A Sampling of Clips for October 26^th, 2009

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

Diplomat Meets North Korean Official In New York
New York Times, Oct. 24 -- A U.S. diplomat met on Saturday with North Korea's second-ranking official involved in stalled six-country nuclear negotiations, a move that could be a step toward reconvening the talks. A State Department spokesman said North Korean Ambassador Ri Gun met in New York with Sung Kim, the State Department's North Korea desk chief and a special envoy to the six party talks. (Ri Gun is expected to participate in the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, a forum sponsored by UCSD that will bring together foreign ministry, defense officials and academics from China, Russia, North and South Korea, Japan and the United States to discuss regional security issues.) More

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Wu Man takes the Pipa Down an Ancient Path
Los Angeles Times, Oct. 24 -- The Chinese-born, San Diego-based musician Wu Man has built a reputation as an eclectic, adventurous artist, one who bends genres as wildly as she does the strings of the pipa, the two-milleniums-old instrument she champions. Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Lou Harrison have written compositions for her; jazz experimentalist Henry Threadgill hired her to play with his band. She's recently completed a week rehearsing an epoch-spanning new piece with the Kronos Quartet. Online, she's been compared with art-rock guitarist Robert Fripp. "I'm interested in finding a new sound," Wu, 45, says from her home in San Diego, where she teaches at UCSD. More

Foreign Language Online
CNN, Oct. 23 -- Whether I was squeezing myself into a crowded subway car or admiring the fall leaves around at Tsaritsino Park, I was constantly learning new Russian words during my two-week study trip to Moscow last October. The Internet offers a variety of options for people looking to learn foreign languages. (Quotes Grant Goodall, linguistics professor at UCSD). More

San Diego Gives Monaco's Prince Albert the Royal Treatment
KFMB, Oct. 23 -- Prince Albert II of Monaco was awarded the Roger Revelle Prize from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla Friday for his efforts to promote scientific research and protect the environment. The prince is the second recipient of the Roger Revelle Prize, which is named after one of the founders of UCSD and the former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography More

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The Da Vinci Clue
San Diego Union-Tribune, Oct. 26 -- If you believe, as UCSD’s Maurizio Seracini does, that Leonardo da Vinci's greatest painting is hidden inside a wall in Florence's city hall, then there are two essential techniques for finding it. As usual, Leonardo anticipated both of them. First, concentrate on scientific gadgetry. After spotting what seemed to be a clue to Leonardo's painting left by another 16th-century artist, Seracini led an international team of scientists in mapping every millimeter of the wall and surrounding room with lasers, radar, ultraviolet light and infrared cameras. Once they identified the likely hiding place, they developed devices to detect the painting by firing neutrons into the wall. More

Scientists Learn How Hormones Aid Plants in Drought
San Diego Union-Tribune, Oct. 26 -- When water is dangerously scarce, a hormone in drought-resistant plants triggers a cascade of mechanisms solely intended to keep it alive: Microscopic pores in leaves close to reduce moisture loss. Growth slows or stops. Seeds become dormant. Scientists have long known about the hormone, called abscisic acid, but how exactly it worked has remained a mystery. In a new paper published yesterday in the journal Science, biologists at The Scripps Research Institute and UCSD say they have solved the riddle of how the hormone binds to a particular target protein — the first step in the survival cascade. More

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Is the GI Bill Just an IOU?
Los Angeles Times, Opinion, Oct. 25 -- In the military, I learned to expect screw-ups, especially when it came to money. So maybe the Department of Veterans Affairs is just trying to ease my transition to civilian life by doing things the military way in its handling of Post 9/11 GI Bill education benefits. Student veterans began applying for education benefits in May, and we were supposed to have our tuition paid and receive our housing and book stipends in August. That didn't happen. Instead, more than two months into the school year, most of us have received nothing, although the VA is graciously offering to advance us emergency checks of up to $3,000 to ease the economic burden of not yet receiving the money we were promised. (Quotes UCSD’s Vonda Garcia, the associate director of financial aid) More

He Makes an App, and Medical World Listens
San Diego Union-Tribune, Oct. 25 -- Students studying to become doctors find all sorts of ways to subdue the stress of school. They hike mountains, dance to hip-hop music, surf and take long trips on bicycles. But Michael Fujinaka is different. The second-year UCSD School of Medicine student spends his free time developing applications for iPhones. His first effort — an app called iMurmur that helps medical staffers learn how to detect troubling heartbeats — has become a big success. More

Colleges Spice up Dining Options
San Diego Union-Tribune, Oct. 26 -- Good-bye, burgers, fries and cheese pizza slices. Hello, beef carpaccio, Spanish tapas and artisan cheese plates. College dining has gone gourmet, as universities seek to capitalize on more sophisticated palates while working to keep students, faculty and visitors from straying off campus for their meals. UCSD is planning anupscale dining establishment that will take reservations, while hospitality planners at the University of Southern California have consulted with celebrity chefs Tyler Florence and Bradley Ogden about future culinary endeavors. More

Robert Mosher Featured Lecturer
San Diego Union-Tribune, Oct. 25 -- Robert Mosher may be old (89), but he’s still relevant in today’s upside-down real estate market, having pioneered San Diego’s modern architectural movement and survived numerous booms and busts. Those and many other reasons make him the perfect candidate to kick off the San Diego Architectural Foundation’s quarterly lecture series this week at the Neurosciences Institute on Torrey Pines Mesa. (Mosher is known for his work on the San Diego-Coronado Bridge, expansions of the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, alterations for the Museum of Contemporary Art’s La Jolla facility and John Muir College buildings at UCSD.) . More

The Game of Pricing Water in San Diego: What Is This?
Voice of San Diego, Oct. 26 -- Well, this is a panel discussion. Except you don't have to go anywhere to see it and you don't have to write your question on a note card and give it to someone to give to the moderator. Nothing is more important to San Diego than its water supply. We import the vast majority of this precious resource from hundreds of miles away through a system of rivers, pumps, canals and reservoirs. Along those routes, more and more people are building homes and businesses and challenging our rights to bring so much water in from so far away. (Mentions panelist, Richard Carson, a professor and former chairman of the economics department at UCSD) More

UCSD Research Drug May Help Fatal Lung Disease
San Diego News Network, Oct. 25 -- A drug currently undergoing tests for use in Alzheimer’s patients also shows promise for reversing pulmonary arterial hypertension, a fatal lung disease, it was announced Sunday. A UCSD Health Sciences team led by Dr. Patricia Thistlethwaite, a professor of surgery and cardiothoracic surgeon, isolated a protein called Notch-3 that in laboratory mice appears to linked to the disease. The illness is a type of high blood pressure that affects the lungs and kills 20,000 Americans annually. The enzyme y-secretase inhibitor, currently being tested for use against Alzheimer’s, hinders Notch-3 and reverses the condition in mice, Thistlethwaite said. More

Grudgingly, Young People Finally Flock to Twitter
North County Times, Oct. 21 -- They think it's pointless, narcissistic. Some don't even know what it is. Even so, more young adults and teens -- normally at the cutting edge of technology -- are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring the minutiae of celebrities' lives. It's not always love at first tweet, though. ''I still find no point to using it. I'm the type of person who likes to talk to someone,'' says Austyn Gabig, a sophomore at UCSD, who only joined Twitter this month because she heard Ellen DeGeneres was going to use tweets as a way to win tickets to her talk show. More

Mural Reflects UCSD Diversity
La Jolla Light, Oct. 21 -- Artist Mario Torero and Fernando Vossa talk about the mural that was unveiled last week at UCSD. The art project was commissioned to celebrate UCSD's diversity and reflect the real communities of California. A native of Peru, who lives and works in San Diego, Torero has been using his talent to embody in visual images the hidden history of Latino communities for many years. He collaborated with UCSD students and staff on the design of the Chicano history mural. More

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