News Briefs

IFC, Village clean up Westwood

For the fourth consecutive year, fraternity members from
different houses spent their Sunday morning scraping, sweeping and
scrubbing in an attempt to reduce visible blight around
Westwood.

UCLA’s Interfraternity Council, the organization
responsible for campus Greek life, teamed up with Shelley Taylor,
director of the North Village Improvement Committee, for
“Operation Clean Sweep.”

About 140 fraternity members showed up in the event’s
“best turnout yet,” according to Taylor.

There will be a second clean-up in the spring, Taylor said.

Researchers find brain cell images

Scientists at UC San Diego have produced dramatic images of
brain cells forming temporary and permanent connections in response
to various stimuli, illustrating for the first time the structural
changes between neurons in the brain that take place when we store
short-term and long-term memories.

Conducted by researchers from UCSD’s Divisions of Biology
and Physical Sciences, the achievement is considered a “Holy
Grail” for neuroscientists who have long sought concrete
evidence for how nerve connections in the brain are changed
temporarily and permanently by our experiences.

“The long-term memories stored in our brain last our
entire lives, so everybody had assumed that there must be lasting
structural changes between neurons in the brain,” said
Michael Colicos, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD and lead author of
the paper.

“Although there’s been a lot of suggestive evidence
to indicate that this is the case, it’s never before been
directly observed,” he said.

While most people assumed some sort of rearrangement of nerve
cell connections took place in the brain, this was difficult to
demonstrate experimentally, said Yukiko Goda, a professor of
biology at UCSD who headed the research team.

Vietnamese show democratic faith

Most Vietnamese citizens support democracy and believe it could
function effectively in their nation, according to a UC Irvine
public opinion survey conducted with the Institute for Human
Studies in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Nearly three-quarters of the Vietnamese public endorse the
Churchillian statement: “Democracy has its problems, but it
is better than other forms of government.”

In addition, the national development slogan ““
“Prosperous people; strong nation; just, democratic, and
civilized society” ““ is nearly universally
endorsed.

The international study is the first scientifically sampled,
public national survey of social and political attitudes in
Vietnam. It is part of a large cross-national study of human
values, in which more than 60 nations are being surveyed, including
the United States.

Berkeley turns to lobsters for ideas

Aquatic creatures like lobsters and crabs depend on smell to
find food, a suitable mate or to avoid predators, but how do they
pluck these odors from the water swirling around them?

A study by researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford University
details the sophisticated way in which spiny lobsters sniff their
way around a watery world and may provide strategies for robot
builders looking for efficient ways to create odor sensors.

“We are learning how animal antennae capture odor
molecules from the water around them. We want to understand which
designs of odor-catching antennae work successfully in nature so
that they could provide inspiration for man-made antennae,”
said lead author Mimi A. R. Koehl, professor of integrative biology
at UCB.

The researchers first made high-speed videos of a lobster
flicking its antennules, measured these details and created a
mechanical lobster that flicked in the same way.

Reports from Daily Bruin wire services.