A new study shows that humans' tendency to drink alcohol might come from our primates' ancestors. The study published last month revealed findings that support the "drunken monkey hypothesis." Between June to September 2013, researchers observed the eating tendencies of black-handed spider monkeys for 12 hours each day on Barro Colorado Island in Panama. The monkeys are probably not getting drunk, University of California, Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley, who co-authored the study , said. In a 2014 book, "The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol," Dudley explained some fruits eaten by primates have a "naturally high alcohol content of up to 7%." But he did not have data illustrating apes or monkeys sought out and preferred fermented fruits. "It (the study) is a direct test of the drunken monkey hypothesis," Dudley said in a news release. "Part one, there is ethanol in the food they're eating, and they're eating a lot of fruit. Then, part two, they're actually metabolizing alcohol — secondary metabolites, ethyl glucuronide and ethyl sulfate are coming out in the urine. What we don't know is how much of it they're eating and what the effects are behaviorally and physiologically. But it's confirmatory." This story appeared in dozens of media outlets. For more, see our press release at Berkeley News.

You've heard about the dangers of secondhand cigarette smoke, but what about secondhand bong smoke? The haze after a bubbly bong hit may appear harmless, but a study published in JAMA Network Open found bystanders may inhale air pollutants at concentrations more than twice federal air quality limits. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, measured fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in a real-world setting where a group of young adults socially smoked cannabis with a bong for two hours in an ordinary household living room. Within the first 15 minutes of smoking, PM2.5 concentrations surpassed air quality levels deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. "There's negative attitudes to secondhand tobacco smoke but not really to secondhand cannabis smoke," said lead study author Patton Nguyen, an industrial hygienist and a graduate of UC Berkeley School of Public Health. "What we want this study to do is really elucidate and help people understand that there are public health concerns." Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, in the air can travel deep into the respiratory tract, reaching the lungs and affecting their function. 

Many parents may be worried about the effect of screen time on their teen children's mental health. However, a team of researchers has found that teens who had positive online interactions were less lonely during the lockdown. This suggests that it's the quality, not the quantity of time spent online that matters when it comes to well-being. The lockdowns related to COVID-19 had teens cooped up in their homes for quite a long time. In Peru, for instance, strict lockdown in 2020 had tens of millions of people in their homes, with only one adult family member allowed to leave to complete errands, the University of California Berkeley noted in a news release. "Our findings support our hypothesis that how you spend your time on screens, and not how much time you spend online, is the best predictor of loneliness and well-being," the study's lead author, Dr. Lucía Magis-Weinberg of UC Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, said. "In light of this, teachers and parents might want to focus more on promoting positive online experiences for youth rather than limiting screen time." Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

New UC Berkeley research draws a strong link between cell phone radiation and tumors, particularly in the brain. Researchers took a comprehensive look at statistical findings from 46 different studies around the globe and found that the use of a cell phone for more than 1,000 hours, or about 17 minutes a day over a ten-year period, increased the risk of tumors by 60%. Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, conducted the research in partnership with Korea's National Cancer Center, and Seoul National University. Their analysis took a comprehensive look at statistical findings from case control studies from 16 countries including the U.S., Sweden, United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, and New Zealand. "Cell phone use highlights a host of public health issues and it has received little attention in the scientific community, unfortunately," said Moskowitz. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Bay Area scientists have captured the real-time electrical activity of a beating heart, using a sheet of graphene to record an optical image -- almost like a video camera -- of the faint electric fields generated by the rhythmic firing of the heart's muscle cells. The development comes from a collaboration between two teams of quantum physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and physical chemists at Stanford University. "Because we are imaging all cells simultaneously onto a camera, we don't have to scan, and we don't have just a point measurement. We can image the entire network of cells at the same time," said Halleh Balch, one of three first authors of the paper and a recent Ph.D. recipient in UC Berkeley's Department of Physics. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Among the large cast of microbiome players, bacteria have long been hogging the spotlight. But the single-celled organisms known as protists are finally getting the starring role they deserve. "Even though protists are important and their relevance has been known for decades, our study is the first one showing an association of protists with plants in a large-scale field experiment," said project leader Mary Firestone, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Earth and Environmental Sciences Area and a professor at UC Berkeley. The project was a collaboration among scientists from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the Noble Research Institute, and the University of Oklahoma.

When wildfires choked the air and turned the skies orange throughout the West in recent years, they caused a variety of health problems from coughs and runny noses to life-threatening heart attacks and strokes. But eczema and other skin issues were a result of the wildfires, too, according to researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the University of California, Berkeley. "Skin is the largest organ of the human body, and it's in constant interaction with the external environment. So, it makes sense that changes in the external environment, such as increases or decreases in air pollution, could affect our skin health," said Raj Fadadu, a student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

A new treatment holds the promise of possibly curing a debilitating disease that disproportionately affects the African American community, sickle cell disease. Researchers from UCSF, UC Berkeley, and UCLA are teaming up to defeat the disease by changing the patient's genetics. To do that, they've turned to a Nobel prize-winning gene-editing technology co-discovered by UC Berkeley biochemistry professor Jennifer Doudna. Known as CRISPR, the system allows doctors to identify genes that cause disease and then replace them with new DNA - a process known as gene editing. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

A team of University of California scientists are launching a first-ever human study of a powerful new gene-editing technique to fix the bad gene that causes sickle cell disease, offering the promise of a cure for the devastating blood illness. The new research efforts enlist CRISPR-Cas9 as a microscopic scalpel, performing genomic surgery with precision and efficiency. "We are motivated to work toward a cure that can be accessible and affordable to patients worldwide," said UC Berkeley's Jennifer Doudna, who leads the IGI's clinical diagnostics laboratory, and along with France's Emmanuelle Charpentier, earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the CRISPR discovery. "The launch of this trial is an essential first step on that path." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Another story on this topic appeared in Sickle Cell Disease News.

In a mere five months, a modest, 1,200-square-foot "pop up" testing lab at the University of California, Berkeley, has been transformed into one of the country's only high-throughput facilities for measuring COVID-19 viruses in sewage water.  "When we test wastewater, we get information about a really large number of people with a very small number of samples, and we get information about asymptomatic infections," says Kara Nelson, who leads COVID-WEB and is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

A recent study shows that rampant use of the "China virus" to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by conservative outlets, had a profound impact on how those in the United States see Asian Americans. "Research suggests that when people see Asian Americans as being more 'foreign,' they are more likely to express hostility toward them and engage in acts of violence and discrimination," said Rucker Johnson, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the study.

COVID-19 is especially hard on the old and frail, with 79% of the deaths attributed to the disease in the U.S. among those 65 and older and 94% among people with at least one "comorbidity" such as diabetes, dementia, obesity or hypertension. 2020 is likely to see big increases in overall mortality. Because of the age profile of the disease, though, the life expectancy decline would be less historic. In a study that estimated 11.7 average years of life lost by U.S. COVID victims, University of California at Berkeley demographers Joshua R. Goldstein and Ronald D. Lee also estimated that 250,000 additional deaths due to the disease would decrease average U.S. life expectancy at birth by about 10 months (0.84 years) - the biggest one-year drop since World War II but smaller than decreases in 1943 and several years in the 1920s and 1930s (mostly due to bad flu seasons), and just a fraction of the staggering 11.8-year decline in 1918.

Two years ago, researchers infected mosquitoes with bacteria and released them into parts of an Indonesian city. In areas where the infected mosquitoes were released, dengue incidence was 77% lower than in untreated areas. Nicholas Jewell of the University of California, Berkeley, who designed the study and led the statistical analysis, described it as a huge breakthrough. "We've now shown that it works in one city. If this can be replicated and used widely, it could eradicate dengue from several parts of the world for many years," Jewell said. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Women are overmedicated and experience adverse drug pharmaceutical reactions almost twice as often as men because clinical trials are typically male-dominated, according to a new study. Scientists at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago found that sex bias in clinical trials means the US Food and Drugs Administration is often approving drugs - and determining correct dosages - based predominantly upon their observed effects on men, without taking into account the possibility that others might react differently to the substance. Irving Zucker, lead study author and a professor emeritus of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, said in a statement that "when it comes to prescribing drugs, a one-size-fits-all approach, based on male-dominated clinical trials, is not working, and women are getting the short end of the stick." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

If California had stockpiled enough masks and other protective equipment, at least 15,800 essential workers would not have contracted COVID-19, and the state would have saved $93 million weekly on unemployment claims, according to a UC Berkeley Labor Center report issued this week. "It was one shocking number after another as I looked at this," said report co-author William Dow, a professor of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. "Based on these numbers, we should be building a stockpile for the future."