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

The weekly roundup - Nov 19th
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:01:54
Publish Date: 2016-11-17 18:00:00
Description: It’s been another busy week for us here at Science Today. During a visit at the University of Calfornia, San Francisco, we learned that about 10 to 25 thousand cases of stroke, aneurysm or epilepsy may go undetected each year. Anthony Kim, director of UCSF’s Stroke Center has been studying misclassified cases of neurological death, which were erroneously thought to be sudden cardiac death. "So, it has kind of implications on the public health estimates, it has implications on the interpretations of death outcomes, in large cardiovascular trials." And it also has implications on diagnosis. And while on the subject of diagnosis – the rates of childhood asthma and allergies are on the rise in this country, so if you want to lessen your child’s risk, you may want to consider getting a dog. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at UCSF made this connection while studying microbes in newborn babies’ bodies. "Exposure in early life to a greater breadth of organisms seems to be beneficial and allows the system to accumulate a greater diversity of organisms, which really means a greater diversity of the microbial functions." In other words, a mixture of home dust and a dog’s dander can help a child become immune to asthma later in life, especially if the pet is brought home when a child is no older than one month. And finally, we crossed the bridge into Berkeley to speak with a cognitive neuroscientist there, who has found that language and memory are actually interconnected. Robert Knight says for decades linguists were ignoring this fact and studying these two brain functions separately. "One of our areas of research is defining the degree of that connectivity; how the brain rhythms in one area, the hippocampus, are coherent with brain rhythms in the language area, like two people dancing. Are they in synch, right? Are they coherent?" To hear these and other episodes about the latest University of California research, tune into Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud. 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/stroke_detection https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/kids_asthma https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/language_memory
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