A. Experienced Doctors Can Accurately Detect Abnormal, Third Heart Sound
Narrator: This is Science Today. Everyone knows that the human heart makes two sounds while pumping blood, but a weakened heart may actually make a third sound, which can be accurately detected by a device called a phonocardiogram. But medical professor Andrew Michaels of the University of California , San Francisco says they found that experienced doctors have a good chance of hearing it, too.
Michaels: We also looked at if the physician thought there was a third heart sound, did this correlate with weakened heart muscle based on the cardiac catheterization and ultrasound of the heart, and it did.
Narrator: Finding this third sound could mean early detection of certain serious heart conditions.
Michaels: There's three main causes of weakened heart muscle. The first is coronary artery disease, or blockages in the heart arteries that supply oxygen to the heart muscle. The second main cause is weakening of the heart muscle itself, usually due to a viral syndrome. And the third main cause is an abnormal valve problem that causes too much stress on the heart.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Wireless Technology is On the Road to Safety
Narrator: This is Science Today. A team of scientists at the University of California , Berkeley are working on using wireless networking technology, or Wi-Fi, and GPS technology to warn drivers about possible accidents. Engineering professor Raja Sengupta says these types of systems could alert and protect drivers from crashes before they happen.
Sengupta: When people realized that stuff like vehicle defects, stuff like that had pretty much disappeared and crashes mainly happen because of driver error, people got interested in this whole genre of systems called advanced vehicle safety systems, where the idea was to have information systems in your car that would track the motions of neighboring cars and figure out if you were in any danger from any of these neighboring cars.
Narrator: Sengupta says this technology is the next big step in improving safety on the roads.
Sengupta: Safety is something that has been an overriding concern through much of our automotive history. And this country's record on improving the safety of road travel is extraordinarily good. And people have realized that the next frontier in safety is this kind of information technology.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Interventions Used to Treat Fetal Heart Disease
Narrator: This is Science Today. Fetal heart disease is an abnormality of a fetus' heart – whether it is a structural defect, a rhythm disturbance or a functional problem with the heart squeeze or filling. Dr. Lisa Hornberger, director of the Fetal Cardiovascular Program at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, says today, problems such as rhythm disturbances, can be treated before birth.
Hornberger: We've learned that we can actually treat the babies for this problem by giving moms medication that are safe, that cross the placenta and actually treat the baby's heart rhythm resulting in a baby who's not likely to get into trouble or resolves any trouble that's there.
Narrator: And just over a decade ago, physicians began interventions for simple valve obstructions that, if left untreated, would progress to more complex issues that could not be corrected after birth.
Hornberger: We've now learned that just dilating that simple valve problem can result in potentially preventing the secondary bad things that develop as a consequence. So, this is a really critical and a very exciting time to be in this field.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
Milestone Achieved in Analyzing Pollutants Dimming the Atmosphere
Narrator: This is Science Today. An important milestone in the tracking of pollutants responsible for dimming the Earth's atmosphere has been reached by a group of scientists led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California , San Diego . Scripps scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan says they used unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAV, technology.
Ramanathan: For four weeks, we probed the polluted atmosphere above the Indian Ocean with lightweight UAVs loaded with instruments such as these to probe the atmosphere to understand how we are polluting the atmosphere as human beings and in turn how this pollution is impacting climate change, including global warming.
Narrator: In particular, three UAVs observed conditions below, inside and above clouds to study in unprecedented detail how pollution particles contribute to the formation of polluted clouds that dim the atmosphere.
Ramanathan: We convincingly demonstrated these lightweight UAVs are uniquely qualified to understand this problem.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
Supercomputers Used to Recreate and Analyze Earthquakes
Narrator: This is Science Today. Seismologists and computer scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used their supercomputers to recreate simulations of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake to measure where the hardest hit areas were. Applied mathematician Anders Petersson describes how these sophisticated computer simulations provide insight into what the next big earthquake will look like.
Petersson: We can predict how badly the Earth will shake in different locations and see how that varies, depending on the soil type and such things. So, we can also predict the duration of the shaking. And what we want to look at in the future is coupling to structures to predict if bridges will fall down.
Narrator: Petersson says the computer simulations can also provide insight into another important, potential problem – the state's levee systems.
Petersson: And if they will stand because you get extended shaking out there in the sedimentary basins and that type of soil can liquefy and we hope to couple our simulations to programs to predict liquefaction as well.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
