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Friday, 23 September 2011
1. UC Berkeley students protest tuition hikes, cuts
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2011
Berkeley — Protest season began with a bang at UC BERKELEY as hundreds of chanting, fist-pumping students angry about tuition hikes charged into Tolman Hall during a raucous protest and building occupation Thursday.
A group filled ground-floor hallways before UC police ordered them to disperse about 9 p.m. Protesters outside Tolman Hall began throwing rocks, bottles and chairs at officers, police said. Two people — both male — were arrested, according to UC POLICE LT. MARC DECOULODE....
"It was a little more violent and aggressive than in the past," DeCoulode said. "We respect people's right to protest, but we ask that they do it safely and peacefully."...
The protesters are angry that basic tuition and mandatory fees have soared to $13,218 this year, twice what they were five years ago — and are likely to rise again....
PROFESSOR RICHARD WALKER, VICE CHAIRMAN OF THE BERKELEY FACULTY ASSOCIATION, told students what they already knew — that the public university is becoming more privately funded as state support diminishes and students pick up more of the costs.
"This great university may no longer be public and may no longer be great," he cried to those gathered on the plaza....
"We share the students' frustrations over the state's disinvestment in higher education, and we absolutely support their right to free speech," said CAMPUS SPOKESWOMAN JANET GILMORE.
But, she said, the protesters would have to leave when the building closed, she said....
Other protesters who have refused to leave buildings have been disciplined under threat of expulsion. Last week, the Alameda County district attorney prosecuted 21 students who took over Wheeler Hall in March.... Full Story
2. Two arrested at UC Berkeley protest
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
September 23, 2011
Two people were arrested after as many as 75 protesters upset over tuition hikes and budget cuts occupied a UC BERKELEY building for most of Thursday afternoon, a university spokesperson said.
The protesters occupied Tolman Hall until the building closed at 9 p.m., at which time campus police gave a dispersal order, said JANET GILMORE OF THE UC BERKELEY OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS. A group of protesters outside the building began throwing rocks, bottles and chairs at police and one person was arrested, according to LT. MARC DECOULUDE OF THE CAMPUS POLICE DEPARTMENT.
The building was empty late Thursday evening, Gilmore said....
Seismic concerns led to the closure of classrooms in Tolman Hall this fall, and protesters wrote in an online blog entry at http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com that the building "stands as a ruin of public education" and that they planned to "reclaim" the campus one building at a time.
They were supported by the BERKELEY FACULTY ASSOCIATION, which on the same site wrote that "faculty, students, staff, parents and alumni could be mobilized to put unprecedented pressure on the legislature to re-fund public education in (California), if the (university) Presidents and Chancellors across the system would mobilize the greater UC community and provide the leadership we all sorely need."...
[This story also appeared in the San Jose Mercury News and Oakland Tribune. Other stories on this topic appeared in more than 100 sources nationwide, including the Sacramento Bee (AP), Chronicle of Higher Education Online, CNN Online, Bay Citizen, Berkeleyside, Berkeley Patch, and Berkeley Daily Planet. Broadcast stories aired on all local stations, with links available online for: KGO TV (link to video) and KQED Radio (link to audio)] Full Story
3. Forever young: Scientists figure out how to renew muscle tissue
Irish Independent
September 22 2011
Muscle tissue can be renewed by chemically resetting its biological clock to an earlier stage of development, a study has shown.
Scientists believe the technique may pave the way to reversing muscle loss due to disease or natural ageing.
It may also be extended to repairs of other kinds of tissue, such as brain and liver....
"The research opens the door to the development of new treatments to combat the degeneration of muscle associated with muscular dystrophy or ageing," said STUDY LEADER DR IRINA CONBOY, FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY.
Crucially, the technique does not rely on the creation of "pluripotent" stem cells — immature cells that can differentiate into virtually any kind of tissue....
The scientists turned the clock back on muscle fibres using one chemical that transmits signals for cell division, and another that prevents cells dying.
"We basically brainwashed the cells to go into the cell cycle, to divide, and also not die in the process," said BERKELEY BIOENGINEER DR PREETI PALIWAL....
[Other stories on this topic appeared in Medical News Today, Newstrack India (ANI), Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, Bioscholar News, and Scope] Full Story
4. Surprising Science Blog: The Evolution of the Orchid and the Orchid Bee
Smithsonian Online
September 23, 2011
When scientists delve into studies of the co-evolution of plants and their pollinators, they have something of a chicken/egg problem—which evolved first, the plant or its pollinator? Orchids and orchid bees are a classic example of this relationship. The flowers depend on the bees to pollinate them so they can reproduce and, in return, the bees get fragrance compounds they use during courtship displays (rather like cologne to attract the lady bees). And researchers had thought that they co-evolved, each species changing a bit, back and forth, over time.
But a new study in Science has found that the relationship isn’t as equal as had been thought. The biologists reconstructed the complex evolutionary history of the plants and their pollinators, figuring out which bees pollinated which orchid species and analyzing the compounds collected by the bees. It seems that the orchids need the bees more than the bees need the flowers—the compounds produced by the orchids are only about 10 percent of the compounds collected by the bees. The bees collect far more of their “cologne” from other sources, such as tree resin, fungi and leaves.
And it was the bees that evolved first, the researchers found, at least 12 million years before the orchids. “The bees evolved much earlier and independently, which the orchids appear to have been catching up,” says the study’s LEAD AUTHOR, SANTIAGO RAMIREZ, A POST-DOC AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. And as the bees evolve new preferences for these chemical compounds, the orchids follow, evolving new compounds to lure back their bee pollinators.
But this study is more than just an interesting look into the evolution of two groups of organisms. The researchers note that in the context of the current decline of bee populations worldwide, their research has disturbing implications for what that decline might mean for plants. “Many of these orchids don’t produce any other type of reward, such as nectar, that would attract other species of bee pollinators,” Ramirez notes. “If you lose one species of bee, you could lose three to four species of orchids.”... Full Story
5. Hair DNA reveals 2 migration waves out of Africa
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2011
Long, long ago, a bold race of early modern humans left Africa and migrated across vast stretches of southern Asia to Australia — a mass migration of humankind that was followed thousands of years later by a second wave of African migrants who would settle all of Europe and the northern reaches of the Eurasian continent.
This new tale of humanity's movements out of Africa and around the world comes from an international team of geneticists who report they have traced the record of that first migration by sequencing the DNA from a single lock of hair of an unknown Australian Aborigine that had lain for nearly a century in a British museum.
The scientists maintain that instead of one human wave out of Africa, as has been traditionally believed, there must have been two....
A report on this elaborate feat of genetic detective work was published online Thursday in the journal Science Express by a group of nearly 60 scientists led by geneticists Eske Willerslev and Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen.
The original work determining the sequence of DNA in the aboriginal hair was accomplished by Danish and Chinese scientists at their joint genomics center in Shenzhen, China, and was compared with DNA sequences from 79 individuals from Asia, Europe and Africa. The results were then sent to a group at UC BERKELEY'S CENTER FOR THEORETICAL EVOLUTIONARY GENOMICS.
There RASMUS NIELSEN AND TWO OTHERS IN HIS LAB, YONG WANG AND KIRK LOHMUELLER, analyzed and confirmed the DNA sequences, focusing on the DNA obtained from the Aborigine's lock of hair....
"Studying DNA can let you go back for hundreds and hundreds of generations, and, after many complex computer simulations, we have strong statistical evidence that makes us pretty confident that the story of the first major human dispersal is correct," Nielsen said.... Full Story
6. Blog Post: Berkeley scientists create visual pictures from brain waves (Video)
Washington Post Online
September 23, 2011
For your Friday morning dose of The Future Is Now: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, SCIENTISTS have managed to create a close approximation of what our thoughts look like. First they mapped brain wave response to 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos. Then, patients viewed a series of videos, and those brain waves were matched with the correlating visuals from the first test.
The result is this video of the clip watched and the matched brain wave activity. It’s amazing how close some of them appear to the original, and it’s equally amazing how some images become written words in our thoughts. The procedure may eventually help create visuals of our dreams.
[Link to videos. Stories on this topic appeared in hundreds of sources worldwide, including Technology Review, Time Magazine Online, Atlantic, Wired, CBS Online, Business Insider, International Business Times, and BioScholar] Full Story
7. QB3 unwraps ‘Startup in a Box’
One-stop shop for life science entrepreneurs
San Francisco Business Times (*requires registration)
September 23, 2011
QB3 is delivering a startup in a box, minus only the bow.
Working with banking and legal partners, the University of California’s link between life sciences companies and academic researchers is rolling out a new program — dubbed Startup in a Box — to move researchers-cum-entrepreneurs a step closer to their startup dreams. If all goes as planned, the program will launch 15 to 25 companies a year, said Douglas Crawford, associate director of QB3, or the CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE FOR QUANTITATIVE BIOSCIENCES.
“It starts with, ‘I’ve got an idea’ to a well-functioning company,” Crawford said.
Since starting its Garage incubator on the Mission Bay campus of UC San Francisco in 2006, QB3’s network has grown to four locations in San Francisco and BERKELEY housing 43 companies.
But where the Garage network provides small chunks of space to help young companies spin a concept from UCSF, UC BERKELEY or UC Santa Cruz into a product, Startup in a Box aims to be a one-stop startup shop for breaking down barriers that stop companies from forming in the first place....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
8. Trailblazers for a Good Cause: Empowering Consumers To Shop Their Values With Dara O’Rourke of GoodGuide
Care2.com
September 23, 2011
The Trailblazers for Good Q&A Series sits down with the most world shaking individuals leading the movement to align impact, profit and purpose. Here we pick the brains of top social entrepreneurs to learn first hand from their stunning accomplishments, utter failures, and stiff challenges in leading the revolution of doing well by doing good. Join us as we explore the collective consciousness that drives and inspires these individuals.
DARA O’ROURKE is the co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer of GoodGuide and an ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND LABOR POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. Dara has spent the last 20 years researching the environmental, labor, and health impacts of global production systems. Dara’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, Business Week, Newsweek, Time, CBS, ABC, NPR, and even O — the Oprah Magazine. Dara has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the Otrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a wide range of non-governmental organizations. He was previously a professor at MIT. DARA HOLDS AN MS AND PH.D. FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY and a BS from MIT.
What is the GoodGuide and what inspired you to start it?
GoodGuide provides information about the health, environmental and social performance of products and companies. Our mission is to help consumers make purchasing decisions that reflect their personal values. We believe that better information can transform the marketplace: as more consumers buy better products, retailers and manufacturers will face incentives to make products that are safe, environmentally sustainable and produced using ethical sourcing of raw materials and labor. GoodGuide’s science team – comprised of chemists, toxicologists, nutritionists, sociologists, and lifecycle assessment experts – has rated over 120,000 consumer products on their health, environmental and social performance.
The idea for GoodGuide came about while I was putting sunscreen on my then 3-year-old daughter’s face. I started wondering about the ingredients in her sunscreen, so I went back to campus at UC Berkeley, where I teach, did some research, and found out that the sunscreen contained traces of potentially toxic chemicals. I then researched the rest of my daughter’s stuff and found that her shampoo, her favorite toys, and even her furniture contained ingredients with potential health hazards. This surprised and angered me. I realized that even though I have a Ph.D., and study products and supply chains full-time, I knew almost nothing about the products I was bringing into my own house. This motivated me to create GoodGuide, to give consumers the information they need to make better decisions about which products best match their health, environmental, and ethical concerns.... Full Story
9. Insight-Economic Malaise Fuels Global Monetary Order Debate
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
September 23, 2011
London (Reuters) — Put money supply growth on auto pilot. Make financial stability an explicit goal of central banking. Set up a European Monetary Fund. Create a new global currency anchor by pegging the yuan to a basket of commodities.
A flurry of proposals from economists, coinciding with a semi-annual IMF gathering in Washington, reflects more than a passing loss of confidence in policymakers' ability to get to grips with the intractable financial crisis that began in 2007....
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama agreed on Wednesday on the desirability of adding the yuan to the basket of currencies that make up the Special Drawing Right (SDR), the IMF's in-house unit of account....
Some policymakers would like a broad-based SDR to evolve into a global reserve currency, but a recent paper from the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London argues that greater use of SDRs would not, by itself, cure the structural efficiencies of the international monetary system.
Economics professors Emmanual Farhi of Harvard University, PIERRE-OLIVER GOURINCHAS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, and Hélène Rey of the London Business School instead recommend ways to temper crises by making international liquidity more plentiful.
They advocate issuing mutually guaranteed European bonds; making temporary central bank swaps permanent; expanding IMF credit facilities and funding mechanisms; and creating a mechanism at the IMF to pool foreign-exchange reserves.... Full Story
10. Token Conservative Blog: Judge Vaughn Walker’s personal prop
San Francisco Chronicle Online
September 22, 2011
Former Judge Vaughn Walker used sealed recordings from the Prop. 8 trial during a speech he delivered at the University of Arizona in February. Feel free to watch the entire speech below, or you can go to minute 33 and watch the portion in which he plays video from the trial.
Watch and you can see why former U.S. Attorney Joe Russionello believes that the entire reason for recording was “to expose, and I use the term guardedly, the witnesses who testified against gay marriage.”
UC BERKELEY LAW PROFESSOR JOHN YOO believes that proponents of cameras in courtrooms might want to consider alternate scenarios: “Would people think that we should allow the televising of testimony by victims in rape trials? I would think not. Or should we allow Southern courts during the Civil Rights protest era to publish the lists of all NAACP members? The Supreme Court said that the risk of retaliation outweighed the right to publicize everything in all cases.”... Full Story
11. Pioneer of EDA to speak at IEF event
EE Times
September 23, 2011
London – PROFESSOR ALBERTO SANGIOVANNI-VINCENTELLI, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT, is one of two keynote speakers added to the program of the International Electronics Forum to be held at the Ayre Hotel, 5-7th October 2011, Seville, Spain.
Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, also known as ASV, is sometimes described as one of the fathers of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. This is because, as well as being a distinguished academic ASV helped found both Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopys Inc., two of the pioneers of the EDA industry. Born in Italy ASV was a graduate of Politecnico di Milano in 1971 before joining the University of California, Berkeley in 1976....
The IEF, organized by Future Horizons (Sevenoaks, England) is now in its 20th year. It includes more than one dozen high-level speakers that address the complete electronics value chain from advanced technology and R&D through to end-market applications and services. This year the assembled C-level executives will attempt to delineate and make sense of the "new rules" that govern the electronics industry.... Full Story
12. You better stand up for this
Canadian Business
September 21, 2011
Nobody thought of office work as a life-threatening activity three decades ago. Back in 1981, we had not yet begun seriously fretting about the health effects of sitting at our desks all day, staring at blinking terminals and breathing recycled air. So it was dumb luck that a pile of data from that era existed to help a U.S.-Canadian team of researchers later prove the perilousness of our sedentary time.
Back in 1981, the Canada Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute asked 17,013 adults how much of their day they spent sitting. Follow-up interviews conducted up to 13 years after the original survey were used to track the number of deaths and serious illnesses among the participants. When 21st-century researchers cross-referenced the death statistics with the sitting data, they encountered a stark result. Controlling for all other factors—age, existing illnesses and even physical exercise—the more a survey respondent sat in 1981, the more likely he or she was to be dead by 1994....
People may blame 800-calorie burgers and a lack of exercise for the western world’s obesity epidemic, but there is evidence it is our jobs, not our off-hours habits, that have changed. Studies show people in industrialized countries actually exercise more than in decades past. Meanwhile, reports of our obscene overeating may be grossly overstated....
Carrie Dyck, a linguistics professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, Nfld., was one of the countless affected by pain she believes came from sitting down all day. “My legs felt bad,” she says....
Dyck ... bought a standing desk through her department’s office budget five years ago and never looked back. She still sits down to do any careful reading but uses a purpose-built standing desk for computer work....
Dyck’s colleagues have inspected her arrangement with interest, but no one has copied it. Standing at a desk frankly looks goofy to some people, probably because we associate sitting with working. Steelcase’s ergonomists say peer pressure is among the biggest obstacles to alternative office furniture. GALEN CRANZ, A SOCIOLOGIST AND PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY who has long crusaded for more active work environments writes via e-mail: “It will take cultural change in order to make significant change.”... Full Story
13. Hikers’ case shows lack of U.S. leverage with Iran
Washington Post
September 22, 2011
Tehran — An intense two-year effort to free two American hikers from prison in Iran involved diplomats, lawyers and leaders from several countries but no direct participation from U.S. officials.
The back story on how SHANE BAUER and JOSHUA FATTAL were released Wednesday from Evin prison in Tehran, met by the Swiss ambassador and flown out of Iran on a private plane to the tiny sultanate of Oman highlighted the U.S. government’s limited leverage with the Islamic republic....
The case stands in sharp contrast to a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Pakistan in January, when CIA contractor Raymond A. Davis fatally shot two men he said were trying to rob him in Lahore. Through negotiations with Pakistani officials, the United States managed to get Davis released from prison in March after relatives of the dead Pakistanis received as much as $2.3 million in “blood money” compensation.
In Iran, the United States had to rely on countries such as Switzerland, Oman and Iraq. Washington was unable to deal directly with Iran’s judiciary or its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad....
U.S. officials have expressed worries about the lack of communication between Washington and Tehran — not only in matters such as the hikers’ case but regarding incidents in the Persian Gulf, in which a clash of U.S. and Iranian naval ships could lead to war....
MOHAMMED JAVAD LARIJANI, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, traveled to New York last year as part of efforts to resolve the hikers’ case. LARIJANI, AN ALUMNUS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY with two high-ranking brothers — one heads the Iranian parliament and the other is chief justice — played a key role in convincing Iranian leaders that it was in their interest to release Bauer and Fattal, even though the two were suspected of espionage and were sentenced last month to eight years in prison.... Full Story
14. Obituary: Bob MacKenzie — KTVU reporter — dies
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2011
San Francisco — BOB MACKENZIE, who brought a rare geniality to the job of television news reporter, died Thursday. He was 75.
Mr. MacKenzie, who died of cancer at his home in Antioch, was a fixture at KTVU from 1978 until last year, when he made the last of what had become occasional appearances on the air. His forte was the wry yarn about some facet of Bay Area life, a task much harder than it seems....
During his career, Mr. MacKenzie was the recipient of 13 local Emmy awards as well as other honors. He was a television critic for the Oakland Tribune and TV Guide before moving from print journalism to the small screen where, he told a Chronicle reporter in 1984, "We make more money for doing less work and that's a fact."...
Robert Kenneth MacKenzie grew up in East Oakland, GRADUATING FROM UC BERKELEY IN 1962 WITH A BACHELOR'S DEGREE IN JOURNALISM. Before long, he was back in Oakland at the Tribune, where he spent 14 years before being hired by TV Guide as the lead critic, continuing to write for that then-influential magazine even after joining KTVU.... Full Story
15. Friday Five: Your family weekend guide, Sept. 24-25
San Francisco Chronicle Online
September 23, 2011
Looking for something to do this weekend? Here are five fun, family-friendly events happening around the Bay Area.
1) Fall Free-for-All, Berkeley. A full day of free CAL PERFORMANCES! See dance performances, hear music, watch a puppet show, and more. See the schedule for a full listing of performances, including a chit-chat with Jane Lynch from Glee. Big laughs! UC Berkeley. Sun., 11:00 am – 6:00 pm. Free. All ages. ...
[For more information, visit Cal Performances] Full Story