A Sampling of Clips for July 29, 2011

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

Computer Drives to Start Your Day Quicker
New York Times, July 28 -- Waiting for computers to boot up is time passed drumming fingers, making a cup of coffee or watching the grass grow. The delay is because of starting the hard drive, which has to awaken and rev up to retrieve stored data. Solid-state drives, or S.S.D., which are comprised of microchips and have no moving parts, easily cut the boot time in half.  Solid-state drives cost 10 times as much as hard drives, gigabyte for gigabyte, but the cost is a fifth of what it was three years ago when solid-state drives first became widely available. (Quotes Steve Swanson, director of the Nonvolatile Systems Laboratory at UC San Diego, which studies the security and reliability of solid-state drives.) More

Drug Could Make Aging Brains More Youthful?
National Geographic, July 28 -- You can't teach an old brain new tricks—but you can restore its ability to remember the old ones, a new study in monkeys suggests. Chemicals given to rhesus macaques blocked a brain molecule that slows the firing of the brain's nerve cells, or neurons, as we age—prompting those nerve cells to act young again. (Quotes Paul Aisen, a neuroscientist and director of the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study at UC Diego.) More

Solar Panel Options Expand, Help Cool Buildings
USA Today, July 29 -- A new study finds that a building's ceiling was five degrees Fahrenheit cooler under solar panels than under an exposed roof during the day and the panels helped hold heat in at night, reducing energy costs in winter. "Talk about positive side-effects," said study author Jan Kleissl, a professor of environmental engineering at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. His research team believes the study provides the first peer-reviewed measurements of the cooling benefits provided by solar photovoltaic panels. More

Women Who Eat Lots of Fiber Have Less Breast Cancer
Reuters Health, July 28 -- A fresh look at the medical evidence shows women who eat more fiber are less likely to get breast cancer. Chinese researchers found those who ate the most of the healthy plant components were 11 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than women who ate the least. (Quotes John Pierce, a cancer researcher at UC San Diego, who was not involved in the work.) More

Copycatting Is Not Always Smart
Women Citizen.com, July 29 -- New research has suggested that mirroring may not always lead to positive social outcomes. In a study Piotr Winkielman and Liam Kavanagh of the psychology department at UC San Diego, along with UC San Diego philosophers Christopher Suhler and Patricia Churchland, noted that in real-life situations there are often observers to the mirroring that takes place between two people. Results of three experiments suggested that mimicry is more nuanced than previously thought and not, the authors wrote, "uniformly beneficial to the mimicker." More

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Party Polarization, Insecurity of Leaders Blamed for Debt Peril
Bloomberg News, July 28 -- If Democrats and Republicans can't agree on a way out of the impasse over raising the U.S. debt ceiling, there will be plenty of blame to go around. The ideological purification of the two parties, the public's demands for painless remedies and the insecurity of party leaders after three elections that shuffled partisan power are all elements that brought Congress, the president and the country to this perilous point. (Quotes Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at UC San Diego.) More

The U.S. Debt Crisis - What Does It Mean To San Diego?
KPBS, July 28 – (Interview with Mark Hendrickson, history professor at UC San Diego.) As the threat of a U.S. debt default looms and many San Diegans want to know how it will affect them. And, does looking back in history help us understand what's happening today on Capitol Hill? More

Scientists Find Old Ice for Climate Studies at Top of Antarctic Glacier
Antarctic Sun, July 22 -- Nearly 13,000 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere suddenly plunged back into a mini-ice age not long after emerging from a 100,000-year-long glacial period. A thousand years or so later — and likely just as quickly — it ended, and the current interglacial warm period returned. Such abrupt climate changes interest scientists looking for clues on how the Earth’s climate might behave in the future. (Quotes Jeffrey Severinghaus, a professor of geosciences at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.) More

The New Chinese Exclusion Act
Wall Street Journal, July 28 – (Opinion) Democrat Judy Chu of the 32nd District in Los Angeles County has called on fellow members to join her in a "Resolution of Regret" over the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—a bill that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed on Wednesday. There's a deep irony in her resolution: Ms. Chu staunchly supports the most harmful form of anti-Asian discrimination in the U.S. today: racial preferences in hiring and university admissions. Prop. 209 was the nation's first referendum explicitly banning a state's public institutions from taking into account race, sex or ethnicity in hiring or admissions. (Mentions UC San Diego.) More

Solana Beach, Del Mar Residents Among New UCSD Foundation Trustees
Del Mar Times, July 28 -- The UC San Diego Foundation announces that 10 new trustees will join the Foundation board, for a total of 42-members. The board oversees the management of approximately $600 million in charitable assets, including $375 million in endowment. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011, the campus expects private support to total approximately $120 million. (Quotes Chancellor Marye Anne Fox.) More

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