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Home > UC Science Today > The weekly roundup - August 5th
Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

The weekly roundup - August 5th
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:01:50
Publish Date: 2016-08-04 19:00:00
Description: This week on Science Today. If you look on the back of a bottle of multivitamins, you might recognize some metal nutrients like zinc and iron. But would you recognize copper as a major contributor to human health? We speak with chemist Chris Chang of the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered that copper actually helps mice burn fat. "And so what happens is that if the mice don’t have enough copper in their fat cells, then they can’t undergo this process of fat burning, the act of breaking larger pieces of fat into smaller pieces of fat for energy." And it turns out that this lack of copper can set the stage for obesity. Our bodies require many nutrients to thrive, but other compounds might be outright harmful. Consider chemotherapy drugs, which can be toxic to the body and cause brutal side effects. That’s why researcher Chelsea Chen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory created a small device called the ChemoFilter. This acts as chemical sponge to absorb the excess drug before it spreads to the rest of the body. "It is used to capture the chemotherapy drug, that’s past the tumor, before it enters the body’s circulation." The device can then be removed from the body after treatment. We also chat with bioinformatics scientist Jonathan Allen of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about a new national panel that will study how microbial communities affect human health in “built environments” like an office building or even a hospital. "How can we apply the current technologies that are being used to study the microbiome in a broad array of research areas and apply them to really advance the field in building design and interactions with people?" Listen to this and other episodes about the University of California research. Subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening and until next time, I’m Larissa Branin. Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday Stories mentioned in this roundup: https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/copper_obesity https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/chemo_filter https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/office_microbiome
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