A.
Scientists Discover Lung Cells Can Produce Histamine
Narrator: This is Science Today. University of California, San Francisco scientists were surprised to discover that histamine – the inflammatory compound released during allergic reactions – can be produced in large quantities in the lung's white blood cells, or neutrophils.
Caughey: These white blood cells are typically associated with pus and infection and were not known to be a major source of histamine, which has its major association with allergic phenomena.
Narrator: George Caughey, chief of pulmonary/critical care medicine at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, led the study.
Caughey: We knew that most people, who end up with serious asthma attacks, have their attacks provoked by infection and we were interested in knowing why that happened. And it was part of our probing of that question that led us to this largely serendipitous chance discovery that a certain white blood cell could produce large amounts of histamine.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
How Climate Change Will Affect Plants and Animals
Narrator: This is Science Today. Scientists have been pointing to climate change as a future cause for droughts, floods, and other natural disasters. Now, biologist Kaustuv Roy of the University of California, San Diego says that climate change can also affect the ecology of certain areas.
Roy : Plants and animals shift around on the landscape so you may have built a nature reserve today and you know exactly what you're trying to preserve because they live there, but if the climate changes substantially, some of those plants and animals may move somewhere else.
Narrator: While the study of climate change is relatively new, Roy says that it could be one of the most important problems facing the planet.
Roy : It really doesn't matter which side of the conservation debate you're in. We all need to figure out what the consequences of the climate warming are. If you can't figure out the consequences, you can't even have a good conservation plan or you can't have a good management plan. And, given the trajectory of climate over the next few centuries, the magnitude of that problem is so big that we better pay attention to it.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Geophysicists Work to Improve Monitoring of Underwater Landslides
Narrator: This is Science Today. Geophysicists at the University of California , San Diego 's Scripps Institution of Oceanography have joined energy producer, British Petroleum, or BP, to develop better strategies and technologies for monitoring underwater landslides.
Chadwell: There were two objectives; for Scripps, it is to develop technologies that we could use at any type of slope site. It could be coastal areas or at mid-ocean ridges. So, this technology is transferable to different water depths.
Narrator: Scripps Geophysicist David Chadwell explains that BP is moving operations off into deeper basins and wants to improve the design and safety of offshore facilities. There's also renewed interest in understanding underwater landslides.
Chadwell: Primarily because of the catastrophic tsunami following the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. But also there has been an advancement in technologies that now make it possible to envision instrumenting slopes in the continental regions where landslides and tsunamis may be a problem.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D. New Findings May Provide More Insight into the Heart's Pathophysiology
Narrator: This is Science Today. Almost every patient admitted to the emergency room with chest pain or shortness of breath gets a BNP test. This blood test measures a cardiac hormone called BNP that becomes elevated when the heart is under stress. Dr. Mary Whooley, of the University of California, San Francisco has found that another blood test for a marker of BNP, called NT-proBNP, accurately predicts the risk of cardiac events and death in patients with cardiovascular disease.
Whooley: I personally do not think this test currently has any commercial value in terms of predicting who is at risk – not because the test doesn't predict who is at risk, but because we don't have anything that we can do about that. Any patient with known coronary heart disease should already be on beta blockers and statins and ACE inhibitors and aspirin.
Narrator: But this test does provide more insight into the pathophysiology of the heart.
Whooley: This hormone is being secreted when the heart's under stress and so maybe that will help us form treatments that prevent that stress from happening.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. Scientists Join Forces to Save Venice, Italy from Flood Damage
Narrator: This is Science Today. The University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography has a history of providing Venice, Italy with scientific expertise. Now, Italian researchers are working with Scripps to deal with the damage of flooding. Dimitri Deheyn is project leader of the Institution's Sediment Research Group.
Deheyn: For the last thirty or forty years, the city of Venice has been more and more flooded because of the rising of sea level, but also because of the increase of very high tides. So, it's a very big problem and a lot of Venetians are tired of that and they're leaving the city and the buildings are being damaged and the architecture is actually undergoing strong erosion from water exposure.
Narrator: The researchers are working on a project in which the three inlets of Venice 's lagoon that open to the Adriatic Sea will be closed off during high tide using gates.
Deheyn: Those gates will actually be lying on the sea floor and when high tide is there, they will be raised up, so that the water level in the lagoon will actually not rise to a level that will create flooding problems.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
