Health News

A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia Tech is one of the first to analyze how incarcerated individuals in California may be impacted by arsenic-contaminated water. The study analyzed 20 years of water quality data from prisons where arsenic levels in the water supply exceeded regulatory limits for months or even years at a time.

In collaboration with Hutson and other Allensworth community leaders, engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are currently field testing a simple and low-cost new arsenic treatment system that is designed to help small, rural communities like Allensworth access arsenic-safe drinking water.

This Halloween season, vampires might want to pause their never-ending search for the blood of youth. A new study from UC Berkeley researchers disputes the idea that, for humans, young blood can rejuvenate the old — and suggests there is likely a better way to ward off the ravages of time.

While food insecurity is a problem for a growing segment of the U.S. population — made even worse by the coronavirus pandemic — few studies have looked at the effect that feast or famine has on the developing brain in isolation from other factors that contribute to adversity. A new study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, simulated the effects of food insecurity in juvenile mice and found lasting changes later in life.

A new study led and co-authored by professor Amanda Brewster found that hospitalizations declined when patients were part of a social needs case management program.

The supply of a plant-derived anti-cancer drug can finally meet global demand after a team of scientists from Denmark and the U.S. engineered yeast to produce the precursor molecules, which could previously only be obtained in trace concentrations in the native plant. A study describing the breakthrough was published today in Nature.

In Berkeley Talks episode 149, Mahesh Srinivasan, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology, discusses the importance of child-directed speech in language learning, how poverty may suppress parents’ speech to their children and how children learn language from overheard speech.

Monkeypox was declared a public health emergency in the United States last week, with cases exploding to over 7,500 between May (when there were only two cases reported) and August 2022. We asked John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, to give us his perspective on the virus: where it came from, how it spreads, and what individuals can do to protect themselves from contracting it.

If you remember your first hit on a cigarette, you know how sickening nicotine can be. Yet, for many people, the rewards of nicotine outweigh the negative effects of high doses. University of California, Berkeley, researchers have now mapped out part of the brain network responsible for the negative consequences of nicotine, opening the door to interventions that could boost the aversive effects to help people quit smoking.

Overcrowding, sometimes in antiquated buildings, compounded by rapidly changing conditions and the need for complex coordination, helped to drive a dramatic surge in COVID-19 in California’s prisons, according to a new report from the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Pancreatic cancer, though rare, is one of the deadliest of cancers, killing nearly 50,000 people yearly and doing so quickly, primarily because it metastasizes rapidly through the body. Barely one in 10 people survive beyond five years. But a discovery by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests a new way to slow or stop metastatic spread of pancreatic and perhaps other cancers.

The landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court will almost immediately limit access to abortions in some states, but in the days and weeks to come, the shock waves will reach deeply into American life, UC Berkeley scholars say. Berkeley News asked a range of top campus scholars for their perspectives about the decision and its ramifications. Here’s what they told us.