The study, published on May 2 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that levels of certain metals in lipsticks and lip glosses may raise long-term health concerns in users. The paper was authored by S. Katharine Hammond, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental health sciences, Sa Liu, a campus researcher of environmental health sciences, and Ann Rojas-Cheatham, director of research and training at Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, a nonprofit organization in Oakland.

Researchers estimated the average consumer’s daily intake of lead, cadmium, chromium, aluminum and five other metals for 32 types of lipsticks and lip glosses commonly found in stores. To assess the health risks of using these products, the researchers compared these estimates with “acceptable daily intakes” they derived from information used by the California Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2007 and 2010, the Food and Drug Administration conducted studies analyzing the lead content of lipsticks and found it to be safe for consumers. According to the FDA’s website, the agency currently regulates the lead in color additives for cosmetics but not the level of lead in the products themselves.

Hammond explained that there are problems when determining an acceptable standard for lead exposure in cosmetic products.

“Lead was not present (in the lipsticks) at the high levels that would lead to a concern,” Hammond said. “However, we also know that lead has a history that the more we study it, the more we see health effects happening at lower and lower levels. So there is no completely safe level of lead.”

While the FDA is aware of the presence of lead in lipsticks, metals like cadmium, chromium, manganese and aluminum — also found in the lipsticks studied — have received less attention, Liu said.

According to Hammond, younger children, whose developing bodies absorb more of the metals, and people with compromised kidney functions or diabetes are the most susceptible to these potential health problems. High levels of cadmium can damage the kidneys and, along with some forms of chromium, can cause cancer. Overexposure to manganese can damage the nervous system over time.

Liu, however, emphasized that the danger of these metals lies in long-term use.

“We don’t want to cause any panic in the users or consumers,” Liu said. “We don’t think it will cause any harm in the short term, but the more you use and the longer you use it, the more likely a person may get overexposed (to the metals) and potentially be taking higher risk for adverse effects.”

According to the study, the researchers did not observe clear patterns indicating that metal concentrations were related to specific brands, product type, color or cost.

Linda Loretz, a chief toxicologist for the Personal Care Products Council — a trade association for the cosmetics industry — reaffirmed the safety of lip products, noting that traces of these metals are also found in food.

“The report does not provide any new meaningful information,” Loretz said in a press release. “The finding of trace levels of metals in lip products is not unexpected given their natural presence in air, soil and water.”

Courtney Mullen, a UC Berkeley junior, also said she did not feel too concerned about the findings.

“I’m in theater, and I use cosmetics for shows,” Mullen said. “I’m not seeing that many health concerns at the present time, and there are many other things that can hurt you that are not cosmetics. So I would probably continue using them.”

Contact Yvonne Ng at yng@dailycal.org.

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Researchers at UC Berkeley are conducting experiments to see whether antimatter, which is made of antiparticles that have the same masses but opposite charges as particles of ordinary matter, can defy gravity.

Joel Fajans, a professor in the department of physics, is part of a team of researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which used an apparatus known as ALPHA — Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus — to conduct a gravity experiment with molecules of hydrogen and its equal-but-opposite counterpart, antihydrogen.

Fajans said the experiment mimicked Galileo’s legendary theoretical Leaning Tower of Pisa, experiment in which two balls of different masses were dropped from the tower to demonstrate that their rates of descent were independent of their masses.

The ALPHA collaboration used the apparatus to catch antihydrogen atoms, hold them without letting them into contact and then dropped them to see which direction they fell.

According to Fajans, the experiment produced inconclusive results about the effects of gravity on antimatter. The team published its results in a paper on April 30.

He and Jonathan Wurtele, a professor in the department of physics and a member of the ALPHA collaboration, said that it would be very unlikely that antimatter defies gravity.

“If we somehow discovered that antimatter fell upwards, almost everything about our understanding of the universe would change,” Fajans said. “All of the laws of physics would be completely destroyed.”

Fajans and Wurtele said they originally intended for the ALPHA apparatus to learn more about the spectral lines and glow of atoms. However, they found the apparatus could also give them a way to test gravity’s effects on antimatter.

Physicists believe that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, but they have been unable to find significant quantities of antimatter in nature. Fajans and Wurtele said that physicists have been speculating for decades that this could be explained by a theory that antimatter falls upward, and ALPHA gave them a way to finally test that theory.

But because of how unlikely it is that antimatter defies gravity, Fajans and Wurtele said that the experiment was more about ruling out the possibility than proving it was true.

“Even though antimatter and matter may seem like opposites, they both give off light in the same way and they both behave according to the laws of physics,” Wurtele said. “They just seem opposite in the way we understand them.”

Fajans and Wurtele said that next year, the ALPHA collaboration will repeat the gravity experiments with CERN’s new and improved ALPHA-2 apparatus, which uses lasers to measure antimatter.

CERN is an international organization made up of physicists and engineers whose goal is to discover and understand the “fundamental structure of the universe,” according to the organization’s website. The CERN laboratory, housed in Geneva, is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, and it houses the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study particles.

Pooja Mhatre is the lead research and ideas reporter. Contact her at pmhatre@dailycal.org.

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In a study conducted by Jennifer Stellar, a UC Berkeley psychology doctoral student, and Robb Willer, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University, the researchers explored the relationship between morality and economics. In a paper published this week in an online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, they concluded that people believe morally tainted money has less value and less purchasing power.

“We tend to think of money as being really objective, but people actually attach a lot of subjective meaning to it,” Stellar said. “We wanted to show the connection between economics and rational decision-making and the fact that morality plays a huge role in our economic decisions.”

Willer and Stellar conducted an experiment involving 59 college-aged participants who were told to enter a mock raffle for a $50 cash prize sponsored by one of two corporations. They were subsequently divided into a “neutral money” group and an “immoral money” group.

The “neutral money” group was told that the raffle prize would be provided by Target, while the “immoral money” group was told their prize would be provided by Wal-Mart. The latter was explicitly told that Wal-Mart had been found guilty of numerous labor-law violations.

The researchers found that those in the
“immoral money” group filled out fewer tickets than those in the “neutral money” group, implying that the participants in the immoral group were not as determined to win the raffle prize because of its association with Wal-Mart.

“People possess powerful motivations to view themselves as fundamentally good and moral,” Willer said during an interview with the UC Berkeley Newscenter. “We find this motivation is so great that it can even lead people to disassociate themselves from money that has acquired negative moral associations.”

Participants were then told to estimate how many of eight food or beverage items — such as a gallon of milk — they could purchase with the $50, and the researchers found that subjects consistently believed money associated with Wal-Mart would buy fewer items.

“This reveals that those in the immoral group believed their money had less value because it is morally tainted,” Stellar said.

The results of the study resonate with ASUC President Connor Landgraf, who said he recognized the link between morality and decisions involving money.

“I absolutely agree with this — I think morality is one of the most important factors in making economic decisions, especially because money represents who we are,” he said.

Contact Jason Liu at jliu@dailycal.org.

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Professors Frances Hellman, Alison Gopnik, Jitendra Malik, Susan Marqusee, David Miller, Hitoshi Murayama, Pamela Samuelson, Ann Swidler, T. Don Tilley and Bin Yu were all recognized in a wide variety of fields and will now have a lifetime membership in the academy, joining the likes of Nelson Mandela, Denzel Washington and Michael Dell.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center, and members come from a broad range of professions and disciplines. Those inducted into the academy are viewed as leaders in academics, public affairs, the arts and business. Once inducted, members contribute to the academy by participating in research and publishing studies in fields such as science and technology, energy and global security and social policy.

Yu, a chancellor’s professor and professor of statistics, electrical engineering and computer sciences, expressed delight at being inducted.

“It is a great honor, and I am humbled,” Yu said. “The Academy of Arts and Sciences is so prestigious because of the very high quality of people and their work in the American Academy. Being inducted is an affirmation of my work in statistics, and it is also a recognition of my collaborators, including students and postdocs, through the recognition of our joint work.”

UC Berkeley now has 234 members in the academy, which, according to professor and chair of physics and inductee Hellman, highlights the strengths of UC Berkeley as both a research institution and as a university.

“Berkeley is an institution that prides itself on its creation and dissemination of knowledge and its service to the broad community through the research, teaching and service activities undertaken by its faculty, students and staff,” Hellman said. “Berkeley, to me, represents the pinnacle of an example of what great things can happen when the public and private sectors work together.”

This year’s number of inductees from UC Berkeley has increased from last year, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Robert Price believes that this shows UC Berkeley’s strength in all subjects.

“This is testament to our strength across the board,” Price said. “The new academy members from UC Berkeley represent a wide range of disciplines, from physics to law, psychology to computer sciences, English to statistics, biosciences to sociology. I am very pleased to see the achievements of UC Berkeley faculty recognized in all of these fields.”

The new inductees will be honored in a ceremony at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., in October.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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A recent study published April 21 in Nature Neuroscience found that when humans search for objects, different regions of the brain devoted to both visual and nonvisual tasks are mobilized to perform a targeted search, similar to the way a search engine works.

Researchers in the campus department of neuroscience strapped five subjects into an MRI machine and showed them a series of Hollywood trailers posted on YouTube.

The subjects watched the hourlong reel of clips three times, while the researchers, headed by doctoral candidate Tolga Cukur, observed the participants’ brain activity using electromagnetic images produced by the MRI.

Participants were not asked to do anything during the first viewing, providing researchers with a neural baseline that could be compared with later results. The second time, participants were asked to search for people in the videos and press a button once they had been located. For the final viewing, subjects were asked to locate vehicles instead of people.

According to Cukur, the results of these experiments may explain why humans find it difficult to multitask. When an individual is searching for a specific item, different regions of the brain abandon their primary tasks to focus on a single network, making extraneous thought difficult.

“We found that when attention switches between humans and vehicles, the representation of the relevant category is expanded across many brain areas, and the representation of the irrelevant category is suppressed,” said Jack Gallant, a campus professor of neuroscience and head of the lab that conducted the study.

Gallant said that this research could have enormous implications for how humans understand basic thought and mental disorders.

Although it is too early to say what further research in this field might unveil, the researchers say they are excited by the possibilities.

“As far as the practical implications, the models we’ve developed could help to build brain machine interfaces that could reconstruct what people are looking at or paying attention to,” said Alex Huth, co-author of the paper. “This could be really useful for something like Google Glass — imagine a system that could figure out what you’re looking for and help you find it.”

Contact Eoghan Hughes at ehughes@dailycal.org.

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The Drone Lab, a group-directed study composed of nine students in the UC Berkeley School of Information, is currently working with consumer-grade drones to extend the possibilities for their application in everyday life. The students meet regularly to test the drones’ capabilities, write codes to make the drones more user-friendly and brainstorm possible future applications for the machines.

“We want to understand the affordances of this technology and how we can apply (it) in various contexts to some real-world problems,” said Dave Lester, a member of the Drone Lab. “We’re trying to think of how these drones could be used by people in their everyday lives.”

The Drone Lab has received much attention due to the prevalent negative implications of the word “drone” and its associations with military use and surveillance. According to the group, however, these associations present a limited view of the possible applications of drones.

“The term ‘drone’ has a pretty bad connotation right now, largely due to the association with controversial military use as well as surveillance and privacy concerns,” said Coye Cheshire, faculty sponsor of the Drone Lab and an associate professor at the School of Information. “But if we only focus on these limited military/surveillance applications, we run the risk of only seeing the technology as something to fear.”

The Drone Lab has theorized uses for the drones extending from retrieval of books in libraries to the convenient delivery of snack foods, according to the group. The group has also experimented with programming different ways of controlling the drones, including voice-command activation and arm-motion signaling.

“We certainly started off with the grander ideas and then focused on what we could actually implement,” said Elliot Nahman, another member of the Drone Lab.

A community of members of the Drone Lab and people from different departments on campus discussing the implications of the drones has emerged, according to the group.

“Everyone wants to give you their opinions on what these things can and should and could do, which is interesting,” Lester said. “It’s a fertile ground for creativity.”

The group’s members said they hope the drone research will continue after some graduate this spring. According to Lester, drones are going to play a larger role in society in a coming years, and it is crucial that groups like the Drone Lab plan for the future.

“I do think that what makes drones so interesting and different from many other technologies is that they are unmanned and often autonomous flying devices,” Cheshire said. “Of course, so are many scientific weather balloons — but the sophistication and fidelity of computer-controlled quad-copters opens up a whole new world of possibilities.”

Contact Claire Chiara at cchiara@dailycal.org.

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The team — made up of Amitesh Maiti, Roger Aines and Josh Stolaroff of the Livermore lab, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering Berend Smit, postdoctoral researcher Jihan Kim and graduate student Li-Chiang Lin — published the research in the journal Nature Communications on April 16.

The researchers used computer modeling to simulate the effectiveness of liquid solvents and nanoporous zeolites — porous materials commonly used as commercial adsorbents — in capturing methane in larger concentrations so it can function as a fuel instead of a wasted byproduct, according to Maiti.

“We are fairly confident in our work,” Maiti said. “And the most advanced computational techniques were used in the work, so we believe that our prediction will be fairly close to the real performance of the material once it is made and put to test.”

The research is groundbreaking because methane contributes 30 percent of global climate warming, second only to carbon dioxide in emissions, according to a Livermore lab press release.

Methane has potential as a cleaner fuel source than coal, but it must be collected in larger concentrations before it can be used, Maiti said. In lower concentrations, methane is only a wasted byproduct of industrial and natural processes.

“We emit methane at a large distribution of sites, from cattle farms to dairy,” said Daniel Kammen, a professor of public policy and nuclear engineering in the Energy and Resources Group. “So you need a low-cost technology that you can apply to a lot of sites, and this technology might be something we can deploy very widely.”

Although researchers have yet to create the material, Kammen imagined ways of implementing methane-capturing technology.

“I think what you would do is take materials that have this embedded in it, and you would place it in places where methane is being emitted, like at a chicken coop,” Kammen said.

UC Berkeley professor of biometeorology Dennis Baldocchi suggested another important application of methane capture at lagoons and wetlands, where methane is abundant.

“The manure (from the dairy industry) is going into these lagoons, and these lagoons tend not to have very much oxygen,” Baldocchi said. “These conditions are very ripe for producing large amounts of methane, and this methane is going into the atmosphere. So what we can do is harvest these lagoons for methane and use it to generate electricity.”

According to Kammen, the likely low cost of the technology could make it easier to implement in industry.

“We do need policies that make this attractive (to industries),” Kammen said. “Otherwise, this will be a great innovation that won’t go anywhere.”

Contact Yvonne Ng at yng@dailycal.org.

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Associate professor of integrative biology Daniela Kaufer and her team of colleagues from UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute published a paper Tuesday showing that while chronic stress may be detrimental to one’s health, acute stress may benefit the brain by keeping it alert and optimizing its performance.

“There’s not much literature out there that fully illustrates the effects of acute stress on the brain, so I was really interested in looking at the molecular mechanism that explains why some some stress may be beneficial,” Kaufer said.

The research team conducted the study by exposing rats to brief stressful events. They found that the stem cells in the rats’ brains began proliferating into new nerve cells that ultimately improved their mental performance.

Additionally, it turns out that cognitive and mental performance reach their peak when there is a brief period of stress but then deteriorates as the severity and duration of stress increase dramatically.

“This makes sense, from an evolutionary standpoint,” said Leslea Hlusko, an associate professor of integrative biology who did not participate in the study, in an email. “We are increasingly learning that environmental influences shape neurological development, (so) this kind of plasticity and reactivity (of the brain) would enable an organism to adapt to a wider range of environmental conditions.”

The study also reveals that humans have a variety of ways of responding to stress in their environment, which can help them deal with future stress, according to graduate student David Covarrubias, a member of Kaufer’s research team.

According to Kaufer, the research project has wide implications because most people routinely experience stress.

“It’s incredible that the research we’ve done is applicable to everyone and that we can explain highly complex physiological processes in the brain from a molecular level,” Kaufer said.

According to Covarrubias, the study shows that there is an entire spectrum of stress levels and that not every level of stress is detrimental to health.

“We wanted to distinguish the different kinds of stress and show that acute stress is entirely different from chronic stress in terms of their impact on cognitive performance,” Covarrubias said.

The results of this study resonate with some UC Berkeley students who, through the experience of frantically studying for exams, know that stress is sometimes good.

“It makes sense that there’s a spectrum of stress levels, because I know that sometimes stressing over a midterm will motivate me to study,” said sophomore Susan Lee.

Contact Jason Liu at jliu@dailycal.org.

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On April 12, UC Berkeley was named the recipient of about $145 million to $200 million for its Ionospheric Connection project, or ICON, an exploratory satellite aiming to pinpoint the relationships between phenomena between different layers of the atmosphere.

In the past decade, scientists have discovered that weather in space is linked to Earth’s weather. Weather in the lower atmosphere drives conditions in space, said Thomas Immel, ICON’s principal investigator. Instruments on the satellite will measure various aspects of the ionosphere in order to determine what exactly drives events there.

“We want to understand how that process occurs so people can mitigate the effects … the ionosphere affects GPS more than anything, a concern for precision GPS users in particular,” Immel said.

Two instruments developed by UC Berkeley that will be on ICON are FUV, or far ultraviolet imager, and EUV, or extreme ultraviolet imager, said Stewart Harris, ICON’s payload manager. FUV will give the relative composition of the upper atmosphere, and EUV will measure the density of the ionosphere.

Led by UC Berkeley researchers, ICON will also use instruments developed by other institutions, such as the University of Texas at Dallas and the Naval Research Lab, said Manfred Bester, mission operations manager of the project.

According to Immel, NASA selected UC Berkeley after a two-year competitive process in which research proposals from UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory were chosen from among more than a dozen other proposals. Among other criteria, NASA considered whether research goals would be met and whether groups had a doable mission for the amount of money NASA had to offer, Immel said.

In early February, before the final decision was made, a NASA team made a site visit to UC Berkeley to ask researchers questions and conduct a firsthand evaluation, according to Harris.

NASA’s heliophysics branch will be overseeing the coming steps and will split the project’s development into different levels, each with a key checkpoint, Harris said. In this way, the funds act more like a contract than a grant, as ICON will have to meet basic requirements set forth by NASA.

Almost everyone on the ICON team, including both individuals and institutions, has worked with NASA before, according to Harris.

According to Immel, Orbital Sciences Corporation — a firm in the aerospace industry that has experience working with NASA — is partnering with the team and will manufacture the satellite.

“What’s called the ‘spacecraft bus’ is built by Orbital,” Harris said. “Orbital will design and build the communications system and the solar array.”

As of now, launch is set for the year 2017, Bester said.

Contact Christine Tyler at ctyler@dailycal.org.

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The supercomputer, called Edison, will be used to complete complex computations that are necessary for research on materials technology, biological systems like the human genome and cleaner renewable energy sources.

According to Jon Bashor, communications manager for Berkeley lab’s Computing Sciences organization, researchers are hoping to guide the computer to artificially replicate photosynthesis in plants, an achievement that would revolutionize the green energy sector and shift attention away from inefficient solar power.

“We use the computers to simulate these processes,” Bashor said. “If we can understand the chemistry that the plant carries out to do photosynthesis and we can mimic that, we would have very efficient energy sources.”

The new supercomputer will also be used to study regional climates and their future changes in much higher detail than before. Climates vary extensively between regions that are close to each other, and Edison has the ability to pinpoint extremely small regions of the world to produce more accurate data about the climate patterns in different areas.

This extensive segmentation will allow simulations of climate patterns and future climate changes to be more accurate and useful to scientists, according to David H. Bailey, a senior scientist in the Computational Research Division of the Berkeley lab.

“If we can use a supercomputer to model the Earth’s climate for the next 100 years and do it in a couple of weeks, then we have some good knowledge to work from,” Bashor said. “Climate changes a lot, and understanding it fully is a very complicated process.”

Researchers have access to Edison through the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a center at Berkeley lab funded by the U.S.Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The center is currently testing only a portion of Edison and will receive access to the rest of it during the summer. NERSC will then decide whether to permanently install the computer.

In its complete form, Edison has 10,000 processor cores and can run two quadrillion arithmetic operations per second, twice as many as the center’s current supercomputer, Hopper.

“When it’s installed, I’m not sure if (Edison) will make the top 10, but it will almost certainly make the top 20 (supercomputers) in the world,” Bailey said. “It’s certainly one of a very small number of computers worldwide that can perform at this level.”

More than 4,500 researchers from universities and laboratories across the country are currently utilizing Edison’s vast capabilities.

“This has led to an enormous number of scientific discoveries,” said Kathy Yelick, a campus professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. “I think this type of capability in the hands of scientists all around the country is really important to the next generation of science challenges that we’re seeing.”

Contact Claire Chiara at cchiara@dailycal.org.

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