Learn about why cancer is stranger than we think and how scientists have “teleported” the behavior of real fish into robot fish.
Learn about why cancer is stranger than we think and how scientists have “teleported” the behavior of real fish into robot fish.
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Scientists "teleported" the real-time behavior of a real fish onto a robot fish by Grant Currin
Additional resources from Kat Arney:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-scientists-teleported-fish-behavior
[MUSIC PLAYING] ASHLEY HAMER: Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIE REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, Kat Arney is back to talk about why cancer is stranger than you think. You'll also learn about how scientists have teleported fish behavior.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's teleport some curiosity.
NATALIE REAGAN: Get ready for this, guys, I've got some big news for you. Scientists have mastered teleportation. OK, they've teleported behavior. OK, OK, they've teleported the behavior of a fish. But still, this is big news. Not only is it freaky and futuristic, it'll help us learn more about human behavior in the long run. The lucky aquatic organisms were a couple of zebrafish. They're a freshwater minnow native to South Asia in and around the Ganges River basin.
Zebrafish aren't endangered or particularly charismatic, but they are important. They're what's called a model organism. That means all kinds of researchers all over the world use zebrafish in their experiments. They're cheap and easy to raise. They reproduce quickly. And they're vertebrates just like us, which makes them good for biomedical research. Plus they're what everyone else uses.
And here's the thing, it works. Zebrafish research has led to a lot of important therapies for cancers and other diseases. And scientists studying their behavior have learned a lot about how activity in the brain makes the body do the things it does. All that to say, zebrafish have given us a lot. And now, researchers in New York have given a few members of the species an experience they'll never forget. Actually, they've probably already forgotten because they're zebrafish.
Just kidding, listen to yesterday's episode. Seriously, it's really cool. These researchers allowed their zebrafish subjects to teleport their behavior. Here's what the setup looked like. There were two separate tanks. Each one had a real zebrafish and a robotic zebrafish. Each tank also had an array of sensors that were designed to closely monitor what the real fish in the tank was doing. That data about the fish's actions is called an ethogram. That's etho as in ethology, which is the study of animal behavior.
The ethograms were processed by a program that made the robotic fish in the second tank behave exactly like the real fish in the first tank. The same setup was guiding both robotic fish, which means both real fish were interacting with each other's behavior. Fish A was interacting with the behavior of fish B in robot form and vice-versa. The system worked about 85% of the time with about 95% accuracy. Not bad for brand new tech.
So why did researchers go to all this trouble? It wasn't to thank zebrafish for all their hard work. In fact, the reason zebrafish were the first in the behavioral teleportation game is probably because of their status as model organisms. Researchers have already been using robot fish to study zebrafish behavior. But they've mostly been pre-programmed to act in a certain way. The scientists behind behavioral teleportation hope their new method will create more natural interactions with study organisms. And that will make it easier to understand why they do the things that they do.
That's crazy. Do you remember "Terminator 2"?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
NATALIE REAGAN: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is a terminator fish.
NATALIE REAGAN: Ah, I'll be back. Just a bunch of fish with the sunglasses. I see it now.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, I mean, they're already silver, so it's fine. I don't know if zebrafish are silver, but a lot of fish are silver.
NATALIE REAGAN: You mean they're not black and white with stripes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yesterday, we talked to Dr. Kat Arney about why we need to treat cancer as a rebel cell that can adapt and evolve within its environment. An environment that just so happens to be the human body. Today, we're going to dive deeper and explore the truly mind-blowing implications of that Kat Arney is a UK-based science writer, and broadcaster, and author of the new book "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal".
And if you thought cancer was just a mass of messed up cells, well, buckle up. Cancer cells are way more advanced than you might think. And Dr. Arney has three examples to prove it.
KAT ARNEY: Every innovation of evolution, we kind of see recapitulated in the microcosm of cancer. And the weirdest one, and this will blow your mind, is that sex evolves in cancers.
ASHLEY HAMER: What?
KAT ARNEY: Yeah, I know. And by sex, I mean, like biological sex. The evolution of sex happened way, way back in the history of time, where, basically, two cells fuse together and then produced, like, little cells from them. And that's the origin of biological sex. And that has happened a couple of times. And it was discovered a couple of years ago, a researcher called Ken Pienta at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. So there's been a few examples in the literature where people have said stuff like, I think that cancer cells can fuse together. And everyone was like, shut up, no, that makes things difficult.
But he did some really detailed experiments. He kind of built a little hunger games for cancer cells and let them loose in there. And he discovered that these cells were fusing together and becoming resistant to cancer therapy. And then, spitting out little cancer cells that were resistant to cancer therapy. And you're like, that is wild, because that's not then just the individual cells picking up changes and just splitting to become two new cells, this is cells coming together to share their genetic advances. And you're like, bloody hell.
The other thing that was very weird was there was a paper at the end of last year, a couple of papers that came out from a research group showing that brain tumor cells actually create synapses. They wire themselves in to the rest of the brain. Because, like, these are cells, they're still in a place, and they're still going to do what cells do. And I was like, wow. that is weird.
And then, the other thing that was very odd. So there's this idea that in order for cancers to really grow, they need to get a blood supply. And so there's this model, this idea that cancers send out molecules, signals going like, we're fricking starving over here. And they go to the blood vessels, and the blood vessels then start sprouting out little blood vessels to plumb into the cancer. And that's how cancers grow blood supply.
And so lots of people have been very interested in trying to block these signals and stop this process. And then, there was a woman called Mary Hendricks. This was a over a decade ago. She discovered in, I think, it was melanoma cells, that the melanoma cells were turning themselves into blood vessel cells and plumbing themselves back in. And you're like, whoa. And she called this vascular mimicry. And absolutely no one believed her.
And then, a couple of years ago, a man discovered it. And suddenly, everyone was like, wow, this is amazing. Yeah, so another researcher at the Cambridge Research Institute, obviously, in Cambridge in the UK, they discovered that breast cancer cells could also do this. And I'm like, that is also wild, that cancer cells aren't just this sort of blob, they are doing stuff. Like, they are creating their environment, they are doing things within it. They are working within the body.
And this idea that we need to think much more holistically, I hate that word because it's been sort of hijacked. But, like, this is a disease of tissue and of the body, not just mutant cells. So that was really kind of mind-blowing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, my mind is definitely blown. Again, Dr. Kat Arney is a UK-based science writer, and broadcaster, and author of the new book, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal". She's also the host of the Genetics Unzipped podcast. You can find links to all of that and more in today's show notes.
NATALIE REAGAN: Yeah, this interview, actually, mind blown.
ASHLEY HAMER: They can create their own synapses. I mean, come on, wild.
NATALIE REAGAN: That is some dedication to surviving. And also, the whole getting blood vessels to, hey, I'm hungry. I mean, that's what's so terrifying. It shows the will to survive. And that's why I think it's going to be interesting to see how scientists combat cancer going forward.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. And we really need that. So it's all good things. All right, well, let's do a quick recap of what we learned today. We learned that scientists could transport the behavior of real fish to robotic fish. And they wanted to do this, because they're hoping they can use it on other animals to better understand their behavior. I just hope they don't use it on humans very soon. Because I'm super creeped out already.
NATALIE REAGAN: Right. I don't know. I feel like if they taught humans to interpretive dance or something like that, that I could get behind. But I have a feeling that's not what they would use it for.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's basically the ultimate remote work environment, right. Like, instead of using Zoom to talk to each other like we are right now, we could be in the same room together. I could be here in my bedroom recording, but my robot would be there with you.
NATALIE REAGAN: They've done this with non-human primates, where they make, basically, an animatronic primate. They did it with mountain gorillas where they had an animatronic mountain gorilla basically spying on the other gorillas and taking in all the sounds, and movements, and everything. And they caught the gorilla singing. They caught the gorillas farting while they were eating. Which I'm like, I can relate to you, guys. And you could tell it had very stiff movements. So I think something like this could give them more authentic, realistic movements, which is also equally as terrifying.
ASHLEY HAMER: There's a viral tweet where someone says that animals don't experience the uncanny valley effect, which suggests that we must have had something in our evolutionary past that looked freaky and made us scared of it. And so it's, like, what scary thing that kind of looked like us existed for our ancestors? And how scary that is. I don't think it's true.
NATALIE REAGAN: I can tell you.
ASHLEY HAMER: What is it?
NATALIE REAGAN: Neanderthals.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. That's what-- I think that's what some people are saying, yeah. But, like, also, you don't know that animals don't experience the uncanny valley effect. I mean, those non-human primates are probably, like, get a load of this guy. He's really making my skin crawl, I don't know.
NATALIE REAGAN: Something's not right with Jim. But yeah, it's interesting to think about where the first instance of uncanny valley came from. Because there were at a certain point multiple hominin ancestors living at the same time. We had Neanderthals, Denisovans. And there's even another species that is yet to be discovered, but we know that their DNA is there. They weren't always in overlapping areas, but they could have been at certain points. And what did that look like? Did they look so different from us that we experienced uncanny valley or there's enough variation within our own species where we wouldn't have noticed much of a difference?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. But, like, I feel like the uncanny valley effect is different than seeing a species that looks a lot like you. Like, there's a tech, there's a robot artificial aspect to it that I don't think would come from seeing other human species. That's just me.
NATALIE REAGAN: I agree. I think that's why everybody was weirded out by Polar Express.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right, exactly. We are going to dig in deeper to the uncanny valley effect in a few weeks. So stay tuned for that.
NATALIE REAGAN: That's going to be good. Halloween is coming. We also learned that cancer cells are very smart, and savvy, and can adapt, and manipulate their environment in order to survive. From brain cells that create their own synapses and cancer cells that can actually hack into blood vessels in order to get the blood supply they need to survive. This was wild.
ASHLEY HAMER: Or even turn into blood vessels themselves. Totally wild.
NATALIE REAGAN: Oh gosh, it's terrifying.
ASHLEY HAMER: It really is.
NATALIE REAGAN: But also so cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know. It's like learning about zombies or something. Like, there's a fascination to it.
NATALIE REAGAN: Yeah, it's like we're being taken over by another organism. Rather than, again, like an undead sort of non-living entity, this is a living thing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah
NATALIE REAGAN: Today's first story was written by Grant Currin and edited by Ashley Hamer who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting and editing by Natalia Reagan. Our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIE REAGAN: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.