Discover how artificial intelligence can help prevent heart attacks, how scientists are working to bring an extinct species back from the dead, and how sugar in our own body might soon make electricity!
Discover how artificial intelligence can help prevent heart attacks, how scientists are working to bring an extinct species back from the dead, and how sugar in our own body might soon make electricity!
Heart attack prevention.
Back from the dead.
Sugar: it’s electric.
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/ai-and-angina-undead-tigers-electrici-sweets
[SFX: MUSIC IN/WOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn about how artificial intelligence can help prevent heart attacks, how scientists are working to bring an extinct species back from the dead, and how sugar in our own body might soon make electricity!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WOOSH]
NATE: Calli, computers help us do all sorts of things.
CALLI: Agreed. I’m currently looking at three devices myself, I’ve got my computer, my phone, and my tablet all glowing at me.
NATE: Make room for another, because soon artificial intelligence may help us predict heart attacks. The research from Johns Hopkins could be a huge help in protecting our tickers.
CALLI: Wow, predicting heart attacks is just as challenging as predicting earthquakes or Beyonce album drops. We just never know when they’re going to happen.
NATE: That may be about to change. First, let’s talk about what exactly a heart attack is. At its most basic, a heart attack is when the flow of blood to your heart is blocked. This often happens when things like fat or cholesterol build up in the arteries as plaque. And, especially in arteries leading to your heart, this can lead to a rupture and cause a clot, blocking that blood flow.
CALLI: Like a tiny little dam.
NATE: A potentially fatal one. But if patients do survive a heart attack, they’re often left with scar tissue where the interrupted blood flow damaged or destroyed parts of the heart.
CALLI: As if the heart attack itself wasn’t enough.
NART: Well it might actually be the key for predicting future heart attacks in these patients. The researchers at Johns Hopkins combined their expertise with the power of artificial intelligence.
CALLI: Have we used AI for real life medicine before?
NATE: Doctors and scientists have been exploring how to use it for a few years now, often in the heavy hitter fields of medicine: cancer, neurology, cardiology, all areas that have leading causes of death. Often, they use AI to process and extract information from clinical notes and medical journals. It turns text and language into data the AI can use.
CALLI: A lot faster than the scientists could ever process it without AI’s help I’m sure.
NATE: Totally. Plus their time is better used elsewhere. But the real power of AI in medicine is in analysis. They can use machine learning techniques to analyze images, genetic information, or whole data sets…This is the type of AI the researchers at Johns Hopkins are using.
CALLI: What data sets are they looking at?
NATE: The team used cardiac images to look at the scars left by the heart attacks in each of the hundreds of real life patients. The algorithm learned to detect patterns and relationships that our eyes just couldn’t recognize. All we humans get out of these images is a simple understanding of scar volume and mass, but the AI can dive much deeper looking at the very same images.
CALLI: Oh that is cool, it sees the things hiding in the shadows. What do we get out of that?
NATE: The program can then build each patient a survival assessment, which can predict, with high accuracy, the chances of sudden cardiac death in the next 10 years, and when it is most likely to happen. They call it: Survival Study of Cardiac Arrhythmia Risk, or SSCAR.
CALLI: But how good was it? Meteorologists will tell you there’s an 80% chance of rain and it’ll be nothing but sunny days that week.
NATE: The program was significantly more accurate, on every measure, than the doctors. It was even validated with data from patients across 60 health centers with different imaging data.
CALLI: If it worked with info from all those health centers, does that mean it could be implemented outside of Johns Hopkins?
NATE: It seems like it could be adopted anywhere. The project is still in process, but researchers hope it could be adapted to detect other diseases in your heart as well, and applied to other types of medicine that similarly rely on visual scans.
CALLI: I know heart disease is a leading killer in the US, so this must have the potential to make a big impact.
NATE: 1 in 4 deaths in the U.S., or about 659,000 per year, are a result of heart disease. If we could predict when events like heart attacks are going to happen, we could be much better prepared to deal with them.
CALLI: That’s incredible.
NATE: Which reminds me, if you think you are having a heart attack, or fear you might be having one, it's crucial to call 911 and get medical help as soon as possible.
CALLI: Great reminder!
[SFX: WOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, I dunno about you, but I worry about endangered animals.
NATE: Oh of course. Extinction is no joke. There’s no coming back!
CALLI: Well...
NATE: Well, what?
CALLI: This bit of news concerns the now-extinct Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine. Scientists are planning to use stem cells to create a new embryo of the thylacine, and if they are successful they might be able to recreate the species that hasn’t been seen in nearly 100 years.
NATE: That’s impossible! Once an animal is extinct, it’s extinct.
CALLI: I guess we’ll see.
NATE: Well, wait, what about the food chain? The ecosystem? Won’t the introduction of a new ... old ... species mess things up?
CALLI: Great question! The plan is to reintroduce the thylacine to an environment where it was a crucial species, and where its absence has been missed. As Tasmania’s only apex predator, they kept the ecosystem in balance, weeding out sick and weak members of other species to keep their populations healthy.
NATE: So, they want to bring them back to life, and put them back in the wild in Tasmania?
CALLI: Exactly.
NATE: Tasmania tigers back in action.
CALLI: You know, they're actually not even technically tigers, they’re carnivorous marsupials like their neighbors Tasmanian devils. They got their name from the distinct stripes that covered their fur from their shoulders to their tail but they are actually closer to Koalas than tigers.
NATE: You’re painting a picture of a pretty strange animal.
CALLI: That’s right. But it gets even weirder, thylacines had their stripes, but also large wolf-like heads, and a long stiff tail. They were pretty big too, about four feet long and weighing around 55 pounds. What's even odder, though, is that since they were marsupials, the females had a pouch for carrying their litters, and the males had a partial pouch!
NATE: A kangaroo-pouched-wolf-headed-striped marsupial? So odd.
CALLI: Yeah. Would be a wonder to see. But, unfortunately, the last known one died in captivity in 1936.
NATE: So how do you de-extinct a species?
CALLI: Researchers have tried cloning, where they create a genetically identical cell and implant it in an egg of closely related living species, but with something that’s been extinct this long, they likely can’t get a DNA sample guaranteed to be intact.
NATE: So, the whole pulling DNA from mosquitos in amber like in Jurassic Park is ...
CALLI: Great, but still fiction. Though, to be fair to them, they did say the DNA had holes...
NATE: Right, right. Okay, so what else can they try?
CALLI: Some researchers use a method called back breeding. It’s like selective breeding, what we did with dog breeds, to concentrate traits and make living species more like their ancestral species. Think: bigger teeth, longer tails, etc. It's not actually the extinct species, but rather a new animal that approximates the extinct species.
NATE: Right, but there are a lot of traits you’re trying to recreate. And you want an apex predator. Seems tough. Any other ways?
CALLI: For this project, scientists used a third method. They’re focusing on understanding the genome of the thylacine, then taking stem cells from other marsupials to create an embryo for a thylacine that they then implant in a surrogate.
NATE: Kind of like cloning, but with more accurate genetic info?
CALLI: Right. Researchers sequenced the genome in 2017 making a sort of thylacine blueprint. It was a huge step. And now they hope to manipulate stem cells to create an accurate recreation of the extinct species. If all goes well, they could have a viable embryo in the next ten years.
NATE: So you’re telling me there is a real shot I could see a striped and pouched Australian dog-like thing in my lifetime?
CALLI: You sure could, though researchers admit there are limitations to recreating a species like this. Life is complex. The hope is, though, if they can recreate something close, it could help rebalance the Tasmanian ecosystem, and help prevent loss to the native species, like another Tasmanian native, the Tasmanian devil. Without apex predators to help weed out their weaker individuals, the species has suffered from a facial tumor disease.
NATE: Apex predators are an important part of the circle of life. De-extinctifying a species sounds like a lot of work, though, and I imagine it’s expensive.
CALLI: Oh it absolutely is, that's why so many other researchers are focusing on preventing extinction rather than resurrecting lost species. Efforts like Discovery’s Project C.A.T. - Conserving Acres for Tigers, hopes to protect the habitat of endangered wildlife so we won’t have to replace them. Discovery partnered with the World Wildlife Fund to double the number of tigers in the wild and conserve 6 million acres of tiger habitat.
NATE: I’m glad we are doing de-extinction, but if Tasmania tells us anything, it's that we really can’t afford to lose more of these important species.
CALLI: Absolutely. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
[SFX: WOOSH]
NATE: Calli, you love candy right?
CALLI: Oh totally, but sometimes I wonder how much I need the extra sugar.
NATE: Well, hold on a second. A new experiment out of MIT has found a way to convert excess glucose into electricity!
CALLI: That’s amazing, Nate! Will I be able to power my room’s AC on Milky Ways soon?
NATE: The technology isn’t that advanced yet, Calli, but there’s still some great news with this experiment. Researchers created a tiny fuel cell by using glucose cells, each 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair, to create electricity in our bodies that could soon be used to power medical implants.
CALLI: That’s wild, how do you take something as normal as glucose and make electricity?
NATE: Right. So in addition to the glucose cells, the fuel cell also had three distinct layers, like an Oreo made of anode, an electrolyte, and a cathode. The anode layer reacts to the glucose inside our bodily fluids and creates gluconic acid, which releases protons and electrons into the bloodstream. Follow me here. It's like someone walking into a party, your blood stream, and separating a dating couple from a larger group that’s talking. The electrolyte then approaches that dating couple, and grabs just the boyfriend to show him something cool in the kitchen. That's the electrolyte separating the electrons and protons, and sending the electrons to the external circuit. Over the course of the night the electrolyte just keeps separating dating pairs, and showing boyfriends into the kitchen. Of course all those boyfriends streaming in creates some energy. Which, if we go back to scientific terms, they’re each electrons, and flowing electrons creates electrical charge to the external circuit. Meanwhile the girlfriends they left back in the main room of the party, they start other conversations. They’re the loose protons who go to the cathode where they react with oxygen and create a water molecule that flows away with the bodily fluids.
CALLI: That’s so cool! And sounds like a great party! So with just a few materials, and our body, the fuel cell can create a stream of electrons, those boyfriends, to make electricity and water?! That electrolyte is doing a lot of work! Popular person! What is it made of?
NATE: That’s right, and great question! The researchers used ceria, a ceramic material, to build the electrolyte layer. And it worked for a few key reasons. One, ceramic naturally conducts protons. Two, it is really stable in the long term. Three, it’s easy to create smaller objects out of ceramic. And four, the silicon chip that the electrons charge can be mounted safely on ceramic with no side effects. Plus, it can withstand high temperatures.
CALLI: That sounds huge, Nate, but what kind of power can it make?
NATE: At peak voltage, the fuel cells made about 80 millivolts. That’s enough to power things like pacemakers. Normally, these implants require huge bulky batteries. And you can’t just change the batteries when they die. You have to get a really invasive, and expensive, surgery. With these fuel cells, which are WAY smaller, your body would constantly recharge the implant with minimal effort.
CALLI: Okay, so this is amazing, Nate. But here’s a hypothetical question for you: what if I wanted to use this cell to, say, power a Fitbit I’ve implanted into my wrist so that I never have to charge it before I leave the house? Asking for a friend.
NATE: Well, tell your friend there’s good news there, too. The fuel cells could be useful for the growing number of people like your friend who implant electronic gadgets in their bodies for convenience. Though the researchers were thinking less about Fitbits and more about powering miniature sensors to measure bodily functions like glucose levels for diabetes patients or tracking the heart for patients with heart conditions.
CALLI: Wow, so in the short term, huge improvements for patients with medical implants. But in the future, this really opens up a world of possibilities for a future of combining humans and new technology.
NATE: Absolutely, someday soon, those Starburst might power devices a lot more powerful than your sweet tooth.
[SFX: WOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Researchers at Johns Hopkins are using an artificial intelligence program to predict when a patient who has suffered a heart attack might suffer another. The algorithm has been more accurate than doctors, even when given the exact same information.
NATE: Scientists are closer than ever to raising the Tasmanian tiger from the dead. Using genome sequencing, researchers hope to create an accurate embryo and de-extinct the important Australian species that has been gone for nearly 100 years.
CALLI: Researchers are using our body’s glucose to create electrical charges in small fuel cells that might soon power our implanted medical devices. Whether you want a smaller and more powerful battery for a pacemaker, or to monitor your blood sugar, glucose might soon be the answer.