Parched land in Nevada. A UCLA-led research team studied centuries of megadroughts in the region spanning southern Montana to northern Mexico and the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains. Photo credit: Famartin/Wikimedia Commons
Climate change is a significant factor, UCLA-led research finds
By Anna Novoselov
The drought that has enveloped southwestern North America for the past 22 years is the region’s driest “megadrought” — defined as a drought lasting two decades or longer — since at least the year 800, according to a new UCLA-led study in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Thanks to the region’s high temperatures and low precipitation levels from summer 2020 through summer 2021, the current drought has exceeded the severity of a late-1500s megadrought that previously had been identified as the driest such drought in the 1,200 years that the scientists studied.
UCLA geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, said with dry conditions likely to persist, it would take multiple wet years to remediate their effects.
“It’s extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year,” he said.
The researchers calculated the intensity of droughts by analyzing tree ring patterns, which provide insights about soil moisture levels each year over long timespans. (They also confirmed their measurements by checking findings against historical climate data.) Periods of severe drought were marked by high degrees of “soil moisture deficit,” a metric that describes how little moisture the soil contains compared to its normal saturation.
Since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice as severe as any drought of the 1900s — and greater than it was during even the driest parts of the most severe megadroughts of the past 12 centuries.
Studying the area from southern Montana to northern Mexico, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, researchers discovered that megadroughts occurred repeatedly in the region from 800 to 1600. Williams said the finding suggests that dramatic shifts in dryness and water availability happened in the Southwest prior to the effects of human-caused climate change becoming apparent in the 20th century.
Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.
One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.
“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”
As of Feb. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels.
Regulators have continued to implement water conservation measures in response to water shortages caused by the drought. In August, for example, federal officials cut water allocations to several southwestern states in response to low water levels in the Colorado River. And in October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency and asked Californians to voluntarily decrease their water usage by 15%.
Williams said initiatives like those will help in the short term, but water conservation efforts that extend beyond times of drought will be needed to help ensure people have the water they need as climate change continues to intensify drought conditions.
The study was a collaboration among researchers from UCLA, NASA and the Columbia Climate School.
This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CrackedlandinNevadaFamartinWikimediaCommons-363x237.png237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-02-14 14:58:332022-03-14 14:09:13Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years
Sea ice in the Bellingshausen Sea, Antarctica, photographed from an aircraft 1,500 feet above ground. Image credit: Michael Studinger/NASA
By David Colgan
Sometime in the next few weeks, during late summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the area covered by sea ice around Antarctica will reach its annual minimum. According to UCLA climate scientist Marilyn Raphael, the measurement could set a new record low, just five years after the last record was established.
That’s because current conditions in the region are similar to those of late 2016 and early 2017, and the planet has just experienced a year of record-high ocean temperatures.
“The temperature of the ocean limits how much area the ice can cover,” said Raphael, a professor of geography and director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “The same thing happened five years ago, when warming and more exposed ocean caused earlier retreat of the ice.”
A paper co-authored by Raphael and published in the journal Nature Climate Change puts those developments in context by using historical data to determine the amount of area covered by sea ice across the entire Antarctic region, season by season, from 1905 to 2020.
Since 1979, scientists have relied on satellite imaging to track the daily extent of Antarctic sea ice, which expands dramatically during the Antarctic winter and contracts in the summer, typically reaching its minimum in mid-February. The new study, a collaboration between UCLA and Ohio University researchers, used extensive weather data, ocean data and previous research findings from locations around Antarctica to reconstruct which portions of the region were covered by ice before satellite imaging existed.
The total area covered by sea ice fluctuates each year according to the seasons. It also fluctuates in cycles of roughly five to seven years. The research also uncovered longer-term trends: The area covered by sea ice declined from 1905 to the 1960s, but since then, despite rising global temperatures, the average area per year covered by ice has increased — in stark contrast to the rapidly declining amount of sea ice in the Arctic region around the North Pole.
It will take further research to determine why these trends occurred and whether 2017’s record low signaled that global warming has begun to affect long-term patterns. But measurement of the 2022 sea ice minimum, expected between mid-February and early March, is the next critical observation point. A repeat of 2017, Raphael said, would provide further evidence that global warming may be playing a major role in this massive, complex natural system.
While previous papers reconstructed historic sea ice conditions seasonally at specific locations, doing so around the entire continent fills a critical gap in baseline information — particularly because conditions vary greatly from place to place in the region, said Mark Handcock, a UCLA statistician and co-author of the new study.
“Statistical methods can weave all the individual sources into a complete picture of the region,” he said.
Antarctic sea ice provides habitat for penguins, seals and other animals around Antarctica itself, but it also important to a range of life around the world. It plays a major role in climatic and oceanic patterns as far north as Iceland and the North Pacific Ocean.
“Antarctic sea ice helps control things like the equator-pole temperature gradient,” Raphael said, referring to the temperature difference between the equator and poles. “That gradient influences large-scale atmospheric circulation.”
Sea ice also influences thermohaline circulation, a global system of surface and deep-water ocean currents. One such current is the Gulf Stream, which is responsible for the Northeast United States’ relatively mild weather.
The scale of Antarctic sea ice is massive. At its maximum size, which typically occurs each September, the ice expands to cover about 7 million square miles — only slightly larger than the land area of South America.
The paper’s findings can be used in future studies on the underlying causes of historic sea ice changes and what to expect as climate change continues to warm the planet.
The research, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, is expected to produce additional findings that will enable scientists to reconstruct historical models for the extent of sea ice at daily, rather than seasonal, intervals.
This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Antarcticaseaice-363x237.png237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-02-10 16:08:592022-03-14 14:35:03Antarctic sea ice level could reach record low in 2022, UCLA climate scientist says
UCLA study shows the strange markings are the result of trapped big cats chewing through wire snares, indicating these animals are injured at far higher rates than previously assumed
An encounter with lions in captivity helped UCLA’s Paula White solve the riddle behind the dental damage she had observed on wild lion and leopard skulls. Image courtesy of Paula White
By Alison Hewitt |
In a hunting camp in Zambia more than a decade ago, UCLA biologist Paula White puzzled over the heavy skull of a trophy-hunted lion. Zambia permits limited hunting in certain areas to help fund its national conservation program, and White had gained permission to examine the trophy skulls and hides to evaluate how hunting was affecting conservation efforts.
This particular skull had a pronounced horizontal V-shaped notch on one of the canine teeth — a marking White had never seen before from natural wear. Over the next few months, she began noticing similar notches on other lions’ teeth.
It wasn’t until three years later, when she visited lions bred in captivity and saw them gnawing on a wire fence, that it clicked: The tooth notches in wild lions resulted from the animals chewing their way out of wire snares — noose-like traps set by poachers. The sheer number of notched teeth she’d seen suggested that such traps, illegal in conservation areas, were injuring far more lions than experts had estimated.
“It was an odd mix of thrilling to figure out the cause of the notches and horrifying to realize that so many animals had been entangled in a snare at some point in their lives,” said White, director of the Zambia Lion Project and a senior research fellow with the Center for Tropical Research at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
From 2007 to 2012, White crisscrossed Zambia examining and photographing the skulls, teeth and hides of trophy-hunted lions and leopards. She shared the photos with UCLA paleobiologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a carnivore tooth-wear expert.
They examined White’s photos of 112 lions and 45 leopards in two Zambian conservation areas and found that 37% of the lions and 22% of the leopards had snare scars and tooth notches, according to a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.
“Identifying the snare damage to the teeth is a real innovation. I’d never seen anything like those horizontal notches before,” said Van Valkenburgh, a professor emerita of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Usually I’m looking at decades-old skulls in museums, but these are the animals we’re trying to conserve right now. This is real-time information, and that’s what you need for conservation decisions.”
Images on the left show notches caused by chewing wire snares, while those on the right show regular wear to lions’ teeth. Image courtesy of Paula White
With lions and leopards having declined in numbers across their former African range and both now classified as “vulnerable,” vigorous conservation efforts are particularly important, the researchers said. The paper recommends requiring trophy hunters to share remains for forensic examination, which would help show whether current conservation programs are effectively reducing the number of human-caused injuries to the animals from illegal activities like poaching.
The researchers were surprised by the findings that more than a third of the lions and more than a fifth of the leopards White examined in the Luangwa Valley and Greater Kafue Ecosystem — which include Zambia’s largest conservation areas — had old snare injuries, even though they suspected existing data undercounted the problem. Previous estimates suggested that only 5% to 10% of Zambia’s lions had snare injuries, and there was virtually no prior data on such injuries among the nation’s leopards.
The authors also discovered that 30 of the 112 lions had shotgun pellets embedded in their skulls and that 13 of these 30 had both shotgun and snare injuries.
The study authors noted that overall rates of injuries among animals in the conservation areas are probably even higher than the current study suggests because researchers can’t count snared animals that never escaped or died undetected.
Some of the lions and leopards are injured or killed when they become unintended victims of wire snares set by poachers to catch wild game, while others fall victim to traps meant to protect poaching camps. Some poachers intentionally capture the big cats to sell their claws, teeth and other body parts. The animals can also be struck by shotgun pellets when people attempt to scare them away from livestock or homes.
More than one-third of lions and one-fifth of leopards studied showed signs that they had chewed through poachers’ noose-like wire snares like the one pictured here. Courtesy of Paula White
Even for those that escape death, their injuries — damaged teeth, feet severed by snares and lead-shot poisoning — can seriously hinder their ability to compete for resources like food, mates and territory.
“Our new method of evaluating anthropogenic injuries provides a window into the stresses these carnivores are experiencing,” Van Valkenburgh said. “So for every trophy animal, a forensic examination such as ours should be routine. Studying the dead animals can help conserve the living animals.”
White’s research has already helped bring about policy changes by Zambia’s parks and wildlife department, which has lowered the number of lions that can be hunted annually by about two-thirds, stipulated that only older animals may be hunted and required that each trophy taken be examined by officials to confirm the age. Unfortunately, White said, problems like poaching and habitat encroachment continue to pose greater threats to conservation.
The paper recommends that countries expand their existing inspections by requiring hunters to provide their specimens for systematic photographic archiving to document tooth damage, snare scars or old embedded shotgun pellets before they export their trophies. The authors note that it’s also possible to detect snare-wear tooth injuries on tranquilized lions.
“I wholeheartedly believe that as long as hunting continues, scientists working with hunters can obtain information that would have been lost and which will really benefit conservation,” White said. “We could compare the past 10 years of data with data 10 years from now. I would hope that if the anti-poaching efforts are successful, we would see a reduction in these types of injuries.”
This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/skullbyPaulaWhite-363x237.png237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-02-10 15:51:462022-02-28 12:30:40Notches on lions’ teeth reveal poaching in Zambia’s conservation areas
UCLA faculty and alumni contributed ideas, expertise and artworks to the $100 million revitalization project
Overhead view of Destination Crenshaw’s Sankofa Park featuring designs for works by Maren Hassinger, Kehinde Wiley and Charles Dickson. Image credit: Rendering by Perkins&Will, courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
By Avishay Artsy |
A cultural and economic corridor that celebrates the contributions of Southern California’s Black community is coming to South Los Angeles. Destination Crenshaw is a $100 million revitalization project that will bring public art, pocket parks and small business investment to 1.3 miles of Crenshaw Boulevard.
Helping bring this project to life? UCLA faculty and alumni.
Crenshaw is a neighborhood in transition. Construction of a light rail line connecting Crenshaw and LAX airport and the opening of SoFi Stadium in nearby Inglewood have boosted home values and brought in new businesses, while accelerating gentrification and displacement. Destination Crenshaw was incorporated as a non-profit in November 2017 to draw attention to the area’s Black history and culture.
“It was a way to kind of lay an anchor and say that this is a Black community, and we want to show that through our cultural heritage,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences in the UCLA College, and a member of the Chancellor’s Council on the Arts. Since 2017, Hunt has served as an advisor to the project at the invitation of city councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who is spearheading the initiative.
Members of Harris-Dawson’s staff had read “Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities,” a book that Hunt had co-edited with Ana-Christina Ramón at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and published in 2010.
In his role as advisor, Hunt recommended key moments and figures in Black L.A. history to include. Marcus Hunter, a professor of sociology and the inaugural chair of the department of African American studies at UCLA, also became an advisor.
“UCLA was kind of the scholarly anchor,” Hunt said. “We were the place that was trying to make sure that they were staying true to the history.”
The community partners working on Destination Crenshaw include artist Judith Baca, distinguished professor emeritus in the departments of Chicana and Chicano and Central American studies and world arts and cultures/dance, and a long list of UCLA alumni: arts educator and independent filmmaker Ben Caldwell, educator Mandla Kayise, curator Naima Keith, community organizers Karen Mack and Alberto Retana, and art advisor Joy Simmons.
Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War” figure in the location of his planned Destination Crenshaw sculpture, which will be a bookend to “Rumors of War” and feature a female figure. Image credit: Rendering by Perkins&Will, courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
Turning insult into opportunity
Destination Crenshaw took shape after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to build the portion of the Crenshaw/LAX line between Hyde Park and Leimert Park at-grade, rather than underground. Area residents fumed at how building the line at-grade would bisect Crenshaw Boulevard in two, making it less walkable and thereby reducing the foot traffic vital to small businesses and a connected community.
Locals vowed to turn an insult into an opportunity, launching an ambitious project to upgrade infrastructure, build community gathering places and parks, add more than 800 trees, invest in small businesses on the boulevard, and install public artworks by local Black artists.
In meeting with Harris-Dawson’s office, Hunter, a Leimert Park resident, heard city council staff members talk about Crenshaw/LAX rail passengers “passing through” the area.
“Then it became a discussion about like, what does it mean to pass through?” Hunter said. “You want to invite people to get off, but also you want people to have some kind of experience or awareness of what they’re passing through on their way to downtown or wherever they’re going on the train.”
Artis Lane’s sculpture “Emerging First Man” in Sankofa Park. Image credit: Rendering by Perkins&Will, courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
Creating a showcase space for public art
Destination Crenshaw, which spans Crenshaw Boulevard from 48th to 60th streets, will include a new “Afrocentric streetscape” design and six new pocket parks. More than 100 public artworks and exhibits, including monuments, statues, murals and augmented reality storytelling, are set to be included.
In October 2021, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission approved plans for seven permanent outdoor sculptures along the route. Destination Crenshaw commissioned work from seven prominent Black artists with local ties, including Kehinde Wiley and Alison Saar. Artists Maren Hassinger and Brenna Youngblood, both UCLA alumna, have also been commissioned to create work.
Sankofa Park featuring design for Maren Hassinger’s sculpture “An Object of Curiosity, Radiating Love.” Image credit: Rendering by Perkins&Will, courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
Hassinger, who was born in Los Angeles in 1947, recalls childhood visits to the May Company department store at the corner of Crenshaw and Santa Barbara (now Martin Luther King Jr.) boulevards. She graduated from Bennington College in Vermont with a bachelor’s in sculpture in 1969, and from UCLA with an M.F.A. in 1973. Her work often incorporates unconventional materials such as plastic bags, leaves and branches, wire, rope and found trash.
For the Destination Crenshaw project, “I knew right away that I wanted to do something that I hadn’t done before,” Hassinger said, “but I somehow wanted it to reflect on an L.A. experience. When I think of L.A., I think of bright and sunny and shiny and warm and loud and busy, and for some reason, I started seeing this pink sphere in my head.”
Hassinger’s sculpture will be installed on a grassy area at the center of Sankofa Park, an elevated outdoor plaza that Destination Crenshaw is building at 46th Street. “An Object of Curiosity, Radiating Love” is a large fiberglass orb, hot pink and six feet in diameter.
As people approach the orb, sensors will trigger it to light up and emit a soft pink glow. This sensation of a dialogue with passers-by is meant to evoke the community-minded spirit of a neighborhood in the midst of a dramatic and unsettling transition.
“So, it’s as if this warm hot pink thing said hello, or winked, or nodded. I want you to know, as a person walking by, that you’re noticed. You exist,” Hassinger said.
I AM Park featuring design for Brenna Youngblood’s work “I AM.” Image credit: Rendering by Perkins&Will, courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
Youngblood grew up in Riverside but visited South L.A. as a child, attending church with her family in Compton and South Gate. She now has a home and studio in the Crenshaw district.
“I’ve been here about six years. Not that long, but long enough to see some changes,” she said.
Youngblood received her bachelor’s of fine arts from Cal State Long Beach in 2002 and her M.F.A. from UCLA in 2006. In 2012, she participated in the Hammer Museum’s inaugural “Made in L.A.” biennial exhibition.
Her piece “I AM” will be installed toward the southern end of the route, near Slauson Avenue, in Welcome Park and I AM Park. The letters I AM evoke the posters carried by Civil Rights demonstrators that read “I AM A MAN.” The 8-foot-tall bronze sculpture resembles stacked toy blocks with letters along the sides spelling out I AM. The blocks also look like a jungle gym, which speaks to the formative role of language in shaping identity. The sculpture is a reimagining of one of Youngblood’s earlier works, “MIA,” (2011).
“I think that people will enjoy it because it’s a sculpture that you can touch, that you can crawl up on,” she said.
A tribute to history based on meticulous research
Harris-Dawson’s Council office asked Hunter and his UCLA students to add historical context to Destination Crenshaw. Hunter and 10 graduate students pored through the archives of the African American newspapers California Eagle and the Los Angeles Sentinelto revisit L.A. history from 1850 to 2015. The students presented their research to the design team of Perkins&Will, the architect-of-record for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., which they worked on alongside design architect Adjaye Associates.
What became clear, Hunter said, was that any conversation about Black L.A. history has to start with Bridget “Biddy” Mason. Born a slave, Mason became one of the first prominent citizens and landowners in Los Angeles in the 1850s and 1860s. Working as a midwife and nurse, she used her money to purchase land in what is now the heart of downtown. The investment made her the wealthiest Black woman in the city. She donated to charities, fed and sheltered the poor, visited prisoners and founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles in 1872.
“[Mason] is the godmother of Black LA. You cannot talk about Black Los Angeles without talking about her,” Hunter said. People passing through this area “need to see her or experience something about her.”
Other historical markers will track Crenshaw’s role in shaping the nation’s cultural imagination. Crenshaw has been home to many prominent Black entertainers, such as stand-up comedian Redd Foxx, rapper Ice-T, and singers Ray Charles, Ike and Tina Turner and Nancy Wilson. It was also home to the hit TV show “Soul Train,” which host Don Cornelius started in Chicago in 1970 but brought to L.A. the following year. Local high school students packed Soul Train’s stage to show off fashion styles and new dance moves that were then copied by teens across the country.
Welcome Park at 50th Street featuring design for Alison Saar’s work “Bearing Witness.” Image credit: Rendering by Perkins&Will, courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
Mapping the movement of Black L.A.
Using census data, the UCLA student researchers also mapped the migration of the Black population across time.
“Black populations have shifted. They’ve moved throughout the decades and centuries in pretty interesting ways,” Hunt said.
Because of redlining and racist housing policies, the neighborhood’s early residents were almost exclusively middle-class and upper-middle-class white families. Former L.A. Mayor (and UCLA alumnus) Tom Bradley and his wife needed a white intermediary to buy their first house in Leimert Park in 1950, while he was serving as a Los Angeles police officer and prior to his entry into politics. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racially restrictive housing covenants, Japanese American families began to move in, and the center of the city’s Black population shifted west from its longtime home along Central Avenue.
However, Hunt continues, “after the ’92 Uprising, a lot of Blacks moved into the Inland Empire for cheaper housing and schools. And for the first time the Black population actually declined during that decade.” Despite this migration to the Inland Empire, Crenshaw’s population remains above 60% Black, while other former Black strongholds like Watts are now predominantly Latino.
“Crenshaw and the surrounding areas, Baldwin Hills, View Park, is still a heavy Black concentrated population, and parts of it are middle class and upper middle class, which is kind of unique,” Hunt said, describing the Crenshaw neighborhood as the “center of gravity” for the community. “It’s where a lot of the action is concentrated, even though it’s not inclusive of the entirety of Black L.A.”
Destination Crenshaw moves ahead
Construction on Destination Crenshaw slowed during the height of the pandemic, but work is now moving apace, and organizers expect the project to be completed by spring of 2023, and to debut the seven permanent artworks before next fall. Fundraising now stands at about $72 million, and the Getty Foundation has provided $3 million to commission and fabricate the first seven sculptures, as well as plan for their conservation. The project, which aims to include more than 100 works of art by Black artists, will continue to commission new works in order to create what’s billed as “the nation’s largest art and cultural celebration of African American contribution to world culture.”
“The intention is to enshrine in a proper, meaningful way what Black people have contributed and that they were here, even if you’re not seeing them now, that they were here and they contributed,” Hunter said.
And while the new streetscaping, pocket parks and large-scale sculptures may lure passengers off the train, the project is largely aimed at boosting local businesses and catering to those who live in the district, not just pass through it.
“It’s definitely for the Black community. It’s about staking claim to our history, our culture, and making sure that those stories are remembered,” Hunt said. But, he added, Destination Crenshaw can also raise awareness that “this is a signature Black community that has a history and is connected to a broader history in L.A.”
This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/OverheadviewofSankofaPark.jpg9571700Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-02-10 09:49:302022-02-28 12:30:31Destination Crenshaw pays tribute to Black creativity and history in Los Angeles
Cortisol is well-suited for measurement through wearable devices, according to study co-author Sam Emaminejad, because its concentration levels in sweat are similar to its circulating levels. Photo credit: Yichao Zhao and Zhaoqing Wang/UCLA
The human body responds to stress, from the everyday to the extreme, by producing a hormone called cortisol.
To date, it has been impractical to measure cortisol as a way to potentially identify conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress, in which levels of the hormone are elevated. Cortisol levels traditionally have been evaluated through blood samples by professional labs, and while those measurements can be useful for diagnosing certain diseases, they fail to capture changes in cortisol levels over time.
Now, a UCLA research team has developed a device that could be a major step forward: a smartwatch that assesses cortisol levels found in sweat — accurately, noninvasively and in real time. Described in a study published in Science Advances, the technology could offer wearers the ability to read and react to an essential biochemical indicator of stress.
“I anticipate that the ability to monitor variations in cortisol closely across time will be very instructive for people with psychiatric disorders,” said co-corresponding author Anne Andrews, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and member of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “They may be able to see something coming or monitor changes in their own personal patterns.”
Cortisol is well-suited for measurement through sweat, according to co-corresponding author Sam Emaminejad, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and a member of CNSI.
“We determined that by tracking cortisol in sweat, we would be able to monitor such changes in a wearable format, as we have shown before for other small molecules such as metabolites and pharmaceuticals,” he said. “Because of its small molecular size, cortisol diffuses in sweat with concentration levels that closely reflect its circulating levels.”
The technology capitalizes on previous advances in wearable bioelectronics and biosensing transistors made by Emaminejad, Andrews and their research teams.
The technology capitalizes on previous work by Sam Emaminejad, Anne Andrews and their UCLA research teams. Image credit: Emaminejad Lab and Andrews Lab/UCLA
In the new smartwatch, a strip of specialized thin adhesive film collects tiny volumes of sweat, measurable in millionths of a liter. An attached sensor detects cortisol using engineered strands of DNA, called aptamers, which are designed so that a cortisol molecule will fit into each aptamer like a key fits a lock. When cortisol attaches, the aptamer changes shape in a way that alters electric fields at the surface of a transistor.
The invention — along with a 2021 study that demonstrated the ability to measure key chemicals in the brain using probes — is the culmination of a long scientific quest for Andrews. Over more than 20 years, she has spearheaded efforts to monitor molecules such as serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain tied to mood regulation, in living things, despite transistors’ vulnerability to wet, salty biological environments.
In 1999, she proposed using nucleic acids — rather than proteins, the standard mechanism — to recognize specific molecules.
“That strategy led us to crack a fundamental physics problem: how to make transistors work for electronic measurements in biological fluids,” said Andrews, who is also a professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
Meanwhile, Emaminejad has had a vision of ubiquitous personal health monitoring. His lab is pioneering wearable devices with biosensors that track the levels of certain molecules that are related to specific health measures.
“We’re entering the era of point-of-person monitoring, where instead of going to a doctor to get checked out, the doctor is basically always with us,” he said. “The data are collected, analyzed and provided right on the body, giving us real-time feedback to improve our health and well-being.”
Emaminejad’s lab had previously demonstrated that a disposable version of the specialized adhesive film enables smartwatches to analyze chemicals from sweat, as well as a technology that prompts small amounts of sweat even when the wearer is still. Earlier studies showed that sensors developed by Emaminejad’s group could be useful for diagnosing diseases such as cystic fibrosis and for personalizing drug dosages.
One challenge in using cortisol levels to diagnose depression and other disorders is that levels of the hormone can vary widely from person to person — so doctors can’t learn very much from any single measurement. But the authors foresee that tracking individual cortisol levels over time using the smartwatch may alert wearers, and their physicians, to changes that could be clinically significant for diagnosis or monitoring the effects of treatment.
Among the study’s other authors is Janet Tomiyama, a UCLA associate professor of psychology, who has collaborated with Emaminejad’s lab over the years to test his wearable devices in clinical settings.
“This work turned into an important paper by drawing together disparate parts of UCLA,” said Paul Weiss, a UCLA distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of materials science and engineering, a member of CNSI, and a co-author of the paper. “It comes from us being close in proximity, not having ego problems and being excited about working together. We can solve each other’s problems and take this technology in new directions.”
The latest research builds upon early work that was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The current study received funding from the NSF CAREER program, the National Institute on Drug Abuse through an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the National Institute of General Medical Science of the NIH, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, the Stanford Genome Technology Center, the Brain and Behavior Foundation and the PhRMA Foundation.
The UCLA NanoLab, Electron Imaging Center for NanoMachines and Nano and Pico Characterization Laboratory, all housed at CNSI, provided instrumentation for the new study.
The paper’s co-first authors are UCLA postdoctoral scholar Bo Wang and Chuanzhen Zhao, a former UCLA graduate student. Other co-authors are Zhaoqing Wang, Xuanbing Cheng, Wenfei Liu, Wenzhuo Yu, Shuyu Lin, Yichao Zhao, Kevin Cheung and Haisong Lin, all of UCLA; and Milan Stojanović and Kyung-Ae Yang of Columbia University.
This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Cortisolsensingsmartwatch-363x237.png237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-02-10 09:11:102022-03-02 10:44:34Sweating the small stuff: Smartwatch developed at UCLA measures key stress hormone
The tennis icon spent his life fighting for the oppressed. A new oral history collection tells his story.
By Peter Hovarth
By Delan Bruce and Mary Daily | Collage by Peter Hovarth
Arthur Ashe ’66 was a champion. Not just on the tennis court — where he won 33 titles and set world records — but throughout his life, as a warrior for justice who fought for the rights of oppressed people and devoted himself to social justice, health and humanitarian causes.
Ashe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and was drawn to UCLA, he said, because it was Jackie Robinson’s university. He attended on a scholarship. In 1965, during his junior year, Ashe became the first African American to win an NCAA singles title. He went on to win the U.S. Open, the Australian Open and Wimbledon, among many other tournaments. He was among the greatest athletes ever to play tennis, an iconic cultural figure and the sport’s reigning champion for many years.
Fighting Apartheid
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, South Africa continually denied Ashe a visa to travel there to compete in the South African Open. He finally obtained the visa in 1973 and was the first Black man to play in the national tournament.
The visa gave Ashe permission to play in South Africa, but it did not mute his opposition to apartheid. Ten years later, he and singer Harry Belafonte founded Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid to lobby for sanctions and embargoes against the South African government. In 1985, Ashe was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., during an anti-apartheid protest, an event that helped focus international attention on that growing movement. He did so much to fight apartheid that when Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison and was asked what American citizen he would like to visit with, he said, “How about Arthur Ashe?”
Donald Dell, Arthur Ashe’s agent, tells the Arthur Ashe Oral History Project about meeting Nelson Mandela with Ashe.
Arthur Ashe at hearings of the United Nations General Assembly’s Special Committee on Apartheid in 1970. Ashe asked the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, Germany and Italy to expel South Africa from the International Lawn Tennis Federation, as well as to bar the country from participating in the Davis Cup. Image credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images
AIDS Awareness
The champion took on a different cause in 1983, when he contracted HIV through a blood transfusion following surgery. In 1992, he went public with news of his infection, prompting a deluge of public attention. Ashe used the spotlight to raise awareness of the virus and its victims.
“I do not much like being the personification of a problem involving a killer disease,” he said. “But I know I must seize these opportunities to spread the word.” He founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, with the goal of eradicating the disease. The nonprofit funded research into the treatment, cure and prevention of AIDS. On World AIDS Day, he spoke before the United Nations General Assembly, lobbying for increased funding for research and addressing the illness as a global issue. Although he’d retired from tennis in 1980, Ashe was named Sports Illustrated’s 1992 Sportsman of the Year because of his unshakable support for humanitarian causes.
Ashe died of AIDS–related pneumonia in 1993, at the age of 49. Just two months earlier, he had established the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, created to address issues of inadequate health care for urban minorities. To the end, he kept fighting for what he believed was right.
Arthur Ashe Legacy at UCLA
In 2008, Ashe’s widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, established the Arthur Ashe Learning Center in New York, dedicated to providing a multimedia resource for understanding and promoting his legacy and the values he espoused. She created a website and an array of visual and innovative learning tools. Seven years later, she ceded the assets of the Arthur Ashe Learning Center to UCLA, where they became part of the Arthur Ashe Legacy Project. The project is under the direction of Patricia Turner, professor in the departments of African American Studies and World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Turner, whose respect for Ashe’s accomplishments dates back to her childhood, taught his autobiography at UC Davis and currently teaches a Fiat Lux seminar about him at UCLA.
The work of the Arthur Ashe Legacy Project includes managing a booth devoted to Ashe at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing, New York, where the U.S. Open is played, as well as reconfiguring a larger exhibition about his life that is currently being assembled and will likely travel to different venues.
Ashe was named Sports Illustrated’s 1992 Sportsman of the Year because of his unshakable support for humanitarian causes.
The Oral History Collection
One of the Legacy Project’s recent initiatives is the Arthur Ashe Oral History Project, designed and led by Turner. In 2019, UCLA alumna and oral historian Yolanda Hester M.A. ’17 began identifying aspects of Ashe’s life that a UCLA oral history collection could examine deeply in ways that existing Ashe archives hadn’t.
Ann Koger, who in 1973 became one of the first African American women to play professionally in the Virginia Slims Tennis Circuit, speaks about traveling through the South as a young Black tennis player in the 1960s.
UCLA’s Ashe oral history archive, which will be housed at the UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, explores his childhood years playing tennis in segregated Richmond. The interviews also document the experiences of African Americans playing tennis during the 1950s and ’60s. The oral histories delve into tennis’s seismic shift to its open era, when both amateur and professional players were finally allowed to compete for the major Grand Slam titles. In 1968, Ashe won the first U.S. Open of this new, much more lucrative era of pro tennis. Through intercontinental interviews, the recordings tell the story, too, of Ashe’s historic 1973 and 1974 trips to South Africa.
Assisting in assembling the collection is Chinyere Nwonye ’19, who in 2017 enrolled in Turner’s Fiat Lux seminar on Ashe. While she had seen the Arthur Ashe Student Health & Wellness Center on campus many times, she had never known that Ashe was Black. In the seminar, Nwonye and her classmates read Ashe’s memoir Days of Grace. They also took a tour of campus sites that are important to Ashe’s story, such as the location of his ROTC service. The course inspired Nwonye to join the oral history project after graduation.
The oral history method captures a person through others’ memories, sometimes in idiosyncratic detail. Hester and Nwonye note that the recordings take listeners inside the narrative in a way not possible through the written word.
Tom Chewning, a lifelong friend of Ashe’s, describes meeting Ashe for the first time at a tournament in West Virginia. The two teens were both rising tennis players from Richmond but had never met due to segregation.
Details emerge from the interviews: One interviewee recalls competing in a match, going to pick up a ball and having felt someone spit on his hand. As a Black tennis player, he felt compelled to contain his anger, wipe off his hand and continue playing. Hester says narrators shared other instances of their struggles against, and triumphs over, subtler forms of racist resistance to tennis integration — for instance, a young player’s tournament registration paperwork would often conveniently disappear.
Archival newspaper clippings: Arthur Ashe’s letter requesting approval of Otis Smith’s membership in the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Ashe featured in The New York Times in 1966. (NYT) COURTESY UCLA ATHLETICS. (LETTER) COURTESY UCLA ARTHUR ASHE LEGACY PROJECT.
Interviews Continue Through Zoom
The oral history format took on a new dimension via Zoom, with narrators in their own homes, among their personal belongings and keepsakes. Nwonye and Hester cite countless moments when narrators would stop and say things like “I’ve got to send you this!” while holding up a T-shirt they’d received from Ashe or showing a racket he’d given them.
The complete project will include interviews with more than 100 of Ashe’s associates. By midsummer of 2021, Hester and Nwonye had interviewed more than 50 people, having completed 15 pre-pandemic Q&As. In spring 2020, COVID created a dilemma. “So much of oral history is about being in the room together, communicating not just verbally but also through gesture and body language,” says Hester.
But Zoom enabled interviews with people who might not otherwise have been as accessible — those in far-flung places across the country or even abroad. This was the case with poet Don Mattera, who interacted with Ashe during the tennis star’s 1973 trip to South Africa and wrote a poem titled Anguished Spirit—Ashe. And Hester says the slower pace of pandemic life made scheduling interviews easier, so she and Nwonye moved through their list much more quickly than they had expected to.
South African poet Don Mattera recites a poem he wrote for Ashe.
How Ashe Changed Lives
One underreported facet of Ashe’s life that the interviews reveal is his business savvy. From his Safe Passage Foundation, which supported young people of color through tennis, to his role as a cornerstone of the Association of Tennis Professionals, founded in 1972, Ashe built organizational infrastructures within and outside of tennis. Hester hopes the oral history project will contextualize some of the benchmark moments coming up in the next few years regarding Ashe’s playing career and humanitarian work that reached beyond the world of sports.
Researchers, students and tennis lovers will be able to immerse themselves in the completed archive. The narrators’ stories traverse pivotal periods of recent history, such as tennis’s open era, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women’s rights movement and the global AIDS epidemic. Nwonye sees symmetry between Ashe’s losing his life to HIV/AIDS at the height of a public health crisis and the COVID crisis challenging the world today.
If the histories are notable for their breadth, they are sometimes most striking for their intimacy. They offer reminders of how Ashe touched lives, sometimes unexpectedly. Take the case of Otis Smith ’01, now director of tennis at the Santa Barbara Tennis Club. In 1975, Smith was a rising junior tennis player who practiced often at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. The club, founded in 1920, had no African American members. Someone complained Smith was spending too much time at the club for a nonmember, forcing the 9-year-old to apply for membership.
Ashe, an honorary participant on the club’s board, learned of Smith’s plight. Fresh off his Wimbledon triumph, he dashed off a direct but characteristically polite letter advocating for Smith’s admission as a junior member — and for the 55-year-old institution to finally integrate. He presented the club’s directors with an ultimatum: They would accept Smith, or Ashe would resign his position on the board. Smith’s membership was quickly approved.
“My dad and Arthur stayed in contact,” recalls Smith, who went on to star in tennis at UCLA before playing professionally. “I met Arthur in Las Vegas, and I played tennis with him for a half-hour. He was there playing in the Alan King Tennis Classic. He changed my life.”
Cover of the Arabic translation of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (author Jessica Marglin) Credit: Khalid Ben-Srhir.
By Margaret MacDonald
The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies has received a pledge of $100,000 from its Moroccan academic partner, the Université Internationale de Rabat (UIR) to support Arabic translation projects pertaining to Moroccan Jewish studies.
Moroccan Jewish studies is an emerging field that focuses on the history of Sephardic Jewish communities in Morocco. Following the final expulsion of Jews in 1492 and Moriscos (converted Muslims) in 1609 from the Iberian Peninsula, many went on to establish Sephardic communities in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Although there is considerable academic literature and studies about Sephardic communities of the Ottoman Empire, research about Jews who sought refuge in Morocco—especially in the cities of Tétouan, Tangier, Larache, Fez, Rabat, Safi and others—has only just begun.
Sarah Stein, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Leve Center, and Aomar Boum, the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, have collaborated since 2015 with Dr. Khalid Ben-Srhir from the Université Mohammed V and the UIR to translate major publications into Arabic and French. Funds from the UIR pledge will be overseen by Boum, who has been instrumental in launching a Moroccan Jewish studies program at the Leve Center.
Noureddine Mouaddib, UIR president and supporter of the translation project. Credit: UIR
“This is an incredibly exciting time for Moroccan Jewish Studies at UCLA and the UIR,” said Boum, a professor in the departments of anthropology, of history and of Near Eastern languages and cultures as well as faculty fellow at the UIR. “Thanks to the UIR’s generosity and collaboration, we will continue to expand our translation project begun in 2015, securing the latest books in the field of Jewish Studies, history and anthropology and working with Moroccan scholars and translators to make this scholarship available to wider readerships.”
Over the past several years, the Leve Center has been building expertise in Moroccan Jewish Studies, capitalizing on its intellectual resources, research collaborations, and UCLA’s broader engagement with southern California’s sizable Moroccan Muslim and Moroccan Jewish émigré communities. The Leve Center has hosted numerous events and partnered with local community organizations as well as with academic and other organizations within Morocco.
Boum has also begun collaborating with graduate students and faculty in the UIR. He plans to organize a workshop on Sephardic themes, such as one exploring archives and manuscripts from North Africa, to be held in Morocco in spring 2023 in collaboration with the UIR.
Leve Center director Stein noted, “I celebrate the expansion of the ambitious project of translating English-language scholarship on Moroccan Jewish culture into Arabic, which my colleagues Aomar Boum and Khalid Ben-Shrihr began six years ago. Availing such scholarship to students and scholars in the Arabophone world will undoubtedly open important new avenues for scholarly and institutional collaborations on an international scale. The participation and support of the UIR is crucial to this project and a mark of the Leve Center’s growing, global reach.”
About the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Founded in 1994 and located in the global city of Los Angeles, the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies serves as the locus for research, teaching and civic engagement in Jewish studies at one of the world’s most prestigious research universities. It is dedicated to advancing scholarship in Jewish culture and history, educating the next generation about the role of Judaism in world civilization and serving as an exceptional public resource for Jewish life and learning.
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Feb2_363x237.jpg237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-02-02 08:58:212022-02-02 09:09:26Gift to UCLA’S Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies bolsters field of Moroccan Jewish studies
Doctoral student Rebecca Glasberg blazes new trails in the study of North African postcolonial French-language literature
UCLA doctoral student Rebecca Glasberg
By Jonathan Riggs
As if earning your doctorate weren’t intense enough, try adding in the worldwide changes brought on by COVID.
“I defended the prospectus for my dissertation the day before UCLA shut down,” says Rebecca Glasberg, a Ph.D. student in the French Section of the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. “Now I’m working on writing my dissertation, but all my experiences doing this are during a pandemic.”
The fact that Glasberg’s dissertation charts new academic waters compounds the challenges she faces as she moves closer to completing her doctorate. Glasberg draws on interdisciplinary sources to examine representations of Jews and Jewishness in North African postcolonial French-language literature. In doing this, she investigates how authors of Muslim background have challenged dominant narratives of interreligious conflict in the area.
“The field of Jewish studies is generally dominated by narratives of European Jewishness, so my focus on Jews from North Africa—and in particular authors writing about them who are non-Jewish—puts me in an unbelievably specific niche,” Glasberg says. “I’m very lucky to be at UCLA and have the support of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies to explore really interesting questions.”
Born and raised in Virginia, Glasberg grew up knowing she wanted to be an educator. Although she loved her seven years as a middle and high school French teacher, she was deeply inspired by the intellectual rigor and emphasis on curiosity she found while earning her master’s in an immersive French-language program at Vermont’s Middlebury College. The decision to proceed to UCLA, where she was impressed by faculty innovators and student collaborators, was easy—even if her subsequent research hasn’t always been.
“There’s no database of the authors who fit my criteria, so it’s a lot of reading to discover what could work, searching used bookstores, talking to other scholars and following seemingly unrelated tangents in search of stumbling onto something that could go into my dissertation,” Glasberg says. “It can be slow going, but the exploration and the questions it raises keep me going. It’s a fascinating knot to unravel.”
After earning the Fritz, Jenny & Gustav Berger Fellowship in Holocaust Studies, Glasberg has been able to add another layer to her research by studying Arabic to enrich her linguistic and cultural access to these texts. She hopes, too, to be able to conduct firsthand research in France and North Africa, but first there’s COVID to navigate—as well as the round-the-clock demands of teaching, research and, of course, actually writing her dissertation.
“It’s taken me a long time to figure out how to set boundaries on my academic work while I’m facing this huge, monstrous project with the world outside so uncertain,” she says. “What I’ve found is if I set a schedule and stick to it, I chug along steadily and keep my sanity. I love doing my nerdy academic thing, but it’s also important for me to get out of my head and go hiking, eat delicious doughnuts and talk to my friends and family about things beyond what it means to be a “French” or “Francophone” author.”
Keeping those real-life connections so alive helps her stay a sensitive, curious reader—after all, the universal aspects of the human experience are what all the authors she studies are writing about. Their books and words have power because they speak to greater truths that affect us all, especially those wise and willing enough to listen.
“One of the questions I keep thinking through is, ‘What does it mean when we talk about a text being authentic?’ It’s an important question, but we need to keep an open mind,” she says. “For example, you might not expect a contemporary Algerian author to write about the Holocaust, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t. So it’s important to remember to keep looking even in unexpected places to find value, significance and poignant understanding.”
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/363x237_glasberg.jpg237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-01-27 16:33:542022-03-14 14:39:20Seeking the universal in the specific
Ellen Sletten’s Photonbooth gives L.A. students a picture-perfect lesson in fluorescence
Students from El Marino Language School in Culver City, California, in the Photonbooth. The exhibit has inspired hundreds of budding scientists to recognize that there is more to the world than what their eyes typically see. Photo credit: Courtesy of Ellen Sletten
By Jonathan Riggs
If you know how to look, our world can be wildly colorful. Under an ultraviolet light, once-familiar objects can take on dreamlike brilliance: Think neon green scorpions, hot pink flying squirrels and electric blue diamond rings.
Known as fluorescence, this ability of certain molecules to absorb light in one colored wavelength and emit it in another is a phenomenon many scientists, including UCLA professor Ellen Sletten, are still exploring.
And a few years ago, Sletten devised a clever way to make her research into fluorescence more accessible to non-scientists: the Photonbooth. A clever twist on the traditional photo booth that’s a staple of carnivals, arcades and parties, Photonbooth — the pun in its name a reference to the fundamental particle of light — has inspired hundreds of budding scientists to recognize that there is more to the world than what our eyes typically see, and that key scientific principles underpin everyone’s daily existence.
“It’s very clear right now, with the pandemic, that misinformation about science is dangerous for us all,” says Sletten, a chemical biologist. “Younger generations especially need us to focus on accurate, responsible scientific communication. Besides, everyone loves a photo booth, right?”
Ellen Sletten. Photo credit: Penny Jennings/UCLA
The concept evolved out of an attraction from her 2015 wedding reception. To echo her engagement ring, which her fiancé chose for its fluorescence (caused by a defect in the diamond’s lattice structure), Sletten envisioned black lights installed in a standard photo booth with fluorescent props for guests to pose with. Her party-phobic father, an engineer, jumped at the chance to pay tribute to his daughter’s life work and to help turn her plans into a reality.The Photonbooth was born.
“It was such a huge hit, even with the non-scientists,” Sletten says. “I realized it was very synergistic with many of my lab’s research goals and could be a perfect avenue for science outreach.”
When Sletten discussed the booth with members of her UCLA research team, her then-graduate student Rachael Day — now a biochemistry professor at Drury University in Missouri — was so inspired that she took it upon herself to build a version of the booth, and they immediately began using it at local parties and educational events, including Exploring Your Universe, UCLA’s annual hands-on science fair.
A typical Photonbooth presentation begins with a quick science lesson demonstrating the fluorescent properties of common household items such as tonic water or detergent, followed by a discussion of the biomedical uses of fluorescence. Attendees next create their own glowsticks, enter the booth with whimsical props they choose and pose for photos, first under normal light and then, to best show off their fluorescent items, under a black light.
“A lot of science — especially chemistry, where everything is nanoscale or smaller — can be difficult to comprehend,” Sletten says. “I really like using fluorescence because it’s so easy for kids to see. I also love how we can take something kids are familiar with, like a highlighter, and then help them realize there is this whole other side to it if they are curious enough to look and question.”
An adult and two children in the Photonbooth at UCLA’s Exploring Your Universe science festival. Photo credit: Courtesy of Ellen Sletten
Science education outreach is especially important to Sletten because it highlights the human connection that she says is so crucial to scientific progress. As she looks back on her lab’s first five years, she cites her relationship with her students and their growth among her most important accomplishments.
“My students are amazing, and I try hard to be an effective mentor who gets to know each of them well,” Sletten says. “In many ways, starting a lab is like starting a small company. You go through all the challenges and problem-solving together, which makes for strong bonds. It has been incredibly rewarding to be a part of my students’ journeys to becoming excellent scientists and communicators.”
Sletten says the experience of children delighting in the Photonbooth experience mirrors the optimism she and her team share for the future of their own research.
“When I think about the videos of molecules flowing within mice which our lab has been able to produce with previously unattainable speeds, colors and resolutions, I can relate to how those kids feel stepping in the Photonbooth,” Sletten says. “The opportunity to see something new, the feeling of discovery and fun — I hope it inspires those kids to become science-savvy citizens or even future scientists.”
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/PHOTONbooth5-363x237.png237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-01-24 13:49:442022-04-05 10:10:24Professor’s invention is a kid-friendly introduction to the chemistry of light
In Western U.S., health risks from ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter continue to grow, study shows
In October 2017, smoke from a nearby wildfire turned the sky orange-brown in Los Angeles’ Mar Vista neighborhood. Photo credit: Sean Brenner
By David Colgan
After decades of air quality improvement due to the Clean Air Act of 1970 and other regulations since, the Western U.S. is experiencing an increase in the number of days with extremely high levels of two key types of air pollutants due to climate change.
From 2000 to 2020, the growing number of wildfires — made more intense by climate change — and the increasingly common presence of stagnant, hot weather patterns combined to increase the number of days with hazardous levels of ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter. Those conditions are creating health risks for people throughout the region, according to a paper published in Science Advances.
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the paper, said the increased pollution affects densely populated regions across a broad swath of the West, including the Los Angeles basin, Salt Lake City, Denver and Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The study found that the number of days when both pollutant levels were extremely high increased in nearly every major city from the Pacific Coast to the eastern Rocky Mountains. (The scientists judged pollution levels to be “extremely high” on days when they were in the 90th percentile of their daily average for the study’s 20-year span.)
Smoke from wildfires can travel thousands of miles, harming people who don’t live directly in wildfire-prone areas.
“When we looked at satellite imagery of the whole country this past summer, we could see smoke from Western wildfires making it all the way to New York City,” Swain said. “There could be a connection with air pollution as far away as the East Coast.”
Wildfires and stagnant, hot weather patterns increase the presence of pollution classified as PM 2.5 — particles that measure less than 2.5 microns in width, the equivalent of about three one-hundredths the width of a human hair — which can make its way deep into lungs and can cross into the bloodstream. Scientific studies have linked PM 2.5 pollution to health problems such as decreased lung function, irregular heartbeat and even premature death in people with heart or lung disease.
The combination of weather patterns and wildfires also increases the formation of ground-level ozone, another threat to respiratory health. Ground level ozone forms due to chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen (such as nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide) and volatile organic compounds, both of which can come from vehicles, power plants, industrial facilities and other sources.
The researchers found that the increase in extreme levels of PM 2.5 due to climate factors increased hazardous air quality conditions by an average of 25 million person-days each year of the past two decades in the Western U.S. and adjacent areas of the Great Plains, Mexico and Canada. (A person-day refers to a single day of exposure by a single person.)
The analysis is based on pollution data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency monitoring sites, as well as atmospheric observations and data on atmospheric pressure and temperatures.
The poor air quality conditions highlighted in the paper are likely to get worse for at least the next few decades, even if drastic climate change mitigation measures are implemented, Swain said.
“It has gotten hotter, wildfire conditions have gotten worse and we’re seeing more persistent periods of high atmospheric pressure,” he said. “Each of those factors is projected to increase in the coming years.”
While mitigating emissions from wildfires and climate change will take decades, cities could still enact regulations and other programs to that would help reduce the presence of oxides of nitrogen and volatile ogranic compounds — so-called ozone precursor emissions — in the near term. Although the benefits of those changes would take years to accrue, it could be practical for cities to implement emissions-reduction measures during periods of hazardous air quality, and it would likely help reduce the dangers to human health, Swain said.
https://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Sunsetinsmoke-filledsky-363x237v2.png237363Lucy Berbeohttps://www.college.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Uxd_Blk_College-e1557344896161.pngLucy Berbeo2022-01-24 13:17:182022-01-24 13:17:18Days with hazardous levels of air pollutants are more common due to increase in wildfires
Famartin/Wikimedia Commons
Michael Studinger/NASA
Courtesy of Paula White
Rendering by Perkins&Will, courtesy of Destination Crenshaw
Yichao Zhao and Zhaoqing Wang/UCLA
By Peter Hovarth
Credit: Khalid Ben-Srhir.
Courtesy of Rebecca Glasberg
Photo credit: Courtesy of Ellen Sletten
Photo credit: Sean Brenner
