Scholar Examines Trade of TV Shows in World Market

How do culture-specific genres like American soap operas and Latin telenovelas so easily cross borders and adapt to new - cultural surroundings? And why is “The Nanny,” whose gum-chewing star hails from Queens, N.Y., a smash in Italy? In an exami- nation of the global television market, Denise D. Bielby, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, explores the cultural significance of the international trade of television shows, and seeks to understand its remakable success despite the inherent cultural differences between shows and local audiences. Bielby and co-author C. Lee Harrington, a professor of sociology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, take a look at the workings of the television industry, including its origins, history, and product management in the book “Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market” (New York University Press, 2008).
— Public Affairs

UC Santa Barbara Receives Grant for Stem Cell Research Tools

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine is granting more than half a million dollars to UC Santa Barbara for tools and technologies to develop new treatments for diseases that can be helped by stem cell research. Dennis O. Clegg, co-director of the UCSB Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering, explained that the new technologies will facilitate cost- effective methodologies for the culture of human embryonic stem cells at clinically relevant scales. The Tools and Technologies Awards are intended to support work that either creates new reagents and methods for stem cell research, or scales up existing technologies –– all designed to accelerate the development of critical therapies for patients with chronic disease or injury.
— Public Affairs

Fisheries Stock Assessment Software Now Publicly Accessible

The most widely used software package for the development of state-of-the- art fisheries stock assessment methods, AD Model Builder, or ADMB, can now be downloaded without charge from a public Web site, http://admb-project.org. The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara is a partner in the project. ADMB-based computer models are used globally to monitor populations of many endangered and commercially valuable species. ADMB-based stock assessments are critical to the management of commercially important fisheries stocks worth billions of dollars, as well as ecologically sensitive species in the United States and internationally.
— Public Affairs

Discovering How Vegetables Help Fight Cancer

While it has been known for some time that eating cruciferous vegetables can help prevent breast cancer, the mechanism by which the active substances in broccoli and cabbage, for instance, inhibit cell proliferation was unknown –– until now. UC Santa Barbara scientists have shown how the healing power of these vegetables works at the cellular level. Their research was published in the journal Carcinogenesis in December. Compounds called isothiocyanates inhibit the proliferation of human tumor cells by a mechanism similar to the way that the anticancer drugs taxol and vincristine inhibit cell division during mitosis. “Broccoli and broccoli sprouts have the highest amount of the isothiocyanates,” said first author Olga Azarenko, who is a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara.
— Public Affairs