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Home > UC Science Today > The weekly roundup - January 6th
Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

The weekly roundup - January 6th
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:02:12
Publish Date: 2017-01-05 18:00:00
Description: It’s a New Year and that means, lots of new stories are in the hopper! First up, do you have trouble sleeping at night? And if you do, how many of you spend time propped up on your pillows, scrolling through your smartphone or tablets before getting some sleep? Our guess is, probably many of you do this, as it turns out 70% of Americans keep their phones on their bedside table. We spoke to cardiologist Gregory Marcus of the UC San Francisco about this. In case you’re wondering why a cardiologist is talking about sleep, he explains that a lack of Zzz’s can cause high blood pressure, heart attacks, arrhythmia and strokes. "Poor sleep quality is not simply an issue of feeling tired the next day, we recognize now that sleep is extremely important to mood, to brain function, cognition." Marcus adds that he’s not trying to demonize technology. Instead, he suggests vigilance and putting the phone away at least an hour before sleep. Give it a try. Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley, researchers took a cue from nature to create Salto. Roboticist Duncan Haldane says Salto can jump higher and faster than any other robot out there. "Salto is inspired by a galago, which is a bushbaby. Biologists have found animals adapted specifically for jumping had this kind of super crouch posture. The longer they stay in a crouch, the more energy they can transfer into the tendons and the more energy they can return for jumping." The team is hoping Salto’s novel locomotive abilities can be used in search and rescue efforts. And finally, we meet UCLA neuroscientist Adriana Galván to discuss the adolescent brain. You may have thought people become adults at 18, but from a neuroscience perspective, the brain keeps growing and developing beyond that age and current literature suggests that it’s around age 25 that the brain finishes the period of adolescence. "The majority of what we call ‘plasticity’ or sensitivity to the environment changes around the mid-twenties and so that means that although the brain can keep changing in response to new experiences or learning something new, the majority of that development has ended." To hear these and other episodes about the latest University of California research, subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.
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