Lesson: Borrow from entertainment
Xbox + math = virtual surgery? Joseph Teran is using mathematical modeling to create a “digital double” with a patient’s tendons, muscles, fat and skin. Surgeons can “practice” on the double in a video-game-like environment. <more>
Lesson: Find creative uses for the everyday
Imagine a pacemaker powered by sugar – which it gets from the glucose in your blood. See what else Dr. Bruce Dunn is cooking up in his lab.
Lesson: Choose education
Take business fundamentals – recruitment, marketing, motivating, incentivizing and team-building – and apply them to a program to teach low-income parents to treat sick kids at home. The UCLA Anderson School program reduced emergency-room visits by 58 percent – with potential Medicare savings of $500 million a year. <more>
Lesson: Be yourself
Linkin Park band member Brad Delson ’99 gave a rousing address at the 2009 Commencement. His advice: Be yourself. Or, if that’s not sufficient, quote smarter, more experienced people.
Lesson: Study the past for clues to the universal
How do you measure the costs and benefits of diversity? UCLA economists base their findings on a surprising set of subjects: 41,000 U.S. Civil War soldiers. <more>
Lesson: Prepare for the future by studying the past in a new light
P. Jeffrey Brantingham helps amp up law enforcement by blending anthropology, math, chemistry, biology and microscale physics to predict where and when new crimes will occur. <more>
Lesson: Be inspired by nature
UCLA researchers built new genes into mice that kept the mice skinny even when fed a high-fat diet. The big idea behind their unconventional approach to the nation’s obesity epidemic? Borrow from the way plants and bacteria digest fat. <more>
Lesson: Rethink conditioning
“It’s hard enough to be a teenager,” says UCLA’s Elizabeth Laugeson, “but it’s harder still for adolescents with autism because they typically lack the ability to pick up on all the social cues most of us take for granted – things like body language, hand gestures and facial expressions.” What’s the answer? Try a hands-on class teaching social skills to teens with autism. <more>
