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Science Friday

Migraines, Galaxy Formation. Jan 10, 2020, Part 2

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Natural Sciences, Wnyc, Science, Friday, Life Sciences

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2020

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Mysteries Of Migraines What do sensitivity to light, a craving for sweets and excessive yawning have in common? They’re all things that may let you know you’re about to have a migraine. Of course each person’s experience of this disease—which impacts an estimated 38 million people in the U.S.—can be very different. One person may be sensitive to light while another is sensitive to sound. Your pain may be sharp like a knife while your friend’s may be dull and pulsating. Or perhaps you don’t have any pain at all, but your vision gets temporarily hazy or wiggly. This week Ira is joined by two migraine experts, Elizabeth Loder, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Peter Goadsby, professor of neurology at the University of California San Francisco, who explain what’s going on in the brain of a migraineur to cause such disparate symptoms. Plus, why some treatments work for some and not others, from acupuncture and magnesium supplements, to a new FDA approved medication that goes straight to the source. How Do Galaxies Get Into Formation?  The Milky Way and distant galaxies are a mix of gas, dust, and stars. And while all of this is swirling in space, there is a structure to a galaxy that holds all of this cosmic dust in order. A group of researchers discovered a nearly 9,000 light year-long wave of “stellar nurseries”—star forming regions filled with gas and dust—running through the Milky Way, and could form part of the galaxy’s arm.  The study was published in the journal Nature. Astronomers Alyssa Goodman and Catherine Zucker, who are authors on that study, tell us what this star structure can tell us about the formation of our galaxy.  Plus, astrophysicist Sangeeta Malhotra talks about one of the oldest galaxies formed 680 million years after the big bang, and the difference between these ancient galaxies and our own.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A few weeks ago, I was sitting here at my desk in the radio studio,

0:07.5

reading something off a page, and all of a sudden, some of the words on the paper, at the end of the

0:13.5

sentence, on the left side, got a little fuzzy and gray, and the effect lasted just about five

0:19.3

minutes, and then everything went back to normal.

0:21.8

But it got me worried.

0:23.5

So I went to my neurologist who said he suspected what I had experienced was actually a type of migraine.

0:31.0

Migrant.

0:31.5

I didn't have any pain.

0:33.4

How could this have been a migraine?

0:34.6

It was only my vision that was impacted and it lasted just a few minutes.

0:39.2

Well, it sounded a lot like what David from Anchorage called in about on our Science Friday Voxpomp app.

0:45.8

I have a form of migraine that does not lead to a massive headache, but to a visual aura that grows over my visual field.

0:54.4

It appears as lines and triangles that rapidly shift between black and white.

1:01.5

And that's what my doctor called an ocular migraine, something that happens in your eye.

1:07.1

And if you're a migraine sufferer or a migrainer, as we are called, your experience

1:13.2

could be totally different from mine or David's. You may be sensitive to light or to sound.

1:19.9

You may have a pain that's sharp like a knife or dull and pulsating. Migraine triggers run the

1:26.1

gamut, too, from eating too many sweets to drinking

1:29.0

red wine to not getting enough sleep, migrainer's will speak of all kinds of triggers. So how can

1:35.8

each person's migraine be so different? And can there ever be a treatment that cures all migraines?

1:42.7

Well, the FDA recently approved a new drug for treating acute migraine attacks called

1:48.1

Ubro-G-PAN.

...

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