A Sampling of Clips for June 15, 2011

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

White Band Disease Treatment? Antibiotics
UPI, June 14 -- Antibiotics, the ubiquitous cure for human ills, also may be a treatment for white band disease affecting certain coral species, California researchers report. David Kline of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and research teammate Steven Vollmer applied white band disease tissue to healthy coral fragments then compared transmission rates using various filtering measures. Kline and Vollmer said the findings implicate bacteria as the primary pathogens of one subtype of the disease and suggest viruses alone aren't likely to be the disease's cause. Treatment with the antibiotics ampicillin and tetracycline almost completely prevented white band disease transmission, the researchers found. More

Improving the Security of Cloud Computing
MIT Technology Review, June 14 -- On-demand cloud computing and data storage can save companies money, but many businesses—particularly in finance and health care—are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking, accidental data loss, or theft by rogue employees of cloud providers. In 2009, computer scientists at UC San Diego and MIT showed how an attacker using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud could land on the same physical server as his intended victim. The researchers also pointed out that attackers who sat on the same servers as victims could do things like monitor usage of shared physical resources, such as the server's central processing unit (CPU), to infer information such as what kinds of programs the victim was running and how much Web traffic the victim was handling. More

Red Chain Reactions Against the Sky
New York Times, June 13 -- The first performances of Trisha Brown’s “Roof Piece” took place on rooftops from 53 Wooster Street to 381 Lafayette Street in Manhattan, and even though I wasn’t there, a remarkable photograph from 1971 has always made me feel otherwise. In [UC San Diego’s] Babette Mangolte’s black-and-white image [of the same name], a dancer stands in the foreground. Leaning forward, one knee bent with her hands pressing into her lower back, she faces an industrial landscape where water towers and a panorama of rooftops dot a hazy horizon. In the piece, last shown outdoors and on rooftops in 1973, one dancer performs improvised gestures that are repeated by the next nearest dancer. The pattern enacts a chain of movement that flows in one direction for 15 minutes and then in the opposite direction for the same amount of time. More

Albert Lin
XETV News 6, June 13 -- National Geographic's 2010 Adventurer of the Year inspired the graduates at UC San Diego this weekend. Albert Lin has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones for his use of technology to search for historical artifacts. A graduate of UC San Diego, Lin holds a Ph.d. in material science. More

Similar stories in
KGTV News 10
KFMB News 8

San Diego Union-Tribune, June 14-- When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Benlysta in March, it was the first time in more than 50 years that a new medication has become available specifically to treat lupus, a debilitating autoimmune disorder that can cause painful swelling, joint problems and unrelenting fatigue. (Quotes Dr. Kenneth Kalunian, a professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and associate director of the UCSD Center for Innovative Therapy.) More

More Annoying Than 3-D: Smells From Your Television
Science 2.0, June 15 -- A two year experiment by researchers at UC San Diego and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology has resulted in a proof-of-concept paper in Angewandte Chemie where they demonstrate that it is possible to generate odor from a compact device small enough to fit on the back of your TV - with potentially thousands of odors. "For example, if people are eating pizza, the viewer smells pizza coming from a TV or cell phone," said Sungho Jin, professor in the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and NanoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "And if a beautiful lady walks by, they smell perfume. Instantaneously generated fragrances or odors would match the scene shown on a TV or cell phone, and that's the idea." More

Similar stories in
Science Codex
PhysOrg.com

How to Keep Hackers Away From Your Pacemaker
CNET, June 14 -- With millions of implantable medical devices in the U.S. alone, and some 300,000 more people receiving them worldwide every year, the need to protect these wireless devices from being hacked is increasingly urgent. Wearers might soon be better protected, thanks to new work out of MIT and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, so long as they don't mind walking around in invisible shields. The system the research team will be proposing at the Association for Computing Machinery's Sigcomm conference in Toronto this August uses a jamming transmitter small enough to be worn as a watch or necklace. (Quotes Stefan Savage, a professor in the Security and Cryptography department at UC San Diego.) More

Similar stories in
Science Daily

Can Hollywood Serve China's One Billion Film-Goers?
The Guardian, June 9 -- Last week, the sequel to Kung Fu Panda, the Chinese-themed, US-made animation broke box-office records in China, taking 125m yuan (£11m) in its opening weekend. It's great news for its creators at DreamWorks, mildly irritating news for Chinese animators and intriguing news for the rest of the cinema-going world, coming just as a newly confident China squares up to the original moviemaking superpower. (Quotes Yingjin Zhang, professor of literature at UC San Diego and author of “A Companion to Chinese Cinema”.) More

Deep Sea Challenges of Microbes and Men
The Naked Scientist, June 14 – Podcast interview with Professor Douglas Bartlett and Kevin Hardy of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography discussing how masses of marine microbes deal with the challenges life in the deep. More

San Diego Union-Tribune, June 13 -- The foundation created in memory of Chelsea King has awarded scholarships to 10 high school seniors who the group says embody her selfless spirit. Nearly 300 students throughout the county applied for portions of the $60,500 in scholarship money. (Mentions The Preuss School UCSD.) More

New Sunscreen Rules
XETV 6, June 14 -- The FDA is ready to slather us with new sunscreen regulations. In the works for 33 years, manufacturers have until the summer of 2012 to change their product labels, but they can start using the new guidelines immediately. The FDA says the long-awaited regulations will require sunscreens to undergo FDA testing to determine whether they protect against both UVA and UVB rays from sunlight. Dr. Richard Gallo from UC San Diego says there are 3.5 million new cases of skin cancer a year. More

Flag Day
KUSI 9, June 14 -- June 14th, 1777 is considered the birthday of the U.S. flag. That was the day Congress adopted the stars and stripes. In 1916, then-president Woodrow Wilson established June 14th as Flag Day. Then, in 1949, by an act of Congress, national Flag Day was established. UC San Diego celebrated Flag Day by placing a plaque on campus. It honored the young republican student group which installed a flag pole to fly the American flag. This was at a time of campus unrest back in 1967. The university is marking historic sites as part of its 50th Anniversary. More

Similar stories in
KGTV News 10
KFMB News 8
La Jolla Light

Growth and Spread of Cancer Curtailed With a Promising New Target
MedIndia, June 15-- Cancer and chronic inflammation are partners in peril, with the latter increasing the likelihood that malignant tumors will develop, grow and spread. Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine say they've identified a tumor inflammation trigger that is common to most, if not all, cancers. And using existing inhibitory drugs, the scientists were able to dramatically decrease primary tumor growth in animal studies and, more importantly, halt tumor progression and metastasis. The findings appear in the June 14 issue of the journal Cancer Cell, authored by Judith A. Varner, PhD, professor of medicine at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, and colleagues in the UCSD School of Medicine and at the University of Torino, Italy. More

Similar stories in
Truth Dive
Drug and Discovery Development
Genetic Engineering News
Daily India

Congressional Reps Well-Financed for 2012 Re-Election Bids
North County Times, June 14 -- The prospect of a new and potentially more Democrat-friendly congressional district for Rep. Brian Bilbray may have left him a little blue, but his campaign bank account is far from being in the red. Bilbray and the region's other congressional incumbents have a big financial head start against any challengers, according to their most recent filings with the Federal Election Commission. (Quotes UC San Diego political science professor Gary Jacobson.) More

San Diego Daily Transcript, June 15 -- With San Diego Gas & Electric looking to wind as a source for much of its growth in its renewable energy portfolio, San Diegans and a group of experts from different fields converged Tuesday at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego for the city's first-ever Wind Energy Symposium. More

Nanotechnology Now, June 7 -- At the White House on Monday, June 6, President Barack Obama met in the Oval Office with the seven U.S. recipients of the 2010 Kavli Prizes  to recognize and honor their seminal contributions to the three fields for which the prizes are awarded: astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. Accompanying the laureates were Fred Kavli, founder and chairman of The Kavli Foundation; Robert W. Conn, president of The Kavli Foundation [and former dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering]; and Wegger Strommen, the Norwegian ambassador to the U.S.
More

Similar story in
KUSI News

* Subscribe with In the News and receive our clips automatically