ART OF THE AUTISTIC MIND

Artwork by Reed Feshbach among the pieces featured in Art of the M.I.N.D.

The book’s 56-piece art collection includes pencil drawings, watercolors and oil paintings created by 36 artists from throughout the world ranging in age from 5 to 86 years old. Also included are short feature stories on each artist, composed with the assistance of the artists and their families. The majority of the selected artists have autism or Asperger’s syndrome, a higher-functioning form of autism. Some of the artists have learning disabilities, including severe dyslexia, and a few have been identified as being in the rare category of autistic savants. These individuals demonstrate an exceptional level of skill and understanding in a particular area—in this case, art.

The works were selected through an international competition judged by Sacramento-area artists Karen Fenley and Wayne Thiebaud, who is also a UC Davis professor emeritus, along with the UC Davis Medical Center art adviser Susan Willoughby and one of the founding fathers of the M.I.N.D. Institute, Chuck Gardner.

“Art is a beautiful form of communication and, for many individuals with autism who live in utter isolation from the rest of the world, it is one of the few ways they are able to be brilliantly expressive,” said Gardner, who has an autistic son named Chas.

Inspired by five Sacramento-area families wanting to help their children live full lives, the UC Davis M.I.N.D. (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders) Institute brings together parents, educators, community members, physicians and scientists in fields as diverse as molecular genetics and clinical pediatrics.

“The art collection inspires those of us working here to connect research with humanity, to find new understandings of and treatments for neurodevelopmental disorders, and to ultimately find cures,” said Robert Hendren, the institute’s executive director.

For more information, visit www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/html/events/books.html.

THE DANGEROUS MIX OF PUMAS AND PEOPLE

A 4-week-old cub

The report summarizes the first three years of a long-term study of 20 pumas (also known as mountain lions or cougars) in and around Cuyamaca Rancho State Park in San Diego County—a popular park shared with a half-million hikers, bikers, campers and horse riders. The park is located 75 miles south of the site of the two puma attacks in Orange County.

The report was written by a team of UC Davis researchers working in close collaboration with rangers, game wardens and biologists from state parks and the California Department of Fish and Game.

The researchers put satellite radio collars on the cats and then regularly recorded their locations. This allowed them to examine the pumas’ beds, dens, kill sites and food caches, creating both intimate individual portraits and general overviews of the local puma population.

By analyzing human use of the park’s facilities (including campgrounds and 100 miles of trails), the researchers were able to compare human and puma activity patterns.

They found that Cuyamaca pumas were generally inactive by day in oak woodlands. The pumas traveled and hunted from 1.5 hours before dusk to 1.5 hours after dawn. They lived largely on wild deer or bighorn sheep (in nearby Anza-Borrego Desert State Park) but frequently visited communities outside the park, killing pets, small livestock and animals including chickens, goats, pigs and alpacas kept in open pens.

Although there were lots of pumas and people in the park, the pumas largely avoided contact with the people.

From those details, the researchers made recommendations to help pumas and humans co-exist. The recommendations—on such issues as education programs and trail and campground planning—should be useful as dangerous encounters increase throughout the American West.

“Ultimately it’s up to the people who live, work and play in mountain lion habitat to decide if they want to share the environment with an animal that can kill them,” said the leader of the study, Walter Boyce, director of the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center. “Attacks are rare, but there is no guarantee of safety. Studies like ours show that there are many things each of us can do to avoid conflicts between mountain lions and people and domestic animals. Information and education are key to balancing the needs of wildlife and people.”

For additional information on the Southern California Puma Project, visit www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/whc/scehp/default.htm.

NAMESAKES: KERR HALL

When Clark Kerr spoke in November 1975 at the dedication of the building named in his honor, he dwelled at length on his fondness for the Davis campus. Kerr, who served as UC Berkeley chancellor from 1952 to 1958 and then as president of the university, was fired in 1967 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, who disapproved of Kerr’s handling of the student unrest that culminated in 1964’s Free Speech Movement.

“I first got to know the Davis campus when I was a young faculty member at Berkeley,” Kerr said that November day. “I came to know it better as chancellor [of UC Berkeley] and then still better as president.” One of the chief reasons he liked the campus, he said, was that, on many occasions after he’d been in Sacramento all day testifying before the Legislature, he’d stop at Davis on the way home. “It was a real oasis after those hearings,” he said, particularly since then-Chancellor Emil Mrak “always had a drink ready when I came to his home.”

Kerr said UC Davis’ “excellent relationship” with agriculture, along with its proximity to Sacramento’s officials and legislators, had added “great strength” to the university and noted that once, in an unguarded moment, he had paraphrased a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm by saying that “all [UC] campuses are equal, but Davis is the most equal of all.”

“I’ve been very glad to have had a chance to work with the Davis campus,” Kerr said, “and I’m very pleased to have my name now associated with it into the future. Tonight, especially, I am reminded of what was such a close, friendly, productive and, for me, extremely happy experience.”

BOOSTING MILK'S BENEFITS

A new discovery by UC Davis researchers could give consumers another reason to make sure they drink their milk. They have developed a new cattle-feed supplement that dramatically boosts the content of unsaturated fatty acids over saturated fats in cows’ milk.

The new supplement, based on naturally occurring proteins, promises to significantly improve the healthfulness of milk and provide dairy-food processors with the ability to modify various food qualities, such as the spreadability of butter and the flavor of cheese.

“We are excited about the health benefits this new technology will offer to consumers and the options it will give to dairy-food processors,” said Moshe Rosenberg, a professor and dairy specialist in the Department of Food Science and Technology.

Rosenberg developed the new feed supplement along with Ed DePeters, a UC Davis animal science professor who specializes in the nutrition of dairy cows.

Milk, butter and meats have long been known to contain high levels of saturated fats. Because saturated fats have been implicated in cardiovascular disease and high cholesterol in humans, there has been a great deal of interest during the past 30 years in reducing the amount of saturated fat in cows’ milk and meat.

Cows commonly eat a variety of plant-based feeds, including hay, corn, cotton seed and almond hulls, all of which contain varying amounts of vegetable oils. These vegetable oils are naturally high in unsaturated fats, so one would expect cows’ milk to also contain more unsaturated fats than saturated fats.

Somewhere between mouth and milk, however, the unsaturated fats found in the feed are transformed into saturated fats. Researchers discovered years ago that microorganisms that live in the rumen—the largest of four compartments in the cow’s stomach— are the culprits responsible for converting unsaturated fats into saturated fats.

“It’s been clear for decades that in order to reduce the saturated fats in milk and meat, we would have to protect the unsaturated dietary fats from these microbes in the rumen,” said DePeters.

The supplement devised by Rosenberg and DePeters relies on proteins that occur naturally in milk and other foods. By taking advantage of the unique properties of proteins, the researchers were able to form complexes between those proteins and substances called lipids, which are high in unsaturated fatty acids. These complexes protect the lipids against modification by the microorganisms that live in the rumen.

During feeding trials, the researchers mixed the supplement with the cows’ normal feed. In less than three days, they recorded as much as an 800 percent increase in the proportion of specific unsaturated fatty acids, such as linolenic acid, in the cows’ milk.