There is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the world is locked into at least a 3.6-degree Fahrenheit global temperature increase that will last for millennia, according to a new report released by the National Research Council.
Marilyn Raphael, a UCLA geography professor who helped write the report from the National Academy of Sciences, said the implications were sometimes frightening even to her committee of mostly experts from government and academic institutions that teamed up to develop “Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia.” The team collected previously published scientific reports to compile their report on climate change.
“I think most of us were really taken aback by the length of time that we’re locked into climate change,” Raphael said. “Previously the conversation has been about the next generation or two, but now we’re looking at millennia. It’s sobering and a little frightening.”
To prevent the global average temperature from increasing more than 3.6 degrees, carbon dioxide emissions would have to be reduced by 80 percent now, the report said. “I think you’ll agree, that’s not likely to happen,” Raphael said.
So, not to put to fine a point on it, but is the world screwed?
UCLA Geography Professor Marilyn Raphael.
“Yes. We’re locked into a temperature change,” she said. “It doesn’t mean we give up or lose hope. On a personal level, it does make me think about personal choices I can make to reduce my carbon footprint.”
As the world’s population continues to emit CO2, it will be locked into higher and higher temperature increases, the report explained. But the sooner emissions are reduced, the authors wrote, the sooner that temperature climb will level off, or stabilize. “Stabilization” doesn’t mean the world will cool back down – it will just stop getting hotter, Raphael explained.
Because carbon dioxide takes so long to dissipate from the atmosphere, the current levels of CO2 are going to be with us for thousands of years, no matter how much people reduce their emissions, the report said. Today’s CO2 measurements – 390 parts per million – will culminate in a 2-degree Celsius, or 3.6 F, increase in the Earth’s average temperature, Raphael said.
“That doesn’t sound like much, but it will change things,” she said. “Think of the warmest summer you’ve experienced in your lifetime. You can expect that to become the norm for summer.”
As the world’s average temperature rises, the report found that for each degree Celsius:
- The Mediterranean, the southwestern U.S. and southern Africa will face 5-10 percent less rainfall;
- Arctic sea ice will melt 15-25 percent;
- Alaska and other far-northern regions will face 3-10 percent increases in heavy rainfall;
- Food crops will falter by 5-15 percent;
- Rivers like the Rio Grande will dwindle 5-10 percent;
- Wildfires will consume two to four times as much land.
While the report anticipated current carbon dioxide levels will create a 2 C increase and therefore multiply each of those effects by two, worse is yet to come, the document said. Emissions must be cut by 80 percent to prevent that 2-degree increase from growing – but scientific articles predict CO2 will continue to accumulate.
“Carbon dioxide concentrations could double or nearly triple from today’s levels by the end of the century,” which would eventually cause warming of 5 C, or 9 F, the report warned.
The National Academy of Sciences committee that developed the report included scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Stanford University; the University of Washington, Seattle; Texas Tech University; the Electric Power Research Institute, Inc. in DC; Concordia University, Montreal; and others in addition to UCLA.
“It’s important that people realize that what we have done to the Earth has an impact not just on our lives and our children’s lives, but generations of children to come,” Raphael said. “People have to use this information to decide what steps to take next. It’s information to act on, not to give up on.”
Aug 222010
Students who are bullied regularly do substantially worse in school, UCLA psychologists report in a special issue of the Journal of Early Adolescence devoted to academic performance and peer relationships.
The UCLA study was conducted with 2,300 students in 11 Los Angeles–area public middle schools and their teachers. Researchers asked the students to rate whether or not they get bullied on a four-point scale and to list which of their fellow students were bullied the most — physically, verbally and as the subject of nasty rumors.
A high level of bullying was consistently associated with lower grades across the three years of middle school. The students who were rated the most-bullied performed substantially worse academically than their peers. Projecting the findings on grade-point average across all three years of middle school, a one-point increase on the four-point bullying scale was associated with a 1.5-point decrease in GPA for one academic subject (e.g., math) — a very large drop.
Teachers provided ratings on how engaged the students were academically, including whether they were participating in class discussions, showing interest in class and completing their homework. The researchers collected data on the students twice a year throughout the three years of middle school and examined the students’ grades.
The study is published Aug. 19 in the journal’s online edition; the print edition will be published at a later date.
“We cannot address low achievement in school while ignoring bullying, because the two are frequently linked,” said Jaana Juvonen, a UCLA professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “Students who are repeatedly bullied receive poorer grades and participate less in class discussions. Some students may get mislabeled as low achievers because they do not want to speak up in class for fear of getting bullied. Teachers can misinterpret their silence, thinking that these students are not motivated to learn.
“Students who get bullied run the risk of not coming to school, not liking school, perceiving school more negatively and now — based on this study — doing less well academically,” said Juvonen, who is also a professor in UCLA’s developmental psychology program. “But the link between bullying and achievement can work both ways. The students who are doing poorly are at higher risk for getting bullied, and any student who gets bullied may become a low achiever. Whether bullying happens on school grounds or after school hours on the Internet, it can paralyze students from concentrating on academics.”
The research is part of a long-term UCLA bullying project led by UCLA education professor Sandra Graham (who is not a co-author on this study) and Juvonen, which is funded federally by the National Science Foundation and privately by the William T. Grant Foundation.
“Instruction cannot be effective unless the students are ready to learn, and that includes not being fearful of raising your hand in class and speaking up,” said Juvonen, who has been studying bullying for more than a decade. “Once students get labeled as ‘dumb,’ they get picked on and perform even worse; there’s a downward cycle that we need to stop.
“If the academically low-performing students are at higher risk for getting bullied, that suggests one way to reduce bullying is to help those students academically,” she added. “Once they get into the cycle of being bullied because of their poor academic performance, their chances of doing better academically are worse.”
Reducing bullying is a “collective challenge,” she said, and not just a matter of dealing with a few aggressive students. The UCLA team’s prior findings show that in middle school, bullies are considered “cool’ by their classmates. The high social status of bullies promotes a “norm of meanness that needs to be addressed.” Bullying affects millions of students, Juvonen said.
Of the students in the study, approximately 44 percent were Latino, 26 percent were African American, 10 percent were Asian American, 10 percent were white and 10 percent were multi-racial. Fifty-four percent were female and 46 percent were male.
Some anti-bullying programs are comprehensive and effective, while some schools rely on a number of “quick fixes” that do not work, according to Juvonen. Teachers need training in how to address bullying, she said.
Co-authors on the Journal of Early Adolescence study are UCLA psychology graduate students Yueyan Wang and Guadalupe Espinoza. The journal offers new perspectives on pivotal developmental issues among young teenagers.
In previous research, Juvonen and her colleagues found that nearly three in four teenagers were bullied online at least once during a recent 12-month period, and only one in 10 reported such cyber-bullying to parents or other adults. The probability of getting bullied online is substantially higher for those who have been the victims of school bullying. Victims of bullying do not want to attend school and often do not, Juvonen said.
In research from 2005 by Juvonen and Adrienne Nishina, an assistant professor of human development at UC Davis, nearly half the sixth graders at two Los Angeles–area public schools said they were bullied by classmates during a five-day period. In another 2005 study, Nishina and Juvonen reported that middle school students who are bullied in school are likely to feel depressed and lonely, which in turn makes them more vulnerable to further bullying.
Children who are embarrassed or humiliated about being bullied in school are unlikely to discuss it with their parents or teachers, Juvonen and Nishina found. Instead, they are more likely to suffer in silence and dislike school.
Juvonen advises parents to talk with their children about bullying before it ever happens, pay attention to changes in their children’s behavior and take their concerns seriously.
Students who get bullied often have headaches, colds and other physical illnesses, as well as psychological problems.
UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Five alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Aug 162010
UCLA Extension’s location in Westwood Village is the gateway to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), one of most famous and distinguished universities in the world. UCLA Extension is an academic division with the same high educational and teaching standards, but we specialize in continuing professional education.
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While you study with UCLA Extension, you can also enjoy access to the vast cultural and recreational resources of the UCLA campus, as well as the many advantages of studying in Los Angeles, a trendsetting international city known for its world-famous beaches, business and entertainment centers, sunny weather, and many cultural attractions.
The UCLA Health System launched a new hand transplantation program last week, one of three others in the United States and the only one of its kind on the West Coast.
The new program, which is currently in the process of recruiting candidates for surgery, aims to further develop the practice of transplanting a bodily limb from a donor to a patient who has suffered from a traumatic loss of limb.
“The reason that we decided to start the program was that we thought there was a real need to bring hand transplantation forward in the United States,” said Dr. Sue McDiarmid, professor of pediatrics and surgery and the medical director of the new program.
While the techniques of reattaching amputated limbs and transplanting organs from donors to patients have been around for many years, the combined process of transplanting limbs is just gaining ground. Currently, nine patients have received hand transplantation in the United States, with a total of 11 hands transplanted.
“Initially we used to perform transplants in order to save one life; the kidney, lung and heart are all lifesaving transplants,” said Dr. Kodi Azari, associate professor of orthopedic surgery and plastic surgery and the surgical director of the hand transplantation program. “Yet now we are switching. We have learned from those techniques and now we are trying to establish transplantation in order to improve one’s life.”
The shift in the use of transplantation as a life-saving function toward improving a patient’s life is a main goal of the program. The program is seeking candidates who have difficulty living their normal lives with amputated limbs and cannot adapt to the use of prosthetic devices.
Through the use of a hand transplantation, the doctors of the new program aim to help those who have suffered traumatic injuries, from car accidents, work-related accidents or military conflicts, regain the function and use of their hands.
With the continuation of military engagements by the United States, the number of such traumatic injuries has been growing, Azari said.
“We have two conflicts that we are currently involved with and there is a significant number of our wounded heroes coming back that are missing limbs,” Azari said.
The surgery to reattach a hand can last 8 to 14 hours, requiring as many as 14 surgeons, and it can take several years for a patient to fully regain acceptable movement and sensation. The process involves experts from a wide range of medical specialties including plastic and reconstructive surgery, orthopedic surgery, psychiatry, neurology, anesthesia and rehabilitation.
“To transplant the hand requires the reattachment of two bones, three nerves, two arteries, four to six veins and somewhere around 23 tendons,” Azari said.
In addition to the complex surgery required, the hand transplantation program is also seeking to test and develop the use of existing immune-suppressing drugs in the reattachment of the hand.
The anti-rejection drugs are used to ensure that the transplants are accepted by the patient’s body, but excessive use can hinder the patient’s immune system. There is little experience with the use of these drugs in the transplantation of limbs, although they are commonly used in organ transplantation.
“We are at the forefront of a brand new frontier in medicine,” Azari said.
“If we can figure out how to manage the immunosuppression medication to use them minimally, safely, effectively and with as little consequence to the patient, we will enter a brand new frontier in medicine called reconstructive transplantation surgery.”
The humanities — philosophy, art history, English literature, Slavic languages, musicology and the rest — are quaint, elderly relatives that the real, serious, modern university (consisting of technological researchers and the professional schools) subsidizes out of charitable tradition but has trouble pampering during difficult times. The president of my university, the University of California, made that clear on national television not long ago: “Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We’re doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who’s going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that’s where we’re running into trouble.”
President Mark G. Yudof probably meant no disrespect when he identified us as the “core problem” of the university’s budget crisis, and maybe I’m mistaken to hear more resignation than enthusiasm in the assertion that an English department is “trouble” that you nonetheless “have to have.” But he is mistaken about the economics—and you probably are, too. As Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, said in a New York Times article last fall, English students usually generate a profit. “They’re paying for the chemistry major and the music major. … The little ugly facts about cross-subsidies are inflammatory, so they get papered over.”
If you count what patients pay for treatment as income earned by a medical center, but do not count what students pay for literature courses as income earned by the humanities department, the hospital will surely look like a much smarter business. You might therefore appoint those productive health-care administrators to a death panel (called a universitywide planning committee) on lost causes like the English major.
But, according to spreadsheet calculations done at my request by Reem Hanna-Harwell, assistant dean of the humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles, based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities there generate over $59 million in student fees, while spending only $53.5 million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category). The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely essential to UCLA’s educational mission, has been sent firing notices, even though the spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3 million dollars in fee revenue, at a cost of only $2.4 million.
So the answer to “Who’s going to pay the salary of the English department?” is that the English department at UCLA earns its own salary and more, through the fees paid by its students — profits that will only grow with the increase in student fees.
That isn’t an eccentric calculation. Of the 21 units at the University of Washington, the humanities and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences are the only ones that generate more tuition income than 100 percent of their total expenditure. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, recently cited a University of Illinois report showing that a large humanities department like English produces a substantial net profit, whereas units such as engineering and agriculture run at a loss. The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern.
Because that evidence runs up against the widespread myth that other units and departments subsidize the humanities, and up against such well-entrenched forces within the university, it is regularly ignored or even suppressed. In the 1990s, UCLA invested huge amounts of money setting up Responsibility Centered Management, an accounting system eventually used at many universities to evaluate all the real costs of different units and the revenue they actually produce. The goal was to make budgeting fair and transparent. However, according to administrators then prominently involved in the process, when the initial run of those intricate spreadsheets showed that the College of Letters and Science was the most efficient user and producer of money, and the health sciences were far less efficient, RCM was abandoned. I have no illusions that the businesspeople and University of California medical executives who evidently have President Yudof’s ear will be more receptive to that inconvenient truth today than they were then.
University budgets, fraught with indirect costs and shared infrastructure, are far too complicated for an amateur to master, and people in other fields would surely emphasize other numbers. We’re all in this leaking, listing ship together, and the humanities will have to bear some of the pain of bailing it out. But, as Wellman of the Delta Project observed in a follow-up e-mail message to me, “cutting humanities is penny-wise and pound-foolish. … Even though scientists bring in research money, research grants never pay for their full costs, so they actually erode resources from the general instructional program. And cutting budgets further in the courses that are already the lowest cost is nutty.”
We produce a profit despite the irreducibly labor-intensive aspects of much work in the humanities, where there are seldom any single right answers toward which students may be directed, and where instruction must therefore engage actively and progressively with the particular subjective attributes of each developing voice and mind in a classroom discussion or in drafts of an essay. Class size therefore cannot swell in many of our departments without destroying our essential pedagogical function, any more than the sciences could function without laboratories.
Yet because the discretionary budget in humanities goes almost entirely for teaching staff, across-the-board cuts hit our instruction especially hard. The dean of humanities’ office at UCLA warned a few months ago that the proposed budget would require programs in this division — already the leanest in staff per faculty — to fire most of their lecturers and teaching assistants, making our curriculum unsustainable.
If you’re wondering who would ever deem that an acceptable outcome, consider that the 30-member commission that the chairman of the University of California Board of Regents, Russell S. Gould, and President Yudof appointed last year to plan the university’s future includes a dozen people from business and economics, a half-dozen from medicine, some lawyers, educational theorists, and social-science undergraduates — but only one humanist, a late addition reportedly after faculty protests. Even in the commission’s satellite working groups, humanities faculty members are outnumbered by a ratio of about 14 to 1, according to my calculations. That scientific researchers always subsidize the humanities was blithely repeated at the commission’s public forum at UCLA without challenge — and without a single humanist on the podium. The official budget-crisis website of the University of California warns that “a federal grant for laser-beam research can’t be used to fund a deficit in the English Department.” Top administrative positions are now dominated by people from technology and medicine, who, without any conscious bias or ill will, are naturally susceptible to that complacent belief, that well-known fact that isn’t true.
For students and faculty members in the humanities, the result is essentially taxation without representation. For the University of California system, the result may be a drastic loss of educational quality that will soon turn into a net loss of money as well — especially if it damages the traditional teaching of writing skills, languages, and cultural literacy that both taxpayers and employers value so highly.
No sane citizenry measures its public elementary schools by whether they pay for themselves immediately and in dollars. We shouldn’t have to make a balance-sheet argument for the humanities, either, at least not until the balance-sheet includes the value, to the student and to the state, of expanded powers of personal empathy and cross-cultural respect, improved communication through language and other symbolic systems, and increased ability to tolerate and interpret complexity, contemplate morality, appreciate the many forms of artistic beauty, and generate creative, independent thought.
That grandiose description surely reveals my own tribal loyalties, and I don’t mean to pick fights with my brilliant and dedicated colleagues in the sciences when it’s really the shared project of a broad and meaningful undergraduate education that’s at risk. And the gravest wounds to this magnificent public university have come from the state legislature itself, which imagines it can continue cutting what it pays for educating Californians without hurting California.
But when a university’s own leaders begin talking about higher education as if it were just another business rather than a great collective legacy, by making English professors the scapegoat for hundreds of millions of dollars in operating deficit, they need to hear some other voices. The assumption that the humanities are a vestigial parasite within an otherwise self-sufficient institutional body is dangerously wrong.
Jul 172010
Imagine if your brain lost its working memory — the ability to hold and manipulate information in your mind’s eye. That’s the plight faced by millions of people with neurofibromatosis type 1, or NF1. The genetic condition affects one in 3,500 people and is the most common cause of learning disabilities.
Now a UCLA research team has uncovered new clues about how NF1 disrupts working memory. Published in the July 12 online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings suggest a potential drug target for correcting NF1-related learning disabilities.
NF1 is caused by mutations in a gene called neurofibromin, or Nf1, which makes a protein with the same name. Previous mouse studies led by principal investigator Dr. Alcino Silva, a professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, showed that the Nf1 protein is essential for controlling the release of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which regulates brain cell activity. Mutated versions of the protein cause too much GABA to be released, dramatically altering communication between brain cells.
In the current study, Silva and colleagues found that mice carrying Nf1 mutations showed higher levels of GABA in the brain region that regulates working memory. The findings imply that excess GABA hinders the activity of neurons in the brain, thus interfering with working memory.
“We focused on a region of the prefrontal cortex that is critical for working memory in mice and compared it to its equivalent region in humans,” said study co-author Carrie Bearden, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. ”When NF1 patients performed tasks that required working memory, they displayed reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex. The results were very similar to what we discovered in our mouse model.”
The team asked NF1 patients to perform a series of memory tasks while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan that measured blood and oxygen flow to various areas of the brain. More blood and oxygen flow indicates greater brain activity. Compared to healthy volunteers, the NF1 patients showed less activity in the part of the prefrontal cortex that controls working memory.
“The NF1 patients’ brain cells didn’t fully activate in the prefrontal cortex, as in healthy people,” Bearden said. “Patients’ brain activity levels also predicted their success rate in the experiment. The less activity we saw in this brain region, the worse they performed on the tasks.”
“Our research implies that the increased release of GABA interferes with working memory in NF1,” said the study’s first author, Carrie Shilyansky, a graduate researcher in neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The UCLA findings suggest that learning disabilities caused by Nf1 mutations could potentially be corrected with a drug that normalizes the excess GABA’s effect on brain cells.
The authors are currently studying the effect of the drug lovastatin on learning and health issues in NF1 patients. To learn more about the UCLA clinical trial, contact Jennifer Ho at 310-825-3458 or beardenlab.ucla@gmail.com.
The study was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Children’s Tumor Foundation, Neurofibromatosis Inc. and the U.S. Army.
Other co-authors included Katherine Karlsgodt, Damian Cummings, Molly Hardt, Alex James, Dan Ehninger, Panayiota Poirazi, J. David Jentsch, Tyrone Cannon and Michael Levine, all of UCLA, and Kyriaki Sidiropoulou of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Foundation for Research and Technology in Crete, Greece.
Jul 122010
For the third consecutive year, the UCLA Anderson School of Management is joining a select group of business schools to offer the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV).
The summer program, which runs from July 10 to 18 at UCLA Anderson, provides education and training in entrepreneurship and small business management free of cost to military personnel injured in the line of duty. The program is designed to help participants learn essential skills that will help them start, grow and successfully manage entrepreneurial ventures.
“It’s a privilege to work with disabled American veterans for the third year,” said Judy Olian, dean of UCLA Anderson and the school’s John E. Anderson Professor of Management. “UCLA Anderson’s expertise in entrepreneurship is a way for us to provide resources to veterans who have sacrificed so much on behalf of the nation and who want to realize their own business dreams and desires to support their families and communities.”
The EBV was introduced by the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University in 2007. The following year, the EBV Consortium was launched as a national partnership with UCLA Anderson, Florida State University’s College of Business and the Mays Business School at Texas A&M. Purdue University joined the consortium in 2009, and the University of Connecticut was added in 2010.
The EBV is designed around two primary objectives. The first focuses on practical training in new venture creation and growth, including information on programs and opportunities specific to disabled veterans and the businesses they own. The second focuses on establishing a support structure for graduates of the program.
The UCLA Anderson EBV program, which is administered by the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, is divided into three distinct phases. Students develop initial concepts during the online component of the program. They then participate in experiential workshops and in-class learning at UCLA. Finally, they receive ongoing support and mentorship from UCLA Anderson faculty and alumni in the year following the residential component.
Thanks to the generous support of corporate sponsors and private individuals, the entire program — including tuition, travel and accommodations — is offered at no cost to the veterans.
“The response that we have received to the EBV program has been tremendous,” said Elaine Hagan, executive director of UCLA’s Price Center. “We look forward to providing this year’s class with an unparalleled learning experience and in continuing to work with them as they become members of the EBV alumni network, which will soon include over 300 participants across the consortium.”
The Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the UCLA Anderson School of Management is an internationally recognized leader in entrepreneurial education and research. With a distinguished faculty as its cornerstone, the center oversees activities that advance the theory and practice of entrepreneurship as well as the related fields of technology and innovation, venture capital and private equity, and social enterprise. Known for the impact of its outreach programs, the Price Center fosters a spirit of innovation in individuals, enhances the managerial capacity of organizations, and prepares entrepreneurial leaders who will provide significant, sustainable and economic value to society.
The UCLA Anderson School of Management, established in 1935, is regarded among the leading business schools in the world. Faculty members are renowned for their teaching excellence and research in advancing management thinking. Each year, UCLA Anderson provides management education to more than 1,800 students enrolled in M.B.A., fully-employed M.B.A., executive M.B.A., UCLA-NUS Global Executive M.B.A., master of financial engineering and doctoral programs and to more than 2,000 professional managers through executive education programs. Combining highly selective admissions, varied and innovative learning programs, and a worldwide network of 36,000 alumni, UCLA Anderson develops and prepares global leaders.
The extinction of woolly mammoths and other large mammals more than 10,000 years ago may be explained by the same type of cascade of ecosystem disruption that is being caused today by the global decline of predators such as wolves, cougars and sharks, life scientists report July 1 in the cover article of the journal Bioscience.
Then, as now, the cascading events were originally begun by human disruption of ecosystems, a new study concludes, but around 15,000 years ago the problem was not the loss of a key predator, but the addition of one — human hunters with spears.
This mass extinction was caused by newly arrived humans tipping the balance of power and competing with major predators such as sabertooth cats, the authors of the new analysis argue. An equilibrium that had survived for thousands of years was disrupted, perhaps explaining the loss of two-thirds of North America’s large mammals during this period.
“We suggest that the arrival of humans to North America triggered a trophic cascade in which competition for the largest prey was intensified, ultimately causing the large non-human carnivores to decimate the large herbivores,” said Blaire Van Valkenburgh, UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a co-author on the paper. “When human hunters arrived on the scene, they provided new competition with these carnivores for the same prey.
“The addition of humans was different from prior arrivals of new predators, such as lions, because humans were also omnivores and could live on plant foods if necessary,” Van Valkenburgh said. “We think this may have triggered a sequential collapse not only in the large herbivores, but ultimately their predators as well. Importantly, humans had some other defenses against predation, such as fire, weapons and living in groups, so they were able to survive.”
“For decades, scientists have been debating the causes of this mass extinction, and the two theories with the most support are hunting pressures from the arrival of humans and climate change,” said William Ripple, a professor of forest ecosystems and society at Oregon State University and lead author on the paper.
In the late Pleistocene, researchers say, major predators dominated North America in an uneasy stability with a wide range of mammals: mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, camels, horses and several species of bison. The new study cites previous evidence from carnivore tooth wear and fracture, growth rates of prey, and other factors that suggest that there were no serious shortages of food caused by environmental change 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.
The large herbivores seemed to be growing quickly, and just as quickly had their numbers reduced by a range of significant carnivorous predators, including lions, dire wolves and two species of sabertooth cats. Food was plentiful for herbivores, and the system was balanced, but it was dominated by predators.
Humans were the triggering mechanism for the extinction. After that, predators increasingly desperate for food may have driven their prey to extinction over long periods of time and then eventually died out themselves.
“We think the evidence shows that major ecosystem disruptions, resulting in these domino effects, can be caused either by subtracting or adding a major predator,” Ripple said. “In the case of the woolly mammoths and sabertooth tiger, the problems may have begun by adding a predator, in this case humans.”
The loss of species in North America during the late Pleistocene was remarkable; about 80 percent of 51 large herbivore species went extinct, along with more than 60 percent of large carnivores. Previous research has documented the growth rates of North American mammoths by studying their tusks, revealing no evidence of reduced growth caused by inadequate food, thus offering no support for climate-induced habitat decline.
Rather, the large population of predators such as dire wolves and sabertooth cats caused carnivores to compete intensely for food, as evidenced by heavy tooth wear.
“Heavily worn and fractured teeth are a result of bone consumption, something most carnivores avoid unless prey is difficult to acquire,” Van Valkenburgh said.
Trophic cascades initiated by humans are broadly demonstrated, the researchers report. In North America, it may have started with the arrival of the first humans, but continues today with the extirpation of wolves, cougars and other predators around the world. The hunting of whales in the last century may have led to predatory killer whales turning their attention to other prey, such as seals and sea otters — and the declines in sea otter populations has led to an explosion of sea urchins and the collapse of kelp forest ecosystems.
“In the terrestrial realm, it is important that we have a better understanding of how Pleistocene ecosystems were structured as we proceed in maintaining and restoring today’s ecosystems,” the scientists wrote. “In the aquatic realm, the Earth’s oceans are the last frontier for megafaunal species declines and extinctions.
“The tragic cascade of species declines due to human harvesting of marine megafauna happening now may be a repeat of the cascade that occurred with the onset of human harvesting of terrestrial megafauna more than 10,000 years ago. This is a sobering thought, but it is not too late to alter our course this time around in the interest of sustaining Earth’s ecosystems.”
UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Five alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
National Intrepid Center of Excellence will treat veterans returning from combat
The U.S. Department of Defense and the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund on June 24 officially dedicated the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, a new 72,000-square-foot medical facility in Bethesda, Md., dedicated to researching, diagnosing and treating traumatic brain injury in U.S. military personnel.
David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center and a nationally renowned expert in the field, played a major role in helping to frame the creation of the Intrepid Center and in raising awareness about traumatic brain injury among soldiers.
“Cerebral concussions are significant injuries that can happen during a battlefield deployment, such as in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack,” said Hovda, a UCLA professor of neurosurgery who has advised the Pentagon on traumatic brain injury. “This center will be essential in exploring what happens to the brain during an IED explosion and offer potential therapies and protocols for healing.”
The research of Hovda and others ― which has helped inform the mission of the new Intrepid Center ― has shown that in IED explosions, the head receives a violent thrust, causing the brain to collide with the skull. As a defense mechanism, the brain can begin to shut down, lowering its activity level in order to begin the process of repair.
Both magnetic resonance spectroscopy and positron emission tomography brain scans have shown depressed metabolic activity in the brain after a concussion, compared with a normally functioning brain. If another blow to the head occurs during this vulnerable period, the injury to the brain can be more severe and could cause long-term dysfunction.
Hovda and his UCLA colleagues, Dr. Paul Vespa, a professor of neurosurgery and neurology and director of the neurocritical care program at UCLA, and Dr. Christopher Giza, a UCLA associate professor of neurosurgery and pediatric neurology, joined forces with Arnold Fisher, honorary chairman of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, to raise awareness of cerebral concussion and to conceive a plan to build the National Intrepid Center of Excellence.
Ultimately, Hovda’s research and work will seek to improve the lives and mental health of our returning military service members.
UCLA is also collaborating with the military in Operation Mend, a unique partnership between Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, and the Veterans Affairs–Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. Operation Mend has been established to help treat U.S. military personnel wounded during service in Iraq and Afghanistan. More information is available at www.operationmend.ucla.edu.
The UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, part of the UCLA Department of Neurosurgery, maintains a comprehensive basic and clinical scientific program in the field of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Its scientists conduct research into imaging, neurophysiology, molecular biology, modeling and behavioral neuroscience in order to apply this knowledge toward understanding the neurobiology of human TBI.
Jun 222010
What we venerate as the Liberty Bell is actually a replica. After the original bell, which had been sent from London, cracked upon testing, two Philadelphia artisans melted it down and recast it in 1753, then recast it again to get better sound from it.
If Philadelphia’s founding fathers had had their way, the now treasured relic would have been melted down a third time seven decades later and sold for scrap metal.
That means the symbol of American patriotism that ultimately became second in importance only to the Stars and Stripes narrowly missed the scrap heap at least once — and possibly two more times, since it was also threatened during aborted plans in 1812 and 1816 to demolish Independence Hall, the site where the Declaration of Independence was signed and the bell’s home.
These are just some of the juicy morsels served up by UCLA historian Gary B. Nash in a new book about the life and times of the bronze icon that next year turns 260 years old.
“It’s pretty much a miracle that the thing still exists,” said Nash, professor emeritus of history, founder of the UCLA-based National Center for History in the Schools and former president of the Organization of American Historians.
In “The Liberty Bell” (Yale University Press), Nash traces the bell’s history from its pre-Revolutionary role as a convener of colonial legislators to its front-row seat in a modern-day controversy over the echoes of slavery on the grounds where the symbol of freedom now stands.
Along the way, Nash details the bell’s slow and arduous rise from scrap metal fodder to international renown. He shows how the bell gained its name and much of its mystique as a symbol for a series of progressive causes, beginning with abolition and ending with self-determination for former Soviet bloc countries and former colonies in Africa.
He also illustrates the role of cross-country trips in drumming up “bellmania” — a frenzy once so intense that Americans would lavish the icon with kisses and touch their totems and babies to it. The last whistle-stop tour concluded 95 years ago this fall, after the bell took its only trip west, a vast sweep through Washington, Oregon and California.
“It’s a great story about how this ordinary bell secured a place as a way of uniting the nation and spreading the freedom message around the world,” Nash said.
A specialist in early American history, Nash is the author 26 books on the American Revolution, Philadelphia and the role of race and class in the fledgling nation. He served as a member of National Park Service’s Second Century Commission, a blue-ribbon panel convened in 2008 to reevaluate the agency’s guiding principles. He emerged as a vocal critic of Independence National Historical Park’s original plans to omit the history of slavery at the site where the Liberty Bell Center was erected in 2003. Nash is serving as a historical consultant to a team of curators, architects and museum designers creating an open-air exhibition detailing that history. The exhibit is slated to open at the INHP this October.
“The history of the Liberty Bell is so rich that it deserves to be told in all its complexity and contradictions,” said Nash, who conducted most of his research for the book in the INHP archives.
The story begins in 1751, when Pennsylvania leaders commissioned an English foundry to cast a bell for the State House, the meeting place for legislators in Philadelphia, then the capital of the America colony. It’s still not clear why the first crack appeared, Nash says. After melting it down, a pair of local metallurgists recast the bell, adding more copper. Instead of a melodious tone, the second bell sounded “a discouraging thud,” Nash writes, so they recast it again, never realizing that their alloy adjustments and recastings would sap the bell’s strength and leave it vulnerable to another cracking.
Initially, the bell’s renown rested on a fabricated distinction: that it tolled on July 4, 1776, for the first reading of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, Nash writes, it took four days to typeset and print the document, so the Declaration was not published until July 8, 1776. Still, the bell’s toll gathered Philadelphians, who heard a sheriff read the document on that momentous occasion, just as it tolled at other high points of the American Revolution, from Paul Revere’s ride to the signing of the Treaty of Paris at the war’s end.
Nash also dispels myths around the origins of the bell’s signature crack. For years, it was believed to have appeared when it rang after the 1835 death of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Marshall. In fact, Nash could find no evidence for the claim. It’s more likely, he believes, that a 10-year-old boy who was allowed to ring the bell during the same year was responsible for the damage. As an octogenarian, he confessed to the accident in a 1911 New York Times article, Nash found.
And it appears to be a well-meaning attempt at fixing the crack in 1846 that left the bell — as described in a newspaper account of the day — “forever dumb.”
Whatever the origins of the crack, the bell had been pretty much forgotten in the years leading up to 1835. Only the prohibitive cost of lowering the one-ton behemoth from its four-story perch in Independence Hall, as the State House came to be known, and hauling it to a foundry kept it from being sold for scrap metal in 1828, Nash writes. The metallurgist tasked with the job determined that the effort was not worth the $400 the city wanted for the bell.
Then the abolitionist movement adopted the icon. Nash traces the first use of the phrase “Liberty Bell” to a 1835 tract published by the New York Anti-Slavery Society, which was taken by the bell’s inscription from the Bible’s book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof.”
Other progressive causes eventually followed suit. Suffragettes under Susan B. Anthony and advocates for child labor laws under Mother Jones also adopted the Liberty Bell as their symbol, Nash found.
“Once the bell acquired the power to move people deeply, to command their respect, awe and even love, it was natural that those who did not yet enjoy full political or civil liberty would try to make the bell ring for them as well,” he writes.
But as influential as these causes were in raising the Liberty Bell’s profile, it was extensive road trips that endeared the icon to the nation, Nash writes. Beginning with the New Orleans World Industrial and Cotton Exposition in 1885, the bell traveled more than 10,000 miles to fairs, exhibitions and commemorations via railroad, Nash calculates. Initially targeting communities south of the Mason-Dixon line, the trips were designed to “bind the nation’s wounds and complete the process of reconciliation following the Civil War,” he writes.
Eventually, promoters used the bell to draw attendance to such events as the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, St. Louis’ Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 and San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, also in 1915.
The pilgrimages ended up lengthening the bell’s crack by 17 inches, necessitating the introduction of the two stabilizing plugs (technically called “spiders”), but they cemented the bell’s fame.
“At towns where the train could not afford the time to stop during the night, people lit huge bonfires so that the throngs could see the Liberty Bell as it majestically rumbled through their towns,” Nash writes.
While the Liberty Bell served successfully as the symbol for war bond drives, the American flag started to eclipse it during World War I and II as the chief symbol of American patriotism, Nash found. Still, the bell served prominently in radio broadcasts during World War II. “Liberty” was tapped out in Morse code on the bell using a rubber mallet and broadcast to U.S. troops at the storming of Normandy beaches, during the liberation of the Philippines and at the end of the war.
The bell also got a shot in the arm from the Cold War, when the CIA, the State Department and Radio Free Europe adopted the bell as a symbol for international democracy, Nash found.
Along the way, the one-time darling of progressive reformers was adopted by a McCarthy-era activist and other right-wing movements, Nash found. On a couple of occasions, opposing sides of the same issue even relied on the bell as the symbol of their causes.
Not that there aren’t enough Liberty Bells to go around. From Berlin to Knott’s Berry Farm, Nash counts more than six dozen full-sized replicas that have been cast over the years. One disappeared while touring Russia in the early 1900s; it is said to have been melted down by Bolsheviks for weapons in the 1917 revolution.
Today’s controversy around the Liberty Bell Center involves the nation’s first executive residence, which originally stood on the site before the nation’s capital moved to Washington, D.C. in 1800. Built by a slave owner, the predecessor of today’s White House was occupied first by George Washington and then by John Adams. Famously, two of Washington’s slaves escaped from the house before the end of his presidency: Oney Judge, Martha Washington’s personal slave, and Hercules, the household’s chef. Originally, the INHP turned its back on the history, but Nash led a chorus of critics who demanded the story be told.
“The presence of slaves at the heart of one of our nation’s most potent symbols of freedom is an opportunity to give us a more complete view of American history,” Nash said. “The bell is a symbol of an ongoing struggle for liberty rather than one of liberty attained.”
UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Five alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
