Contributed by Clifton Parker

Japan’s stunning political shift last summer is a reflection of deep-rooted angst within the Japanese people, a top diplomat of that country said.

Yasumasa Nagamine, the San Francisco-based consul general of Japan, told a campus audience Jan. 28 that he expects big adjustments ahead as a result of the Democratic Party of Japan’s landslide election in August 2009.

“A very dramatic change has taken place,” said Nagamine, who has worked as a Japanese diplomat for 33 years.

“The Japanese people feel a loss of direction and frustration about future planning and job security.”

The election was an indication of such frustration in Japan, he said. Another round of elections set for June will further define the country once known for its post-World War II economic miracle.

Critical elections ahead

Nagamine described the Democratic Party as more activist than the Liberal Democrat Party, which held the reins of power throughout the entire post-war era. Both the faltering economy and key electoral reforms in the 1990s helped pave the way for the 2009 outcome, he said.

In the past couple of years, the Japanese engaged in a national debate on key issues, often watching spirited discussions among cabinet officials on TV, he said.

“That’s kind of a drama that everyone enjoys watching,” Nagamine told the East Asian Studies-sponsored forum audience.

An Oxford scholar, Nagamine’s overseas assignments have included the embassies of Japan in Washington, D.C., New Delhi and London. He began his tenure as the consul general in San Francisco in 2007.

Demographic concerns

He said that Japan is confronting serious demographic issues that affect its economic performance — the population is aging and the birth rate is very low in the country of 127 million.

In a crowded country only about the size of California, this could result in fewer younger workers working to pay for older people with rising medical costs. On top of this, he said, Japan’s income gap between the rich and poor is widening.

“The fundamental situation for growth is unfavorable,” said Nagamine, adding that in 2008 Japan suffered the worst GDP growth rate among all major industrial countries. His country once enjoyed double-digit growth rates from the 1960s to the 1980s. Today, Japan’s neighbor, China, is the only major power experiencing that kind of boom.

All of this factored into the DPJ’s proposed subsidy for young families to encourage them to have more children. Japan needs more young workers.

While many in the U.S. bemoan the country’s escalating public debt, Japan’s debt circumstance is worse, described as “enormous” by Nagamine. Japan has more public debt than the U.S., Great Britain, Germany or France, as measured by the percent of debt to GDP.

Special U.S. relationship

Nagamine expects the new party will be more cabinet-driven and in favor of redistributing power to local governments, middle-class-oriented policies and so-called green technology.

He said Japan seeks to “deepen” its special and longstanding alliance with the U.S., but wants a stronger “voice” in that relationship, which has areas of tension, such as the American military base situation in Okinawa.

In a historical sense, Japan is somewhat new to international politics, Nagamine maintained.

“Our relationship with the outside world only started about 160 years ago,” he said,. Then, the island nation of Japan signed trade treaties with Western powers that forever changed its destiny.

“We opened up to the United States first,” Nagamine said.

This article originally appeared in Dateline.

UC Davis psychology professor Gregory Herek is testifying today for plaintiffs seeking to overturn Proposition 8, the state ballot measure passed in 2008 that bans gay marriage in California. Herek, an internationally recognized authority on prejudice against lesbians and gay men, testified this morning that for gays and lesbians, the distinction between ‘marriage’ and a ‘domestic partnership’ was about more than just words. He also testified that research shows that gays and lesbians do not choose their sexual orientation and that they are subject to stigma.

The San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times are covering the trial in a live blog. At the time of this post, the plaintiffs had completed their questions and the pro-Prop 8 lawyers were due to begin cross-examination of Herek.

Greg Herek’s research web page is here. He also has a blog, “Beyond Homophobia.”

Last week, UC Davis law professor Vikram Amar was one of several legal experts quoted by the Los Angeles Times who worried that a ruling against Prop 8 by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would lead to a damaging loss in the US Supreme Court.

“The worst-case scenario is a 9th Circuit ruling in favor of the plaintiffs. That will force the Supreme Court’s hand, and it will lead to a bad precedent,” Amar told the LAT. “I don’t see the five justices to affirm that. There may not be two or three even.”

Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers and stomach cancer, may also play a protective role against tuberculosis, according to studies in both humans and monkeys by a team from Stanford University, UC Davis, the University of Pittsburgh and Aga Khan University in Pakistan.

“Here is a bacterium that we know is sometimes harmful and that is clearly associated with cancer,” said Jay Solnick, professor of medicine and microbiology at the UC Davis Center for Comparative Medicine. “But it’s not that simple.”

One-third of the world’s population is infected with TB, although most infections are latent and only one in ten progress to active disease.

The presence of H. pylori in the stomach may boost immunity to the TB bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. H. pylori infection is still almost universal in developing countries.

The researchers studied people with latent tuberculosis in California, Pakistan and the Gambia over a two-year period. They found that people who were also infected with H. pylori were less likely to advance to clinical tuberculosis than those who were not infected with the stomach bug.

They also carried out complementary studies with cynomolgous macaques at the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis. Like humans, many monkeys naturally carry H. pylori in their stomachs. This study used tissues and samples from monkeys that had already been infected with tuberculosis for other experiments.

Of 41 monkeys, 30 carried H. pylori and only five of these developed active tuberculosis. Six of 11 monkeys that were negative for H. pylori developed tuberculosis.

A paper describing the results was published Jan. 20 in the journal PloS (Public Library of Science) One. The work was funded by grants from the NIH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Full press release from UC Davis Health System.

The direct measurement of Dark Matter makes it to #8 on Discovery News’ list of the Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade (slideshow). Marusa Bradac, now an assistant professor of physics at UC Davis but then at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is part of the team that made the discovery back in 2006.

Dark matter is thought to make up about one-fifth of the universe, far more than “ordinary” matter. It is invisible and appears only to interact with other matter through gravity.

Using several light and X-ray telescopes, the team looked at an object called the bullet cluster which is actually made up of two galaxies passing through each other. As they do so, the normal, visible matter gets slowed down, while the invisible dark matter that normally hangs around galaxies goes ahead and can be found by looking for distortions in the light from galaxies in the background.

SLAC press release on the original discovery.

UC Davis graduate student Abigail Boggs has been blogging over the weekend about her trip to Davos, Switzerland to attend the World Universities Forum with Chancellor Linda Katehi. So far, she has blogged on “How universities think,” innovation and universities in China, and (satirically) on “How to Destroy a Department.”

Katehi addressed the conference today on “Privatizing a Public Research University.” In her talk, according to Boggs, Katehi summarized the history of public universities from the nineteenth century on, and the achievements of publicly-funded schools such as the University of California. But she also described a long-term trend to reduce public investment in research and education, as attitudes shift away from public funding of education for the public good towards seeing education as a personal entitlement.

Raymond Rodriguez, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology has been awarded an honorary doctorate of science by the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), one of the top-ranked universities in Japan. The doctorate is the first honorary degree presented by the institute in its 20-year history and recognizes Rodriguez’ efforts in establishing the successful academic exchange program between NAIST and the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis.

The program provides research and educational opportunities for UC Davis and NAIST graduate students and faculty studying biological, material and information sciences. Rodriguez was principal organizer of the program and served as faculty contact from 2001 to 2006.

At the Dec. 14, 2009 ceremony in Osaka, Japan Rodriguez was presented with the honorary doctorate and a bouquet of genetically modified blue roses, courtesy of the Suntory Corp., a major supporter of the Institute’s biotechnology program.

Pictured: Rodriguez, right, with NAIST President Akira Isogai.

Rodriguez is also the founding director of the Center of Excellence for Nutritional Genomics, a  multi-disciplinary research collaboration between the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Davis, the USDA Western Human Nutrition Research Center, the Children’s Hospital of Oakland and Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI), and the Ethnic Health Institute.

The Center is sponsored by an award from the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Update: Rodriguez forwarded the following notes from Wikipedia about blue roses:

A blue rose is a flower of the genus Rosa (family Rosaceae) that presents blue to violet pigmentation and also the Morganus Clarke sunflower seed disposition, instead of the more common red or white. Blue roses do not exist in nature. False blue roses were traditionally created by dyeing white roses, since the flower lacks the gene that produces true blue flowers.In a book by Ibn al Awam, which was written in the twelfth century, translated into French by J. J. Clement entitled Le livre de l’agriculture. the book speaks of azure blue roses that were known to the orient. These blue roses were attained by placing a blue dye into the bark of the roots. This process is explained in the book and has been proven to work by Joret, a very knowledgeable french scientist. Nominal “blue roses” have been bred by conventional hybridization methods, but the results, such as “Blue Moon” are more accurately described as lilac in color.

After 13 years of joint research by an Australian company Florigene, and Japanese company Suntory, a blue rose was created in 2004 using genetic engineering. Years of research resulted in the ability to insert a gene for the plant pigment delphinidin cloned from the petunia and into an Old Garden Cardinal de Richelieu rose. Obtaining the exact hue was difficult because amounts of the pigment cyanidin were still present, so the rose was darker in color than true blue. Recent work using RNAi technology to depress the production of cyanidin has produced a mauve colored flower, with only trace amounts of cyanidin. Genetically modified blue roses are currently being grown in test batches by Suntory Ltd., according to company spokesman Atsuhito Osaka.

UC Davis civil engineering professor Dawn Cheng recently carried out a series of tests at UC San Diego’s Englekirk Structural Engineering Center. The center has the largest outdoor shake table in the world — meaning that you can build a structure on it then shake it to simulate an earthquake.

Cheng was carrying out the first tests on retaining walls, used for example to hold back soil from freeways or support bridge abutments across the state. There are thousands of miles of such walls across California, but surprisingly their behavior in earthquakes is not well understood. The tests, which were funded by the California Department of Transportation, will ensure that new retaining walls are designed to high seismic standards.

Cheng tested both a regular retaining wall backed by fill, and a retaining wall with a soundwall built on top (often found along freeways). The photo on the right shows the retaining wall on the shake table: there is soil backing on the right of the wall.

Both structures stood up well to shaking equivalent to a magnitude 7.4 earthquake, although the sound wall did eventually show some cracking at the bottom. The additional mass of a soundwall does change how the whole system behaves in an earthquake, Cheng noted.

Full story and more pictures from UC San Diego here.

The UC San Diego shake table is part of the national Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, which also includes the nation’s largest geotechnical centrifuge at UC Davis.

If you are among the 16,000 people attending the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week, scientists from the UC Davis KeckCAVES facility will be running several demonstrations of their interactive virtual reality technology. The demonstrations will be run on a laptop and displayed on a large monitor, so will not have the full immersive, 3-D experience of the KeckCAVES lab itself, but they will use real data in real time and show how scientists can use virtual reality to work with their data.

Times and places:
Wednesday, Dec. 16:
*** Interactive Demonstration ***
11 am - noon:  LIDAR Visualization demonstration at the UNAVCO booth, by C. Bowles, T.S. Bernardin, and L. H. Kellogg

UNAVCO is a consortium of universities doing measuring deformation of the Earth’s crust with high precision techniques such as GPS, satellite interferometry, and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). This demonstration will show how UC Davis researchers are using LIDAR data.

*** Interactive Demonstration ***
1:40-6:00 pm,  Crusta: Visualizing High-resolution Global Data, by T.S. Bernardin; O. Kreylos; C.J. Bowles; E. Cowgill; B. Hamann; L.H. Kellogg, in the Virtual Globes session (IN33A),  Poster Hall (Moscone South).

Thursday, Dec. 17:
*** Interactive Demonstration ***
1:40-6:00 pm ,  New Frontiers in Fault Model Visualization and Interaction, by J. Van Aalsburg; M.B. Yikilmaz; O. Kreylos; L.H. Kellogg; J.B. Rundle, in the Virtual Globes session (IN33A),  Poster Hall (Moscone South).

Background information:

More information about KeckCAVES. The facility is supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation and UC Davis.

KeckCAVES on YouTube.

Follow @keckcaves on Twitter.

NewsWatch video on the virtual reality in geology research.

It has been said that all politics in California is ultimately about water. With almost everyone in the state, from farmers to fishermen to urbanites who want clean drinking water, having a stake in the issue, opinions and allegations about California’s water supply abound. Depending on your point of view, villains range from big ag to thirsty cities to tiny fish.

Now the Public Policy Institute of California in collaboration with the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences have released a new report, “Myths of California Water — Implications and Reality.” Accompanying the report is this elegant web site, which runs through issues such as subsidized agriculture, the Peripheral Canal, the Endangered Species Act and water use by Southern California cities, presenting facts to address the arguments.

More: http://watershed.ucdavis.edu/myths/index.html

It’s been a few weeks since we checked on UC Davis geology professor Dawn Sumner and postdoc Bekah Shepard, who are spending several weeks by an Antarctic lake investigating strange microbes that are something like the earliest life on Earth.

Internet access from the camp has been spotty, but both have been blogging about their experiences.

In her most recent entry, Sumner takes a walk and takes in the local landscape, discovering frozen ponds that (in the summer) feed into Lake Joyce as well as traces of previous visitors.

We aren’t the first people here, but we are the first to make some of the scientific observations we’re working on. I don’t mind not being first. I am happy to be here, learning what I can from an interesting lake in a beautiful environment.

After being sidelined with flu for a few weeks, Shepard made her first SCUBA dive below the ice of Lake Joyce on Nov. 25, which she describes with typical restraint on her blog as “Sensory overload!”

“SCUBA diving over these structures really felt like going back in time and being able to dive in an ocean on early Earth,” she writes.