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Home > UC Science Today > The weekly roundup - Oct 28th
Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

The weekly roundup - Oct 28th
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:02:09
Publish Date: 2016-10-20 19:00:00
Description: This week on Science Today. We’ve all experienced spaces with uneven heating and cooling systems, so what if this can be optimized in novel ways? We spoke to electrical and computer engineer Yasamin Mostofi of UC Santa Barbara who is using existing WiFi signals to essentially conduct a headcount. But why? "You need to be able to estimate your occupancy with WiFi signals. We want to figure out how many people were there, which areas are more crowded, then the heating and cooling can be optimized accordingly." If counting calories is more your thing, you may want to know more about added sugars in your diet. This is the one of the most significant contributors to diseases like diabetes and heart attacks, so Kris Madsen of UC Berkeley says if everyone was aware of this, there would be a better chance that public health agencies and municipalities could partner with industry to produce healthier products for people to consume. Madsen recently found that a soda tax in Berkeley led to lower consumption of sugary drinks in low-income neighborhoods. "I think some would say sugar-sweetened beverages have been unfairly singled out, they are not the only problematic item in our diet. This is true. There’s a few things about them that really makes them stand out – first of all, they are the largest source of added sugars in the American’s diet; the other problem is that we don’t usually compensate for those calories." This week we also visit the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where engineers are looking to overcome one of the current limitations of commercial 3D printers on the market – that is, the lack of material that’s being used. Engineer Chen Zhu helped develop a novel, ultra-lightweight graphene aerogel to expand the fabrication of devices or functional materials. "So first we developed the graphene aerogel ink that’s a printable ink, so that means the material is easy to flow through the very small nozzle and after squeezing the printing, the material can maintain the shape and it’s not going to shrink or collapse or deform." There’s just so much research going on at the University of California – subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud or Stitcher to hear these and other episodes. I’m Larissa Branin, thanks for listening. 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/wifi_systems https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/added_sugars https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/print_material
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