Studying abroad is meant to be a time of exploration — something that, sadly, I have largely avoided for the last two months — so last week I decided to go to a fútbol (soccer) game. I’ve never been before, but with Spain as the reigning World Cup champ, it seemed only logical to have my first authentic futbol experience while in a country that lives and breathes the sport.

Four years ago, we sat down with Dr. Seracini and quizzed him on everything from his self-assigned title as the “Doctor of art” to his appearance in Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci code”. After the doctor added some recent accolades to his list of accomplishments, we sat down with him once more for a better look into his life, his work and the technology that drives it.

It’s custom to get a quick pep talk from the UCSD study abroad office employee prior to departure — a general overview of the kinds of “cultural differences” to be “highly aware of” on your trip, lest someone disgrace our school’s good name by demanding free water while donning a college sweatshirt. Or, worse, a Pocahontas costume (hearing you loud and clear on this side of the Atlantic too, Penny Rue!).

[caption id="attachment_19587" align="alignright" width="300" caption="John Hanacek / Guardian"][/caption]

Back in September, the Tritons’ season seemed to be in jeopardy after a fifth straight loss. This weekend, the UCSD Women’s Volleyball team found some peace by completing a sweep in the second half of the season of the teams that sent the squad to the brink.

“I was hoping to win another game at that point,” head coach Ricci Luyties said. “I know this team is good, but we weren’t playing well for awhile. I think now their confidence is up, and the difference is they’re playing well at the end of games.”

The Tritons beat Cal State Stanislaus 25-20, 25-23, 22-25 and 25-19 on Friday night, followed by a sweep of Chico State on Saturday with set scores of 25-13, 25-19 and 25-19.

Against Stanislaus, junior Roxy Brunsting led the way with 14 kills, 21 assists and 8 digs. Juniors Hilary Williamson and Katie Condon each had a double-double in kills and digs as the Tritons were able to grind out a victory. The Tritons won the first two games, but seemed to lose focus in the third set.

“I get worried when they get a little complacent,” Luyties said. “As we’ve seen, every team can beat us at any time, especially if we’re making mistakes. If we get in that mindset where we think we’re going to win and we’re going to cruise through, [that] is when we have problems.”

The Warriors hit .225 in the third game and cut the Triton lead with a 22-25 victory. But the Tritons came back in the fourth set, going on a 7-0 run in the middle of the game to put the match to rest.

Junior libero Janessa Werhane added 24 digs, playing an outstanding game defensively.

“Janessa played really well tonight,” Luyties said. “She got to balls she hadn’t been getting to earlier in the year. She’s getting digs, and her passing has been great all year. Now that she is moving and digging balls all over the place, it’s really a plus for us. She’s really stepped up.”

Saturday’s match was Senior Night, as seniors Audrey Green, Alanna Rutan, Cara Simonsen and Caitlin Potter were recognized for their achievements as Tritons before the team played its last regular season match in RIMAC arena.

The Tritons made sure to send off their seniors in style, as the squad produced an emphatic 3-0 win over Chico State. Brunsting nearly had a triple-double with 11 kills, 22 assists and 9 digs and Condon once again had a double-double in kills and digs. But it was Potter who had the final kill to put the Wildcats away.

“It felt really, really great,” Potter said. “To beat them in three was remarkable. It’s definitely something to go away with.”

UCSD hit a .305 clip on the match to record its  eighth straight win.

“Its definitely one of the best matches we’ve played,” Luyties said. “I thought the whole team played well, too. Every player on the court contributed in part of the game at least, and I think that as a team, this might have been our best effort.”

With the victories over Stanislaus and Chico State, the Tritons have now beaten all five of the opponents they lost to during their five-game skid early in the season. Potter had a simple answer to explain the turnaround.

“Practice,” she said. “Taking it one day at a time, and building on the beginning part of the season. We had kind of a rough start, so beating these teams we lost to — especially in three games — there’s nothing better than that.”

Luyties emphasized the impact the seniors have had, especially in his first year as UCSD head coach.

“Some of them haven’t been playing that much, and they have done an unbelievable job accepting that and doing whatever they can to help the team,” Luyties said. “As far as them contributing, they all have in their own ways, and they have at practice, in pushing each other and pushing the new players. They’ve done everything I could ask for in that manner.”

Even though the Tritons have won 10 of their last 11 matches, Luyties said they still have work to do. The team is 15-7 overall and 12-6 in the CCAA, putting the Tritons in third place in the standings.

“We’re still looking to win every match right now and keep this streak going,” Luyties said. “I still feel like we have to win them all. We’re in a pretty good spot right now, but things can change pretty quickly. We want to keep getting better.”

UCSD will travel to Cal State Dominguez Hills on Friday before playing at Cal State Los Angeles on Saturday.

The last thing UCSD alumnus Faraz Ellahie — better known as comedian Feraz Ozel — wanted to be doing after he finished school was working on odd jobs. It’s not that Ozel, who graduated with a B.A. in political science magna cum laude last year, had no other options —  his mother called him every time a new law school acceptance letter came in, and the burgeoning funny-man was accepted to study at Santa Clara, UC Davis and other top-tier law schools. But Ozel decided to defer his ambitions as a lawyer and try his hand at becoming a comedian.

“They’ve been more supportive than most people from our background would be,” Ozel jokes of his Pakistani family. “I thought they were going to disown me.”

For Ozel, the decision was an easy one: He’s been the class clown since his elementary school days. As the self-described “fat kid with a great rack,” Ozel said he used comedy to avoid being the butt of everyone else’s jokes. Instead, he became the funny fat kid, experience which came in handy when he performed a comedic musical skit on stage for the first time at age 15 to a Pakistani audience of over 600 people.

“I turned the best jokes I had into a song all about Pakistani culture,” Ozel said. “It was all about how they feed you too much, how my mom turned me into a fat kid with all her curry and rice, why they always make you drink tea, how everything you say has to rhyme and a lot of inside jokes.”

A few years later at UCSD, Ozel entered a comedy competition hosted by his fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, and won a $100 gift card.

“It was another musical skit that I still use in my shows today, just amped up,” Ozel said. “It was about how my girlfriend gave me a guitar for Christmas. I still dumped her a week later, but I kept the guitar because she got to keep the herpes. It was only fair.”

Most of Ozel’s jokes are geared toward a more mature audience — his favorite is about the video game Halo and its morbid relationship to the Go Army ad campaign. Generally, his material ranges anywhere from marijuana use to taking a shit on a classroom floor.

“I have this one joke where I needed to go to the restroom one time in a lecture hall at UCSD and the teacher was like ‘Well, is it an emergency?’” Ozel said. “I was like, well, back when I was six years old and didn’t know anything I would be like ‘Yeah, this is an emergency’ but I’m older now, I know what an emergency is. 9/11 is an emergency, Hurricane Katrina was an emergency — I’m just going to shit on your floor. It’s just a code brown, maybe a code orange.”

His jokes have garnered some interesting responses from audience members — most of them inappropriate.

“And then this guy in the second row, [who had been] quiet the whole time, was like, ‘Man, I’ve done that shit,’” Ozel said. “And I was like, ‘What, you shit on the floor? You had a teacher who wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom?’ He was like, ‘I just needed to shit.’”

He isn’t all about shits and giggles — for Ozel, developing his craft is a top priority. Last year, the comic performed throughout Europe in countries like Slovenia, Austria and Romania, and was interviewed by a Hungarian magazine. Ozel hopes to follow in the footsteps of some his favorite comedians — David Chapelle, Louis CK, Greg Giraldo and Sebastian Meniscalco — and write more political jokes.

“I started picking up the science of jokes, like the analogy and misdirection,” Ozel said. “So, with misdirection, it’s when people say, ‘You’re Pakistani; does that mean you hate Jews?’ And I’d say, ‘No, what kind of ignorance is that? That means my grandfather hates Jews.’”
Since returning from Europe, Ozel has begun working with a group of local comics (which has helped land him several gigs) and booking two to three gigs a week. His connections have also been essential to the success of the Loft Out Loud series. LOL is a string of comedy shows, featuring both local and celebrity comics, that Ozel hosts once a month at the Loft.

“I bring the best comics in SD [together] — the guys who headline shows at bars and clubs,” Ozel said. “I get guys from L.A. who are normally on TV to come down and headline. LOL really is one of the best shows you’ll see in the city, better than some of the clubs. It’s definitely the best show you’ll see if you’re under 21.”

Once LOL has made a name for itself, Ozel hopes to partner with Triton Television to broadcast LOL on TTV and turn it into more of a late-night comedy show.

Eventually, Ozel hopes to be able to move beyond San Diego into the bigger comedy scenes, like in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Luckily, the start-up comic has already managed to beat some of the pre-show jitters that trip up most comedians.

“Any rituals? Yeah, I like to make sure I stretch — touch my toes, limber up, do a few push-ups.” he said, “No, I don’t fucking do any of that. I just like to look over the crowd for a second. When I first started up, I would lock myself in the bathroom and go over everything a few times in the stall. But now, I’m so comfortable that I just wait for them to call my name. I just run up there and do it.”

Ozel will be performing at the Comedy Store in La Jolla on Oct. 28 and The Loft’s next LOL show on Nov. 9.

As a child, UCSD literature professor and MFA Writing Program director Sarah Shun-lien Bynum had little desire to become an author: Instead, she nursed the dream of forming a band and living off her piano prowess. She never imagined that she would become a critically acclaimed writer, featured in The New Yorker’s prestigious “20 Under 40” issue (a list of 20 of the best contemporary American fiction authors under the age of 40) published July 5, 2010.

This wasn’t Bynum’s first brush with the illustrious magazine. Her previous short story “Yurt,” about the love affairs of elementary school teachers, was published in The New Yorker two years earlier, on July 21, 2008. The 2010 issue features Bynum’s story “The Erlking,” about a mother and daughter who attend a Waldorf school fair where unusual mishaps occur. Originally scheduled to print prior to the “20 Under 40” issue, magazine editors notified Bynum that they would be pushing back the publication date of her piece in order to include her.  Typically, editors only contact writers to notify them if they’ve been accepted or rejected, but in Bynum’s case they made an exception.

Once the news reached Bynum, she was taken by surprise. Bynum only wrote “The Erlking” (from the German poem “Erlkönig”) as a favor to fellow writer Kate Bernheimer, who was creating an anthology of revised fairy tales. After weeks of careful consideration, Bynum decided to write a modern retelling of her favorite folk tale. Depending on the interpretation, the original “Erlkönig” illustrates the death of a young child -— either through illness or supernatural beings.

“The point of the anthology was to revisit a favorite fairy tale, so I chose a German folktale, ‘The Erlking,’” Bynum said. “It was a wonderful little poem written by Goethe that is often attached to a song. I used that story as a jumping-off point.”

With Germanic inspiration in tow, Bynum proceeded to take several slow months — between shuttling her 5-year-old daughter to various summer activities, attending her book club and tending her vegetable garden — to weave the intricacies of her short story.

“I’m actually a really slow writer,” Bynum said. “It requires a certain concentration that’s hard to muster when there are so many distractions in my life and the world. Just to find a space where I can concentrate hard enough to write is in and of itself a major task. It’s so tempting to have distractions take over.”

Though she has improved at committing to bouts of intense concentration, Bynum still concedes that, for her,  writing has always been a lengthy process inundated with difficulty. Her first novel, Madeleine is Sleeping — a story about a young girl’s coming of age — took ten years of sporadic bursts of writing to complete. She relies on the support of her friends and mentors in order to get her through elongated periods of writer’s block. But even with two novels, eight short stories and several personal essays under her belt, Bynum still occasionally succumbs to doubt.

“Writing has never been easy for me,” Bynum said. “When I’m in the process of writing, I’m just thinking about the end of the sentence and how I’m going to get to the end of the paragraph. I just hope that I can continue to finish the story.”

Bynum’s love for writing is inspired by a childhood home filled with music, books and culture (Her family hosted several foreign exchange students in high school.) The days when she visited Louisa May Alcott’s house in her hometown of Boston and scribbled clumsy limericks or the occasional short work of fiction in her school notebook provided the genesis for her future literary career.

Today, she draws much of her inspiration from her daily life — a visit to the marketplace, teaching, spending time with her children. “Literature was my first love,” Bynum said. “I love literature. I love books. I love talking about ideas. I love the conversations that come with writing. I can’t quite imagine anything else.”

Through every piece she struggles with, Bynum said she feels lucky to have a strong basis of support for her career. She still keeps in contact with her ninth-grade English teacher, who first nurtured her talent and encouraged her to write.

“Forming writing friendships are really important,” Bynum said. “You need to find people who are good readers for your work and for whom you are a good reader. These are the relationships that will last long after the class is over, long after you’ve graduated. It’s having someone whom you really trust, who you can share your work with. It’s someone who can be a source of support, camaraderie and sympathy.”

Not only does Bynum rely on her own personal community, but she also finds enlightenment within UCSD academia. According to Bynum, the most exciting part of being a professor is the opportunity to meet new, young and passionate literary voices in her fiction class.

“Every quarter, you encounter a voice on the page that you’ve never heard before,” Bynum said a few days ago. “Sometimes in my really large introductory class, I’ll come across a new writer that just blows me away; he’s doing something that I’ve never seen before. It’s always a sense of discovery, a sense of surprise. It makes me very hopeful of where fiction can go. There’s so much uncharted territory, and so many young writers excited about charting that territory.”

It’s a mutually beneficial system — Bynum’s students have frequently helped her improve her writing by experimenting with new forms.

“There’s a lot of risk takers among students,” Bynum said. “For me, that’s exciting, and it challenges me to take risks with my writing.”

As the director of the MFA Writing Program,  — now in its sophomore year of offering degrees in fiction or poetry— Bynum hopes to better define the relatively new program and clearly distinguish it from others.

“It’s been really fun, to start something from scratch, to build something new,” Bynum said. “And the first MFA class has been really great; they’re really contributing enormously of themselves to shaping the identity of the program.”

For the time being, Bynum plans to continue working on her next piece, a tale about a haunted house (about which she is regrettably mum).

As for the new generation of writers that haven’t yet had the benefit of her teaching, Bynum offers some advice.

“Keep a low overhead — make choices that will allow you to live simply, so that you can continue to write, so that you don’t have to be working at some other profession to support your own expensive lifestyle,” Bynum said. “If you can keep a low overhead and if you can live simply, that will make a big difference in terms of protecting your own writing.”

There’s something no one wants you to know about studying abroad. It’s a secret so well concealed by slews of Eurotrip Facebook albums and Programs Abroad Office employees that it’s remained the classified knowledge of the experienced — except, you know, until now.

Frequented by beach bums and small families alike, Board and Brew is a an obsession among locals and a classic trademark of San Diego. Located on Camino Del Mar, about a 15-minute drive from UCSD, the small sandwich shop doesn’t instantly stand out. The front of the shop sports the same simple brown wood exterior as all the buildings on Camino Del Mar, but a pastel-colored sign points the way to hoagie heaven.

From the giant surfboard on the wall to the aroma of fresh bread wafting from the kitchen, this shop’s laidback atmosphere creates a relaxed (though ravenous) state of mind. The front countertop is worn from years of holding serving trays, and the wall behind the register is coated in board shop stickers, local sports team posters and ads for surf lessons. The restaurant has indoor seating for about 15 only, but two shady outdoor seating sections can accommodate a larger crowd.

With incredibly generous portions and high-quality ingredients that (thankfully) don’t look like they have been sitting out all day, this place beats out the local Subway and any on-campus dining halls. Their top-secret sweet-and-sour special sauce is perhaps one of the best food discoveries of my life. This sticky orange sauce, with the consistency of salad dressing, is locally famous and can be ordered with anything on the menu. If only Board and Brew took dining dollars ­— I would be eating there daily, trying to smuggle special sauce back to my apartment.

The most popular items on the menu are the Turkado cold sandwich and the chicken club, hot from the grill. I got the Turkado, which consists of turkey and jack cheese topped with avocado, tomatoes, lettuce, onion and mayo on sourdough bread, but the chicken club is probably my favorite, with marinated chicken breast, bacon, melted jack cheese, tomato, lettuce and mayo on a toasted French baguette.

Board and Brew has reasonable prices — the most expensive sandwich is $6.95 including sales tax — and all sandwiches come stuffed full of goodness. Try to get there in the cooler months — during the summer it’s packed with locals and trying to find a seat— it’s akin to trying to locate your keys in a pile of dirty laundry. And if you’re traveling by car, expect to spend time looking for street parking that is almost nonexistent during rush hour.

Fortunately, patrons can text in their order ahead of time and pick it up when it’s done. Text that you want a large Baja Chicken (marinated chicken breast, grilled onions, jalapenos, melted jack cheese, mayo, tomato, lettuce and special sauce on toasted French baguette), receive a confirmation text, pick up the sandwich and head to the beach.

Board and Brew’s location is perfect for grabbing lunch and walking a few hundred feet down to the beautiful Del Mar surf for a classic San Diego study break. So check it out — and don’t bother asking for the special sauce recipe, because they don’t give it out. I already tried.

While few things in life are fair or easy, students have come to expect that a grade, at the very least, reflects the quality of work put into a course. Not seemingly so with grade quotas — a policy where only a certain percentage of students can get an A, and the remainder are boxed into the B and C category.

These numbers are determined by professors prior to reading or grading any students’ work— setting up numerous students to get grades lower than they would have expected, in order to curb grade inflation. Not to be confused with a grade curve, where outlying grades scored by students are dropped often to positive effect, grade quotas set a cap on high scores before the course begins.

For example, if a course only allows for 10 students to receive an A, students have to compete for those 10 slots. If 15 students’ work merits an A percentage-wise, only 10 will receive one. The other five get Bs.

At UCSD, the Academic Senate is responsible for handling grade distribution.  However, none of its policies directly address grading curves or quotas.

Mark Appelbaum, chair of Committee on Educational Policies in the Academic Senate, explained that while there are school-wide grading policies, the method used to determine grades and the school’s grade policies aren’t mutually exclusive — educators are given the freedom to decide how to mark their courses.

“The distribution of grades is a matter that individual faculty decide so that ‘my grading policy is my own policy,’” Appelbaum said. “Usually there’s some sort of general rule or idea about grades that may be in departments.”

The university gives its faculty the freedom of choosing the grading method for each class. Though Appelbaum did not know that the policy of grade quotas was common amongst faculty, and had yet to encounter a professor who put it into practice, he explained that it was a professor’s personal choice to use quotas.

“It’s my responsibility to teach the content of the course, how I do it is part of my professional judgment,” Appelbaum said.

Lisa Lowe, a professor of literature and Critical Gender Studies, said a grade quota system would not work well for her writing courses.

“It doesn’t make sense to me in teaching literature,” Lowe said. “In general, when I grade a literature student’s performance, I evaluate the student’s ability to read closely, interpret and think analytically, as well as the quality of their written and oral expression.  I grade students on the quality of their own individual performances.”

Kristopher Nelson, a social science T.A., used grade quotas when evaluating students in a contemporary law course taught by Professor Gerald Doppelt. Nelson said Doppelt felt that the students should earn their grades and the grade policy of the class was not set in stone and allowed T.A.s to award more As if they deemed it as necessary . The professor allowed the T.A.’s to grade with more flexibility and the amount of As allowed expanded as the quarter wore on.

“It’s a sense of countering grade inflation, when people who got As actually deserved the As,” Nelson said.

Princeton agrees. Six years ago, the Ivy League university aimed to reduce grade inflation by setting a maximum number of As that students could receive, encouraging students to compete for the elusive higher marks. According to the New York Times, the move has been an unpopular one, especially with such a competitive economy — lower grades reduce the chance of being hired, and it seems graduate schools and employers seldom factor in grade deflation.

Princeton’s administrators have been working to remedy the issue by sending out notifications about the grade deflation to graduate schools and employers.

But here, the grading policy isn’t the same across the board, so schools have not notified potential employers and graduate schools.  At UCSD, the average under graduate GPA sits around a 3.0. When some professors chose to implement grade deflation policies at random, it drops this already-low average.

Nelson understood why so many students were frustrated with a system that seemed arbitrary, but said that the results often panned out in the end.

“I don’t think it’s just due to chance,” Nelson said, “People pretty much ended up similar to how I would have given them grades without that restriction.”

As a result of the quota, more students came to Nelson’s office hours to discuss their grades and to understand the course content better. The competition between students helped motivate them to out-study their classmates.

Nelson said that the quotas build character and a competitive spirit among students.

“It did encourage people to work harder, they knew they had to actually work to get an A,” he said.

He added, “it can be beneficial in the sense that people worked harder and maybe learned more.”

For UCSD students, the jury is still out on whether grade quotas are a good thing. For many students in Doppelt’s course, the negatives outweighed the benefits.

“It’s totally unfair,” Amy Gains* said,  “If I had known that this class had grade quotas, I would have dropped it. Now I’m stuck.”

In her case, the LAWS 101 course syllabus did not mention that the professor would use quotas.  As students were graded, T.A.s realized they had awarded too many high marks and erased original grades from papers or exams, replacing them with a lower, less satisfactory grades.

Sophie Rosseel, an Eleanor Roosevelt College sophomore, took a physics course which used quotas and agrees with Doppelt’s students.

“Professors should grade students based on how well they understand the material rather than mold the grades to fit certain quotas,” she said. “My main problem with them is that in a class full of high-achieving students, someone still has to fill the lower quota; it’s unfair to the students.”

Still, a number of students expressed favorable opinions on grade quotas. Kaitlyn Keigharn, a Muir College senior, has taken several classes that implement grade quota policies, all of which were offered by UCSD’s science department.

“I felt that it actually encouraged students to work harder,” she said.

Though the controversy is unlikely to die down soon, especially during the current economic depression, Appelbaum provides UCSD students with a simple solution — ask your professors if they utilize grade quotas. Though the quota policy isn’t prohibited, those who find it limiting could always drop the course and try re-enrolling under another professor at a later date.

“I think as long as you know in advance, so that when you go into that course that you know that this is going to be a curved course and that you know that 15 percent of the grades will be A’s and 40 percent will be…if that doesn’t seem like the way you want to do this, [then] drop that course and move to another section,” he said.

Fair point.

*Name has been changed to

protect privacy.

In the interests of both helpless international students and ambitious natives, there’s a language exchange program at my university in Barcelona. The premise is simple: Indicate your name, phone number, e-mail address, perceived Spanish ability and first language on the sign-up form, and wait for the call to meet for coffee. Or, you know, talk about Lady Gaga over a beer or two — whatever comes naturally. I learned, however, that “natural” isn’t easily feigned, and the road to fluency is frequently littered with uncomfortable encounters with locals.

I’m not a very good driver. Sure, I like to hurdle down Interstate Highway 5 at 90 mph as much as the next girl, but odds are I’m going to make as least one San Diegan scream in terror along the way.

So, a scant 15 to 20 minutes from campus, the Miramar Speed Circuit offers the opportunity to quench this rabid thirst for speed, at almost all hours. The track is seemingly always open — I showed up at 9 p.m. on a Friday (it’s open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, 9 p.m. Sundays and Mondays and 11 p.m. every other day) with enough time for a few sessions before closing. Though the track isn’t very big — it takes a minute at most to go around the whole thing — the excitement comes from navigating its sharp right-angle turns as your tires screech with effort, and dodging (and sometimes ramming) other drivers.

Twenty-three dollars earns you 10 minutes on the track (they also have lessons and a Grand Prix option, among other things), and after forking over the money, you’re directed to a set of doors with “drivers only” scrawled along the top. There’s a flurry of movement: families sitting on the side of the track watching, numerous people careening down the track’s lanes, employees warning daredevils to slow down. Glaring fluorescent lights illuminate the indoor track, and kart colors are thrown into sharp relief. It’s exhilarating.

After donning a head protector that resembles a black polyester condom, it’s time to pick out a helmet from an array of color-coded sizes. At the track, an elusive employee (these men are neither chatty nor easy to flag down) explains the rules: no excessive ramming, slow down when the light is yellow or when you’re causing yourself undue pain. No dying. Check, check, check — let’s race.

There were four other people entering the track as my racing partners: a couple out on a date and a father-and-son team. Since the son seemed to be 12 years old (at most) and definitely did not have a valid driver’s license, I was totally positive I was about to kick some seventh-grade ass.

I sat down in my kart (ladies: no skirts, trust me on this one) and awaited instructions. The kart was designed like every standard go-kart (think a poor man’s Ariel Atom minus the intense torque, supercharged speeds and overall “holy-shit” factor) with one pedal for gas, another for the brakes, a number stamped on the front, and a wide bumper around the edges for safety. Once I settled myself into my seat, a short, dour man came to start up my kart. Three false starts later and I was off, trailing the father-son team.

Miramar’s race karts only reach up to 30 mph, but it seems a hell of a lot faster. The top of the kart is uncovered, the wind is rushing at you, and you’re heading straight at a wall. The effect is a lot more overwhelming than going at blistering speeds down a freeway. After the first 30 seconds, I began ramming the dividing walls at top speed — not by choice, mind you — knocking the wind out of me and making my ribs scream with pain. An employee hopped over the divides with practiced diligence and wagged his finger at me. Slow down.

With my ego badly bruised, I cruised along down the track. Soon, I heard the sound of a motor behind me: I was struck from behind by the 12-year-old (actually, he looked more like a 10-year-old) and unceremoniously shoved to the side of the lane. The kid was killing it down the track at an impressive 30 mph with his father tearing it up beside him. After being tossed aside by the obnoxious child four more times, I hit the gas. I’m normally not the kind to bully someone who can’t reach the top shelf at the library, but no one the size of an Oompa-Loompa was going to make a fool out of me.

I didn’t beat him — he’d lapped me about a thousand times at that point — but I did ram him in the rear pretty hard on the way back to the starting point, which was enough to make the $23 racing charge worth it all on its own.

Miramar Racetrack brings out the competitive side in its patrons, inspiring heated adrenaline rushes as they gun down the race lanes. It’s a good option for those looking to get drunk on a Friday and put a few people to shame — assuming you know how to, you know, drive.

Every morning, Dr. Pascal Gagneux shrugs into his lab coat, heads off to the UCSD School of Medicine and then spends his day dealing with a whole lot of monkey business — figuratively speaking, of course.

Dr. Gagneux, assistant professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the UCSD School of Medicine, studies evolutionary biology and primates. Specifically, he studies the role that glycans play on the surface of mammalian male reproductive cells. That’s right. He studies monkey sperm.

Glycans are a type of sugar molecule that control a huge portion of the reproductive process. For non-biology majors, this means that Gagneux is interested in the way mammals’ cells recognize each other, how this has changed through evolution and how it can affect reproductive capability. Gagneux is currently trying to answer the question: Do the different sugars on chimpanzee and human sperm affect reproduction? Can chimpanzee sperm provide the key to problems with human fertility?

Gagneux decided to study chimpanzee sperm as a result of the observations he made on the  different mating systems of chimpanzees and humans, as well as their different sugar molecules. Because chimpanzees practice polygamy, there are much higher levels of sperm competition in chimps than in humans.

It’s a complex concept to grasp. “Given that the glycans on sperm are involved in mediating interactions between sperm and the female — her reproductive tract cells, immune system and ovum — I decided to focus on sperm glycans,” Gagneux said. By studying the differences between human and chimp sperm, especially the sugars on the outside of the sperm and how they bind to female reproductive cells, scientists can determine what helps sperm bind to eggs — potentially solving the problems that plague human fertility.

For Gagneux and his colleagues, the most difficult part of carrying out an experiment like this is obtaining live sperm from chimpanzees. It’s messy work.

“It requires training of captive chimpanzees by positive reinforcement,” he said. “Luckily the [chimpanzee] keepers consider it a form of enrichment.” Basically, keepers have to coax chimps to masturbate into a tube. (And you thought your job was tough).

Once the sperm is collected, Gagneux studies it under a microscope. He is particularly interested in chimpanzee sperm’s saitic acid and how it might help  females choose the most compatible mate. Human cells create a similar saitic acid, but do not have the correct enzyme to produce the chimp’s version.

“Understanding how glycosylation affects fertilization is innovative and interesting,” said Jeffrey Esko, co-director of the UCSD Glycobiology Research and Training Center and Gagneux’s colleague for the past 10 years.

Sandra Diaz, senior lab technician in the Varki Lab and a colleague of Gagneux’s since 1998 when he joined the lab as a post-doc, said that his research is original in field of cellular medicine.

“Pascal is a very creative individual, not only in coming up with experiments to test his hypothesis, but also in the ways in which he illustrates them,” she said. “He builds models — sometimes huge, sometimes small, always interesting.”

Gagneux earned his masters in population biology and his doctorate on population genetics from Basel University in Switzerland. He has been studying the population genetics of West African chimpanzees since he came to UCSD as a graduate student 17 years ago. He was drawn to the school in part by Professor David Woodruff, who pioneered a method of amplifying mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from shed hair samples, allowing Gagneux to learn genotyping techniques.

He remained at the university for post-doctoral experience and eventually earned an assistant professorship.

“I like the open-minded curiosity so commonly encountered among researchers here, combined with the relative lack of hierarchical thinking [when] compared to European universities,” he said.

In the future, Gagneux wants to explore the parallels between reproduction and infection, comparing the “tricks” sperm uses to hide from the female’s immune response to the way successful parasites and pathogens conceal their true identity.

With a lab full of primate sperm, Gagneux clearly has no time to monkey around.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” is a familiar saying to mothers everywhere attempting to sweet-talk their children out of shoving a fourth cookie down their throat. These same mothers cram reluctant feet into soccer cleats and lug shrieking seven-year-olds off to AYSO practice, hoping for an afternoon of supervised exertion. But what if it took more than a healthy diet and regular exercise to ward off childhood obesity?

Dr. Jeffrey Schwimmer, associate professor of pediatrics at UCSD and director of weight and wellness at Rady Children’s Hospital, published a paper in the journal Pediatrics on Sept. 20 that argued a radical new idea: obesity as a virus.

Schwimmer and his colleagues Charles Gabbert, John Arnold and Michael Donohue studied 124 children ages 8–10 to assess the relationship between a particular virus, adenovirus 36 (AD36) and obesity in children. The researchers hypothesized that if a child was to catch this virus, and subsequently develop an immunity to it via antibodies, they became more likely to have a higher body weight than children who were not exposed to the virus at all.

Childhood obesity is a huge public health concern in America, and — according to Schwimmer’s paper — obesity rates have more than tripled in the past three decades. It’s become such a widespread concern that Michelle Obama has made it a point to combat childhood obesity during her time as First Lady. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 17 percent of children and young adults are obese, which will shorten the child’s life expectancy by as much as 20 years if he or she should remain obese into adulthood.

Schwimmer was intrigued by this particular topic after some in the scientific community began suggesting a link between microorganisms and body weight regulation.

“I wanted to know — number one — do these results replicate? And — number two — are they relevant to children?” he said.

Schwimmer and his team recruited children from the San Diego area specifically for the study. The children were classified according to their body mass index percentile as either obese or non-obese, and the presence of AD36-specific antibodies was determined.

The results of the study revealed that 78 percent of children found to be AD36-positive were obese. In addition, 22 percent of obese children had the virus, compared to only 7 percent of non-obese children — statistics that supported an association between obesity and the presence of AD36 antibodies.

Although these results proved the researchers’ hypothesis, other possibilities for the link include increased susceptibility to infection within obese children, as well as an increased likelihood of lingering AD36 antibodies.

“There is a lot of research around nutritional and activity factors and sedentary factors — sleep, stress, certainly genetics — and there are other things that are speculated to play a role,” Schwimmer said. “It’s hard to actually prove something in people, because the only way to prove it is to do an experiment where you actually control the parameter.”

The biggest challenge to the researchers was securing funding. Many potential investors were skeptical of a hypothesis that suggested something other than poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle could cause obesity.

“Some people sort of oversold it, as if we were suggesting that this is the whole story underlying the obesity epidemic,” Schwimmer said. “And that’s certainly not at all what we’re suggesting. I think that the reality is [that] it is not going to turn out that any single factor is the whole story.”

Schwimmer hopes to better understand how, exactly, the virus affects or leads to increased body fat.

On a grander scale, however, Schwimmer wants to continue studying fatty liver disease or NASH (non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, or fatty liver disease), which is the most common form of liver disease in children. It was for his work with this disease that he was awarded an American Gastroenterological Association Young Investigator Clinical Science Award in May 2010, and it’s a condition for which he hopes to eventually find a cure.

“He is one of the leading researchers on NASH in children,” Dr. David Brenner, Dean of UCSD School of Medicine, said. “His study is the first to show a relationship between a viral infection and NASH. This will provide new insights into the mechanism of the disease.”