Learn about how researchers may have figured out a way to cure the common cold; what exactly happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck the Earth; and, why researchers have been putting beatboxers in a real-time MRI machine. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Curing the Common Cold May Come down to this Simple Scientific Fix — https://curiosity.im/32PxIgz Here's What Happened the Day the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Struck Earth — https://curiosity.im/2lJOX2Y Watch a Beatboxer Inside a Real-Time MRI Machine — https://curiosity.im/32N4hM7 Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about how researchers may have figured out a way to cure the common cold; what exactly happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck the Earth; and, why researchers have been putting beatboxers in a real-time MRI machine.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/cure-for-the-common-cold-what-really-killed-the-dinosaurs-and-beatboxing-in-mri-machines
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how researchers may have figured out a way to cure the common cold; what exactly happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck the Earth; and, why researchers have been putting beatboxers in a real-time MRI machine.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Curing the Common Cold May Come down to this Simple Scientific Fix — https://curiosity.im/32PxIgz (Republish) (from Saturday 10/12) (Ashley)
Scientists may have figured out a way to cure the common cold. And as reported by Futurity, a new study suggests the solution could be as simple as temporarily disabling a single protein inside our cells.
By “cold’ I mean “noninfluenza-related upper respiratory infection.” At least half of all colds are the result of rhinovirus infections, and those fall under roughly 160 known different types. And while they’re common, the challenge to cure them is not easy. To make matters worse, rhinoviruses are quick to develop drug resistance, and to evade vaccines.
But Stanford University researchers have found a way to stop a broad range of enteroviruses, including rhinoviruses, from replicating inside human cells in culture, as well as in mice.
To do this, they simply disabled a protein in mammalian cells that all enteroviruses seem to need in order to replicate. Enteroviruses are like any other virus in that they use protein in the cells they infect to make more of themselves.
For this study, researchers generated cultured lines of human cells that enteroviruses could infect. Then they used gene editing to randomly disable a single gene in each of the cells.
The scientists infected the cultures with enteroviruses and found just a handful of individual genes whose absence stifled the success of the enteroviruses. One of these genes in particular stood out, the gene that encodes an enzyme called SETD3.
In a later experiment, the researchers found that cells that lacked the SETD3 enzyme had a thousand-fold reduction in viral replication, compared to that of cells that had it.
Most importantly, the mice that were bioengineered to lack SETD3 grew to adulthood while staying apparently healthy and fertile, and stayed impervious to infection by two distinct enteroviruses.
According to the researchers, this means there is the possibility of developing an antiviral drug against not only the common cold, but maybe all enteroviruses, without disturbing SETD3’s regular function in our cells.
Here's What Happened the Day the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Struck Earth — https://curiosity.im/2lJOX2Y (from Friday 10/11) (Cody)
New research from the crater in the Yucatan Peninsula is helping researchers understand exactly what happened on the day the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck the Earth. You know — the asteroid that hit us with the force of a hundred million atomic bombs. It’s officially known as the Chicxulub Impactor, and it was at least 6 miles (or 10 kilometers) in diameter. Possibly larger! When the asteroid landed in the Gulf of Mexico, the impact pushed rock out from the asteroid and then up into the sky like the splash from a cannonball at a pool party. The event forced rock from 6 miles below the surface outward and upward, forming a ring of peaks around the crater. And for a new study published in September 2019, researchers took a closer look at geological clues to see what happened next. They started by drilling in and around the crater, then figuring out what types of rock were in the samples they collected. Most of the rock they found had been created during the impact, but it’s actually what the scientists DIDN’T find in the crater that makes the resaerch so important. The normal rock in the area around the crater is full of the mineral sulfur. But when the researchers examined the samples taken from the crater itself, they found very little sulfur. This new data actually supports a long-standing theory that explains why this North American asteroid collision was so important to the history of the planet: it wasn't the tsunami, the wildfires, or the asteroid impact itself that spelled doom for the dinosaurs. It was the global cool-down that happened in the following weeks and years. And what was behind the big chill? All the sulfur that was vaporized when the asteroid hit. Sulfur is incredibly effective at cooling the planet. When volcanoes or asteroid impacts send sulfur into the stratosphere, it combines with water to create tiny droplets that blanket the Earth and reflect sunlight back into space. Plenty of dinosaurs died in the immediate aftermath, but it was that shift in Earth's climate that wiped out around 75 percent of life on the planet, including the dinosaurs. The collision kicked up at least 325 billion metric tons of sulfur-bearing minerals, and that’s what caused the global haze that made temperatures on the planet plummet. And this cataclysmic event is why some people are considering sulfur as the main ingredient in a drastic fix to global warming. Maybe millions of years ago, 75 percent of life on Earth died so we could learn from the asteroid and find a path to save our planet today. Who knows?
Watch a Beatboxer Inside a Real-Time MRI Machine — https://curiosity.im/32N4hM7 (Ashley)
So, a beatboxer walks into a real-time MRI machine. [pause] No, that’s not the setup for a joke; it’s the setup to a story about a scientific study! Plenty of people can mimic sounds with their mouths, but beatboxers, take things to a whole new level. They can realistically create every bass beat, snare hit, record scratch, and melody line in a single track, all with their voices. And a research team from the University of Southern California wanted to know how they do what they do. What they ended up with is some jaw-dropping footage of the beatboxers’ vocal tracts in action.
Beatboxing might sound like a weird thing for scientists to research, but it actually has the potential to solve a lot of deep mysteries. It could help us better understand things like how human communication starts as a mental representation and becomes a produced sound; whether people tend to use different approaches to creating the same sounds; and how people learn to use their vocal equipment in the first place.
Since 2006, the team has put five different beatboxers of various experience levels inside a real-time MRI machine to watch what happens inside the beatboxer's mouth and vocal tract as they perform.
So, what have they found? Turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that beatboxers create a lot of the same sounds you find in human language. One sound that's common to both language and beatboxing is what linguists call an "ejective," which is a sort of popping consonant you make when both your mouth and vocal folds cut off air flow, and the larynx rises to push air through the vocal closure. You find these sounds pretty regularly in Native American and African languages, but not in English. The researchers also observed sounds that you don't find in language at all. One of those sounds being an "inward K," which beatboxers produce by breathing in while making a "crisp, percussive sound"
Breathing in to produce certain sounds helps beatboxers keep the beat going without stopping to take a breath.
You can actually see video footage of this research in our full write-up on this story, which you can find a link to in today’s show notes or by heading over to curiosity-dot-com. But the takeaway is that there's exciting potential in beatboxing as a way to not only answer scientific questions, but also to give beatboxers and vocalists a novel glimpse into their art form — not to mention give doctors and clinicians new ways to help their patients.
CODY: And now, let’s recap what we learned today. Today we learned that scientists may have a lead on finding a cure for the common cold, by disabling a single protein.
ASHLEY: And that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was so deadly because it displaced so much sulfer, which caused temperatures on the planet to plummet. And that’s why researchers are considering sulfur as an ingredient in the recipe to somehow fix global warming.
CODY: We also learned that researchers have learned a lot about the way we produce sounds by studying beatboxers in real-time MRI machines.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Stay curious!