Heart Mending with Stem Cells

Bioengineering professor Adam Engler and bioengineering Ph.D. student Jennifer Young landed in Technology Review today. Journalist Lauren Gravitz covered their presentation on Tuesday at ASCB 2009 where they reported advances in using embryonic stem cells (from chickens) to regenerate heart cells.

The big idea is that the bioengineers are working to re-create the physical consitions and cues within organisms that guide (at least in part) the differentiation process from stem cells to heart cells.

Read the Technology Review story here.

Read the Jacobs School of Engineering summary of the research here.

Below is related video from the Engler lab, which is part of UC San Diego's Institute of Engineering in Medicine.

KPBS covered Cell Phones, Sensors and Pollution Monitoring Story

Ed Joyce from KPBS, the San Dieog NPR station, ran a story on the new pollution monitoring system being developed by computer scientists at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Here is the cell phone and pollution monitoring story from KPBS.

BTW, you can follow Ed Joyce on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/EnviroEd

San Diegans, Cell Phones, Air Pollution Monitoring Network

“San Diego County has 3.1 million residents, 4,000 square miles, and only five official EPA air quality monitors. We know about the air quality in those exact spots but we know much less about the air quality in other places. Our goal is to give San Diegans up-to-the-minute environmental information about where they live, work and play—information that will empower anyone in the community to make healthier choices,” said William Griswold, the principal investigator on the grant and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

So here is the deal: everyone has cell phones. What if those phones could be used to transmit environmental information collected by tiny, inexpensive sensors hanging from your backpack or board shorts...transmit that info to centralized computers that analyze it and send insights back to regular folks in real time?

That's the plan that computer scientists are putting into action now that they have a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Read the full story here.

Also, KPBS has this story up on their web site.

Photo caption:
The CitiSense leadership team (l-r) includes computer science professor William Griswold, computer science professor Ingolf Krueger, School of Medicine/Calit2 professor Kevin Patrick, computer science professor Tajana Simunic Rosing, and computer science professor Hovav Shacham. (Not pictured: computer science professor Sanjoy Dasgupta).

Sustainability Talk Tomorrow

THE GREENOVATION FORUM: SENSING AND SUSTAINABILITY

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at the CALIT2 Auditorium at Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego

Reception: 4:00 PM
Program: 4:30 PM

As we reach the beginning of December, there are looming signs that the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen will not reach an agreement. What lies ahead and how can we reach an agreement to stem the growth in emissions?

Join the Greenovation forum at UC San Diego to learn about a more sustainable approach to sustainability. We will discuss how sensor technology can help achieve sustainability at lower cost. The San Diego region is home to a number of promising sensor companies. Come and join the discussion about how sensor research and commercialization can pave the way for a more sustainable future!

The program will feature the following speakers:

Professor Larry Smarr, Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) and computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Shimon Gersten, Chief Technology Officer, Talon Communications

Professor Jan Kleissl, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department

Professor Vish Krishnan, Rady School of Management

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. For more information and to RSVP, visit http://ssi.ucsd.edu/greenovation.

Systems Biology and Insulin Resistance

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego recently offered the sharpest-yet picture of how core biochemical pathways in skeletal muscle cells and fat cells are altered in people who suffer from insulin resistance—a primary defect in type 2 diabetes and obesity. Taking a systems biology approach, the bioengineers and medical researchers also determined how a common class of drugs for treating insulin resistance—TZDs—alter these same core pathways. This led the team to uncover previously unknown effects of TZDs and insights that could lead to improved drug therapies for insulin resistance.

The team—led by investigators from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and School of Medicine—recently published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“When you are insulin resistant, your metabolism suffers. If you take a TZD for your insulin resistance, will the drug fix the dysfunction in muscle and fat tissues? Will these changes be functionally related to drug efficacy? These are some of the questions we addressed in our new study,” say UC San Diego faculty members Dr. Shankar Subramaniam and Dr. Dorothy Sears, co-corresponding authors of the new paper. The collaborative project involved Dr. Subramaniam’s Bioinformatics and Systems Biology laboratory in the Department of Bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, Dr. Sears and her colleagues in the Department of Medicine, and Pfizer, Inc.

Read the PNAS paper online.

Read the full press release.

Gaming Site Profiles Music Search Project

IGN Music profiled the electrical engineering music search engine project from the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band rank players based on how good they are at replicating a musical performance,while Herd It gives props based on how good they are at predicting the "herd's" opinion on the style, emotion, instrumentation, etc. of music. All of this happens in realtime via Facebook -- check out http://www.blogger.com/www.herdit.org.

They also embedded the music search engine YouTube video.

IGN is a leading Internet media and services provider focused on the videogame and entertainment enthusiast markets...lots of interested eyes!

Carbon Nanotubes for Cell Phone Batteries?

In a recent paper in Applied Physics Letters, Prabhakar Bandaru, a professor in the UCSD Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, along with graduate student Mark Hoefer, have found that artificially introduced defects in carbon nanotubes can aid the development of "supercapacitors" that could be used in batteries and battery charging technologies of the future.

Read Andrea Siedsma's full press release here.