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Campus Research at
Work
New Discoveries
Advance Science, Enrich Lives
By
Tamara Keith, Public Affairs
UC Berkeley is a cornucopia of research and discovery.
Scientific breakthroughs regularly occur in campus
laboratories and classrooms, improving our lives and
understanding. For example:
Growing Better Brains
Professor Marian Diamond knows brains. As a Berkeley
researcher and professor in integrative biology, she has
spent more than three decades studying the complicated gray
mass. In her latest book she's letting the world in on a
significant discovery about the way a child's brain develops
and how parents can help the process.
Diamond's new book, co-authored by Janet Hopson, "Magic
Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child's Intelligence,
Creativity, and Healthy Emotions from Birth through
Adolescence" (E P Dutton, 1998), surveys studies of human
and animal brain development and draws inferences about the
best way to enrich a child's brain.
"We have to catch the brain while it's growing rapidly
after birth," said Diamond. "If you provide early enrichment
while the brain is growing rapidly you can get larger
changes than after it has reached its peak of growth." This
informative guide on how to get the most out of a child's
mind from fetus to teen includes more than 100 pages of
learning resources for the parent and educator, including
suggested computer software.
Diamond's research is just one of many scientific
breakthroughs that occur on campus almost daily. A
significant number of them have wide-ranging impact. In the
last year alone Berkeley faculty and researchers have made
many discoveries that are already affecting the average
citizen in countless ways.
Pollution Busters
UC Berkeley researchers recently discovered that
cattails and other wetland vegetation are more than just
pretty plants; they actually work as pollution busters,
cleaning contaminated water and soil. Wetland vegetation
planted around a Bay Area Chevron oil refinery for cosmetic
reasons was found to remove 89 percent of the toxic chemical
selenium from the refinery's waste water (which flows
through the plants on its way to the Bay).
The investigation revealed that 10 to 30 percent of the
selenium is broken down and then released harmlessly into
the air through a process called volatilization. The rest is
stored in the plants' roots, shoots and sediments.
Researchers are now looking at ways to get the most out of
the plants' natural filtering system.
"This approach will revolutionize water treatment in the
Western U.S.," said Professor Norman Terry, a UC Berkeley
plant biologist and principal investigator on the study of
this natural filtration system. "There will be thousands of
acres of constructed wetlands put in."
Lizards and Lyme Disease
A recent UC Berkeley study of ticks in the East Bay
Hills explains why Lyme disease is less common in California
than in the northeastern United States. Ticks carrying the
Lyme disease bacterium can be cleansed of the infection when
they feed on the blood of a common western fence lizard.
"Lizards are doing humanity a great service here," said
Robert Lane, professor of insect biology in Berkeley's
College of Natural Resources. "The lizard's blood contains a
substance -- probably a heat-sensitive protein -- that kills
the Lyme disease spirochete, a kind of bacterium."
Lane's study of ticks in Tilden Park showed that only 1.3
percent of adult ticks and 5.7 percent of nymphal ticks
carry the Lyme disease bacterium. These rates are much lower
than those in northeastern states where approximately 50
percent of adult ticks and 25 percent of nymphal ticks carry
the disease.
Lane collaborated with Berkeley researcher Gary Quistad
on the recent work, which was funded by the National
Institutes of Health. 
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