UC Berkeley
Immersed as we are in a sea of smells, how is it we're not continually overwhelmed with fair or foul odors until we actively inhale a rose or sniff the milk for a hint of sourness? University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists have scanned the brains of people sniffing odors and found an answer. It turns out that the brain is detecting and processing all the odors around us, but a particular area of the brain actively tunes this out unless the odor reaches a high level, such as when we walk into a cloud of cloying perfume or step in dog poop.
Hummingbirds aren't known for their power-lifting prowess. But researchers nevertheless put nearly 1,000 Peruvian hummers through lifting trials and flight tests over a two-year stretch in order to find out how their flying abilities are affected by the lower oxygen and thin air of higher elevations.
A $42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will create a powerful new approach to developing a more affordable, accessible cure for malaria, which kills more than a million children each year. UC Berkeley will conduct research to perfect a microbial factory for the compound artemisinin, currently the most effective treatment for malaria, and Amyris, a new biotech company founded on the breakthroughs in synthetic biology pioneered at UC Berkeley, will develop the process for industrial fermentation and commercialization.
Seismologists have discovered mysterious tremors deep under the San Andreas Fault that may portend future earthquakes. The continuous tremors are ''a kind of chatter'' emanating from a depth of 20 to 40 kilometers below the surface, near the boundary between the Earth's crust and the hot mantle and much deeper than the 15 kilometer limit of most earthquakes, said study leader Robert M. Nadeau, an assistant research seismologist at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. Most of the tremors are five times deeper than the average quake on this segment of the fault.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have given ''blind'' nerve cells the ability to detect light, paving the way for an innovative therapy that could restore sight to those who have lost it through disease. A team lead by neurobiologist Richard H. Kramer, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology, and Dirk Trauner, assistant professor of chemistry, inserted a light-activated switch into brain cells normally insensitive to light, enabling the researchers to turn the cells on with green light and turn them off with ultraviolet light.
First they were seen to go away, now, for the first time, they've been seen coming back. An international team of researchers at KamLAND, an underground neutrino detector in central Japan, has shown that not only do anti-neutrinos emanating from nearby nuclear reactors ''disappear,'' they also ''reappear.'' This is further evidence that the three known types or ''flavors'' of neutrinos -- electron, muon and tau -- all have mass and can oscillate or change from one type to another.
Babies who are breastfed have a lower risk of developing childhood leukemia, according to a new analysis of 14 studies by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper, to be published November in the journal Public Health Reports, found that breastfeeding was linked to lower risks of both acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common of the childhood cancers, and acute myeloblastic leukemia. ''Our paper is the first to systematically review the epidemiologic evidence of the link between maternal breastfeeding and the risk of childhood leukemia.''
On Jan. 14, 2005, the Huygens probe will plow into the orange atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan, becoming the first spacecraft to attempt to land on a moon in our solar system since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 touched down on Earth's moon in 1976. Though scientists hope that Huygens will survive the plunge, it will be flying blind through hydrocarbon haze and methane clouds to a surface that could consist of seven-kilometer-high ice mountains and liquid methane seas.
A Berkeley paleobiologist and his colleagues warn that the future of the Earth's mammals could be as dire as it was between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, when a combination of climate change and human pressure resulted in the extinction of two-thirds of all large mammals on the planet. Anthony D. Barnosky and his colleagues reached this conclusion after review of studies of the extensive large mammal, or megafauna, extinctions that occurred in the late Pleistocene, when animals such as mammoths and mastodons, the saber-toothed cat, ground sloths and native American horses and camels went extinct.
In a nod to scientific paradox, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have slowed light down in an effort to speed up network communication. They have shown for the first time that the group velocity of light - the speed at which a laser pulse travels along a light wave - can be slowed to about 6 miles per second in semiconductors. While that speed is not exactly the pace of a turtle, it is 31,000 times slower than the 186,000 miles (or 300 million meters) per second that light normally clocks while traveling through a vacuum.
Researchers have identified a critical gene for plants that start their lives as seeds buried in soil. They say the burial of seeds was an adaptation that likely helped plants spread from humid, wet climates to drier, hostile environments. In a new study, the researchers describe how a gene called phytochrome-interacting factor 1, or PIF1, affects the production of protochlorophyll, a precursor of the chlorophyll used by plants to convert the sun's energy into food during photosynthesis.
Biologists take for granted that the limbs and branches of the tree of life - painstakingly constructed since Linnaeus started classifying organisms 270 years ago - are basically correct. New genetic studies, the thinking goes, will only prune the twigs, perhaps shuffling around a few species here and there. Hence the surprise when a new study of the largest family of salamanders produced a genetic family tree totally inconsistent with the accepted classification, which is based primarily on physical features.
Using the latest, most sensitive climate models to date, a team of 19 scientists predicts that California will experience significantly hotter summers by 2100, with resulting impacts on human health and the availability of water that could upend the state's current water rights system. ''These new predictions illustrate more than ever the urgent need to control greenhouse gas emissions now,'' said study co-author W. Michael Hanemann, professor of agricultural and resource economics and director of the California Climate Change Center at UC Berkeley. ''Because of lags in the natural system, what we do today will affect climate thirty years from now.''
An elegant experiment conducted by University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) scientists, in collaboration with a group of scientists at Tokyo University, shows clearly that in high temperature superconductors, vibrations in the crystal lattice play a significant though unconventional role. The results, reported in the July 8 issue of Nature, shed much-needed light on the enigmatic superconductors which, 18 years after their discovery, still puzzle theoreticians and experimentalists. The findings also could point scientists to new materials to explore as possible superconductors.
A bevy of satellites buzzing around in the Earth's magnetosphere has found at least part of the answer to a long-standing puzzle about the source of the charged particles that feed the aurora. The charged particles come from explosions on the sun and smash into the Earth's magnetic field, which repels the bulk of them. But many slip through, often via a physical process called magnetic reconnection, where the magnetic field traveling with the particles breaks and reconnects with the Earth's field, opening a window for the particles to surge through. Once inside, these excited particles can spiral down toward the poles and create brilliant auroras when they hit the atmosphere.
