study Brain Function
Narrator: This is Science Today. Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, is a technique used to observe tiny electrical currents in the brain by measuring the magnetic fields that they produce outside of the skull.
Kraus: What magnetoencephalography allows us to do that is really a unique capability is to look at the functioning of your brain – what happens in your brain while you think, millisecond by millisecond, or one one thousandth of a second at a time, in real time. So that doctors can then spot when there are problems and also learn about problems at a very, very small time resolution.
Narrator: Physicist Robert Kraus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory helped enhance this method by developing an MEG helmet, which would do away with the need for hospitals to build very expensive, shielded rooms necessary to measure the magnetic fields.
Kraus: So that this technique can be used throughout the country. Only by having lots of doctors using it are we going to be able to understand the basic mental disorders to find cures.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. Countering a Stealth Attack that Can Drain Cell Phone Batteries
Narrator: This is Science Today. Many of us now have cell phones that feature a system called multimedia message service, or MMS. It's the next generation of text messaging and it allows users to receive images, audio, video and rich text. But there's a weakness in the MMS system that could be the target of a stealth attack. Computer scientist Hao Chen of the University of California, Davis demonstrated that this vulnerability can be exploited to drain people's cell phone batteries.
Chen: What we do is, just before your phone is about to enter the standby mode, we deliver a packet that is a piece of data to your cell phone. This would prevent your cell phone from ever entering the standby mode.
Narrator: Chen says bad guys can easily obtain a large hit list of vulnerable cell phone numbers and use a computer to launch the attack, silently sending these packets of information to drain batteries.
Chen: That would prove to be very bad in certain situations, such as emergency response and rescue.
Narrator: By demonstrating this weakness, companies and researchers can now come up with ways to foil such attacks. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin .
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