This week on Science Today, caregiving was a theme – from helping out dementia patients and those who look after them; to giving rice crops in polluted China the best chances to thrive. And even a story about how a college dining hall’s desire to care for the planet, led to an interesting way to cut down on food waste. First, did you know that one in 10 people age 65 and older suffer from dementia? And that the disease takes a toll only on patients, but their caregivers, too. We spoke to psychologist Robert Levenson of UC Berkeley. His new study showed that rates of depression among caregivers are about four times higher than non-caregiving adults in the same age group. And that a depressed caregiver contributes to a faster decline of the loved one with dementia.
"If you are being cared for by a quite depressed person, you are going to live, on average, by about 14 months less than if you are being cared for by a person who is not very depressed. This is a significant shortening of life."
And at UC Davis, we met with Colin Carter, a professor of agricultural and resource economics. He cares about how surface ozone impacts rice plant production in polluted China.
"There’s a critical period during the growing season where you have a day of extremely high ozone that it can reduce the yield up to 1 percent – just one day. So we measured across the country that yields could be reduced by two percent or more."
That may not sound like a lot, but it is when you consider the fact that China is the world’s largest producer of rice and the world’s largest importer. So, Carter is hoping their findings will help China enact regulatory polices to alleviate damaging effects of ozone pollution on rice yields. Finally, in an effort to reduce food waste and create a more sustainable approach to dining, Jill Horst at UC Santa Barbara describes how they dealt with all the half-eaten apples they were noticing in their tray returns.
"And it wasn’t because the apple wasn’t good, but the apple was so large. So we decided, well, they have different sized apples, so why don’t we take a look at what would be the best size apple that somebody could consume without any waste?"
While students at first questioned these dinky apples and wondered why they had them, Horst put up a display of all the wasted, larger apples to show students. It worked and led to much less waste in the dining hall – meaning much less waste in the landfill. That’s all for this week, if you want to stay on top of University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or Soundcloud. Until next time, I’m Larissa Branin.
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/caregivers_dementia
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/rice_ozone
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/apples_waste
