“Third-hand smoke” is also a threa

Experts have identified a new health threat from cigarettes: an invisible and toxic combination of gasses and particles labeled as “third-hand smoke” that persist long after second-hand smoke has cleared.

The toxins cling on smokers’ hair and clothes, as well as in carpeting and furniture.

The study, published in this month’s issue of Pediatrics, especially focuses on the toxins’ effects on child and infant health. Researchers say children can possibly ingest the toxins, especially while crawling on the floor.

Researchers say the study has new implications for behavior, as it shows simply shutting a door does not shield kids from the harmful effects of the smoke.

Third-hand smoke includes materials such as hydrogen cyanide which is used in chemical weapons, butane which is used in lighter fluid, arsenic and lead. Eleven of the compounds in third-hand smoke are highly carcinogenic and are cancer risks for people of any age.

(Source: nytimes.com)

Bedbugs bite in Ohio

Cincinnati, Ohio has seen an alarming rise in the pest Cimex lectularius, commonly known as bedbugs.

Although the bugs were thought to have vanished in the 1950s because of the use of DDT and other pesticides, a recent public survey found that one in six residents of Cincinnati have had an encounter with bedbugs within the last year.

Reports of bedbugs in the city started about three years ago, but officials thought it was an abnormality, not a trend.

City officials say they expect the problem to get worse. If the occurrence of the pests increases, city officials say they won’t be able to keep up with inspections.

The complaints don’t stop in Ohio. Reports of the bugs are coming from college campuses, high-end hotels and movie theaters nationwide.

Adult bedbugs are reddish brown in color and about a quarter of an inch long. They tend to be mostly active at night, and hide in mattresses or behind furniture during the day. Their bites leave itchy marks on the skin.

Killing the bugs can be a challenge, and in many cases numerous treatments by a professional exterminator are needed to eliminate the problem.

Entomologists say it is difficult to figure out the extent of the problem nationwide. What adds to the problem is that many cities suffering from current financial difficulties don’t see the bugs as a public health priority, as they don’t carry disease such as mosquitoes or cockroaches.

Reasons cited for an increase in the bugs include the ban of DDT and an increase in international travel.

(Source: latimes.com)

Study links control of blood sugar and memory decline

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center say rises in blood sugar (glucose) can negatively impact memory by affecting the dentate gyrus, an area of the hippocampus that helps form memories.

The effects can be seen, researchers say, even when glucose rates are just moderately raised. This may explain the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging, as glucose regulation worsens with age.

The researchers used MRIs to map out brain regions in 240 elderly test subjects. A correlation was found between spiked glucose rates and reduced blood flow in the dentate gyrus, an indicator of reduced functions and activity in that area of the brain.

If decline in memory is the result of glucose regulation, then the issue affects everyone, researchers say. Exercise is recommended to help combat the issue, as glucose regulation is improved with physical activity.

(Source: nytimes.com)

SCIENCE SCENE was compiled by ANNA OPALKA. She can be reached at features@theaggie.org.

Two UC Davis School of Medicine researchers received funding for stem cell research from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) earlier last month.

Kit Lam, professor of medicine and chief of the division of oncology and hematology, and Alice Tarantal, professor of pediatrics and director of the Center of Excellence in Translational Human Stem Cell Research, were among two dozen scientists to receive research funding under the new CIRM Tools and Technologies Awards. Both were awarded $835,540 and $842,149 respectively to fund investigation for the next two years looking into new techniques and capabilities for stem cells or improve already existing techniques.

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells found in either an embryo or among organs and tissues in adults. The potential of these cells lies in their unique properties. Unlike other cells found in the body, they do not have a specific function and can be manipulated to perform certain functions.

Lam’s research mostly involves discovering a way to track cancer cells in the human body.

“The main focus of my laboratory is to apply combinatorial chemistry to address a variety of biomedical problems,” said Lam in an e-mail. “These include the development of therapeutic and imaging agents against cancers, Alzheimer disease, and autoimmune diseases.”

Lam specifically uses the technique he developed as a junior faculty at the University of Arizona, the One-Bead-One-Compound (OBOC) combinatorial library method.

Lam plans on using this technique to discover synthetic molecules that will bind to the unique protein receptors on the surface of the stem cell. This will allow researchers to develop a tracer that can be used by other researchers such as Tarantal to track where the stem cell is in the body.

Building on Lam’s work, Tarantal’s research involves the next step -the process of tracking the stem cell with the use of positron emission tomography (PET). The PET scan requires a radioactive molecule, usually radioactive glucose, to be inserted into the body, which can be seen as the body breaks down the glucose to use as energy.

Her focus is on making the PET scanner sensitive to the point that it can detect the specially tagged stem cells and track them in the body.

Tarantal’s research is necessary if stem cells will be used as therapy for many different diseases in the near future.

“It is important to know where these [stem] cells go, what they are doing and whether the cell population is expanding as this will have a direct bearing on the success of a therapy,” said Simon Cherry, professor and chair of the department of biomedical engineering who will be working with Tarantal and the PET scanner. “Imaging is an ideal tool, as it can look non-invasively throughout the body to see these cells.”

Cherry believes that the PET scanner will play a vital role as a tracking technology for stem cells. There are two possibilities for trackers that can be used. One possibility is to tag the cells with some radioactive molecule that can be traced in the body. However, this will only last for a few days. The other, long-term option is to genetically modify the stem cell in order for it to express a so-called imaging reporter gene, which can make the cell somewhat radioactive once it recognizes certain molecules that were inserted into the body.

Not only are Tarantal and Lam part of the promising goal of using stem cells for treatment purpose, but UC Davis is also a leader in advancing research into the field. Supported by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures will be housed in the Sacramento campus, according to the UC Davis Medical Center’s website.

The institute plans on continuing the research into stem cells as possible treatments for various diseases including liver disease, blindness, HIV/AIDS, cancer and diabetes. UC Davis plans to launch a series of clinical trials once the facility is completed that focus on retinal occlusion, heart attacks, peripheral vascular disease and Huntington’s disease.

NICK MARKWITH can be reached at features@theaggie.org.

A toxic mix of pesticides and industrial chemicals polluting the San Francisco Estuary is contributing to a downward spiral in fish populations by affecting the earliest stages of growth and development, according to a recent UC Davis study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The San Francisco Estuary connects the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers to the Pacific Ocean and includes both the Delta and San Francisco Bay.

Although several estuary fish species populations have been declining since the 1970s, record lows in recent years fly in the face of weather and river conditions that typically reverse these losses, according to the latest CALFED report on the subject.

The intensified decline reflects the estuary ecosystem’s cumulative response to various stresses including water flow diversions, invasive species and pollution, said lead study author David Ostrach, a research scientist at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.

Ostrach’s study showed that the offspring of striped bass – a model indicator of overall estuary health – are exposed to dangerous levels of contaminants passed on from the mother through eggs.

Past studies showed that the vast majority of river-collected progeny die shortly after hatching, while fish that survive to adulthood with contaminant exposure have higher incidences of disease, Ostrach said.

“The focus on effects in early life stages is appropriate because early development is highly sensitive to mutagenic pollutants,” said Ben Greenfield, an environmental scientist at the San Francisco Estuary Institute who was not involved in the study.

Researchers found significantly higher levels of contaminants in eggs from river bass compared to those from bass that were raised and bred in a hatchery with clean water. The list of elevated chemicals includes both discontinued and currently used pesticides, as well as PBCs and PBDEs, widely used organic compounds that have been shown to disrupt hormone balance and function and to cause permanent behavioral defects in mice.

To follow possible exposure effects on developing bass hatchlings (larvae), Ostrach used a novel approach to examine growth, organ formation and signs of health. Compared to their hatchery counterparts, river-raised larvae were deformed, grew slower, had stunted brain development and dysfunctional livers, and lacked enough energy stores to fuel their search for food.

“The majority of larvae would not make it to first feeding due to the developmental problems caused by the contaminants the mother fish is passing on to them,” Ostrach said.

In contrast to studies showing effects of a single to a few chemicals on fish development, our study clearly shows that a real world mix of contaminants is causing developmental problems, he said.

“These types of studies of conditions in the field are more difficult to perform than controlled laboratory experiments,” Greenfield said. “But they … often yield the most important results for managers.”

Further studies will examine the overall health of the striped bass population at all life stages and how problems might relate to other declining fish species in the Estuary, Ostrach said. The goal will be to provide conclusive data so that actions can be taken to mitigate some of the problems.

“These fish are being exposed to a lot of things that are a result of our human environment,” Ostrach said. “So to use them as a parallel model [regarding human health implications] is not unreasonable.”

PBDE levels in San Francisco Bay Area women’s breast milk are 100 times higher than elsewhere, indicating that humans are similarly accumulating the compounds and passing them on to children.

“In my opinion, more work by agencies, research scientists and the public needs to be addressing these contaminant issues … to seriously look at what is being [produced and] dumped into the environment … and to try and curtail that as well as to clean up the environment,” Ostrach said.

ELAINE HSIA can be reached at features@theaggie.org.

Today

UC Davis Master of Public Health (MPH) Admissions Information Night

Stephen A. McCurdy, Director of UC Davis MPH Program

7 to 8:30 p.m., MU II, Memorial Union

Sponsored by Public Health Services

Tomorrow

Action Video Game Playing Enhances Vision and Perceptual Decision Making

Daphne Bavelier

4 to 5 p.m., Center for Neuroscience, 1544 Newton Court, Research Park

Sponsored by the Center for Neuroscience

Where Mechanics and Biochemistry Meet: Dynamics of Cell Polarization in the Early C. elegans Embryo

Ed Munro- University of Washington, Friday Harbor

4:10 to 5:00 p.m., 1022 Life Sciences Building

Sponsored by College of Biological Sciences, Graduate Groups in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Cell & Developmental Biology, Section of Microbiology, Section of Molecular & Cellular Biology, Departments of Biological Chemistry and Cell Biology & Human Anatomy, the Molecular & Cellular Biology Training Grant (NIH), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Friday, Jan. 9

Center for Visual Sciences Vision Research Symposium

Trevor Lamb – Australian National University; Andrew Mariani, National Eye Institute

8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., Center for Neuroscience/Center for Visual Sciences, 1544 Newton Court, Davis

Sponsored by the Center for Visual Sciences

Monday, Jan. 12

Epidemiology and Management of Invasive Phytophthora species in UK Woodlands

Elizabeth Fichtner – UC Davis

10 a.m. to 10:50 p.m.; 115 Hutchison Hall

Sponsored by plant pathology

Structure and Evolution of an Embryonic Cell Specification Pathway in Caenorhabditis elegans

Morris Maduro – UC Riverside

4:10 to 5 p.m.; 102 Hutchison Hall

Sponsored by nematology

More seminars can be found at calendar.ucdavis.edu. If you’d like to publish a seminar here, send an e-mail to features@theaggie.org.

If you’ve ever wondered if a certain drug would make that biology lab class a little more bearable, you’re not alone. Evolutionary biologist and UCD professor Jonathan Eisen found the prospect all too entertaining, producing a fake study on the issue as an April fool’s joke.

But when he’s not pulling pranks on the science community he manages to delve into the microscopic world of evolution and ecology offering both the community and his students a diverse and broad width of knowledge.

What do you teach at UC Davis?

This year I co-taught the first offering of BIS2C, the third quarter in the new Introductory Biology series. After two years working on the design of this course it was good to finally get it taught. I will be teaching this again next fall.

In addition, I teach an upper level course on microbial evolution which was offered as an EVE198 class and will probably have a new EVE number next time it is offered. Also I give some lectures for some medical microbiology and immunology classes here and there, as I have a split appointment between EVE and MMI.

And what do you research here?

I study how microbes evolve new functions and how we can use that knowledge to understand how microbes function in the world around us. Most of the time I study this by sequencing the genomes of microbes and then using computational methods to analyze the genome data. I am particularly interested in two specific scientific topics these days: how microbes survive and thrive in extreme environments and how microbes function as symbionts of animals.

What did you study in college?

Initially, I was an East Asian Studies major (at Harvard) with a background interest in biology. Then I took a cool introductory course on evolution from Stephen Jay Gould, a famous evolutionary biologist, and I switched to a biology major with a focus on evolution and ecology.

After working for a year in the lab I had worked in as an undergraduate, I then went to do my Ph.D. at Stanford in biological sciences. Initially I worked on butterfly population biology, but I switched to studying how mutations originate and how differences in mutation processes between species affect how those species evolve. I dabbled in studying genomes of microbes then and once I got my Ph.D., I got a faculty job at the place that helped launch the field of genomics (The Institute for Genomic Research).

What is the most interesting aspect of science you have studied?

Being the first person to glimpse the entire genetic make up of a particular species was and still is a thrill.

What is your favorite ecosystem?

Hydrothermal vents in the bottom of the ocean where the entire ecosystem is based on chemical energy (in contrast to the surface where most ecosystems are based on light energy).

What example of symbiosis do you find most fascinating?

I think the most fascinating aspect is how organisms are able to colonize new habitats simply by engaging in symbioses with other organisms rather than inventing new functions themselves. This is what allows lots of animals to survive on cellulose (e.g., cows), what allows plants to photosynthesize and what allows many species in the bottom of the ocean to survive without eating.

Do you think humans have evolved to their full potential? If not, how could we improve?

Evolution continues for all species, all the time. It never stops. As for potential, that depends on what one’s goals are. So sure, if you think humans should be faster, I am sure that one could conceive of a way to evolve humans to be faster. But that would likely be unethical and probably silly.

I think the most interesting thing about humans is that in addition to genetic evolution, we have cultural evolution and therefore we can supplement our genetic potential or limitations with other things. I for one am highly supplemental thanks to cultural evolution with glasses, lots of possessions and insulin. I probably could survive without the possessions, possibly survive without the glasses, but I would be dead without the insulin.

We have lots and lots of problems in the world. They are not going to be solved by genetic changes, but instead by cultural ones.

Other than what you learned in school, what tool or piece of information do you use most in your line of work?

Computers computers computers.

Tell us about that April fool’s prank …

I have always been a prankster. I have been [pulling pranks] for years.

Last year[2007], in a fit of hacking on the evening of Mar. 31, I made a fake New York Times article about [one of my colleagues] Craig Venter which I then circulated by e-mail and it got distributed very widely and lots of people liked it. However, it did not become completely viral and I think this was because it was not posted on the web. So I schemed to do one this year[2008] which involved fully using the web, and I found the perfect place to plan this joke – I got invited to a meeting at Google HQ with a collection of top notch science journalists, scientists, engineers and science bloggers.

I thus began my conspiracy to have as many people as possible post entries on April 1 about the same fake story. The story would be a spoof of the doping controversies in cycling and baseball but do it for scientists. Initially we were going to say the same drugs used in cycling were being abused by scientists, but then we came up with the idea to say that “brain doping” was being outlawed by the US and EU governments and that there was a worldwide crackdown on cognitive enhancement.

Little did we know when we first planned this that brain doping was a real issue and though the government was not crackingdown on it yet, there were high level discussion about the problem. We decided to continue with the joke although in a way it was less funny because it was sort of close to reality.

In my mind, good pranks like this seem real when they happen and then are completely ludicrous in retrospect. So we planned our joke, and I even created a fake website for the World Anti-Brain Doping Authority (WABDA), and became viral with all sorts of people believing it.

Outside of the prank, do you think that scientists could actually benefit from any kind of drug?

I keep getting asked this. I think scientists get plenty from drugs already, like caffeine so there is certainly anecdotal evidence that drugs can help. But despite a lot of people apparently taking these other drugs to improve thinking, it is not clear if it really helps.

So I think it is possible drugs can help people do better science. But the data seems to be weak on which ones to take. And then you get into ethical questions, such as, if we compete for grants, is it fair to take drugs if they are not available to all?

What do you do when you aren’t teaching or doing research on campus?

Hanging out with my kids, Analia, who is almost 4 and Andres who is almost 2. They are the best things ever.

LAUREN STEUSSY can be reached at features@theaggie.org.