Learn why aliens have a dataome; how animals sniff out viral infections; and how reading out loud can boost your memory. Additional resources from Caleb Scharf: Pick up "The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Information-Machines-Unending-Algorithm/dp/0593087240 Website: http://www.calebscharf.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/caleb_scharf When animals sniff out viral infections, what are they smelling? by Cameron Duke Arakawa, H., Arakawa, K., & Deak, T. (2010). Sickness-related odor communication signals as determinants of social behavior in rat: A role for inflammatory processes. Hormones and Behavior, 57(3), 330–341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2010.01.002 Else, H. (2020). Can dogs smell COVID? Here’s what the science says. Nature, 587(7835), 530–531. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03149-9 Geddes, L. (2020). How nosy mice sniff out sickness. New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17001-how-nosy-mice-sniff-out-sickness/ Jendrny, P., Schulz, C., Twele, F., Meller, S., von Köckritz-Blickwede, M., Osterhaus, A. D. M. E., Ebbers, J., Pilchová, V., Pink, I., Welte, T., Manns, M. P., Fathi, A., Ernst, C., Addo, M. M., Schalke, E., & Volk, H. A. (2020). Scent dog identification of samples from COVID-19 patients – a pilot study. BMC Infectious Diseases, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-020-05281-3 Rivière, S., Challet, L., Fluegge, D., Spehr, M., & Rodriguez, I. (2009). Formyl peptide receptor-like proteins are a novel family of vomeronasal chemosensors. Nature, 459(7246), 574–577. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08029 Trained ferrets can smell avian flu in duck poo! (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/p-tfc051921.php This Simple Reading Technique Can Boost Your Memory and Learning Speed originally aired August 17, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/massive-ocean-beneath-earth-s-surface-road-trip-ga Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. 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.
Learn why aliens have a dataome; how animals sniff out viral infections; and how reading out loud can boost your memory.
Additional resources from Caleb Scharf:
When animals sniff out viral infections, what are they smelling? by Cameron Duke
This Simple Reading Technique Can Boost Your Memory and Learning Speed originally aired August 17, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/massive-ocean-beneath-earth-s-surface-road-trip-ga
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. 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 transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/alien-dataomes-how-animals-smell-viruses-why-to-read-aloud
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how finding an information “dataome” could help us find intelligent alien life, with help from astrobiologist Caleb Scharf. You’ll also learn about how animals sniff out viral infections; and how you could boost your memory by reading out loud.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Yesterday, Caleb Scharf told us how humans and information have a symbiotic relationship, where neither of us could survive without the other. But as an astrobiologist, Caleb is interested in more than just life on Earth — and he thinks extraterrestrial civilizations must have a similar relationship with their data. Caleb Scharf is the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center and the author of the new book, "The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm." We asked him what an astrobiologist is doing studying information.
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So it's sort of a good news bad news situation. The bad news: other civilizations are probably destroying themselves with their data. The good news: It's not just us! Again, that was Caleb Scharf, the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center and the author of the new book, "The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm." You can find a link to pick it up in the show notes.
Every so often, there’s a headline about dogs detecting cancer or viruses like COVID-19 with the power of their sensitive noses. But how is that possible? Do these diseases even have a smell? It turns out that the answer is yes — kind of. And it’s not only dogs who can detect those smells.
Viruses likely don’t have scents. Or, at least not that we can detect. But the ability to sniff out infections seems to be important for many species. Rats, for example, seem to have specialized scent receptors that respond to the chemical byproducts of inflammation. These scent receptors likely evolved because avoiding sick rats would easily confer an evolutionary advantage.
When your body — or any animal’s body — is trying to fight off an infection, the immune system kicks in long before you get the sniffles and a fever. It produces white blood cells and antibodies to thwart the assailant. While the virus itself might not have a smell, that inflammatory response does.
Whether dogs have specialized scent receptors for this purpose remains to be seen, but evidence suggests that they might have something even better. In one experiment, scientists trained dogs to smell the infectious byproducts of COVID-19, then deployed them at the Lebanon Airport. In one trial they screened 1600 passengers and correctly detected 92 percent of positive COVID cases — and 100 percent of negative ones.
What these animals are smelling is not the general byproducts of viral infections, but their specific scent signatures. A very recent experiment with ferrets, found they could detect avian flu in mallard poop, even when that poop is contaminated with other viruses. Scientists think that it’s possible that viruses, while not having a smell themselves, set off specific inflammatory processes that create signature mixtures of volatile chemicals that can be detected by sensitive noses.
If scientists could learn more about what chemicals make up these signatures, then engineers could potentially create “artificial noses” that could be trained to detect and diagnose viral infections long before there are symptoms. And that might give us a leg up on the next pandemic. Or we could just keep outsourcing to dogs.
CODY: So there’s this pretty cool life hack I’ve been using lately, and I learned about it from Curiosity Daily. Well, I thought it might be fun to dig it out of our archives and polish it up in case you missed it when we first ran it in 2018. So here’s the remastered cut, just for you.
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Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
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ASHLEY: The writer for today’s first story was Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also an audio editor on today’s episode.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: See if your dog can smell our podcast! Then, join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!