Improving Impoverished Children's Brains

For the last four decades, UC Berkeley integrative biologist Marian Diamond has studied how the brains of rats are affected by enriched environments. In groundbreaking research, she quantified how good diet, stimulating games and objects, and, well, fun, spur the growth of better brains. Recently, Diamond has been applying what she learned in her laboratory to a group of people whose environment is anything but enriched: young orphans living in a Cambodian forest. The project is called Enrichment In Action.

Island Tales

UC Berkeley professor Patrick Kirch spends a great deal of time digging in garbage heaps. The discarded bits of plants, animal bones, and other detritus that he discovers give him great insight into the people behind the rubbish. Kirch, an archaeologist, isn't after stinky urban garbage, though. His field research takes him to the Pacific Islands where trash heaps that are hundreds or thousands of years old hold clues about how humans may have impacted their environments, and vice versa.

Nanowired

The future of tomorrow's electronic devices, from microchips to biosensors to solar cells, may be a tiny wire that's 4,000 times thinner than a human hair. UC Berkeley chemist Peidong Yang has pioneered methods to grow these nanowires from the bottom-up. At such a small scale, unusual physical properties emerge that could lead to solar cell paint, labs-on-a-chip that analyze single cells to detect disease, and new computer processors thousands of times faster than today's speediest PCs

Marian Diamond, ground-breaking researcher and author, is sharing her knowledge about the things that help kids develop better brains with a group of young Cambodian orphans.