Science Today

Science Today is a daily radio feature produced by the University of California and distributed on CBS Radio News. From breakthroughs in medicine, health and the environment to insights into the world around us, Science Today covers it all.

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Why do fools fall — and stay — in love?

University of California love experts chat with Science Today host, Larissa Branin, about the science behind romance. Originally broadcast as a Facebook Live video, this is the audio version of UC Berkeley psychologists and neurologists Arthur Aron, Robert Levenson and Emiliana Simon-Thomas discussing the drug-like effects of budding romance, and how that differs from the psychology and brain chemistry at work in a long-term relationship.

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Sorry - it’s been a while since we’ve posted. Here’s a roundup of what’s been going on, though.

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Go ahead, let your mind wander.

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Children who suffer from emotional or physical abuse are at higher risk of developing health problems, but scientists are unclear about how to reverse these harmful effects. So, this is the focus of a new study by Nicole Bush, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco.

One of our goals was to look across the variety of systems to see for example whether we can improve immune functioning, cortisol stress hormone level, telomere lengths and DNA methylation profiles.

Bush hopes to achieve this with psychotherapy, which could be very effective for mental and physical health. And studies have proven just that.

There has been a recent meta-analysis that suggests we can improve children's cortisol functioning through intervention after adversity and we can get them to return to normal levels.

And less stress means fewer health problems in the future, including obesity, depression and diabetes, which is widespread among young Americans.

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The mental health of aging adults seems to consistently improve with age. But in the same study of adults ages 21 to 100, researchers discovered that those in their 20s and 30s had far worse levels of psychological well-being than any other period of adulthood. Have a listen ... 

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CARBON HUNGRY PLANTS

Over the past few decades, the amount of carbon dioxide that trees and plants have been grabbing from the atmosphere has increased. Trevor Keenan, a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, found that plants have been “inhaling” more carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. But they did not "exhale" more CO2 into the atmosphere through respiration.

So this is called the CO2 fertilization effect - a widely known effect of how CO2 affects plants. During the last few decades, the concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere continue to go up and this means plants have more CO2 to use.

This sounds like good news since less carbon dioxide is accumulated in the atmosphere, but Keenan says the threat of global warming is still there.

And so even though the plants are helping us out, whether they will continue doing it is a big question. CO2 in the atmosphere is still going up and so climate change is getting more and more likely to be more extreme.

In the meantime, this research underscores the importance of protecting vital ecosystems.

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With so little room for a diagnostic lab, what happens when an astronaut gets ill in space? And what if we could even prevent a medical issue from happening? In this interview excerpt, Matthew Coleman, a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes a revolutionary, small handheld diagnostic device that can work with three different sample streams. Have a listen.

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It Takes Less Than a Second to Tell Humans From Androids

It can be hard to tell the difference between humans and androids in such sci-fi TV shows as “Westworld.” But in real life, beyond our screens, the human brain takes less than a second to tell between reality and fantasy, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.

The research is in Nature Communications. (full access paywall)

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Ever watch Blade Runner?

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As many of us are set to gather around the table for #Thanksgiving, this seems like a good time to remind everyone that giving thanks should be a year-round practice. We chatted with a leading UC Riverside positive psychologist and author about this.

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We interview a lot of researchers at the University of California, and one thing we hear about a lot is how beneficial it is for researchers to have students and interdisciplinary faculty at their fingertips.

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One of the current limitations of commercial 3D printers on the market is the lack of material that’s being used. Mostly it’s thermoplastics, like ABS. So what researchers would like to do is expand the materials used to fabricate devices or functional materials. So, engineers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory teamed up with UC Santa Cruz to do just that. What they came up with was a novel, ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel. Have a listen!

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Have you missed us? Time to catch up ...

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It's one thing to hear researchers describe 3D printing technology, but it's quite another to actually see it in action. Here at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory we filmed the production of a 3D supercapacitor that uses an ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel. This scene will be part of a larger series about how the University of California’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative is leading the way to mitigate #climatechange by improving its energy efficiency, developing new sources of renewable energy and enacting a range of related strategies to cut carbon emissions.

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Amazing how much damage these pests wreak...

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What strange eyes you have ...

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This is not your parents’ colonoscopy ...