40th Anniversary Gala: 40 Years at the Center of Transformation
On Saturday, April 13, 2013, the UC Berkeley Student Learning Center hosted 40 Years at the Center of Transformation, a gala celebrating its 40th Anniversary. Guests enjoyed a reception, dinner and dancing, as well as a program in which alumni spoke to the multiple ways in which the Student Learning Center has transformed their lives. SLC staff members also introduced the Lorraine "Rainy" Rust Endowment Fund, created in memory of Rainy Rust, a former Assistant Director of the Student Learning Center. The fund will support the work of undergraduates teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Calcium, the main constituent of bone, turns out to play a major role in regulating the cells that orchestrate bone growth, a finding that could affect treatment for conditions caused by too much collagen deposition, such as fibrosis and excessive scarring, as well as diseases of too little bone growth, such as Treacher Collins Syndrome (TCS).
The finding by Michael Rape and his colleagues at UC Berkeley came from study of the signals that tell undifferentiated stem cells in the very early embryo to mature into bone cells. In the craniofacial disorder TCS, for example, the embryo does not form a structure called the neural crest, from which the jaws, inner ear and numerous other bones in the head and face develop.
As a result, people like Francis Smith, a University of Colorado researcher who visited Rape in his lab a month ago, require dozens of surgeries during childhood to reconstruct the face, implant hearing aids and even reconstruct the trachea to breathe normally.
Cont'd story at: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/10/06/research-gives-hope-to-those-with-head-and-facial-deformities/
Rape hopes that basic research to pinpoint the key signals that trigger proper bone growth can help those like Smith avoid such painful surgeries. One option could be the implantation of a biodegradable matrix seeded with bone cells called chondrocytes, which would then be stimulated to release collagen, the blueprint for bone growth. The new findings suggest that stimulating collagen release with calcium would also trigger proper bone growth.
Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally
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University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, three-dimensional scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland.
Essentially a computed tomography, or CT scan, of Earth’s interior, the picture emerged from a supercomputer simulation at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The new, high-resolution map of the mantle — the hot rock below Earth’s crust but above the planet’s iron core — not only shows these connections for many hotspots on the planet, but reveals that below about 1,000 kilometers the plumes are between 600 and 1,000 kilometers across, up to five times wider than geophysicists thought. The plumes are likely at least 400 degrees Celsius hotter than surrounding rock.
Senior author Barbara Romanowicz, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science, noted that the connections between the lower-mantle plumes and the volcanic hotspots are not direct because the tops of the plumes spread out like the delta of a river as they merge with the less viscous upper mantle rock.
To create a high-resolution CT of Earth, French used very accurate numerical simulations of how seismic waves travel through the mantle, and compared their predictions to the ground motion actually measured by detectors around the globe. Earlier attempts by other researchers often approximated the physics of wave propagation and focused mainly on the arrival times of only certain types of seismic waves, such as the P (pressure) and S (shear) waves, which travel at different speeds. French used numerical simulations to compute all components of the seismic waves, such as their scattering and diffraction, and tweaked the model repeatedly to fit recorded data using a method similar to statistical regression. The final computation required 3 million CPU hours on NERSC’s supercomputers, though parallel computing shrank this to a couple of weeks.
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New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina: Lessons for California's Levees: The recent flooding and devastation of the greater New Orleans region during hurricane Katrina represented the most costly peace-time failure of an engineered system in North American history. Extensive investigations and analyses have been performed by several major teams in the wake of this disaster, and some very important lessons have been learned. Many of these have very direct and urgent applications to California's levee systems and flood risk exposure, and to the security of our State's vital water supply systems. UC Berkeley Professor Ray Seed discusses what California can learn from New Orleans and how to prevent a...