Science Today Stories

Below are a few examples of my work as an assistant producer for Science Today, a University of California-produced radio feature on CBS Radio News. My duties included conducting research, interviewing scientists, writing the stories, and editing the audio.

An app that personalizes driving patterns

If you’re still unsure about whether electric vehicles can meet your daily driving needs, you’ll soon be able to get personalized answers based on your own individual driving patterns. Research scientist Samveg Saxena of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that the app, called MyGreenCar, uses a vehicle-to-grid simulator to provide fuel economy estimates for drivers in any vehicle.

"If you were making exactly the same trips that you wanted to make that you were making in your current vehicle, what would happen if you were driving an electric vehicle instead? And through the "MyGreenCar" tool that we have coming up soon, we'll be able to give people the individual ability using their smartphones to record how they're driving, how they're using whatever vehicle they have right now. And then give them a personalized answer, would whatever vehicle they're looking at buying for their next vehicle meet their needs?"

Saxena says that one of the goals of the app is to help drivers to understand the benefits of clean vehicles.

"Electric vehicles go a long way in mitigating these global challenges and these urban challenges."

Is an affinity for alcohol an evolutionary adaptation?

You’re not alone if you love alcohol. In fact, you may have a whole lineage of alcohol-loving ancestors dating as far back as 45 million years ago. Evolutionary biologist Robert Dudley of the University of California, Berkeley explains in a new study that our attraction to alcohol is an evolutionary adaptation because the smell of alcohol drew primates to fermenting fruit in the tropical jungle.

"We are interested in alcohol because we have evolved as fruit-eating primates and alcohol is found naturally in fruit within tropical environments. So, the hypothesis suggests that they are preferentially selecting fruits that have a fairly high alcohol content we have inherited an ancestral bias that associates alcohol with nutritional reward."

Dudley hopes to understand how we as humans have come to enjoy drinking and even overdrinking.

"One goal of the hypothesis is to facilitate basic research into the biology of alcohol exposure."

How scientific curiosity can lead to practical applications

Our natural curiosity of how the world works leads us to study complex subjects such as particle physics and astrophysics. And while they don’t always have immediate benefits for everyday life, physics professor Marjorie Shapiro of the University of California, Berkeley says that learning more about how the world works will eventually lead to practical applications in the future, even if it’s unclear what those applications will be.

"The history has always been that when you probe things in a new way, you learn stuff that’s useful. In the 19th century, people who were doing experiments with electricity and magnetism never would have thought about transistors, and the Internet, and computers. It just would have been completely inconceivable, but they said, “I want to know how charged particles work,” and so all of us believe that sooner or later, we will find applications, if we understand the world better."

Fortunately, Shapiro’s curiosity is fed by having access to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

Citizen scientists help track space dust

Imagine if you could help identify space dust brought back from outside the solar system? It’s possible – and it’s been done – by volunteers in a citizen scientist project called Stardust@Home. The project, managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, allows volunteers to use a web-based virtual microscope to interactively scan the tracks of dust collected by NASA’s Stardust mission.

"It would have taken us decades of effort to do it on our own. And so, we started the project called Stardust@Home and this is ongoing. More than 32,000 people now have participated and have collectively searched more than 100 million fields of view."

Project director Andrew Westphal says of the seven interstellar particles identified so far, two were discovered by volunteers.

"We feel very excited that this is an era in which people who are not professional scientists can really participate directly in science projects like this."

Are certain life goals healthier to pursue than others?

Are certain life goals healthier to pursue than others? In a recent study psychologist Sheri Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley found that people who pursued extrinsic life goals such as fame and wealth were at a much higher risk for mental health issues such as mania, depression and anxiety. Johnson explains that people generally strive for either extrinsic or intrinsic goals.

"Some kinds of goals are very extrinsic. I'd like to be very powerful, I'd like to be very famous. Those are very extrinsically oriented goals where your chief hope is that you're going to be admired, respected, recognized by other people. There are other kinds of goals that we would think of as being intrinsically motivated that are about finding very satisfying moments in your life."

Johnson says the key is to have your intrinsic goals outweigh your extrinsic ones.

"Be focused on other issues in your life, like did I have a nice day, a nice conversation with somebody I love."

How we consume sugar matters

It’s no secret that sugar is one of the leading causes of obesity. But how we consume sugar also matters. Cindy Leung of the University of California, San Francisco says that taking in calories from sugary beverages has a different metabolic response than eating those same calories in food.

"Usually if we were to eat 200 calories of a sugary food, like a piece of cake or a doughnut, our body would tell us that we’re full and we would eat less at the next meal. What we are seeing with sugary beverages is that it is not happening. People drink the soda. It overrides our satiety signals. We don’t register that we’re full. So we end up eating more at the next meal or at the same meal we’re drinking a soda than if we were to eat those same calories from sugar."

Leung says that the rapid influx of carbohydrates from drinking soda can also lead to other diseases.

"Diabetes has been linked with soda consumption, as has coronary heart disease and stroke. So there’s many health outcomes that are linked with soda, not just obesity."

The benefits of seeing that familiar face

We usually think of natural selection as acting to get rid of genetic variation, but for human faces, variation is actually favorable. Behavioral ecologist Michael Sheehan of the University of California, Berkeley explains that distinction in our faces is part of an evolutionary trend to make us recognizable in social environments.

"I think when we think about evolution and selection we usually think about things like some mutation that makes you a faster runner or something and so that’s really great and so therefore selection fixes it. But in this case we’re actually looking for a selection that maintains genetic variation. So we want -- it’s not good to have a big nose or a small nose in and of itself. But it’s good to have a nose that’s different from everyone else in the population is sort of the basic idea."

Sheehan says that while we may take recognition for granted, it’s still an issue today.

"If you go on Google and you type in "mistaken identity arrest" or "mistaken identity jail" you can find lots of cases of people that have gone to jail because of mistaken identity."