|
A.
A Study of Two Aneurysm Treatments over the Short-term
Narrator: This is Science Today. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco previously found that when it comes to treating an aneurysm, a method using coils to pack the inside walls of a weakened brain artery works just as well as clipping the aneurysm over the long term. Now, neurologist S. Claiborne Johnston says they've completed a second study looking at the short term benefits of these methods.
Johnston : There's a big debate about how much you need to work to treat the aneurysm. Can you just put a little coil in there, can you just clip the top part of the aneurysm? Is that enough to prevent it from doing any harm later?
Narrator: The researchers specifically looked into whether it's alright to loosely pack coils or clip the aneurysm slightly off the perfect spot. Johnston says the answer is no.
Johnston : So, it looks like the patients who have the early re-ruptures after they're treated are the patients who are not completely treated initially. So, hopefully that will help the surgeons and interventionalists in making better decisions about how to treat patients.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Researchers Discover a Novel Approach to Hearing Therapy
Narrator: This is Science Today. If you've ever gone to a loud concert or cranked up the volume on an MP3 player one too many times, you may have experienced an internal ringing sound in one or both ears. This is a form of hearing damage called tinnitus and while some treatments exist, none have been consistently effective. Fan-Gang Zeng, director of the speech and hearing lab at the University of California , Irvine , says the simple way to treat tinnitus is to make a sound that's louder than the sound perceived.
Zeng: We call that masking and what we found in this particular patient that we have worked with is that it simply does not work. The tinnitus is so loud, just imagine if you try to use another external sound to mask it, just how loud that would be.
Narrator: Instead, Zeng and his colleagues used an MP3 player to apply a low-pitched sound. This successfully suppressed and provided temporary relief to the patient.
Zeng: So, we played with this case and we found out we can use a sound that's totally different from tinnitus and somehow that sound suppresses his tinnitus.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
A 'Nuclear Car Wash' to Protect our Nation's Ports
Narrator: This is Science Today. A bomb detector that would scan cargo containers for a hidden nuclear device is under development at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Nuclear physicist Dennis Slaughter, who is leading the development team, says it's called Active Neutron Interrogation of Cargo, but they call it the nuclear car wash project.
Slaughter: We call it a car wash because our notion here is that you'd have this neutron beam, perhaps below ground, aimed upward or perhaps in a bridge aimed downward and you'd two a container passed this thing, either over it or under it, depending on the arrangement.
Narrator: The researchers are working out a variety of issues, including the speed of this technique.
Slaughter: The containers are off-loading off the ships nationwide at the rate of about twelve a minute, 24/7. In any one port, they're coming off the ships often times at one a minute. So, to look at a container, you've got one minute to make up your mind whether this container's OK for release or not and so we're aiming to do our screening in one minute or less than that. We'd like to get down to twenty seconds per screening and we might get there, but today we're gunning for about a one-minute scan.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
Understanding Social & Cultural Differences in Medical Research
Narrator: This is Science Today. Type 2 diabetes affects more than 18 million Americans of all ages and ethnic groups. But research has long indicated that the disease is most prevalent in Hispanic-, African- and Native-Americans. Michael Montoya, an assistant professor of anthropology and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California at Irvine , has been studying how medical research is influenced by social and cultural differences.
Montoya: Often times we look at ethnic groups as the ones most impacted by this emerging epidemic and when we do that, often times it's explained as a susceptibility of that ethnic group. The problems with that are that if we think of it as a susceptibility of an ethnic group, then we don't fully appreciate what's causing the disease. We think it's just having to do with their genes or their biology and then we don't push further to find out what are the environmental conditions, what are the social factors that are far more predictive of what groups get Type 2 diabetes.
Narrator: The number one risk factor for type 2 diabetes is obesity. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. Evolution Doesn't Always Favor Larger Animals
Narrator: This is Science Today. Biologists have long believed in a maxim known as Cope's Rule, which states that evolution favors larger animals since the tendency is for lineages to get larger over time. But biologist Kaustuv Roy of the University of California , San Diego says their research suggests Cope's Rule may be only partly true.
Roy : What we noticed is there's another pattern that goes hand-in-hand with Cope's Rule that's called Bergman's Rule. And that one has to do with patterns in space, not time. What it says is, if you go from warm to cold climates, on average in many groups, things tend to get bigger as you go north. And one of the things we got curious about is with, is there some causal relationship between Cope's Rule and Bergman's Rule.
Narrator: Roy found there was by studying the fossil record of crustaceans called deep-sea ostracodes. Their body size increased only when the global ocean temperature cooled.
Roy : So, what we find was if you look over time, there's a very, very tight correlation between body size and temperature. When climate remained flat, it didn't change much, size didn't change much either.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
|
