Outage leaves 3,000 without power A...

Outage leaves 3,000 without power

A transformer that blew near Orange Avenue and 18th Street at

about 3 a.m. Tuesday left 3,021 Costa Mesa customers without power

for more than five hours, Southern California Edison officials said.

The outage was caused by “a small fire that had gotten to some

insulators on a pole,” Edison spokesman Gil Alexander said.

“We had most of our customers back on by 8 a.m.,” he said.

About 350 in the area of Rochester, Cabrillo, Knox and 21st

streets were without power until about 2 p.m., Alexander added.

The area of the outage was bordered by Wilson Street to the south,

16th Street to the north, College Avenue to the east and Tustin

Avenue to the west.

Police officers manned three intersections where traffic signals

had blacked out, Costa Mesa Sgt. Don Holford said. No incidents

occurred as a result, he said.

Teacher will discuss the Freedom Writers

The Newport Beach Library Foundation will launch its tolerance

program with a presentation by Erin Gruwell, a teacher who overcame

excessive intolerance in her classrooms.

To appease the racial tensions she faced during her first teaching

position in Long Beach, Gruwell decided to teach a curriculum based

on peace and tolerance, beginning with lessons on “The Diary of Anne

Frank” and discussions on the Holocaust. As a result, her students

began tracking their personal struggles in diaries of their own and

began calling themselves the Freedom Writers.

Gruwell will discuss her experiences with her students and the

path she created by highlighting the importance of racial harmony at

a presentation titled “Peace Through Understanding” at the Newport

Beach Central Library on Nov. 6.

The library is at 1000 Avocado Ave. For more information, call

(949) 717-3801 or visit www.newportbeachlibrary.org.

Central Library to exhibit paintings

Paintings and prints by Albert Beach will be on display at the

Newport Beach Central Library from Nov. 1 through Dec. 30. The public

is invited to a reception for the artist at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3.

Already displayed throughout California, the East Coast and Italy,

Beach’s works depict colorful Los Angeles and international scenes.

The Newport Beach Central Library is at 1000 Avocado Ave. For more

information, call (949) 717-3801.

UCI study focuses on reversing paralysis

Paralysis from spinal cord injury was significantly reversed by

adding tiny nerves from the rib cage and mixing them with a powerful

growth inducer found in most nerve cells, a UC Irvine and Long Beach

Veterans Administration Medical Center study has found.

The study, conducted in rats, suggests that nerve cells can be

inserted and stimulated to grow through damaged areas of the spinal

cord, perhaps leading to better treatments for spinal cord injury.

The research is part of a wave of studies challenging the

conventional wisdom that severed nerves in the spinal cord are nearly

impossible to regenerate. The study appears in the October issue of

the Journal of Neurotrauma.

Dr. Vernon Lin, professor of physical medicine at UCI and director

of the Spinal Cord Injury Group at the Long Beach hospital, and his

colleagues found that grafting nerves from the rib cage and adding

the growth stimulator partially restored hind leg movement in rats

that had their spinal cords severed.

“By using tiny nerves from the rib cage as cables connecting the

severed spinal cord, we were able to get some improvement in leg

function,” Lin said. “Regeneration is considered very difficult

because the damaged area apparently inhibits growth of new nerve-cell

connections. This study gets us closer to arriving at the right

combination of growth factors, nerve cells and physical stimulation

that overcome these inhibitions and successfully treat spinal cord

injury.”

The researchers also plan to study the use of robots in the

placement and maintenance of nerve cells that are grafted into an

injured area to help improve movement.

They recently received a $600,000 research grant from the Veterans

Administration to continue their work in designing and testing robots

that could help maintain the gait necessary to walk. Currently, they

are testing the ability of the robots to accurately maintain a

walking gait in rats. Eventually, the researchers hope to test the

robots in humans and determine if the machines are actually helping

restore the ability to walk after spinal cord injury.

Lin’s colleagues in the study include Yu-Shang Lee of UCI’s

College of Medicine and Ian Hsiao of UCI and the Long Beach VA

Medical Center.