New Horizons in Science

The Hayward fault runs through Berkeley, Oakland, the Oakland zoo, Hayward and Fremont. For nearly a millennium, researchers have now determined, it has been the site of severe earthquakes every 140 years. The last one was in 1868. (Do the math.) Thomas Brocher will walk us along the fault with new data from an airborne laser, and show us a "shake map" of damage from the 1868 quake, when the population of the Bay Area was 260,000. It is now 7 million.   more…

A 28-year-old otherwise healthy woman was near death from an unidentifiable infection. The costs of her care reached hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days. A quarter of that went to failed diagnostic tests, including a lung biopsy that itself had a mortality rate of 10-15 percent. In 24 hours, a new viral chip made the diagnosis and saved her life. Joseph DeRisi will discuss his latest work on diagnosis of infections of unknown origin, and a project on malaria.   more…

How do thoughts and emotions shape social judgments? Mahzarin Banaji has worked to reveal people's unconscious judgments and preferences, demonstrating that they can contradict values people think they hold dear. She will demonstrate the phenomenon using the audience and herself as subjects. She will also present her latest findings using this test with different social groups, including data on whether these unconscious thoughts and behaviors can be changed.   more…

The human brain was wired for speech, and now machines are being built to take advantage of that. Nass has discovered that even crude computer speech can trigger a profound human response we so want to believe those voices are real. Can we use that response to improve machine-human communication? Would a female-sounding computerized physics tutor encourage more women to become physicists? Can a car's navigation system encourage you to drive more safely? Or might it irritate you enough to provide a dangerous distraction? Nass has the data.   more…

The nature of the metaverse' of virtual worlds, what we can learn from them, and how they will change the nature of work, e-commerce, social life and politics -- those are the things Robert Bloomfield thinks about when doing economics research in virtual worlds or interviewing guests on his virtual weekly television show, Metanomics. The study of markets in virtual worlds can teach us about economics in the real world, and is raising serious questions for real-world policy makers.   more…

Prosecutors, judges, and police would like to know which psychopathic criminals are likely to repeat their crimes if released and which are not. Kent Kiehl has wheeled his tractor-trailer sized mobile MRI scanner to prisons, where he has done more than 1,000 scans of inmates in the past year that's 10 times the number of such scans of psychopaths ever done. Kiehl will share with us what he's learned.   more…

Sapolsky is a neuroscientist and field biologist who studies, among other things, the effects of stress on the brain, and its relation to depression, brain aging, and PTSD. He is also interested in how parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts. He's looking in particular at toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a parasite that causes rats to lose their fear of cats. Humans can become infected with the parasite, called /Toxoplasma gondii/. Sapolsky will report on how it might affect human behavior.   more…

Lawrence M. Wein uses advanced mathematics and operations research to address bioterrorism risks. He was praised and vilified in 2005 for a /New York Time/s Op-Ed in which he explained how terrorists could poison the nation's milk supply. He calls himself "a probabalist." He has looked at the consequences of attacks using anthrax, smallpox, and botulinum. He's also used his techniques to study Alzheimer's disease, organ-transplant waiting lists, border-security issues, pandemic influenza, and port security.   more…

Robert B. Dunbar roams the world in search of sediments and coral skeletons that can help him track climate change over the past 50 to 12,000 years. These samples are crucial to understanding climate change, he says, because most of the planet's heat is stored in the oceans. Data collected from such projects as submersible dives in the Gulf of Alaska and an Antarctic drilling project suggest how much the Earth is being altered by increasing carbon dioxide independent of the effects of warming.   more…

Why do we say one thing but do something else? We announce we're on a diet and gobble down a burger. Brian Knutson does brain scans as people make decisions, and he's beginning to sort out where and when decisions are made and what can affect them. He's observed brain activity that correlates with anticipatory emotions or what people feel just before they choose. And he believes that some psychiatric disorders, such as phobias and schizophrenia, could result from imbalances in decision-making circuits.   more…

Researchers trying to attack pain are stymied by a fundamental lack of understanding of pain mechanisms. Pain management is trial-and-error. Sean Mackey, who runs what he calls the "house of pain" at Stanford, is trying to understand pain by seeing how it can be derailed. In one recent study, he found that Stanford students who were madly in love were less susceptible to pain while looking at a picture of their beloved. Distraction is also about as effective as love at reducing pain.   more…

Baba Shiv put volunteers into an MRI and told some they were drinking $45-a-bottle wine. The others got $5 wine. Those who got the high price tag liked the wine much more. In both cases, it was, of course, the same wine. What Shiv found was not just that the subjects thought they liked the expensive wine better their brain activity showed that they really did prefer it. His studies concern the emotional brain, and they apply to assemble-it-yourself furniture from Ikea, impossible-to-open bubble packages, coffee and tea, and whether we really want freedom of choice.   more…

Karl Deisseroth can introduce into brain cells a gene sensitive to light, so it is activated only when a lab animal is exposed to a certain color light. By varying where he introduces this gene, he can turn different circuits on and off. He calls it "speaking the language of the brain." He is now using the technique in animals to create models of psychiatric diseases, which, he says, are "the paradigmatic engineering problem."   more…

Effective explosives detection involves a combination of materials science, physics and chemistry. But it's more than a scientific problem. Once a technology has been developed, researchers need to know how to implement it at airports, or in the hand of a soldier searching for explosive devices in Iraq. They also need to anticipate emerging threats.   more…

In honor of the 2009 bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, David M. Kingsley will share with us the latest findings from the nearly completed genome of the threespine stickleback, a fish that thrives in oceans and fresh water.   more…

When stem cells differentiate into more specialized cells, what happens inside the cellular machinery? It's a problem that has defied easy explanation.  Bruce Lahn has been looking into how genes are turned on and off during maturation of a stem cell to find out why it ordinarily cannot go back to its undifferentiated state. He will also discuss some controversial findings on brain evolution, a separate area of investigation.   more…

Jon Krosnick is one of the principal investigators on a $10 million National Science Foundation study of American elections, and an expert on scientific polling. He will talk about how polls can correctly and incorrectly assess the public's views on global warming, elections, and presidential candidates. He'll discuss findings on how the gender of an interviewer can affect a poll, or how placement on a ballot can affect the outcome of a vote. Would Al Gore have won Florida if his name had been first on the ballot?   more…

Almost a decade ago, Saul Perlmutter discovered something that can't be seen or felt dark energy. Though unseen, the universe apparently consists mostly of this stuff -- and it is causing the universe to expand ever faster. Nobody has a clue as to what this stuff is (or if it is even a "stuff"). In fact, new theoretical papers attempting to explain dark energy have appeared an average of once every few days for the past 10 years.   more…

Which statin is best at lowering cholesterol? Drug companies do trials, and, happily for them, each company's trials usually show that its drug is best. In one study, Lisa Bero found that almost half of a group of statin trials were improperly blinded. She has data that show profound problems with the way new drugs are approved. And she has ideas about how the system should be fixed.   more…