Ashok Gadgil honored for work in global innovation such as UV Waterworks, Darfur Stove.

Ashok Gadgil, Berkeley Lab

The Lemelson-MIT Program today (May 2) announced Ashok Gadgil as the recipient of the 2012 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation in recognition of his steady pursuit to blend research, invention and humanitarianism for broad social impact. Gadgil is the director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I am honored and thrilled that the Lemelson-MIT Program has chosen to recognize innovations to help improve lives of poor people in the developing world,” said Gadgil. “We can make a positive difference to the lives of large numbers of people by addressing big problems with low-cost but high-impact innovative solutions.”

Gadgil’s inventions and innovations are improving the livelihood of more than 100 million people in more than 41 countries on four continents, with estimated annual societal economic benefits exceeding $5 billion per year.

He developed the UV Waterworks, a technology for developing countries that uses ultraviolet light to inexpensively disinfect drinking water. UV Waterworks earned Gadgil the Discover Award in 1996 for the most significant environmental invention of the year, as well as the Popular Science award for “Best of What is New–1996.” UV Waterworks is now deployed in villages by WaterHealth International Inc. It provides affordable, safe drinking water to more than 4 million people in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Liberia and Ghana, with plans for expansion to Bangladesh. Gadgil estimates that with 5 million people served, UV Waterworks would now annually avoid about 1,000 statistical deaths of children from diarrheal diseases in the serviced population.

Current projects by his research team include developing low-cost ways of removing high levels of naturally occurring arsenic from groundwater used for drinking, a serious problem in rural Bangladesh, neighboring parts of India and some other parts of the world.

His research team developed a fuel-efficient stoves for Darfur to help reduce the firewood demand of Darfur displaced persons, most of whom are women at risk of violence as they forage for firewood outside of camp boundaries. To date, more than 20,000 Berkeley-Darfur Stoves have been distributed, helping 125,000 displaced women and their dependents. A survey in 2010 in North Darfur found that the $20 stove annually saves $330 in fuel costs annually for each recipient household. Thus, over their five-year estimated life, the 20,000 stoves will save $33 million for the recipient households. Gadgil is currently working on an iteration of the stove for dissemination in Ethiopia.

The utility-sponsored compact fluorescent lamp leasing programs that he pioneered are being successfully implemented in 38 countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Gadgil has received several other awards and honors for his work, including the Pew Fellowship in Conservation and the Environment in 1991 for his work on accelerating energy efficiency in developing countries, the World Technology Award for Energy in 2002, the Tech Laureate Award in 2004, the Heinz Award in 2009, the European Inventor Award in 2011, and the Zayed Future Energy Prize for sustainable energy in early 2012.

He serves on several international and national advisory committees dealing with energy efficiency, invention and innovation, and issues of development and the environment. During the 2004-2005 academic year Gadgil was the MAP/Ming Visiting Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University.

The Lemelson-MIT Program celebrates outstanding innovators and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention.

Neurological process triggered by suspected carcinogen may increase autism risk.

Isaac Pessah, UC Davis

New research from UC Davis and Washington State University shows that PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, launch a cellular chain of events that leads to an overabundance of dendrites — the filament-like projections that conduct electrochemical signals between neurons — and disrupts normal patterns of neuronal connections in the brain.

“Dendrite growth and branching during early development is a finely orchestrated process, and the presence of certain PCBs confuses the conductor of that process,” said Pamela Lein, a developmental neurobiologist and professor of molecular biosciences in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “Impaired neuronal connectivity is a common feature of a number of conditions, including autism spectrum disorders.”

Reported today (April 24) in two related studies in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the findings underscore the developing brain’s vulnerability to environmental exposures and demonstrate how PCBs could add to autism risk.

“We don’t think PCB exposure causes autism,” Lein said, “but it may increase the likelihood of autism in children whose genetic makeup already compromises the processes by which neurons form connections.”

The senior authors of the studies were Lein and Isaac Pessah, chair of molecular biosciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine and director of the Center for Children’s Environmental Health at UC Davis. Both are researchers with the UC Davis MIND Institute, which is dedicated to finding answers to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The lead author was Gary Wayman of Washington State University’s Program in Neuroscience, who first described the molecular pathway that controls the calcium signaling in the brain that guides normal dendrite growth.

Wayman found that key cellular players, called calcium and calmodulin kinases, are activated by increased calcium levels. Activated calmodulin kinase then turns on the protein known as CREB that regulates genes that produce Wnt2, a potent molecule and the final arbiter of whether and how dendrites grow. Wnt2 directs structural proteins to construct scaffolding that supports dendrite growth and branching.

“Orderly choreography of the calmodulin kinase-to-Wnt2 pathway translates normal increases in calcium levels into normal levels of dendrite production,” said Wayman. “The wiring of billions of neurons is dependent on the health of this cellular process and is crucial to proper development of virtually all complex behaviors, learning, memories and language.”

For the current studies, the team set out to determine if that pathway was altered by exposure to PCBs, focusing on neurons of the hippocampus — the brain region linked with learning and memory and known to suffer impaired connectivity in many neurodevelopmental disorders.

The scientists also focused on the effects of an understudied PCB subset known as non-dioxin-like PCBs, which have been shown to increase calcium levels in neurons. Both non-dioxin-like PCBs and the more familiar dioxin-like subset were widely used in electrical equipment in the 1950s and 1960s. Banned in the 1970s because of the potential for dioxin-like PCBs to cause cancer, all PCBs are stable compounds that persist throughout the environment today.

One of the current UC Davis studies examined dendrite growth in rat pups born to and nursed by PCB-exposed mothers. Another study analyzed how PCBs affect rat neurons in cell cultures at developmental stages similar to those in the third trimester of pregnancy in humans. In both studies, PCB exposure levels were similar to those found in the human diet and in human tissues, including the placenta and breast milk.

Evaluation of the brains of the rats exposed to PCBs early in life showed significant overproduction of dendrites. The cellular studies showed that PCBs triggered the calcium pathway that led to the aberrant brain architecture, and that dendrite production was normal when that cellular pathway was blocked.

“We are the first to show that non-dioxin-like PCBs alter how the developing brain gets wired by hijacking the calcium signaling pathway and greatly expanding dendrite growth,” said Lein.

The experiments also helped identify for the first time the specific trigger for this cellular chain of events as the ryanodine receptor (RyR) calcium channel. Pessah, a recognized leader in calcium-channel dysfunction and neurodevelopment, previously showed that RyR is selectively activated by non-dioxin-like PCBs. The new studies prove that RyR is a necessary component in the pathway that controls dendritic growth.

“These same calcium pathways are implicated in some forms of autism and, while environmental exposures alone do not cause autism, these new findings provide good evidence that PCBs could add to autism risk in genetically predisposed children,” said Pessah. “Understanding the fundamental mechanisms by which PCBs alter neural networks sets the stage for research on environmental contaminants that are structurally related to PCBs, including flame retardants, and their risks to susceptible populations.”

In addition to Lein, Pessah and Wayman, coauthors on the papers were Dongren Yang, Diptiman Bose and Donald Bruun of UC Davis; Adam Lesiak of Washington State University; and Soren Impey and Veronica Ledoux of the Oregon Health & Science University.

Funding for the studies was provided by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01 ES014901, R01 ES017425, P42 ES04699, R01 MH086032, P01 ES011269 and T32 ES007060), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (grants R833292 and R829388), the Hope for Depression Research Foundation and the J.B. Johnson Foundation.

The studies — “PCB 95 Promotes Dendritic Growth via Ryanodine Receptor-Dependent Mechanisms” and “PCB 95 Modulates Calcium-Dependent Signaling Pathway Responsible for Activity-Dependent Dendritic Growth” — will be published in a future print issue of the journal with several other investigations focused on autism and the environment. Copies of the UC Davis-Washington State University studies are available online now at http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1104832 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1104833.

At the UC Davis MIND Institute, world-renowned scientists engage in research to find improved treatments as well as the causes and cures for autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, fragile X syndrome, Tourette syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics, pharmacology and behavioral sciences are making inroads into a better understanding of brain function. The UC Davis MIND Institute draws from these and other disciplines to conduct collaborative, multidisciplinary research. For more information, visit mindinstitute.ucdavis.edu.

Washington State University’s Program in Neuroscience is housed in the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology and Physiology in the College of Veterinary Medicine. The program will be moving to a new state-of-the-art neuroscience research building in spring 2013. Research in the program focuses on how cellular and molecular events integrate to control organismal physiology (e.g., cardiac function, autonomics) and behavior (e.g., sleep, feeding, addiction, emotion). For more information, visit vetmed.wsu.edu/neuroscience.

UC’s Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program is studying the health risks.

The stale smell of cigarette smoke moves many a traveler to request a smoke-free hotel room. Who wants to smell someone else’s bad habit? But the lingering odor may be telling us something else — something more troubling.

Research funded by the UC-run Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) shows that long after smoke has cleared from a room, toxic pollutants from cigarette smoke adhere to bedspreads, carpets, clothing — even furniture, walls, ventilation systems and hallways of hotels that allow smoking. Similar toxicants cling to surfaces in rental cars driven by smokers.

Byproducts of cigarette burning produces potent carcinogens when they combine with common indoor compounds. Many can remain in rooms for months.

“In the 1950s, we found that smoking could kill you; then research in the ’80s and ’90s, showed that secondhand smoke is dangerous,” said Georg Matt, a psychology professor of at San Diego State University who focuses on policies to protect nonsmokers.

“The potential health risks of what we call thirdhand smoke are only now being studied. This is a new frontier.”

Matt is a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at UC San Diego and an investigator in a new thirdhand smoke research effort by the TRDRP.

The TRDRP funded the research consortium in 2011 to bring together experts in a range of fields, from toxicology and chemistry to behavioral and policy research, in order to determine the scope of thirdhand smoke risk and help develop policies to protect people where needed. Consortium researchers presented their findings on thirdhand smoke at the “Linking Tobacco Control Research and Practice for a Healthier California” conference — held April 10-12 in Sacramento. The conference was sponsored by TRDRP and the state’s Tobacco Control Program.

“We don’t yet know the degree of risk, but we are already finding that indoor smoking leaves a nearly indelible imprint,” Matt said. “We need to find out what risk this pollution poses.”

Risks to infants and toddlers are of particular concern to consortium scientists. Young children crawl on rugs and carpets and often put their hands in their mouths. They have more contact with pollutants that cling to surfaces in the home.

An infant’s developing brain is very susceptible to low levels of toxins, and immature immune systems are particularly vulnerable to persistent pollutants. Researchers suspect that children with respiratory diseases like asthma are likely to be at highest risk.

“This is a newly emerging concern, but one we think is very important to study,” said Anwer Mujeeb, program officer for TRDRP’s thirdhand smoke research effort. “We are leading the way in research to learn how these pollutants form, how long they remain and how they interact. Of course, it’s critical to determine at what concentrations they pose a threat to health.”

TRDRP is funded by California state cigarette taxes and managed by UC. The program launched the thirdhand smoke research consortium with $3.35 million to support a range of investigations.

“We’re very fortunate to have in California scientists who are already making an impact in tobacco research,” said Mujeeb. The research goes hand in hand with efforts to reduce the number of people who take up smoking in the first place.”

Matt and his colleagues in the THS consortium have shown that about 90 percent of nicotine from cigarette smoke remains on indoor surfaces long after the butt is in the ashtray. Their new research shows how much nicotine nonsmokers pick up on their hands from furniture and bedding in hotel rooms where cigarettes have been smoked. Cotinine, a byproduct of nicotine metabolism, shows up in the urine of these nonsmokers after a single night in the hotel room.

“Secondhand smoke is a mixture of more than 4,000 compounds, including some 50 carcinogens, plus irritants and teratogens (substances that can cause developmental or birth defects). But the potential dangers don’t end with direct exposure to smoke,” Matt said.

In effect, the smoke never really clears.

Consortium research brings together scientists and policy scholars at UC campuses, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and other sites in and out of the state. Experts vet research proposals, and studies are selected to answer the many unknowns in this new field and integrate findings from different areas of expertise.

Hugo Destaillats and colleagues at LBNL, UCSF and Portland State University have recently found that in just three hours, cigarette smoke and a common indoor home compound known as nitrous acid combine to form a carcinogen at levels 10 times higher than normal. Unvented gas appliances and car engines commonly emit nitrous acid. (See video at top of this page for more about research at LBNL and UCSF.)

The carcinogen formed by the smoke residue and nitrous acid may persist on surfaces in the home long after the cigarette is extinguished, exposing residents any time they are home, Destaillats said.

“Smoking a cigarette can last maybe 10 minutes,” he said. “But the pollutants remain for hours.”

Destaillats is a staff scientist in the Indoor Environment Group of the Environmental Energy Technologies division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL) and a professor at Arizona State University. The new research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Tackling thirdhand smoke is tough because it’s pushing the technological sensitivity of measurements of pollutants,” said UCSF scientist Neal Benowitz, an authority on nicotine metabolism and principal investigator of the TRDRP thirdhand smoke consortium.

The only way to make solid ressarch progress, he said, is to look at it from many angles: developing biomarkers to measure levels of pollutants, assessing their persistence in the indoor environment and determining how much they are absorbed by the body.

“The effort requires many skills, like environmental chemistry, toxicology, pharmacology and the ability to track and measure the pollutants over time,” said Benowitz, who is vice chair of the UCSF’s Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences and co-leader of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF. He is also the leader of the Tobacco Control Program of the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“I think the state of California is very forward thinking to try to pursue this question. If anyone has the expertise to make real progress, it’s this talented, multi-discipline research group,” Benowitz said.

The thirdhand smoke trail may well lead to changes in attitudes about smoking and to decisions to give up the habit or not ever start it, Matt said.

“Afterall, there would be no third or secondhand smoke without ‘firsthand’ smoking,” he said.

One positive sign he’s found is an uptick in the number of people demanding smoke-free used cars, rental cars, apartments and hotel rooms.

A 2008 study found that used nonsmoker cars were offered for sale at a considerably higher price than their published value and above comparable smoker cars.

“These findings suggest that community preferences are affecting the value of smoke-free cars,” Matt said. “That’s how norms change. And as we close more research and policy loopholes, we’ll have more ammunition to cut down smoking and save lives.”

UC Berkeley School of Public Health professor recognized for work identifying health hazards of household smoke from cookstoves.

Kirk Smith, UC Berkeley

Kirk Smith, whose groundbreaking work has documented the dangers of household air pollution, has been named one of two winners of the 2012 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. The Tyler Prize is given to those who “confer great benefit upon humankind through environmental restoration and achievement,” and is regarded as the premiere award for environmental science, environmental health and energy.

A professor of global environmental health at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Smith was recognized for his work identifying that household air pollution in developing nations is responsible for nearly 2 million premature deaths per year, disproportionately among women and children. He was the first to demonstrate that acute exposure to smoke from the burning of biomass fuels like wood or dung in homes represents one of the world’s greatest health threats. He has documented a heightened risk of pneumonia, cataracts, tuberculosis, heart disease, and chronic lung disease.

“We now understand the deadly effects of these fuels that are used by nearly half the world,” said Smith. “The impact of household air pollution is on scale with any other major health risk in developing countries, including exposure to HIV, mosquitoes, or dirty water.”

In addition to recognizing the impact of this cooking and heating practice on health, Smith’s work has also led to the recognition of the role it plays in climate change. He realized the potential major co-benefits for both health and climate from improvements in household energy technologies in poor countries. This has led to increased support to get improved stoves out to developing countries.

Throughout his career, Smith has advised major international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, and his research, including the first measurements of the global warming impacts of stoves, is routinely cited by other scientists. His research on the health and climate effects from indoor cooking with solid fuels contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that helped earn the organization a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with former Vice President Al Gore. In 2009 he received the Heinz Award for Environmental Achievement. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Tyler Prize, established in 1973 and administered by USC, is named for the prize’s founders, John and Alice Tyler. Previous winners include Edward O. Wilson, a biologist and naturalist, and Jane Goodall, a conservationist and one of the world’s leading experts on chimpanzees.

Smith and John Seinfeld, a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, will each receive a $100,000 prize and will be given gold medallions at an award ceremony in Los Angeles on April 27. On April 26, they will deliver public lectures at the Davidson Conference Center at USC.

“Professors Smith and Seinfeld are giants in the efforts to understand and reduce the devastating impacts of air pollution,” Owen T. Lind, a biology professor at Baylor University and the chairman of the award’s executive committee, said in a statement. Lind said the pair’s research has “dramatically advanced our understanding of the ways in which air pollution threatens our health as individuals and the health of the planet.”

UC Davis professor is co-author of paper.

Worldwide increases in the incidences of asthma, allergies, infectious and cardiovascular diseases will result from a variety of impacts of global climate change, including rising temperatures, worsening ozone levels in urban areas, the spread of desertification and expansions of the ranges of communicable diseases as the planet heats up, the professional organization representing respiratory and airway physicians stated in a new position paper released today (March 14).

The paper is published online and in print in the Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society. The society is the professional organization for pulmonologists, thoracic surgeons and respiratory therapists, among others. It issued the position paper to help its members know how to respond to these changes with their patients and within their communities, and to add their voices to calls for international cooperation to respond to the existing and anticipated negative health effects of global warming.

While based in the United States, the 15,000-member society has members from around the globe. The position paper was written by a 10-member committee that included representatives from Europe, Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa.

“In these proceedings, we address such questions as how climate change may impact the distribution of respiratory disease worldwide, the impact of heat stress and adaptation, and how extreme heat affects the individual and the community,” said Kent Pinkerton, professor of pediatrics at the UC Davis School of Medicine and director of the UC Davis Center for Health and the Environment.

“Since my research focuses on environmental air pollution and its impact on the respiratory system, my biggest concern has been with issues of air quality,” said Pinkerton, who is co-author of the paper and the organizer of the workshop upon which it is based. “These include more smoke and particulate matter from more wildfires, which are known to increase in frequency as the climate warms, and the presence of airborne particles from dust storms caused by desertification.”

The position paper outlines a complex web of interrelated respiratory health effects from global climate change. For example, mold spores that previously only were seen in Central America have been found as far north as Vancouver, British Columbia, promoting increases in allergies and asthma, with climate-change conditions implicated. Infectious diseases common in the Mediterranean region now are being seen as far north as Scandinavia, as that area grows warmer.

“There are certain vector-borne diseases caused by certain types of parasites or organisms whose range has expanded and that has been associated with increases in temperature,” Pinkerton said.

Pinkerton said that some of the prospective respiratory health impacts from global climate change will be direct, such as more asthma due to increases in particulate matter in the atmosphere because of desertification, or increases in pollen because of more and extended plant blooms. But some will be indirect, Pinkerton said.

For example, greater concentrations of displaced populations following extreme weather events — such as hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian or Japanese tsunamis — could lead to increases in outbreaks of infectious diseases. The health impacts will, of course, be more serious for sensitive populations, he noted.

“There are individuals who will be much more susceptible to the effects of global climate change than will the members of the general population,” Pinkerton said. “In particular, we know that infants and young children, people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and those who are elderly or who have compromised immune systems will have more difficulties when air quality is poorer.”

The position paper also categorizes the main issues that workshop participants deemed of key importance to respiratory health. The society placed heat-related disease resulting from increased frequency and severity of heat waves as the most serious and direct health risk of climate change. Higher surface temperatures, especially in developed urban areas, will promote the formation of greater amounts of ground-level ozone, exposure to which has been linked to exacerbations of asthma, lung cancer and acute lower-respiratory infections.

Public health measures should be developed to support vulnerable populations during specific climate-change related events, such as heat waves or severe air pollution episodes and other extreme weather events (e.g., extreme rainfall and floods) or rising sea levels and storm surges that challenge or threaten community infrastructure, Pinkerton said.

“Our greatest concern is infants, children, the elderly and other sensitive populations,” he said. “They will be the first to experience serious climate change-related health problems.”

The position paper was co-authored by William Rom, professor of medicine and environmental medicine at the New York University School of Medicine.

UC Davis report studies harmful levels of nitrate contamination in drinking water of ag areas.

One in 10 people living in California’s most productive agricultural areas is at risk of exposure to harmful levels of nitrate contamination in their drinking water, according to a report released today by the University of California, Davis. The report was commissioned by the California State Water Resources Control Board.

The report, “Addressing Nitrate in California’s Drinking Water,” is the first comprehensive scientific investigation of nitrate contamination in the Tulare Lake Basin, which includes Fresno and Bakersfield, and the Salinas Valley, which includes Salinas and areas near Monterey. It defines the extent of the problem, suggests promising solutions and outlines possible funding mechanisms.

“Cleaning up nitrate in groundwater is a complex problem with no single solution,” said Jay Lund, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and a report co-author. “This report should help inform discussions among people involved with drinking water, waste discharge, and agricultural issues, including various local and state government agencies.”

The study was funded by the State Water Board in response to state legislation passed in 2008 that required an examination of nitrate contamination in the Tulare Lake and Salinas basins.

“California groundwater quality is a significant concern to the Water Boards, and this comprehensive report presents current science and potential solutions on how to deal with this chronic and longstanding issue,” said Thomas Howard, State Water Board executive director.

Nitrogen in organic and synthetic fertilizers has dramatically increased crop production in California in recent decades. However, excess nitrate in groundwater from surface nitrogen use has been linked to thyroid illnesses, some cancers and reproductive problems.

In their new report, UC Davis scientists examine data from wastewater treatment plants, septic systems, parks, lawns, golf courses and farms. The report concludes that more than 90 percent of human-generated nitrate contamination of groundwater in these basins is from agricultural activity.

The nitrate study area includes four of the nation’s five counties with the largest agricultural production, representing 40 percent of California’s irrigated cropland and more than half of the state’s confined animal farming industry.

Since the 1940s, synthetic fertilizer use, increased manure applications to cropland and a shift from pasture-raised dairy cattle to confined animal facilities have resulted in the accumulation of excess nitrate in groundwater, the report says.

Much of that excess is only now beginning to affect water quality in the Tulare Lake Basin and Monterey County portion of the Salinas Valley. Today’s discharges will continue to contaminate drinking water decades from now, the report says.

Fixes for drinking water systems in these basins could cost about $20 million to $35 million per year for decades, the report concluded. As nitrates continue to spread, drinking water system costs could increase for Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley communities.

The UC Davis report outlines several potential funding solutions, including a fee on nitrogen fertilizer use to help fund drinking water costs.

The report found that 10 percent of the 2.6 million people in the Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley rely on groundwater that may exceed the nitrate standard of 45 milligrams per liter set by the California Department of Public Health for public water systems. The problem is likely to worsen for decades, as nitrogen applied to today’s crops slowly makes its way into groundwater as nitrate.

Communities often respond to initial contamination by drilling a new well or shifting to cleaner water sources. But as high nitrate concentrations continue to persist, communities are faced with using expensive treatment and alternatives. In addition to the public health risk, nitrate groundwater contamination imposes major abatement costs on small rural communities, which often have little financial means or technical capacity to maintain safe drinking water.

More than 17 percent of the residents in the Tulare Lake Basin and 10 percent of residents in the Monterey County portion of the Salinas Valley live below the poverty line.

“First and foremost, this is about getting safe drinking water to people,” said report co-author Thomas Harter of the UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources. “In the intermediate and long-term, it’s about fixing the source of the problem.”

The report also calls for a statewide effort to integrate water-related data collection by various state and local agencies.

“The report defines the extent and costs of the problem, for the first time, and outlines how we can address it,” said Harter. “We hope it provides the foundation for informed policy discussions.”

Key findings include:

• Drinking water supply actions, such as water treatment and finding alternative water supplies, are most cost-effective. However, well supplies will become less available as nitrate pollution continues to spread.
• While many options exist to provide safe drinking water, there is no single or ideal solution for every community affected.
• Agricultural fertilizers and animal manure applied to cropland are the two largest regional sources of nitrate leached to groundwater — representing more than 90 percent of the total.
• Reducing nitrate in the groundwater is possible, with methods such as improved fertilizer management and water treatment. Costs range from modest to quite expensive.
• Directly removing nitrate from large groundwater basins is extremely costly and not technically feasible.

Part of the natural global nitrogen cycle, nitrogen is a key element that plants require for growth. Yet, in addition to contaminating groundwater, the surge in human-related nitrate over the past century has also created marine “dead zones,” nitrogen oxide emissions that contribute to climate change and a host of other environmental problems.

The State Water Board will be conducting a public workshop on May 23 to consider public comment, as well as discuss the findings and options outlined in the UC Davis report. The board will review the public comment and issue recommendations to the state Legislature, as called for in the legislation.

The board has posted the documents online for public review and comment.

For the full UC Davis report, videos, maps, and more information, visit the report’s website.

About UC Davis

For more than 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has more than 32,000 students, more than 2,500 faculty and more than 21,000 staff, an annual research budget that exceeds $684 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

About the State Water Resources Control Board

The State Water Resources Control Board’s mission is to preserve, enhance and restore the quality of California’s water resources, and ensure their proper allocation and efficient use for the benefit of present and future generations. For more information visit their website.

About Senate Bill X2 1

The bill amended Water Code Section 83002.5 to require that the State Water Resources Control Board, in consultation with other agencies, develop pilot projects in the Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley to study nitrate contamination and identify remedial solutions and funding options to recover costs associated with cleanup or treatment of groundwater and report to the Legislature within two years.

UC Irvine-led finding could explain why air pollution models underestimate organic aerosols.

Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, UC Irvine

Airborne gases get sucked into stubborn smog particles from which they cannot escape, according to findings by UC Irvine and other researchers published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results could explain a problem identified in recent years: Computer models long used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California air regulators and others significantly underestimate organic aerosols – the major component of smog particles. Such pollution blocks views of mountains and has been linked to everything from asthma to heart attacks. It is also the largest unknown in climate change calculations.

“You can’t have a lot of confidence in the predicted levels right now,” said lead author Veronique Perraud, assistant project scientist to pioneering UCI air chemist Barbara Finlayson-Pitts. “It’s extremely important, because if the models do a bad job of predicting particles, we may be underestimating the effects on the public.”

An independent expert who reviewed the research for PNAS agreed.

“The conclusions are highly significant,” said Purdue University atmospheric chemist Paul Shepson. “This paper should – and, I expect, will – have a big impact. We’ve known for nearly a decade that there’s a huge difference between what’s in the models and what’s actually in the air. Thanks to this paper, we have a much better idea of why.”

Scientists at UCI, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory and Portland State University combined pinene, a common ingredient in household cleaners such as Pine Sol and outdoor emissions, with oxides of nitrogen and ozone to mimic smog buildup.

Models used by regulators for decades have assumed that organic aerosols in such pollution form liquid droplets that quickly dissolve potentially unhealthy gases. But the new work found that once gases are sucked into a particle, they get buried deeper and deeper.

“They check in, and they don’t check out. They cannot escape. The material does not readily evaporate and may live longer and grow faster in total mass than previously thought,” Finlayson-Pitts said. “This is consistent with related studies showing that smog particles may be an extremely viscous tar.”

Perraud noted that broader study needs to be done: “The next logical step is to straighten the models out. We need enough follow-up data to do so.”

Sophisticated tools made it easier to pinpoint the exact characteristics of chemical compounds in air. The scientists used a 26-foot-long “aerosol flow tube” at the AirUCI unit and a one-of-a-kind, 900-pound instrument known as SPLAT (a single particle laser ablation time-of-flight mass spectrometer) at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Co-authors are Emily Bruns, Wayne Chang, Donald Dabdub, Michael Ezell, Stanley Johnson and Yong Yu of UCI; M. Lizabeth Alexander and Alla Zelenyuk of PNNL; Dan Imre of Imre Consulting; and James F. Pankow of Portland State University. Funding was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UCI is among the most dynamic campuses in the University of California system, with nearly 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,000 staff. Orange County’s second-largest employer, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $4 billion. For more UCI news, visit www.today.uci.edu.

Campus joins with China-based genomic organization to form BGI@UC Davis partnership.

Ralph Hexter, UC Davis

The University of California, Davis, and China-based BGI, the world’s largest genomics organization, based in China, signed a master agreement today (Feb. 17) sealing a partnership that will change the landscape of genomic sciences in California and the Western states by establishing a joint facility called BGI@UC Davis. The alliance will foster critical breakthroughs in the areas of food security and human, animal and environmental health.

The master agreement was signed today by UC Davis Provost Ralph G. Hexter and Hao Zhang, co-director of BGI@UC Davis, at a morning ceremony in Los Angeles, with high-ranking dignitaries from China and the United States attending.

“Today marks an exciting new chapter in the collaboration between UC Davis, with our exceptional strengths in biology, medicine, food and the environment, and BGI, the world’s premier genomics organization,” said UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. “The discoveries that flow from this partnership will have a worldwide impact.”

Under the agreement, UC Davis faculty and students will expand access to the capabilities and expertise of one of the world’s premier genomics and bioinformatics institutes, while BGI researchers will be able to access the university’s diverse resources and expertise in research, especially in biology, human and veterinary medicine, agriculture, the environment and education.

Jian Wang, president of BGI, stated, “We look forward to a highly productive relationship with UC Davis, one of the top research universities in the U.S., especially in the areas of agricultural, environmental and biological research. Given UC Davis’ expertise in these areas, coupled with BGI’s expertise in genome sequencing and bioinformatics, we expect this partnership and the establishment of BGI@UC Davis to lead to significant scientific breakthroughs.”

In June of 2011, Katehi and Wang signed the initial agreement to establish the BGI@UC Davis partnership during a meeting in Shenzhen, one of China’s Special Economic Zones.

This was followed by a second agreement signed in October 2011 that established an interim BGI facility for immediate use at the UC Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento and initiated planning for a permanent BGI@UC Davis facility. That signing ceremony, held in Sacramento for this second agreement, was attended by both Qin Xu, the mayor of Shenzhen, and Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento.

Under the October 2011 agreement, BGI has moved three state-of-the-art DNA sequencing machines into the interim facility on the UC Davis Sacramento campus. When complete, the facility will accommodate 20 such machines, dramatically increasing the DNA sequencing capacity readily available to campus researchers.

The partnership between BGI and UC Davis will provide new opportunities for researchers at both institutions, said Harris Lewin, vice chancellor for research at UC Davis. It will enable them to tackle bigger and more complex problems and assemble teams that can compete for bigger grants. It will also act as a catalyst to bring new companies and businesses to Sacramento, Lewin said.

The BGI@UC Davis facility will partner with the existing UC Davis Genome Center, located in the Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility on the UC Davis campus, in the further development of genomics at UC Davis. The new BGI@UC Davis facility will dramatically increase the capacity for sequencing at UC Davis.

Genomics is a discipline of biology concerning the study of the genome, or all the genes of an organism. The field includes intensive efforts to determine the genomes of plants, animals, microbes and other living things, as a way to better understand how they grow, develop and function. Since the first human genome was completed in 2001, the genomes of many other plants and animals have been sequenced, including lab animals and plants, crops such as rice, and disease-causing microbes.

About BGI
BGI was founded in Beijing, China in 1999, with the mission of being a premier scientific partner to the global research community. The goal of BGI is to make leading-edge genomic science highly accessible through its investment in infrastructure that leverages the best available technology, economies of scale and expert bioinformatics resources. BGI and its affiliates, BGI Americas, based in Cambridge, Mass., and BGI Europe, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, have established partnerships and collaborations with leading academic and government research institutions as well as global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, supporting a variety of disease, agricultural, environmental and related applications. BGI has established a proven track record of excellence, delivering results with high efficiency and accuracy for innovative, high profile research, which has generated more than 170 publications in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science. These accomplishment include sequencing one percent of the human genome for the International Human Genome Project, contributing 10 percent to the international Human HapMap Project, carrying out research to combat SARS and deadly German E. coli, playing a key role in the Sino-British Chicken Genome Project, and completing the sequence of the rice genome, the silkworm genome, the first Asian diploid genome, the potato genome and, most recently, 1,000 genomes and human gut metagenome. For more information about BGI, please visit www.genomics.cn and www.bgiamericas.com.

About UC Davis
For more than 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has more than 32,000 students, more than 2,500 faculty and more than 21,000 staff, an annual research budget that exceeds $684 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

UC Davis study highlights the interaction between epigenetics and genetics and exposure to a flame retardant in mice.

Rima Woods (left) and Janine LaSalle, UC Davis

Mice genetically engineered to be susceptible to autism-like behaviors that were exposed to a common flame retardant were less fertile and their offspring were smaller, less sociable and demonstrated marked deficits in learning and long-term memory when compared with the offspring of normal unexposed mice, a study by researchers at UC Davis has found. The researchers said the study is the first to link genetics and epigenetics with exposure to a flame retardant chemical.

The research was published online today (Feb. 16) in the journal Human Molecular Genetics. It will be presented during a symposium on Saturday (Feb. 18) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) by Janine LaSalle, a professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology in the UC Davis School of Medicine and the UC Davis Genome Center. (LaSalle will discuss her research during a news briefing with her colleagues at 9 a.m. Sunday (Feb. 19) in room 221 on the second level of the Vancouver Convention Center).

“This study highlights the interaction between epigenetics and the effects of early exposure to flame retardants,” said LaSalle, the study’s senior author and a researcher affiliated with the UC Davis MIND Institute. “Our experiments with wild-type and mutant mice indicate that exposure to flame retardants presents an independent risk of neurodevelopmental deficits associated with reduced sociability and learning.”

Epigenetics describes the heritable changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than those in the DNA sequence. One such mechanism is DNA methylation, in which genes are silenced when their activation no longer is required. DNA methylation is essential for normal development. The researchers chose a mouse that was genetically and epigenetically susceptible to social behavioral deficits in order to understand the potential effect of this environmental pollutant on genetically susceptible humans.

LaSalle and her colleagues examined the effects of the chemical BDE-47 (Tetrabromodiphenl ether), a member of the class of flame retardants called polybrominated diphenylethers, or PBDEs. PBDEs have been used in a wide range of products, including electronics, bedding, carpeting and furniture. They have been shown to persist in the environment and accumulate in living organisms, and toxicological testing has found that they may cause liver toxicity, thyroid toxicity and neurodevelopmental toxicity, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. BDE-47 is the PBDE found at highest concentrations in human blood and breast milk, raising concerns about its potential neurotoxic effects during pregnancy and neonatal development.

The research was conducted in the offspring of mice genetically engineered for the autism phenotype found in Rett syndrome, a disorder that occurs primarily in females and causes regression in expressive language, motor skills and social reciprocity in late infancy. The condition affects about 1 in 10,000 children.

Autism spectrum disorders are a group of neurodevelopmental disabilities that can cause significant social, communication and behavioral deficits. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that an average of 1 in 110 children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.

Rett syndrome is causally linked to defects in the methyl-CpG-binding protein 2 gene MECP2 situated on the X chromosome. Mutations in MECP2 result in a nonfunctional MeCP2 protein, which is required for normal brain development. The researchers evaluated the effects of exposure to BDE-47 on mice genetically engineered to have mutations in MECP2 and their offspring, or pups. The genetically engineered Mecp2 mother mice, or dams, were bred with non-mutant wild-type males. The dams were monitored for 10 weeks — for four weeks prior to conception, three weeks during gestation and three weeks of lactation. They were then compared with a control group of normal, unexposed dams and pups over several generations and hundreds of mice.

The study found that that the weights of the pups of the lactating BDE-47-exposed dams were diminished when compared with the controls, as were their survival rates. To assess the effects of the flame retardant exposure on the pups and their genotypes, the researchers placed them through more than 10 cognitive, social and physical tests.

Female offspring of dams exposed with BDE-47 spent half as much time interacting with another mouse in a 10-minute sociability test compared to controls. The reduced sociability in BDE-47 exposed females corresponded to reduced DNA methylation in females regardless of genotype. In addition, genetic and environmental interaction effects in this study were specifically observed in females.

In a short-term memory test of social novelty, although all mice showed the expected preference for interacting with a novel over a familiar mouse, BDE-47-exposed mutant female mice spent about half as much time interacting with the familiar mouse than their non-mutant littermates. In a long-term memory test of swimming to reach a hidden platform in a cloudy pool, female mice who were both mutant and BDE-47 exposed did not learn to reach the platform faster after fourdays of training. These behavioral changes in social and cognitive learning specifically in the interaction group corresponded to changes in a known epigenetic regulator of DNA methylation in brain, DNA methyltransferase 3a (Dnmt3a).

LaSalle said that the study results are important because better understanding of the epigenetic pathways implicated in social behavior and cognition may lead to improved treatments for autism spectrum disorders.

“While the obvious preventative step is to limit the use and accumulation of PBDEs in our environment, this would likely be a long-term solution,” LaSalle said. “These pollutants are going to be hard to get rid of tomorrow. However, one important preventative that all women could do tomorrow is to start taking prenatal vitamins before becoming pregnant, as these may counteract the toxins in our environment through DNA methylation,” she said.

A study by researchers at UC Davis conducted in 2011 found that women who reported not taking a daily prenatal vitamin immediately before and during the first month of pregnancy were nearly twice as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder as women who did take the supplements — and the associated risk rose to seven times as great when combined with a high-risk genetic make-up.

Other authors of the research are Rima Woods, Roxanne O. Vallero, Mari Golub, Joanne K. Suarez, Tram Anh Ta, Dag H. Yasui, Lai-Har Chi, Isaac N. Pessah and Robert F. Berman, all of UC Davis, and Paul J. Kostyniak of the Toxicology Research Center, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.

The research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences/Environmental Protection Agency Center for Children’s Environmental Health, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program.

At the UC Davis MIND Institute, world-renowned scientists engage in research to find improved treatments as well as the causes and cures for autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, fragile X syndrome, Tourette syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics, pharmacology and behavioral sciences are making inroads into a better understanding of brain function. The UC Davis MIND Institute draws from these and other disciplines to conduct collaborative, multidisciplinary research. For more information, visit mindinstitute.ucdavis.edu.

UCLA public health professor hosts nationwide TV series.

In a four-part TV series airing on public broadcasting, UCLA Dr. Richard Jackson shows viewers the best and worst examples of urban planning and its effects on health.

The old adage says we are what we eat, but perhaps it should also say we are what we build.

One of America’s leading voices calling for smarter urban planning and architecture to create healthy environments is making that case to the public in a four-part series that’s airing nationwide on public broadcasting stations.

Dr. Richard Jackson, a UCLA professor of public health and urban planning as well as chair of environmental health sciences and a member of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, became convinced that the built environment deserved some of the blame for rising health risks after studying environmental health issues around pesticides, air pollution and cancer clusters.

The pediatrician and epidemiologist has already found a national audience for this concept among scientists, mayors, governors, urban planners, architects and public health specialists. Through his books, lectures and articles over the last three decades and as head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and as California’s chief state health officer, Jackson has long advocated designing, planning and building healthy communities. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects, and last year, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors awarded in the fields of health and medicine.

Once considered controversial, his premise that poorly thought-out design and planning of our cities, buildings and freeways have contributed to higher rates of asthma, cancer, obesity and diabetes has been borne out by studies of airborne particulates from cars and trucks, water contamination, lead poisoning, traffic congestion and the scarce access to fresh, healthy food in low-income urban communities.

“I’ve talked to a lot of ‘elites’ — science groups, mayors and groups of governors,” said Jackson from his fifth floor office in the School of Public Health. “But I became convinced four or five years ago that we are not going to change the way we have built America unless we change the fundamental American consciousness and our cultural awareness of the need for physical activity and designing good places.”

To do that, Jackson has been working on the television series, “Designing Healthy Communities,” over the last four years. The series, funded by the Kresge Foundation, California Endowment, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Kaiser Permanente, starts Tuesday, Jan. 31, on KLCS at 9 p.m. and will run Tuesdays, beginning Feb. 7, on KOCE at 10 p.m.

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UC Berkeley endocrinologist a pioneer in understanding how hormones affect development.

Howard Bern

Howard A. Bern, professor emeritus of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a pioneer in understanding how hormones affect development, including that of the human fetus, died Jan. 3 at his home in Berkeley after a nine-month battle with cancer. He was 91.

Bern was an endocrinologist whose research in the 1960s on diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic hormone given to women to prevent premature birth, helped scientists understand its role in causing cancer. He was co-author of the standard book on the developmental effects of DES during pregnancy.

Today, chemicals that affect hormones — so-called endocrine disruptors — are a major concern because of their prevalence in the environment.

“He was instrumental in recognizing that many synthetic chemicals can act as ‘endocrine disruptors,’” said developmental endocrinologist Tyrone Hayes, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology who has done groundbreaking research on the detrimental effects of the herbicide atrazine on amphibians. “By mimicking and/or affecting hormone synthesis or degradation, many chemicals can have drastic yet non-lethal effects on wildlife and humans … in processes ranging from reproductive failure to cancer. Howard’s groundbreaking work on DES, which affected millions of people exposed in utero, was critical in the development of studies in this area.”

According to Bern’s colleague and friend Stacia A. Sower, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of New Hampshire, Bern was “one of the truly great scientists I have known. He was a giant and one of the founding fathers in our field of comparative endocrinology and the founding father of the field of endocrine disruptors.”

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UC Merced researchers show burning of sugarcane fields prior to harvest can create more pollution that previously thought.

The burning of sugarcane fields prior to harvest for ethanol production can create air pollution that detracts from the biofuel’s overall sustainability, according to research published recently by a team of researchers led by scientists at the University of California, Merced.

UC Merced graduate student Chi-Chung Tsao was the lead author on the paper and was aided in the study by UC Merced professors Elliott Campbell and Yihsu Chen. The study — published online this week in the Nature Climate Change journal — focused on Brazil, the world’s top producer of sugarcane ethanol and a possible source for U.S. imports of the alternative fuel.

“There is a big strategic decision our country and others are making, in whether to develop a domestic biofuels industry or import relatively inexpensive biofuels from developing countries,” Campbell said. “Our study shows that importing biofuels could result in human health and environmental problems in the regions where they are cultivated.”

[Download a PDF of the study.]

Ethanol is seen as an alternative to fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gasses when used and are a major contributor to air pollution and climate change. But despite some governments encouraging farmers to reduce field burning — which is done in part to protect farmworkers by removing sharp leaves and harmful animals — more than half of sugarcane croplands in Brazil continue to be burned.

That leads to a reduction in air quality that can offset the benefits of ethanol over petroleum fuels that emit more greenhouse gases during their use, something Campbell said the U.S. should consider when determining whether to import inexpensive ethanol from Brazil or continuing to invest in domestic corn ethanol production.

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