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A.
New Technologies Improve Livestock Distribution Methods
Narrator: This is Science Today. For decades, there's been concern about the impact of livestock grazing on public and private land. Mel George, a range specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis has led a study looking into ways to reduce grazing impacts on wildlife and aquatic habitats.
George: Using livestock distribution methods, we can improve the distribution of animals on the landscape and reduce overuse in any one area within a filed or pasture or an allotment and that's been a goal of range managers from the very beginning.
Narrator: George says livestock distribution methods, such as water trough placement, supplemental feed and salt are still used to control grazing distribution, but now they have GPS and geographic information systems to help.
George: Those two technologies allow us in a research mode to study how animals distribute themselves far better than we've ever been able to do it in the past. And that allows us to fine tune our practices, so that we do a better job of controlling livestock distribution.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Lessons Learned from Job Burnout Research
Narrator: This is Science Today. The positive antithesis of job burnout is job engagement and that's just what researchers in this field are now looking into. Dr. Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying job burnout for over thirty years.
Maslach: The important thing about the lesson that's coming out of a lot of the research is we're doing a lot more on the positive opposite of burnout. It's not just about how do you get rid of the negative it's how do you build the positive? What we have found is that on the research on engagement is that it's not just a simple opposite in some way. It allows you to do a different kind of thing when you're talking about interventions and trying to make a difference.
Narrator: Maslach says preventing job burnout is much better than waiting to treat it.
Maslach: I have been dogged most of my research career by the comment in organizations, if it ain't broke, don't fix it and if you wait until it's broke, you've got a big problem and an expensive fix.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
A Prognostic Tool Improves Prediction of Stroke Risk
Narrator: This is Science Today. Each year, between 250 and 300 thousand Americans are diagnosed with mini-strokes that are called transient ischemic attacks, or TIAs. And there may be many more of equal number that occur, but are never diagnosed. Dr. S. Claiborne Johnston, a neurologist at the University of California , San Francisco says TIA patients are at high risk of suffering a major stroke within the first few days to weeks after an attack.
Johnston : We've only just begun to appreciate this high overall risk of stroke in the TIA population and so it was mostly clinical judgment about who was at high risk and who not.
Narrator: Johnston devised a simple prognostic scoring system for physicians that can improve the prediction of stroke risk in these patients.
Johnston : Basically, what we came up with was a tool that lets emergency physicians, neurologists, primary care docs, figure out whether a person's risk for having a stroke after a TIA is high or low. That's one of the advantages of the score, is that we can take those highest risk patients and put them in a hospital where we can watch them very carefully.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
What Makes the Human Brain Unique?
Narrator: This is Science Today. What sets the human brain apart from other species? According to Dr. George Bartzokis, director of the UCLA Memory Disorders and Alzheimer's disease Clinic, it's myelin the fatty insulation that coats a neuron's axon. Bartzokis explains that humans have more myelin, percentage-wise, than other species and that allows us to be human.
Bartzokis: And unfortunately, we also get uniquely humans diseases. There are not many primates that develop schizophrenia and in older age in fact, the developmental Alzheimer's disease basically occurs only in humans. We're unique; both in the amount of myelination we get in our brain and the fact that we get these diseases and they all seem to involve either a problem in the development of myelin or in its degeneration.
Narrator: Myelin helps our neurons signal efficiently and improves the overall function of our brain's wiring system. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. Addressing Climate Change and California Agriculture
Narrator: This is Science Today. The state of California produces half of the nation's fruits, vegetables and nuts, so recent projections indicating that the state is going to experience a much warmer climate than previously expected, has experts working on dealing with achieving agricultural sustainability. Louise Jackson, of the University of California, Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, says confronting the issue and planning for it now will result in less impact.
Jackson : For example, in agriculture, we're going to be need to be breeding crops that are temperature tolerant. We're going to be having to think about much more stringent water conservation strategies. We're going to be thinking about different tillage regimes that reduce fossil fuel use, that store more carbon, reduce the amount of nitrous oxide that's emitted. So the message here was really clear. Climate change is happening. It's going to have a big effect, and we're going to be able to do something about it in California if we plan now.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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