Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand.

Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time.

From startups to scaleups, online, in person, and on the go.

Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

Welcome back to another week of Cool Stuff Ride Home, where we have some of the more

interesting, intriguing, cool stories

from around the world and outside this planet. I'm Reggie Rizzu alongside Marcus Paff on

today's episode, how pupil size during sleep helps sorts new and old memories and enhances

memory retention and a mercury flyby. Plus on this day in history, Henry Ford's plastic automobile. That's all coming

up on cool stuff. Well, turning to Science Daily and new research out of Cornell University,

where researchers have found the pupil, the pupil in your eye, that is, is key to understanding

how and when the brain forms strong, long-lasting memories.

By studying mice equipped with brain electrodes and tiny eye-tracking cameras,

the researchers determine that new memories are being replayed and consolidated

when the pupil is contracted during a sub-stage of non-REM sleep.

When the pupil is dilated, the process repeats for older memories.

The brain's ability to separate these two sub-stages of sleep with a previously unknown microstructure is what prevents, quote-unquote, catastrophic forgetting, in which the

consolidation of one memory wipes out another one.

The findings could lead to better memory enhancement techniques for humans and may help

computer scientists train artificial neural networks to be more efficient.

...