Science (Audio)

Heart repair is moving beyond a single strategy. Catriona Jamieson, M.D., Ph. D., Ehtisham Mahmud, M.D., FACC, FSCAI, Eric Adler, M.D., Karen Christman, Ph. D., and set designer Robert Brill discuss approaches to preventing and repairing heart damage. Mahmud describes a model linking cardiovascular care, training and clinical research. Adler explains how patient skin cells can be turned into beati...

Grecia Paola Siono Gutierrez and Jose Enrique Siono Gutierrez share how family, mentorship and community shaped their path from Mexicali to studying electrical engineering at UC San Diego. The siblings describe beginning at community college, transferring together and adjusting to classrooms where they often saw few students who shared their background. Grecia discusses finding support through the...

Valley fever, also known as coccidioidomycosis, is a fungal infection that is contracted when soil borne spores are disrupted and inhaled. The infections can cause symptoms similar to pneumonia or COVID-19, such as cough, headache, fever and, in more severe cases, meningitis. UC Davis Health patient Rex shares his journey with valley fever and how UC Davis doctors and researchers are advancing ear...

RNA damage, mentorship and the realities of building a career in science come together in Alex Chaim's work and personal journey. Chaim, principal investigator of the Chaim Lab and assistant professor of cell and developmental biology at UC San Diego, studies whether damage to RNA may contribute to diseases associated with oxidative stress, including neurodegeneration. He also reflects on finding...

New research at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain is taking a leap forward in understanding how the brain — down to the individual neuron — navigates us through the world to find what we need. Jack Lin, the study’s principal investigator, is a professor and neurologist who directs the UC Davis Comprehensive Epilepsy Program. Lin works with patients like Travis Rouse. He has epilepsy, and a RN...

Chancellor May stops by the UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab to meet the researchers behind brain-computer interface technology. The technology helped a man with ALS communicate again with his family and used AI to mimic the sound of his own voice. Watch as Chancellor May tries out the technology himself in a lab simulation. Series: "UC Davis News" [Health and Medicine] [Science] [Show ID: 41741]

Climate change is fundamentally altering marine environments worldwide. But what does this mean for the creatures that call the ocean home? Join Martin Tresguerres, Ph. D., as he delves into the work of the Allen Discovery Center for Neurobiology in Changing Environments (ADC-NiCE), where researchers are working towards answering this question. Through a combination of neurobiology, physiology and...

Topology offers a way to organize complex data by looking for shape, structure, and relationships. Yusu Wang, Ph. D., UC San Diego, and Gunnar E. Carlsson, Ph. D., Stanford University, discuss how ideas from algebraic topology move from pure mathematics into data science, machine learning, and AI. Carlsson explains why topological data analysis helps identify meaningful groups in large data sets,...

Archaeology can help communities understand environmental change, protect cultural heritage, and prepare for an uncertain climate future. Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo, Ph. D., of UC San Diego studies relationships among people, oceans, coastal ecosystems, and climate in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. She explains how Hurricane Maria shifted her research from identifying theoretical vulnerabilities to...

Authentic autism representation begins with listening to autistic people and including them in stories about their lives. Seth Bakke, producer, writer and director of The Rescue, explains how his autistic cousin Aaron and a poem by autistic typer Peter Tran inspired the film. Bakke describes working with Aaron on screen, consulting the Tran family and adapting the set to support his needs. Autisti...

Scientific progress depends on curiosity, investment and the freedom to take risks. Nobel Laureate and UC San Diego alumnus Fred Ramsdell traces his path from community college to biotechnology and a discovery that reshaped understanding of immune regulation. He explains how decades of publicly funded research made that breakthrough possible and why failed experiments are essential steps toward di...

With the success of Artemis II, NASA is preparing for humanity’s return to the Moon through the ambitious Artemis Project. In this lecture, Professor Neil Farber explores the future Artemis missions, the spacecraft and technologies designed to support them, and the challenges NASA faces in sending astronauts back to the lunar surface. Building on the legacy of the Apollo program, Artemis represent...

Human brain organoids help researchers study neurodevelopmental disorders that are difficult to examine directly in developing brain tissue. Giorgia Quadrato, USC, uses cortical organoids derived from human pluripotent stem cells to examine SYNGAP1, an autism risk gene associated in the transcript with intellectual disability, epilepsy, and global developmental delay. Quadrato describes how SYNGAP...

As chatbots trained on Large Language Models become more sophisticated, their responses can sometimes seem uncanny, as if they come from a source that is mysterious, inexplicable, or even divine. Webb Keane, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, examines what happens when people treat artificial intelligence as a kind of “metahuman.” He explains how this reflects a broader human...

Hard optimization problems often look impossible through worst-case analysis, but real-world problems can contain structure that helps algorithms work faster. Ellen Vitercik, Ph. D., of Stanford University explains how machine learning can improve algorithm design for NP-hard optimization problems while preserving the formal guarantees that make solvers useful. She discusses beyond worst-case anal...

Heart regeneration faces two connected challenges: replacing lost muscle and keeping transplanted cells safe and accepted by the body. Charles Murry, M.D., Ph. D., of USC explains why the adult heart heals major cardiomyocyte loss with scar tissue rather than new muscle, leading to progressive heart failure. Murry describes how stem cell derived cardiomyocytes can be manufactured at scale, transpl...

Hematopoietic stem cells make blood across the lifespan, but they do not all behave the same way. Stephanie Xie, Ph. D., Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University of Toronto, examines how these rare cells self-renew, differentiate, and respond to inflammatory stress, asking whether differences in the stem cell pool help explain why aging affects people so differently. Xie identifies...

Rare disease research is creating new paths for diagnosis, treatment, and broader medical discovery. Gene therapy can repair or replace faulty genes, and work on cystinosis has led to a stem cell platform now being applied to Danon disease, Sanfilippo syndrome C, Friedreich’s ataxia, and Alzheimer’s research. Funding programs support gene therapy, clinical trials, and new platform approaches for r...

Health data affects artificial intelligence in important ways. Camille Nebeker, Ed. D., M.S., UC San Diego, explains why ethically sourced data is foundational to building trustworthy, AI-ready health data repositories. Nebeker examines how ethical sourcing applies across the full data lifecycle, including consent, governance, transparency, data quality, privacy, stewardship, and community engagem...

Pre-cancer and cancer can begin when stressed blood-forming stem cells lose their normal controls. Catriona Jamieson, M.D., Ph. D., UC San Diego, explains how inflammation-linked editing enzymes, repetitive elements in the genome, and stem cell stress shape the progression from myeloproliferative neoplasms to acute myeloid leukemia. Jamieson examines how spaceflight accelerates stem cell aging, ho...

Space healthcare depends on connected health data that can follow people wherever care happens. Peter DeVault, Epic, explains how electronic health record tools built for hospitals, labs, and patients can also support healthcare in space. DeVault describes patient-facing tools like MyChart, interoperability across health systems, structured genomics and pharmacogenomics in the patient record, and...

Brain aging and disease research can gain new insights from space. Aline M.A. Martins, Ph. D., UC San Diego, explains how neuroscience studies in space use brain organoids, proteomics, and single-cell analysis to understand cognition decline, space-induced neurosenescence, and disease-related changes. Martins examines molecular markers of senescence, mitochondrial impairment, and neuroinflammation...

Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben has helped shape how the world understands climate change. In this conversation with Marco Werman, host of The World, McKibben offers a clear-eyed look at the climate crisis and the solutions that could help reduce the damage of a warming planet. As part of the Burke Lectureship at UC San Diego, McKibben also explores the moral and spiritual questions at t...

How does global warming connect to the extreme weather people experience close to home? Drawing on the work of the Weather Extremes and Climate Impacts Analytics group, Sasha Gershunov of Scripps Institution of Oceanography outlines the accelerating warming trend, the role of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide, and the greenhouse effect, and how it relates to extreme weather. He also traces key miles...

Microgravity can change biological systems in ways that may open new paths for biomedical research and commercialization in space. Twyman Clements, Space Tango, explains how “middleware” helps connect research use cases with space infrastructure by adapting terrestrial processes and supply chains for a spaceflight environment. Clements examines how long-duration microgravity creates different phys...