SoCal Minds

UC medical centers join to attack breast cancer

From UCLA

With more than 200,000 women stricken with breast cancer each year, the UC hospitals statewide have decided to take on a big collaborative effort to combat the disease that kills 40,000 women annually and on which the nation spends $20 billion for screening and care. Under the ATHENA Breast Health Network, more than 150,000 California women will be tested for breast cancer and then followed for decades wth $10.1 million in total grant funding from the UC system and the Safeway Foundation. Researchers hope to compile a giant mass of data and knowledge that will reshape the treatment of breast cancer, including designing and testing new approaches to research, technology and delivery of care.

Statewide collaboration aims at disease that afflicts 200,000 women annually

Click here to learn more about the ATHENA project

250,000 cans, bottles show water is priceless

From USC & UCI

After the Rose Parade ended, they scurried and scrambled to grab up 20,000 discarded bottles and cans. They scavenged for a long time after, eventually collecting 250,000 glass containers and cans. It wasn't an ordinary recycling crusade for a half-dozen kids at Gabrielino High School in the San Gabriel Valley: This was part of their big push to learn more and appreciate the real value and preciousness of water, for they converted their recycling rewards -- and they're continuing to collect and add to the sums -- to buy needy and thirsty youngsters in the developing world special devices that will provide them with water they can drink safely. The recycling efforts paid for LifeStraws, special sipping and filtering devices that for a few dollars can provide a portable and potable water supply to the Third World poor. For their labors, the San Gabriel Valley youngsters won the Edison Challenge and got to spend time on Catalina Island for fun and educational activities. The second-place finishers in the contest, cosponsored by the utility and the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, were Santa Monica High and Sycamore Canyon School in Newbury Park. Meanwhile, on Friday and Saturday in Irvine, the university will conduct a two-day free and open event to remind the public that 1 billion people globally lack potable water supplies.

Kids in contest convert discards into drinkable water for thirsty in Third World

Click here to learn more about LifeStraw, other life-savers in developing world

Click here for more on Edison Challenge, which soon will accept entries for next year

In Irvine, two days of programming to remind public that water is precious

Can paying for 'episodes of care' cut health costs?

From RAND

Even as Congress and the White House wrangle over an array of reform proposals in Washington, there's tons of tough cogitating going on by smart folks nationwide about how to cut the costs and to improve the results of health care in this country. Some of the fixes that are developed may be incremental and still important, such as a proposal by researchers in Santa Monica to figure a better way to handle common, recurring health situations like hip replacements or diabetes care. Currently, providers rack up fees for  each and every procedure they undertake in these situations. But why not, instead, pay one previously negotiated and agreed upon amount for certain "episodes of care?" While this approach holds promise for reducing paperwork, bureaucracy and complexity, lots of nitty-gritty stuff needs to be worked out for it to work, researchers say.

Many details found to be unresolved in promising proposal to cut health costs

Historian to tell how LA got freeway nightmare

From the Huntington

Stuck in traffic? Wondering how this mess came to be? If that SigAlert lifts, might want to try to get to a free, public presentation at 7 tonight on "Concrete Utopia: Roads and Freeways in Los Angeles." Matthew Ross, the historian for AAA, will talk about the origins, engineering and "back story" politics that shaped the highways that Los Angeles residents can't live without but, increasingly, are learning to love less and less. No reservations are required for the program.

Auto Club expert to explain 'back story' of city's congested byways 

For aspiring MDs, a new way to hone credentials

From Keck Graduate Institute

Stuck in limbo, even with or on the brink of receiving an undergraduate degree? Not quite ready or maybe unable just now to get in to medical school? Want to see if, perhaps, some other part of health care might be a better career fit? The school's offering a new, novel certificate -- which also can build toward a master's degree -- and added classwork, application counseling and assistance to those who haven't gotten admitted just yet to medical school. The post-baccalaureate premedical program will launch in January and will seek to take advantage of the institute and its sister Claremont schools to get candidates enhanced academic experience to get them admitted to medical school or to learn about and get into other health care fields, via additional study that will bolster the awarded academic certificate into a master of bioscience degree.

Year-long program offers med school candidates a way to learn, bolster admission hope

How to volunteer? Info now is just a click away

From UCLA & UCI

Oh, the wonders of the internet, especially when online resources can make good things occur. In Westwood, a member of the biz school faculty discusses in a videotaped talk his efforts to link Samaritans with causes via a nifty, useful web site, allforgood.com. It lets would-be volunteers swiftly and easily find and connect with do-good groups in their area that need their aid. The site was put together with the help and support of experts and ordinary folks from some of the nation's biggest-name businesses as part of President Obama's push for Americans to take on more public service. Meantime, in Irvine, the university has set up a new web site to let community members know more and better how to take advantage of the school's programs and resources.

Prof who served on Obama transition describes need, ways for Americans to aid others

In Irvine, a new website seeks to tie school closer to community  

Tough, real talk about end of life decisions

From USC

'Tis a pity that amid all the horror and fright surrounding the Obama Administration's attempts to reform the U.S. health care system and health insurance that grown-up conversation about one particularly painful aspect of modern living got shoved into "death panel" hysterics: What is this society supposed to do about very sick and very old folks on the brink of death? Besides the big issues, such as the economics of caring for the terminally ill, there's an excruciating personal aspect, as a lawyer-author recently explained as he told of his own experiences with and role in his parents' assisted suicides.

Author-lawyer tells of his experience, role in his parents' assisted suicide

Not so white any more? Are you poor or in jail?

From UCI

The pigment in your skin may not change but others' perceptions of you can -- dramatically, researchers say, explaining why they'll take up new grant-supported work on racial fluidity. It's not a phenomenon that affects only multiracial people or those, like Latinos, who some may see as white, others as brown or even black. White people, it turns out, can be perceived by themselves and others as being of a different race, depending on factors such as whether they're poor or imprisoned. While more work needs to be done, this happenstance suggests that race or at least its perception is considerably more fluid and may change more over time and circumstance than previously believed or understood.

Greater understanding sought of phenomenon of fluid racial identification

Eyewitness testimony to undergo new scrutiny

From Claremont Graduate School

While jurors consider them to be among the most convincing  kinds of testimony they can consider, experts know that eyewitness identifications can be among the most unreliable of  evidence presented -- so how to reconcile the disparity? With a $225,000 federal research grant, a psychologist who is expert in this area will focus on two key players in the criminal justice system to try to learn more about how they see and react to eyewitness testimony in criminal cases. Their views are critical because so many criminal cases never reach trial these days, for economic, overcrowding and other reasons. So if matters are to be plea-bargained, how the prosecution and defense judge eyewitness testimony in a given case can be decisive.

Psychologist to study how prosecution, defense evaluate eyewitness testimony

Kathy Pezdek Discusses Eyewitness Identification Memory from Claremont Graduate University on Vimeo.

Finding may speed along drugs for genetic ills

From UCLA

In a finding that could lead to new medications for genetic diseases, researchers say they have identified two chemicals that convince cells to ignore erroneous and premature signals to stop making important proteins. They have screened thousands of chemicals for years before focusing on the two, which ignore the stop signals generated by changed DNA in "nonsense" mutations. The work -- done in continuing research on ataxia-telangiectasia (AT), a progressive neurological disease that afflicts children, often killing them by the time they reach their teens or 20s -- could help drug companies develop medications to correct genetic disorders caused by nonsense mutations, researchers say.  These afflictions include AT, muscular dystrophy, and in other ways, cancer.

Chemicals identified that help cells ignore orders to halt key protein production