A. Harnessing Brain Plasticity to Develop 'Smart' Neural Prosthetic Devices
Narrator: This is Science Today. Neuroscientists and engineers are working on developing ‘smart' neural prosthetic devices, which are intended to restore function through electrical stimulation to damaged motor neural circuits. Dr. Mike Merzenich of the University of California , San Francisco, says a smart neural prosthesis would take advantage of the brain's natural plasticity – that is, its capacity to change.
Merzenich: We have an amazing adaptive machine, which will actually reorganize itself to get the most out of a prosthetic device that's appropriately designed as a smart device so that we get a consistently good outcome from it. That's what it does when it actually controls our real bodies and that's what it can do when it controls the prosthetic.
Narrator: Merzenich, a pioneer in brain plasticity research, is currently working on developing intensive mental and physical training programs to encourage the brain to rewire itself to help patients with schizophrenia or those with functional losses due to normal aging.
Merzenich: To what extent can we drive the individual's brain back in a corrective direction?
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
A Simple Flash-Heating Method Kills HIV in Breast Milk
Narrator: This is Science Today. Worldwide, it's estimated that every year up to 700 thousand infants are infected with the HIV virus. The majority of those babies are living in developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa and about 40 percent of the infections come from breast feeding. To address this, researchers at University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis have developed a low-tech, simple way for these moms to pasteurize their breast milk before feeding their babies.
Israel-Ballard: The method we devised is a form of flash pasteurization, where the idea is to heat the milk hot and heat it very fast. That is known to kill a lot of the pathogens, but keep the milk healthy as well.
Narrator: Kiersten Israel-Ballard of the University of California , Berkeley led the study.
Israel-Ballard: Our study to date has focused on looking at the safety, but certainly we want to start looking at feasibility. Can mothers do this in the field? They tell us they can, they tell us they would, but now we need to actually see if they can.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
Protecting Your Skin from the Summertime Sun
Narrator: This is Science Today. Now that the summer sun is out, it's time to enjoy the great outdoors – just don't forget about protecting your skin. Melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, is on the rise. Dr. Christopher Zachary, a professor and chair of dermatology at the University of California, Irvine, says one in 75 people will get melanoma at some time in their life. That figure used to be one in 200.
Zachary: Why? In part it's related to your genes, but in part it's the sunshine. As parents, we have a responsibility to our children, who get 50% of their lifetime exposure to sun during the childhood years, to keep those children not necessarily out of the sun, but protected from the sun. So, it's very important that we should have our children educated and our parents educated, that sunshine is fine as long as you learn to live with it in a careful manner – wearing appropriate clothing, wearing sunblock with at least sun protection factor of 15 or higher and it should be protecting you against UVB and UVA.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
A Unique Glimpse at Deep Sea Fish Populations
Narrator: This is Science Today. Over the last fifteen years, ocean scientists at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography have been studying fish populations living in the vast, muddy plains on the ocean floor more than 13 thousand feet deep. Researcher David Bailey says their first-of-its-kind study gives researchers a unique glimpse into fish populations unperturbed by human influence.
Bailey: What we did is look at an environment where the fish numbers are not being changed by fishing and what we showed is that the numbers of fish are getting driven by changes in their numbers of their prey.
Narrator: In fact, the researchers found a threefold increase in fish abundance in the deep sea driven by food available to the animals, such as dead plankton and carcasses of fish, mammals and crustaceans that fall to the bottom of the ocean. Bailey says this is called a “bottom-up control”.
Bailey: Because it's driven from the bottom, driven by food availability, whereas what people thought was going on previously was it was top down, which is changes in the numbers of predators drive changes and everything else.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E. Improving Musculoskeletal Health at the Office
Narrator: This is Science Today. A year-long ergonomics study evaluated workstation interventions on the musculoskeletal health of customer service workers. David Rempel, a professor of medicine at the University of California , San Francisco and director of the Ergonomics Program at UC Berkeley, says the padded forearm support board effectively reduced upper body pain linked to workers' computer use.
Rempel: At the end of the year, we determined that their pain in their shoulders and neck and their right arm were less when they used a forearm support board than those people who did not use a forearm support board.
Narrator: Rempel says unlike wrist rests, a forearm support board is wider and the pressure is not applied directly to the wrist area.
Rempel: The forearm support board – it attaches to the front edge of the desk and it's wider than a wrist rest, so it really supports the arm in the bulky part, the muscle part of the forearm. The wrist rest is narrower and sits right in front of the keyboard, so the forearm support board transferred some of the load from the arms onto the meaty part of the forearm where the muscles are, instead of right at the wrist.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
