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Home > UC Science Today > The weekly roundup - August 19
Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

The weekly roundup - August 19
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:01:58
Publish Date: 2016-08-17 19:00:00
Description: This week on Science Today: Astrophysicist Richard Klein of the University of California, Berkeley gives us a glimpse at his new supercomputer simulation that covers 700,000 years of star formation. "So we start with these turbulent magnetized clouds. Follow the cloud for up to a million years of evolution, all the way to the point where stars can form in clusters." Klein is currently working on an even larger simulation and hopes they will lead to a comprehensive theory of star formation. With this next piece, we pull our heads out of the clouds and dive into the world of cephalopods – creatures like squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. Although these animals lead strikingly colorful lives, they’re thought to be colorblind. But UC Berkeley graduate student Alexander Stubbs theorizes that their bizarre pupil shape can in fact help them detect color. "And what we showed in this paper is that their fairly unique pupil shape – with a U-shaped pupil in cuttlefish and squid or a dumbbell shaped bar pupil in octopus – means that they blur their image, but in a color dependent way." To test his theory, Stubbs had to get creative. His father, Christopher Stubbs of Harvard University, programmed a computer simulation to model this type of eyesight, showing how this color blurring may help explain the paradox of cephalopod vision. We then visit UCLA, where we speak with professor Karen Gylys about how she creatively studies the brain to better understand Alzheimer’s disease. Gylys can essentially isolate synapses - the space between two neurons. "It’s cryopreserved so that we can get these little spherical, they’re called ‘synaptosomes.’ And so that gives us the ability to sort of see into the synapse – to study what’s happening. We actually purify thousands and thousands synapses." If you want learn more about research at the University of California, subscribe to UC Science Today on iTunes or Stitcher. You can also follow us on Facebook. Thanks for listening. I’m Larissa Branin. Subscribe to Science Today: iTunes: apple.co/1TQBewD Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/science-today Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ucsciencetoday Stories mentioned in this roundup: https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/supercomputer_stars https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/octopus_eye https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/synapse_brain
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