Ever wonder about the artificial intelligence helping us find and fight Parkinson’s disease? What about the new methods for collecting energy from solar panels at night or how the tiny immortal jellyfish may help us massively extend our lifespans. Tune in to learn more!
Ever wonder about the artificial intelligence helping us find and fight Parkinson’s disease? What about the new methods for collecting energy from solar panels at night or how the tiny immortal jellyfish may help us massively extend our lifespans. Tune in to learn more!
Robots that help.
Solar but at night.
Jellyfish: the secret to life.
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Calli and Nate — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/ai-vs-parkinsons-dark-sun-power-death-proof-jellyfish
[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 the artificial intelligence helping us find and fight Parkinson’s
disease, new methods for collecting energy from solar panels at night, and how the tiny
immortal jellyfish may help us massively extend our lifespans.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WOOSH]
NATE: Calli, I have some big news about artificial intelligence changing how we find and fight
disease.
CALLI: AI is fascinating, I know we’ve talked about it helping us control prosthetic arms, and
decoding ancient texts but what in the world is it doing now?
NATE: Researchers are now using artificial intelligence to both help us diagnose Parkinson’s
disease by finding cellular markers and discover new treatments to fight it. It is huge news for
the nearly 1 million people in the US living with the disease.
CALLI: I’ve heard of the symptoms of Parkinson’s - shaking, problems controlling limbs, and
balance issues. But what part of the brain does the disease actually affect?
NATE: It’s found in the “Substantia Nigra” area of your midbrain where it mostly affects
dopamine-producing neurons. The symptoms you mentioned usually develop slowly over the
course of years. But the disease affects everyone differently and progression can differ quite a
bit from one person to another.
CALLI: How do we treat it right now?
NATE: We have therapies that can improve symptoms, but the bad news is that they don’t slow
down or stop the progression of the disease. And while Parkinson’s itself isn’t fatal, it can cause
some pretty serious complications, and increase your likelihood of a fatal fall, pneumonia, or
choking. One of the biggest issues, though, is how little we know about where it comes from.
We haven’t had any reliable ways to identify cellular markers for it so we often only identify it
when symptoms appear.
CALLI: Is that where the AI is stepping in?
NATE: Exactly! The team of scientists worked with a Google Research team to profile over a
million images of skin cells from a group of 91 Parkinson’s patients as well as healthy control
subjects. They then looked at these cells with a robotic system called the “Global Stem Cell
Array” which isolates and expands the cells, then labels different parts of them. The work gave
us thousands of detailed images of the microscopic cells.
CALLI: But that's not AI, right?
NATE: AI was the next step! Researchers ran the cell images through an AI driven image
analysis program that could identify distinct differences between the Parkinson’s cells and the
healthy ones, and clue us in on exact markers for the disease.
CALLI: That’s genius!
NATE: And the AI tech not only discovered these markers, but did it so accurately that it could
even detect variations between cells, which could help us better diagnose and treat specific
cases of the disease. So while it is a huge discovery, it's really even bigger than researchers
may have allowed themselves to hope for.
CALLI: So what you’re saying is we might have just solved one of the biggest problems in
Parkinson’s research?
NATE: That’s what it looks like. And like we said earlier, knowing the specific cellular markers
for Parkinson’s means we can start accurately researching treatments to fight the disease. So
often our drug trials fail because we don’t have accurate info on what drives the disease. But
that might not be true in the near future.
CALLI: Are there other treatments that fail because we haven’t found those cellular markers?
NATE: Yes! Parkinson’s research is just the start for this AI tech. If we can continue to use it to
accurately assess cellular markers - the possibilities are pretty limitless when it comes to finding
the roots of different diseases.
CALLI: Which also means the possibilities to discover new treatments are also limitless!
NATE: We don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves but the use of this AI technology could be
the first step towards reversing or even curing a bunch of different, tough to fight, diseases.
CALLI: Thanks AI! Our researchers couldn’t have done it without you!
[SFX: WOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, I’ve got an incredible story today about getting power from solar panels…after the
sun goes down.
NATE: Solar power without the sun? I don't know about that Calli.
CALLI: Well I do, researchers at Stanford have found a way to keep solar panels productive at
night by harvesting energy from the temperature differentials that we can’t see. It has the
potential to solve many of the shortcomings of our current solar power systems.
NATE: Nighttime solar power? Are we collecting reflections off the moon?
CALLI: Not quite, the team at Stanford was able to use their solar panels to capture energy
from infrared light that emanates from, rather than shines on, the Earth.
NATE: Ah, infrared, some of the light beyond our visible spectrum?
CALLI: Exactly. We can’t see it, but we can feel this energy as heat. But first let's talk about
exactly how solar panels work when the sun is up.
NATE: I like this plan.
CALLI: Solar panels work thanks to photons, the charged particles of light that shoot toward the
Earth from the Sun. When these particles fly into solar panels, they knock electrons loose from
atoms in the panel. Conductive metal plates on the side of the solar cells collect these loose
electrons and transfer them to wires where they can flow as electrical current.
NATE: Then don’t we need those photons that come from…well the Sun…to make electricity?
CALLI: Right, and that has been one of the major drawbacks of solar panels. Without the sun,
we can’t get any energy, and that happens every evening, cutting off our power supply. We’ve
tried to work around this with batteries when the sun is down, but batteries are expensive,
heavy, and need rare earth metals. Ironically, mining those rare earth metals can have a
supremely negative effect on the environment.
NATE: Why must doing good, also do bad?
CALLI: Well we might be able to work around this if we collect energy at night and use fewer
batteries. To do this, researchers relied on the photons that the solar panels themselves emit.
NATE: Solar panels glow in the dark?
CALLI: Sort of, but at a frequency we can’t see. Warm things emit infrared radiation with
wavelengths that are too long for the visual spectrum, but they still carry photons. It’s like putting
your hand over a cast iron pan after the stove is turned off. The energy still flows out of it as
heat. So on a clear night, when clouds don’t bounce the infrared rays back at the Earth, infrared
energy flows off the earth, and these solar panels, and out into space.
NATE: There is a massive flow of energy out from the Earth? And we can capture that?
CALLI: The solar panel itself warms during the day. Then at night, as the photons leave the
solar panel as infrared radiation, the panel cools. This makes the panel a few degrees cooler
than the air around it. The Stanford team used a device called a thermoelectric generator to
create electricity from the transfer of heat that then flows from warmer air into the cooler solar
panels.
NATE: How much power can this create?
CALLI: At first the researchers were surprised. Their system created only about 10% of the
power they expected. But they realized that solar panels aren't actually good conductors of
thermal energy, it doesn’t flow easily through the solar cell itself. The solution was simple,
though, they attached the solar panels to aluminum plates, far more efficient conductors of
thermal energy.
NATE: I love how advanced the science is, and how basic the solution is, “Just bolt it to a hunk
of metal.”
CALLI: (Laughs) Exactly. But this improved the output to an admittedly modest 50 milliwatts per
square meter of solar panel. But improvements could yield more power, the theoretical limit is
about 1-2 watts per square meter.
NATE: So at its most efficient, you’d need 30 square meters of panel to power a 60 watt light
bulb? Not a ton of power, but that's not nothing.
CALLI: Right, it could lessen or eliminate the need for some batteries and it is opening the door
to greater night-time energy production that could be a real lifesaver. Think of off-grid
communities that could power emergency systems or essential services at night without
batteries.
NATE: Wait, but aren't these panels emitting infrared radiation during the day too?
CALLI: I’m so glad you said that! You’re right on the money. This tech could be used to improve
power generation and efficiency during the day too!
NATE: I love stories like this. If we can get power from solar panels even without the sun, it
gives me hope for solving other seemingly impossible problems. The power of science.
CALLI: Night or day, it keeps us going.
[SFX: WOOSH]
NATE: Calli, did you know that some animals might be…immortal?
CALLI: Like they don’t die? How is that possible?
NATE: There are animals that live extremely long lives, like sharks that live up to 500 years, but
the immortal jellyfish seems to be able to avoid death all together. And research into how they
avoid death could prove revolutionary in extending human life.
CALLI: How long have these immortal jellyfish been around?
NATE: Well its scientific name is Turritopsis dohrnii, and it's only 3 millimeters across. They’ve
been around more than 66 million years, since before the dinosaurs, but we didn’t start studying
them until the 1980s, a blink ago in its lifetime.
CALLI: Wait, but if they’re immortal, are they all 66 million years old?
NATE: Well just because they’re immortal, doesn’t mean they’re impervious to predators like
sharks and turtles.
CALLI: Imagine being immortal, then ending up someone's lunch. Bummer. But how does it
avoid death from natural causes?
NATE: Well it all starts with how they develop. Their life goes through five stages…They start as
a fertilized egg, then they become planulas in their larval stage, these are like microscopic
worms that swim about. Next these worms attach themselves to the ocean floor and become
polyps that develop a digestive system so they can eat to fuel asexual reproduction. In this
reproduction, the polyp splits itself into two to create another identical polyp. They continue to
repeat this process of asexual reproduction until they form a colony. In the colony the polyp
forms nerves and muscles until a chunk of the colony splits off to become an ephyra, an
organism that can swim, feed, and grow. Finally, that ephyra grows into an adult jellyfish, called
a medusa, that can reproduce sexually.
CALLI: Ok, it's a lot of steps but it doesn't sound too out of the ordinary yet.
NATE: Right, but where things get a bit wild is that unlike most creatures that progress through
the stages of life in one direction, this jellyfish can actually do the process in reverse.
CALLI: But how would becoming a less developed creature…help?
NATE: Well if the adult medusa is injured or in really inhospitable conditions, like water that is
too hot or too cold, it drops to the ocean floor and becomes a cyst, a tiny piece of tissue, that
becomes a polyp. Then it can work back up the stages of development as conditions improve.
It’s like a butterfly crawling back into the cocoon when the going gets tough. As its life goes on,
it can repeatedly move between medusa and polyp over and over and over again.
CALLI: Well, how exactly does it do this?
NATE: It's called trans differentiation. Specialized adult cells with a particular purpose can
change into other types of specialized adult cells. Its cell adaptation, reconfiguring the body. In
the polyp stage the adult cells change roles then reintegrate into the body.
CALLI: How do they do that? If we could figure that out, could we make new kidneys out of our
fat cells?
NATE: That's the dream, but the exact process is still a mystery. Our best guess is that they
turn genes on or off in existing cells to change their role. Researchers are sequencing the
genome and looking into gene expression, and the work even won them a National Science
Foundation Award. In particular, they’re looking into the genes that are “on” in the cyst. Those
are likely the ones that help with regeneration.
CALLI: So if they succeed, what will that look like for us? Will we regrow amputated arms?
NATE: We are a long long way from understanding, much less implementing, this knowledge.
But the research should help us better understand aging and our ability to fight it. If we could
borrow the process to reprogram cells, like making adult cells into stem cells, we could address
many common concerns with aging, disease, and cancer.
CALLI: What a revolution that would be for medicine, we could heal and rebuild ourselves.
NATE: Right. It could potentially extend our lives to hundreds of years, and provide solutions to
stubborn health problems.
CALLI: Even if we didn’t want to live forever, what better lives we could live in our elder years.
[SFX: WOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Researchers have discovered remarkable information on specific cellular markers for
Parkinson’s disease, all thanks to a little help from artificial intelligence. This data is a massive
breakthrough not only in understanding the origins of the disease, but will help us create more
effective drug treatments to stop, and perhaps reverse, the effects of the disease
NATE: Researchers at Stanford have done the seemingly impossible: collected power from
solar panels at night. This new technology relies on infrared radiation and opens the doors for
greater efficiency in our power generation, and a smaller dependence on environmentally
harmful batteries.
CALLI: Studying the DNA of the immortal jellyfish may allow us to stall, if not counteract, aging
in humans and massively extend our lives. The tiny creatures reprogram their cells to reverse
their development and avoid environmental hardships.