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Home > UC Science Today > The weekly roundup - Nov 4th
Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

The weekly roundup - Nov 4th
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:02:13
Publish Date: 2016-10-30 19:00:00
Description: This week on Science Today. A new role of the brain’s hippocampus has been discovered. Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley explains this is the part of the brain where Alzheimer’s often starts. But until now, the hippocampus was only known for storing memories. But as Knight found, it’s also involved in generating language. "It is not just being told what to do by the cortex and the language areas. They are both contributing to effective language capacities. It kind of elevates the hippocampus out of the memory field and puts it to a more global cognitive domain – in this case, language." It just goes to show that researchers still have a lot to learn – and as we found out in our next story, one thing that’s been helpful are study cohorts. Epidemiologist Janet Wojcicki of the University of California, San Francisco says she’s been able to garner so much information beyond her original research following a Latina cohort recruited in pregnancy and followed a number of years. "Our primary outcome was really to better understand factors that are related to obesity and development of chronic disease in early childhood, but we also measured telomeres, the protective cap of the DNA." Shorter telomeres are associated with chronic disease development and Wojcicki found that in this cohort, early, exclusive breastfeeding of infants was linked to longer telomeres. And next, we visit the beautiful Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to talk to atmospheric scientist V. ‘Ram’ Ramanathan. He’s written countless studies, which he called “obituaries of the planet’ after successfully predicting a significant increase in global warming within the next two decades. And yet, he felt no one was listening. So, as a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he took his message to the Pope. "So I told him basically to talk about climate change in his speeches and urge people to be better stewards of the planet. Ten days later, he made this major pronouncement and talked about climate change and warned people if you destroy nature, it will destroy you." This later became known in climate change communication circles as ‘The Francis Effect’, but that’s a story for another time. You can catch up on all of Science Today’s episodes on iTunes or 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/hippocampus_language https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/research_cohorts https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/climate_pope
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