There’s long been an assumption that the mental health of older people mirrors their declining physical and cognitive function. But according to a University of California, San Diego study, despite physical ailments, aging adults seem to get better over time. In the same study, Dilip Jeste found high levels of depression and anxiety among adults in their 20s and 30s. It made him wish that there were more studies looking into the value of intergenerational activities. 

"There has been some work of that kind in the past, but I think we need larger scale, better studies in which you can have younger people having an older person, and they become partners or a team with mentorship in both directions. The younger ones are teaching the older ones, let’s say, about technology; and the older ones are teaching the younger ones about how to live life and so on. And we need to measure the outcomes in terms of not just their satisfaction, but even biological measures."

And this would help develop broader interventions to promote mental health in all age groups.

Can intergenerational activities improve mental health?

A new center for mindfulness and human potential

This week on Science Today, we covered a lot of topics, including a new finding sheds light on the unknown parts of the genome. This has often been called ‘junk DNA’, but scientist Diane Dickel of the Berkeley Lab doesn’t like that term. Instead, she says these are non-coding parts of the genome. 

"Only about 3 percent of the genome consists of genes, the other, more than 95 percent of the genome, what we call non-coding, which just means that it does not encode genes. And it is clear these are important things in that non-coding sequence."
 
It is mutations in these non-encoding sequences, called enhancers, that causes genetic diseases. And this is an important finding because doctors don’t know what triggers some of these diseases, including cardiomyopathy – that’s a genetic heart disease. And that’s because researchers were looking for clues in the wrong part of the genome. Meanwhile, at UC San Diego, researchers looking into the mental health of seniors made a startling discovery about young adults. Dilip Jeste explains that there’s long been an assumption that the mental health of older people mirrors their declining physical and cognitive function – but that’s not the case. They seem to do better with age, despite physical ailments. It’s those in their 20s and 30s who have very high levels of depression and anxiety.  So Jeste suggests people do more studies looking into the value of intergenerational activities. 

"I think we need larger scale, better studies in which you can have younger people having an older person and they become partners or a team with mentorship in both directions."

So, a younger person can teach seniors about, technology for instance; and older folks can pass along pearls of wisdom about certain aspects of life. The main goal would be to promote mental health in all age groups. And in a similar vein, UC Santa Barbara has a new Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential. We spoke to co-director Jonathan Schooler about how in the last decade, mindfulness has been picking up steam as a topic of scientific research.

"Ten to 15 years ago, it would have been considered almost a taboo topic, like not really science. Almost more in the realm of spirituality or something. But now, the mound of research showing the value of mindfulness has just become demonstrated so many times, in so many contexts."

To hear more about this and other stories about University of California research, follow Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Facebook. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for tuning in!

The weekly roundup - March 18th

A medical device that could be used in deep space to check up on the health of astronauts, could also someday be used for various environmental monitoring here on terra firma. 

"I mean, if it works with saliva, it will certainly work with water from the environment; it could work with material isolated from insects and plants and trees. So we could do all kinds of environmental sensing."

That’s Matthew Coleman, a senior research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He says that if they can make a handheld diagnostic device like this rugged enough for space, it would also be perfect in the African desert. 

"We’re thinking of something that’s doesn’t require a cold storage, so you don’t have to keep it in the refrigerator until you use it. You’ll just have to add water or an actual blood or saliva or breath condensate sample."

Some other uses for a diagnostic device built for space

Researchers are striving to unveil the secrets about  “dark” DNA, part of the genome that does not code proteins, but plays an important role in regulating genes. Scientist Diane Dickel of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been working on finding all of these non-coding regulators -so called enhancers - and pinning them on a map.
 
“I mean, it is like building a road map and adding information onto that, to point that particular pairs in the genome act as these enhancer elements to regulate gene expression.” 
 
This map will help researchers get a better picture of the dark DNA, which could shed a light on whether mutations in the enhancers cause genetic diseases. Dickel says this would also be the next step towards improving genetic testing.
 
“The hope of genetic testing is to try to understand biology of what’s happening in the cell to develop treatments for that longer term."
 
And, give patients clear answers about their health and genetic predispositions. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

Getting a better picture of 'dark DNA'

In what’s being called a genetic ‘Rosetta Stone', researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have discovered molecules that can lead to infantile epilepsy or autism. Specifically, a neuronal protein called NaV1.2 and the gene that produces it, called SCN2A. Both play a crucial role in early brain development, according to the neuroscientist Kevin Bender.

“One of the central functions of the brain cell is to fire something that is called an action potential, which is a way of transmitting information from one cell to the next. And SCN2A and NaV1.2 are at the heart of that process.” 

Genetic defects that increase neuronal activity as they transmit signals lead to epilepsy, and when this process abnormally slows down, it may cause autism. 

“We now have a roadmap for understanding how different mutations in SCN2A could lead to different diseases and if we understand that, it might uncover new areas for intervention in the future.”

Researchers discover a genetic Rosetta Stone

Do you dread getting vaccinations because of the needle? Well, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed what could be a game-changer for vaccinations. Dorian Liepmann, a professor of mechanical and bioengineering says their needleless technology is called MucoJet, and it’s designed to self-administer vaccines. 

"What we have is a pill that actually shoots a jet of drug into your cheek without pain. We use a reaction in here just like vinegar and baking soda. Once that starts reacting, it makes a gas and builds up the pressure inside of the pill.  On the end of the nozzle, we have a membrane that holds the pressure in and when it gets to a certain pressure, it releases. This piston pushes down, pushes the drug out and it shoots a jet of the drug into the cheek."

Right now, this is a proof-of-concept study, but Liepmann hopes it will be available within the next five to ten years. 

"The next step is actually a smaller pill and this one’s actually designed to be swallowed. One of the target possibilities would be insulin for diabetics – swallow a pill versus having to take an injection."

A possible game changer for vaccinations

Genome sequencing, which is figuring out the order of genetic letters in your DNA code, will most likely become a standard testing procedure in the next decades. This, according scientist Diane Dickel of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This will help identify diseases you might be prone to. 

"We’ll continue to accelerate people getting the whole genome sequencing as a routine type of genetic testing rather than what previously been done which is testing a few genes for mutations.”   

Now, doctors mostly perform genetic testing for people with heart problems or a history of breast cancer, since these diseases have a strong genetic component.

“We could use it better for preventative or monitoring types of mechanisms, being able to identify genetically which people should have yearly mammograms vs maybe mammograms every 5 years.”

Dickel hopes in the future, more diseases, like diabetes, which is less understood genetically, can be studied with DNA sequencing.

Will genome sequencing become a standard testing procedure?

Researchers have discovered a new way to spot brain injuries that arise after a concussion.  With advanced, functional MRI scanners, doctors can not only make images of what the brain looks like after the injury, but also how it works. 

“To get a better handle of being able to say what’s going wrong in the brain after the concussions, we are actually looking at brain function and connectivity in the brain, how different brain regions connect with each other and talk to each other.”
 
Pratik Mukherjee, a professor of radiology at the University of California, San Francisco adds that the new technology allows scientists to see what traditional MRI tests failed to detect.
 
“The typical MRI scan that people get at a hospital or in outpatient clinics are not useful for concussions because they just look at the anatomy of the brain and most people with concussions don’t have big problems anatomically. Few might have tiny little bleeds in the brain, but even that is a minority.”

A better view of brain injuries that arise after a concussion

One way to improve the nation’s healthcare quality is to start effectively analyzing medical data using modern technology in clinics and hospitals. This is something that the industry hasn’t done just yet, according to pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee of the University of California, San Francisco. 

“We don’t have one unified electronic medical record system. So it is hard to aggregate big data, but I believe we are on the cusp of that. ”

Lee says diagnostic methods should be improved too. 

“For instance, the data that the nurses collect to determine whether a patient is in a good or bad nutritional status is they record how much food is left on a patient’s tray when it gets taken away by the support staff. So that’s the best metric to ascertain whether or not patients are at high or low risk of decubitus ulcers. To currently use this, it borders on the preposterous.”

According to Lee, with a modernized approach to data and technology, doctors could better understand diseases and bring precision medicine to fruition.

Here's one way to improve the quality of the nation's healthcare

There was a lot of exciting University of California research news this past week. First the Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug that could halt Multiple Sclerosis. We had previously spoken to neurologist Bruce Cree of the University of California, San Francisco about his work testing the new drug, called ocrelizumab. At the time, Cree explained that it actually targets B-cells in the human body, blocking the inflammation that drives the disease. He explained that most MS therapies in the past targeted T-cells, which often had serious side effects.

"You can have profound immunological effects and clinical benefits by just targeting B-cells alone. And I think this is actually an important advance for multiple sclerosis because when you just target B-cells without affecting T-cells, you have less of a potential for adverse events due to broad spectrum immune suppression."

Really, such great news considering this devastating disease affects hundreds of thousands of Americans and more than 2.3 million people worldwide. While at UCSF we visited neurologist Lauren Weiss, who has discovered a new way to study brain disorders. Basically, they are growing brain cells out of simple skin biopsies taken from patients with autism and other developmental problems.

"We can grow those cells in a lab and then turn them into stem cells and ultimately in the cells of the brain. That’s a pretty amazing advance when you think about how challenging it is to study the human brain. Nobody wants to give you too much access to that!"

Hear these and other stories about the latest research at the University of California. Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud and Stitcher. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.

The weekly roundup - April 22nd

Your mental state often affects the way you handle uncomfortable situations. Jennifer Mitchell, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco has recently tested what she calls stress reactivity of patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and alcohol abuse. 

“We make people nervous in a social situation. And that induces really robust cortisol response, increase in heart rate, changes in respiration and blood pressure. And we administer either oxytocin or placebo and then we look to see whether oxytocin enables people to be less nervous and less apprehensive in that situation.”

The oxytocin therapy reduces stress and anxiety and also helps patients be more resilient to alcohol cravings. 

“A lot of people who have troubles with alcohol use disorder and PTSD are self medicating. They are anxious, they are stressed, they are fearful and they find that drinking alcohol ameliorates some of those problems.”

How your mental state affects how you handle stressful situations

How can a college dining hall make a difference when it comes to climate change? Get rid of the trays. That’s just what Jill Horst, director of residential dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara did in an effort to reduce the amount of food waste that the university produced. 

"It, just overall, was this big huge impact. The food waste per person, per tray, reduced by 50 percent. That’s a lot! That's a significant impact to help with not only the food waste, but food cost."
 
Psychology played a part in this in that people naturally want to load up a large tray with food. 
 
"So by removing - the trays, people are managing how to carry their food to the table. And by doing that they're not taking as much. They're taking you know smaller portions to start, and then they could get back up, and go have more food, but it really was about why do we want to reduce food waste, which reduced costs, which helps the environment."

To learn more about how the University of California is working to be carbon neutral by 2025, go to: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/climate-lab

How a tray-less dining hall can benefit the environment

When it comes to composting, there are different phases. There is pre-consumer waste, like scraps from prepping food, and then there’s post-consumer waste, or table scrap refuse, which needs to be separated from the other trash. Jill Horst, director of dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says composting on their campus has evolved over the years. 

"We started small and we just did pre-consumer waste to compost and we really wanted to do post-consumer because we were trying to divert as much as possible from the landfill."

By partnering with a local company, Horst says the campus now has a compost compactor to scrap everything in the dining hall. 

"So right now, we divert 90 percent of our waste from the landfill, so 90 percent of our waste is going to this composting company up that street. It is huge."

And it’s in keeping with the University of California’s efforts to be carbon neutral by 2025.

One way a university dining hall reduces food waste

Narrator:	This is Science Today. Sustainable dining is a huge deal on college campuses and the University of California, Santa Barbara is no exception. In fact, for years they’ve been taking an innovative approach towards reducing food waste that incorporates some behavioral psychology. Jill Horst, director of dining services, describes how they dealt with all the half-eaten apples they were noticing in their tray returns.
Horst:		9:17 It wasn’t because the apple wasn’t good, but the apple was so large. 9:27 So …we decided, well they have different sized apples, so why don’t we take a look at what would be the best size apple that somebody could consume without any waste?
Narrator:	They found that a five to six ounce apple was the proper portion. And while the change resulted in much less waste in the dining hall, it wasn’t without some initial push back from students.
Horst:		“Uh, what happened to the apples? These are, like mini apples”. But we never took anything away, we just sized things the right way. How do you educate them and why are you doing this? And you have a bunch of half-eaten apples as a display to say, this is why we’re doing that. It really resonated with them. 
Narrator:	For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

Using behaviorial psychology to lessen food waste in a dining hall

Space missions are exciting, but they’re risky for astronauts’ health. The lack of gravity in space may seriously damage their musculoskeletal systems, especially the spine and hip. Thomas Lang, an imaging scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has recently discovered crucial details about bone loss in space. 

“What we did in our study is to look at how this corresponded to architectural changes in the hips.  We used a 3-dimentional approach called quantitative computed tomography and in particular in the hip we found the trabecular bone – the spongy bone in the center of the medullary canal in the hip  - was lost at about up to 3 percent per month.” 

That’s similar to the bone structure that 70 or 80-year old women might lose in a year. 

“The driving factor is disuse. Very similar to what happens when somebody has a spinal cord injury and they sit down in a wheel chair.”

One solution is to ensure that astronauts get strenuous workouts in space.

How space travel wreaks havoc on the body

Can pregnant women be cured of insomnia?  Jennifer Felder, a clinical phycologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is testing out a therapy called cognitive behavioral treatment, which could help expecting mothers fight sleep disorders. 
 
“There is not currently much research on how best to treat insomnia during pregnancy. We know that cognitive behavioral treatment is effective for insomnia generally, but we don’t yet know if it is effective during pregnancy. “ 
 
Felder’s study shows that insomnia during pregnancy put women at a higher risk for delivering before 34 weeks of gestation. But according to Felder, doctors don’t always see lack of sleep as a problem.  
 
“Insomnia is often going undetected. It maybe dismissed as part of the normal process of pregnancy.”
 
Yet, In the United States one in 10 women deliver their babies preterm, so Felder hopes the insomnia therapy could reduce the rate of preterm birth.

Can pregnant women be cured of insomnia?

How do you handle stress? Psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley wanted to learn how people deal with stressors, so she ran an experiment that involved exposing study participants to uncomfortable situations. 

“We stressed everybody out by having them giving an impromptu speech that we said would be videotaped and later scrutinized by judges. It’s an experience that people find very unpleasant. ” 

But the way one reacts to a stressful situation like this changes the outcome. 

“We found that people who tend to be more accepting of their negative emotions actually responded with less stress to that experience.” 

According to Mauss, their study refutes previous notions that fewer bad things happen to happier people. It’s just that these people often see their negative experiences in a positive light.

How you handle stress matters

About a quarter of all the global climate change problems we’re seeing today can be attributed back to our food system and the dietary choices we’re making on a daily basis.

"This is greater than all of the cars on the planet; in fact it’s about twice as much global warming pollution as the cars."

That’s Benjamin Houlton, director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He studies the connection between climate and diet. For instance, just switching from a meat-heavy American diet to a Mediterranean diet, which has less meat, more fish and lots of vegetables is not only good for your health, it’s good for the planet’s health, too. 

"If we all switch to a diet like the Mediterranean diet – that is equivalent to taking somewhere around a billion cars off of the streets in terms of vehicle emissions each year.  So, it’s a huge number that has a tremendous amount. In terms of percentages, it could solve up to 15 percent of global warming pollution by 2050. We thing these are really important things to understand; our dietary choice does matter and it’s something we can do every day."

How our food choices affect climate change

What really makes you happy or sad? According to Psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley it is not so much about what’s happening to you, but how you perceive the situations you are in. 

"How you relate to your own emotions, transforms the experiences that you have in some way."

Mauss says the right way of thinking is the best way to protect yourself from moodiness, depression and anxiety.

"If you accept your negative emotions as just a natural response, you are going to pay less attention to them and so while they exist and happen, they blow over pretty quickly. Another idea is if you accept the negative emotions you have, you basically don’t punish yourself for feeling them and you avoid piling negativity upon negativity."

Or if you simply don’t chalk up your misfortunes to “bad luck,” this alone might cheer you up.

How your perception of situations affects your mood

How much stress can you take? Maybe you’re OK with a small bump in the road, like a parking ticket or a spat with your neighbor. But what about more serious troubles? 

“Things like going through a divorce, financial troubles, unemployment. Those are pretty big stressors.” 

That’s Irene Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In her recent study, she discovered that you will be much better off if you accept your negative emotions, no matter how bad they are. 

“We found the same positive effect of emotional acceptance. I don’t know at this point where the upper boundary is, but from other research we can speculate that actually there is no upper boundary in terms of the intensity of stressors."

But Mauss says accepting your negative emotions doesn’t mean accepting negative reality. You should still work on making positive changes in your life if things took a wrong turn.

Accepting your negative emotions is a positive thing

Virtual Reality becomes a reality in medical research. Derek Harmon, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, is working with software companies to develop 3D brain scan visualization tools.  

“With your two hand-held controllers of the virtual space you can slice with one axes and then the other and see a view of a head CT scan. In real time you can see all these different angles and again, build on special arrangement of the body, which I don’t know where else you can even do something like that.” 

Harmon has just started a pilot curriculum that offers virtual reality anatomy classes to medical students, so a 360-degree view of a digital human body using Google glasses. Harmon says lessons like these will help students become better physicians in the future. 

“If you have a company that built the software for you, you have pre-selected layers of tissue, organs and whatever you want to learn from, which does a lot of legwork for you and because of that people can start experimenting with it. I think it is so early on in the technology, but there is a lot of promise on things that you really can’t do on another type of medium."

Virtual reality becomes a reality in medical research

Sleep disorders during pregnancy can lead to a preterm birth. 
To improve sleeping patterns of mothers-to-be, Jennifer Felder, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is running an intervention research. 

“So we are doing a research on expecting moms and it is a digital intervention for sleep during pregnancies, so we are able to recruit women across the nation and in Canada. So we are hoping to have a really broad reach with that."

Besides pre-term birth outcomes, Insomnia is linked to other problems in pregnant women.  

“Poor sleep during pregnancy may also increase risk of perinatal depression and there are some data that suggests that it might increase risk of suicidal ideation, gestational diabetes, cesarean section births. So it does appear to have really broad consequences both psychologically and physically."

Treating sleep disorders might help reduce the rate of pre-term births, which affect 1 in 10 women in the United States.

A digital intervention program to help moms-to-be get better sleep

When you accept your own negative emotions – you will likely have a more positive outlook on mood swings than people around you have. That’s according to Iris Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“If you have an accepting attitude for other people’s emotions that tend to make those other people feel better and it helps you respond to their distress in a more constructive way.”

Mauss says this mindset is invaluable for parents who often deal with their little ones’ tantrums. 

“Small children have difficulty regulating their emotions because, they are - children."

But if their moms and dads are responsive and understanding – 

“We believe that over time that might actually help children develop better emotion-regulatory skills. ”

And not only that. Mauss says if you learn how to accept your negative emotions, you’ll become a better role model for your kids.

Dealing with moody people starts with your attitude

Artificial Intelligence has been developing fast – and it’s making more and more decisions on humans’ behalf. From simple web searches to e-commerce to self-driving cars. But researchers like Dawn Song, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, are struggling to find the best ways to protect this technology from hackers.

“One thing we are looking at how we can use AI and deep learning techniques to develop stronger security capabilities to enable us to build better defenses. One of our recent works uses advanced deep learning techniques to try to identify software vulnerabilities in IOT devises.” 

Deep learning techniques are advanced algorithms, which allow researchers to process massive amounts of data.

“The advantage of deep learning is that it can enable us to build very large data sets.  And now we have very good computation framework and hardware to perform a variety of tasks.” 

But as machines becomes smarter, so do viruses that attack them, so scientists are challenged to stay one step ahead of hackers.

How to protect artificial intelligence technology from hackers

Social connections are important and can make you happier, according to psychologist Iris Mauss of the University of California, Berkeley. But how can those who are, shall we say, not so easy going build such a network? Mauss says – just be yourself, and open up to others. 

“People who are perceived to be more authentic are better liked by others and have better social connections. And we have found that if you hold in your emotions, you stifle them, then others tend to perceive that as.. on average, finding you less authentic.” 

Mauss says accepting your negative emotions could also help you become more personable. 

“Having that accepting attitudes about your own emotions will make you be more open about your own emotions which I believe would be perceived by others as greater authenticity.” 

So, if you shy away from sharing your feelings, just give it another try!

How to improve your social connections and boost happiness

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have started an ambitious project to build a brain atlas. According to neuroscientist John Ngai, the goal is to create a catalogue of different brain cells.

"The human brain contains about 80 billion neurons, nerve cells. And of the neurons we suspect there could be hundreds, if not thousands of types of distinct types of those cells, but until recently we really haven’t had a way of categorizing or classifying those cells in a quantitative or rational way."

But why do researchers need this mapping tool?

"In order to understand how the brain processes information and gives raise to things like cognition, emotion, we really need to know what different parts are."
  
Ngai also hopes this atlas will help scientists understand brain cells’ connections well enough to launch new therapies for treating cognitive and neurological diseases.

The ambition Brain Atlas Project

Glaucoma is the world’s second-leading cause of blindness, and it affects about 80 million people worldwide and has no cure. But vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered molecules that could probably halt the progression of the disease. 
Gronert: “We identified a novel factor, a new factor that potentially protects the optic nerve against damage, which is one of the underlying causes of glaucoma. 

That’s Karsten Gronert, a professor of optometry at UC Berkeley. He says, for decades, academic labs and pharmaceutical companies were trying to find treatment for glaucoma, but couldn’t show any promising results. This is probably because they were targeting the disease when it was already too late. 

"Once you have a degeneration of the optic nerve head, which is what causes glaucoma and eventually leads to blindness, that process is irreversible and cannot be stopped.” 

So Gronert and his colleagues took a different route. Instead of trying to fix what has been permanently damaged, they focused on prevention - protecting the mechanism that stops nerve degeneration.

Could the progression of glaucoma be halted?

Believe it or not, neuroscience is still considered a relatively new field of medical research. That’s because there’s still a lot of the unknown about our brain. For instance, how do brain cells wire up and function? To answer this question, John Ngai, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is creating a brain catalogue or - as researchers call it – an atlas. 

“So the idea behind this brain atlas project is to identify all the cell types in the mouse brain as a model for understanding the human brain and then to understand their physiological properties, how they connect with other so this can be used as a basis for understanding not only normal function of the brain, but also how diseases might progress and eventually how you might treat those diseases in human neurological conditions."

The effort is part of the federal government’s BRAIN Initiative, which launched four years ago. Its ultimate goal is to understand brain circuits well enough to devise new therapies for diseases of the human brain and nervous system.

Mapping the great unknown of our brain

Exposure to flame retardant chemicals or PBDEs during pregnancy can affect children’s neurodevelopment. Environmental health scientist Tracey Woodruff of the University of California, San Francisco, found ten-fold increases in a mother's PBDE levels could lead to a drop of 3.7 IQ points in her child. While that may sound like a small number…

"If you look at it over a population, it becomes very significant, because you have everybody exposed to PBDEs at a smaller risk. The small risk over a large population means that you can have a relatively large number of people who can have some type of effect." 

If this happens, the population level IQ could get shifted. This means there will be more people with an IQ score of about 70, which is considered a mentally-impaired category. 

“It can also decrease the number of people who are in the mentally-gifted categories." 

PBDEs can be found in many household items from furniture to toys to electronics. So, Woodruff says buying flame retardant-free products could make a big difference in your children’s health.

How exposure to PBDEs affect a child's IQ

Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, affects over two million people worldwide. The neurodegenerative disease strikes when the immune system attacks myelin, layers of a fatty insulating membrane that surround nerve fibers and help send nerve signals faster. Ari Green, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has found an over the counter allergy drug called Clemastine that could possibly help repair damaged myelin. 

“It was originally designed back in the 1970s as an antihistamine and we were excited that it showed the evidence that myelin repair is possible even with injury that is not immediate or acute, but has been there for some time."

Green says because of possible side effects of the medication, Clemastine is only a prototype for a better myelin repairing drug that researchers have yet to develop. 

"What we want is a drug that has a very targeted effect that would be capable of inducing this repair without causing other side effects."

An over-the-counter drug that may help in the fight against MS

How does one make a brain atlas? John Ngai, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley explains.

“You can think of it as a taxonomy. You might think about what are all the species of birds that there are on Earth, you might think of it as needing to first identify those types.”

So, just like with a bird encyclopedia, UC Berkeley neurologists are trying to find and organize brain cells into a catalogue of sorts.

“We know there are many different types of neurons in the brain. They look different. We might have some ideas about how they function differently. But we have no rational way of categorizing them. But using new molecular and genetic techniques, we have a very powerful way of classifying them.”

The brain atlas is an ambitious multimillion-dollar project that will help researchers better understand how brain cells wire up and function. And that could be the key to cure of neurological diseases, including autism and Alzheimer’s. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

Cataloging the brain to make sense of functionality and cure disease

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, might be close to finding a drug that could cure glaucoma, which is the world’s second-leading cause of blindness. Karsten Gronert, a professor of optometry, says it has been a long process of trial and error.

"With decades worth of research there have been several approaches to try to develop neuroprotective drugs that somehow can stop once you see neurodegenerartion. And there have been several approaches and none of them actually were able to stop the progression of neurodegeneration."

But Gronert discovered that astrocytes - cells in the eye retina  - produce lipid signals that protect nerves from damage. And when the eye is stressed, the astrocytes stop making the protective signal.

"It was an unexpected finding. This means it has some unknown role with nerves that we were not aware of."

So, if researchers can find a way to protect astrocytes, they might get on the right track to fight glaucoma.

Are we close to curing glaucoma?

It's a workday, just after lunch. You have a deadline and there's plenty of time left in the day to get the task done. If only you could stop thinking about other things. One thought can lead to your mind just...wandering away. This can't be good, right? You've probably been scolded as a kid for daydreaming in class. But in recent years, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that there are some very redeeming qualities to this mental state - in fact, it could be an essential cognitive skill. Here's an excerpt from an interview conducted with one of those researchers.

There are benefits to letting your mind wander

If you’ve been around awhile, chances are you’ve experienced foods that were once touted to be good for you, suddenly becoming the worst thing you could possibly eat. Or at least that’s how it feels when there’s a lot of media coverage about the latest scientific studies. Take eggs, for example. Over the years, these nutrient-rich orbs have gone from what’s for breakfast, to heart-attacks waiting to happen … only to be redeemed again as a healthy choice. Of course, moderation is key – for anything, but what gives when it comes to such nutritional see-saws? We asked nutrition researcher Angela Zivkovic of the University of California, Davis. 

"Part of the problem is that we just have natural variability between people, and if we keep trying to find the answer about how a certain diet affects all humans, we're probably never going to find the answer, and we're going to keep having these sort of pendulum swings back and forth. Eggs are good for you, eggs are not good for you, eggs are good for you, eggs are not good for you because every time you get a different population, you'll get a different answer. Really, it's that eggs are good for some people at certain points in time, and eggs are not so good for other people especially at certain points in time.  So, you know, we just need to try to figure out, how do we understand how different people respond to different diets at different points? And, again, it's not even just about, how do you respond to eggs? It's today versus three years from now versus 10 years ago. It's very different. People change over time and people are very unique and individual. And it's the overall context, too. That's often something that's really forgotten and missed. It's like, you know, we try to isolate these foods as if we eat them in isolation of other things. Of course, we eat them as complete diets. So let's say I'm on a vegan diet except I eat eggs. The effect of those eggs might be very different than if I eat eggs, but I'm actually on a Paleo-type diet, where I'm also eating a lot of other animal products. So it's really all about context and trying to understand how different people vary and change and respond to these different dietary treatments."

Why nutrition studies can't be one-size-fits-all

In 1989, UC Berkeley psychologist Robert Levenson began to study a group of people who had been married at least 15 years or 35 years, depending on age, to get a better sense of what fairly successful marriages are like. This was not purely a behavioral study, as they also managed to collect genetic samples from many of these 156 couples. In this interview excerpt, Levenson explains the implications for future couples. 

Robert Levenson:
"Well, one of the things that motivated us to do this study is that we felt this might be the last opportunity to study the dinosaurs of marriage.  The people who had 50 years with a particular person.  And at the time we started in the 80s it looked like the divorce rate was reaching 65 percent in this country.  Seven out of 10 marriages ending in divorce.  And so here was a group that grew up in a different era and had you know sort of stayed together and we wanted to understand them just in case they disappeared from the earth.  

Well, I think things are different now and you know we’re in this period of flux in marriage.  A lot of people don’t marry.  The divorce rate has gone back down again to 50 percent.  I don’t know whether the modal marriage for the millennial generation will be, you know, marry once, marry twice, marry three times.  But I think the basic biology here, the relationship between behavior and biology doesn’t require you to be married.

You know this is a statement about what counts in terms of your being happy in a relationship.  And although our tools may not be strong enough to detect these in the first and second and third years, I still expect that these genetic influences are having the same effects on relationships today as they did, you know, 20 and 40 years ago in those marriages."

Branin/host:
"Right and as you say with the dinosaurs, I mean I think that’s the joke, you know, people will say about their grandparents - they stuck together even though they didn’t seem very happy and yet they did."

Robert Levenson:
"Now that might happen again.  You know we go through these pendular kinds of sociological changes and for a while it seemed like we were in sort of a casual relationship.  People lived together, they didn’t marry, but who knows what it’s going to be like in the future.  And who knows probably the best bet is the pendulum will swing back and maybe people will form better marriages and will find ways of making better mate selection.  And maybe even genes will play a role in that.

And you know you’ll go and you’ll talk to your grandma and your grandpa and they’ll give you advice and then you’ll go to your geneticist and she’ll give you advice and you’ll put that all together in this kind of unique algorithm that will say okay I’m going to go this way.  And then if you’re smart you’ll listen.  And if you’re not you’ll say ah, I know best.  I’m just going to marry whoever I want to.  But I don’t think human nature is going to get re-writ in any particular, you know, in any short period of time."

Want to hear the entire interview?
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/robert-levenson

Or, listen to several experts, including Levenson, describe our brain in love in this discussion:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/brain_love

What we can learn from the "dinosaurs of marriage"

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