A Sampling of Clips for March 30, 2010

* UCSD faculty and staff may obtain a copy of an article by e-mailing the University Communications Office

FDA Ponders Regulating Menthol Cigarettes
CBS News, March 29 -- A new U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel will take a closer look at menthol cigarettes and how the government should regulate them, but most believe an outright ban is unlikely. (Quotes Dr. David Burns of UC San Diego, scientific editor of several surgeon general reports on tobacco) More

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The New York Times
MSNBC
The Washington Post
Forbes
Miami Herald
Sacremento Bee
San Francisco Chronicle
San Diego Union-Tribune

"Big Bang" Machine Makes History
CBS News, March 30 -- The world's largest atom smasher set a record for high-energy collisions on Tuesday by crashing proton beams into each other at three times more force than ever before. (Quotes Bivek Sharma, a professor at UC San Diego) More

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Discovery Channel
CBC, Canada

Planning Children's Care is Becoming a Full-time Job
MarketWatch, March 30 -- The juggle between family and work isn't new. But parents are spending increasing amounts of time on child care, according to a working paper titled "The Rug Rat Race" recently presented at the Brookings Institution. Why all this additional togetherness? It's not because kids are getting cuter or parents more loving, according to the paper, by Garey Ramey and Valerie Ramey, both of UC San Diego. More

Seeing Impostors: When Loved Ones Suddenly Aren't
NPR, March 29 -- While there have so far been no confirmed cases of a human being replaced by an alien or any other life-form, the feeling that your loved one has been replaced by someone else can be very real. (Quotes UC San Diego neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran) More

Crib Sheet
The Guardian, U.K., March 30 -- Forget the rose-tinted glasses; it seems that grey clouds are more likely to make a student decide to apply to a university, according to research by Professor Uri Simonsohn of UC San Diego. More

South Asian, Arab Writers Focus of Montreal's Blue Met
CBC, Canada, March 30 -- Governor General's Award-winning author M.G. Vassanji and Mexican novelist Cristina Rivera Garza are among the literary stars who will appear at Montreal's Blue Metropolis festival next month. Garza is on the UC  San Diego faculty. More

"Strike-Slip": Seismic Shifts at the Human Level
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, March 24 -- Misunderstandings between races, generations and individuals mark the dynamics of "Strike-Slip" by Naomi Iizuka, now in a mesmerizing production by Nimbus Theatre at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage. Iizuka is on the UC San Diego faculty. More

Q&A:  Debunking the Deniers
IPS, March 24 -- Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at UC San Diego and co-author Erik Conway, a science historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, document efforts to manufacture doubt around the science on acid rain, the ozone hole, secondhand cigarette smoke, and the pesticide DDT in their forthcoming book, "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming". More

Prop 13: The Battle Between Taxpayer and Taxes
KPBS, March 29, 2010— For the second year in a row, the County Assessor is predicting San Diego will collect less in property taxes because of the housing crash. It’s a win for taxpayers who will pay less – but a loss for the county which relies on property taxes to fund schools and other services. This battle between taxpayer and taxes has been long fought in California. It began 32 years ago with a ballot initiative called Proposition 13. These Days guests Isaac Martin, a sociologist at UC San Diego and Julian Betts, an economics professor at UCSD, discuss Prop. 13. More

In San Diego, Preparing for Biological Warfare
Voice of San Diego, March 29 -- Many researchers across San Diego are working on the forefront of an effort to defend the country against bioterrorism. Last year, the National Institutes of Health gave out $1.5 billion in funding for research on biological agents like smallpox, anthrax, Ebola virus and the plague, and $96.6 million of it went to research institutes and biotech companies in San Diego. And UC San Diego received $21.5 million for research on everything from giardia, a water-borne parasite, to salmonella and drug-resistant tuberculosis. More

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