UCLA scholar, culinary historian champions foraged foods in new book
Today, delicacies like capers, arugula and fennel are at home at Dean & Deluca, Whole Foods and fancy restaurants, but they haven’t always lived the high life.
These and other darlings of the foodie set started out as peasants’ fodder, foraged from rocky outcroppings, empty fields and roadsides, according to a new book by a UCLA professor.
Luigi Ballerini revisits this distant past in “A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Edible Plants” (University of California Press), which celebrates the foraged foods that are currently enjoying a renaissance in Italy and elsewhere. (more…)
High-risk children adopted from foster care do equally well when placed with gay, lesbian or heterosexual parents, UCLA psychologists report in the first multi-year study of children adopted by these three groups of parents.
The psychologists looked at 82 high-risk children adopted from foster care in Los Angeles County. Of those children, 60 were placed with heterosexual parents and 22 were placed with gay or lesbian parents (15 with gay male parents and seven with lesbian parents). (more…)
A study of 544 star-forming galaxies shows that disk galaxies like our own Milky Way reached their current state as orderly rotating pinwheels much later than previously thought, long after much of the universe’s star formation had ceased.
Galaxies are in no hurry to grow up, a team of astronomers has discovered. A comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies observed by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected pattern of change that extends back 8 billion years, or more than half the age of the universe.
Researchers say the distant blue galaxies they studied are gradually transforming into rotating disk galaxies like our own Milky Way. Until now, it had not been clear how a galaxy’s organization and internal motion change over time, said Benjamin Weiner, assistant astronomer at the UA Steward Observatory and co-author of the paper describing the findings, which are published in The Astrophysical Journal. (more…)
There’s an old adage (with several variations) that California has four seasons: earthquake, fire, flood and drought. While Californians happily cede the title of Hurricane Capital of America to U.S. East and Gulf coasters, every once in a while, Mother Nature sends a reminder to Southern Californians that they are not completely immune to the whims of tropical cyclones. Typically, this takes the form of rainfall from the remnants of a tropical cyclone in the eastern Pacific, as happened recently when the remnants of Hurricane John brought rain and thunderstorms to parts of Southern California. But could a hurricane ever make landfall in Southern California?
The answer, as it turns out, is yes, and no. While there has never been a documented case of a hurricane making landfall in California, the Golden State has had its share of run-ins and close calls with tropical cyclones. In fact, California has been affected by at least a few tropical cyclones in every decade since 1900. Over that timeframe, three of those storms brought gale-force winds to California: an unnamed California tropical storm in 1939, Kathleen in 1976 and Nora in 1997. But the primary threat from California tropical cyclones isn’t winds or storm surge. It’s rainfall — sometimes torrential — which has led to flooding, damage and, occasionally, casualties. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Develop New Technique for Heterogenizing Homogenous Nano Catalysts
Catalysts are substances that speed up the rates of chemical reactions without themselves being chemically changed. Industrial catalysts come in two main types – heterogeneous, in which the catalyst is in a different phase from the reactants; and homogeneous, in which catalyst and the reactants are in the same phase. Heterogeneous catalysts are valued for their sustainability because they can be recycled. Homogeneous catalysts are valued for their product selectivity as their properties can be easily tuned through relatively simple chemistry.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have combined the best properties of both types of industrial catalysts by encapsulating nanoclusters of a metallic heterogeneous catalyst within the branched arms of the molecules known as dendrimers. (more…)
Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
—Voltaire
In the first scientific study to test whether doubts about getting married are more likely to lead to an unhappy marriage and divorce, UCLA psychologists report that when women have doubts before their wedding, their misgivings are often a warning sign of trouble if they go ahead with the marriage.
The UCLA study demonstrates that pre-wedding uncertainty, especially among women, predicts higher divorce rates and less marital satisfaction years later. (more…)
Analysis of data from the National Science Foundation’s South Pole Telescope, for the first time, more precisely defines the period of cosmological evolution when the first stars and galaxies formed and gradually illuminated the universe. The data indicate that this period, called the epoch of reionization, was shorter than theorists speculated — and that it ended early.
“We find that the epoch of reionization lasted less than 500 million years and began when the universe was at least 250 million years old,” said Oliver Zahn, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. “Before this measurement, scientists believed that reionization lasted 750 million years or longer, and had no evidence as to when reionization began.” (more…)
A UA study has found poverty, water scarcity, food insecurity and interdependence between the United States and Mexico along the border.
The U.S.-Mexico border is the border in the world with the greatest disparity in access to food and water needed for human survival, according to a report commissioned and published by the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona.
An endowment from the Kellogg Foundation and a UA Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry grant supported the study and its focus on assessing transborder food systems to understand water scarcity and food insecurity within the borderlands region.
The report underscores how in the globalized economy, Arizona and the rest of the United States rely on the skilled labor, water, fresh produce, fish, shellfish and livestock originating in northern Mexico; while in Mexico, the population is increasingly dependent upon frozen and processed foods originating in the United States. (more…)
