Today we discuss how a new piece of technology is able to transfer the data of the entire internet in just one second, how eating a lot of tomatoes can improve your gut health, and how scientists are looking into how medicine is processed in the body at different times of day.
Today we discuss how a new piece of technology is able to transfer the data of the entire internet in just one second, how eating a lot of tomatoes can improve your gut health, and how scientists are looking into how medicine is processed in the body at different times of day.
Internet Chip
Tomato Diet
Wrong Time Meds
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/internet-chip-tomato-diet-wrong-time-meds
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
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 a new piece of technology is able to transfer the data of the ENTIRE internet in just one second, how eating a lot of tomatoes can improve your gut health, and how scientists are looking into how medicine is processed in the body at different times of day.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Okay, Nate, what if I told you that there is now a way to download 230 million photos in one second?
NATE: Well, I would say that I don't really have any need for 230 million photos. I don't think I could possibly store them. And I would also be surprised to hear that there's any network on Earth fast enough to send that much data.
CALLI: Okay, so maybe not yet, but there will be soon. I am going to back you up real quick, though, and just say that I absolutely think I could take that many photos of my cats. Anyway, so an international team of scientists have set a new record for fastest data transfer ever. They created a custom computer chip that can send 1.8 petabytes of data in one second.
NATE: All right. That is a lot. Let's go over for a minute how much that is for our listeners, because.
CALLI: I could hardly grasp this number.
NATE: Without doing some research. I didn't really have a good sense of this. So a petabyte is the equivalent of 1 million gigabits, and a gigabit is the equivalent of 1000 megabits. It goes on and stacks like that. All of these words with the suffix bit are measurements of file size. So we're talking about time and space for how fast data travels from one point to another. An average person's home internet has a speed of maybe a few hundred megabits per second, and even that might be considered a better ISP than some. If you're really lucky, maybe you are in one of those cities that has fiber set up. You could be on a one gigabit or maybe even a ten gigabit connection. Those are really fast by most considerations and you're pretty lucky to have one.
CALLI: I think I've got a one gigabit and it is speedy.
NATE: Yeah, you know, I'm I'm not even on one gigabit. It handles everything I need just fine. So a 1.8 petabyte transfer is absolutely insane. That's more than 20 times faster than ESnet6, which is the scientific network used by NASA.
CALLI: I didn't even know that existed.
NATE: We're talking something two times faster than the entire global internet speed.
CALLI: It's absolutely nuts. And the researchers created this chip in the coolest way possible. They used a laser. So, I mean, there's that. One infrared laser used to create hundreds of different light frequencies imprinted with data. Give you sort of an idea of how this works. Each frequency is separated by a fixed distance, so imagine a brand new comb. Each needle is separated equally. That's how these light frequencies sort of work. It's one big comb, sort of brushing the hair of the Internet. They call this a frequency comb. It's a little bit hard to visualize if this isn't something you've been given a, you know, diagram of before.
NATE: But I do feel like maybe really understanding the technology behind this would require an advanced engineering degree. But I think that we can get the idea that laser frequencies are separated out and those are all able to move data, which sounds pretty neat.
CALLI: Exactly. This data encoded light was sent down a nearly eight kilometer long optical fiber that the researchers used to measure how much data was transferred. So here's the best part: we're talking about how big a petabyte of data is right? So yeah, they expected the chip to send a petabyte of data. That was the goal. What they weren't expecting was for that number to actually double. This is a massive. Yeah. So you would have to use a thousand commercially available lasers working at the same time to send the amount of data normally that they got. So accidentally trying to send a petabyte of data they sent close to 1.8 petabytes of data.
NATE: That's a very fortunate miscalculation on them. Like, rarely do accidents work out like, “Oh, I accidentally made double the profit I meant to,” you know, that doesn't happen a lot.
CALLI: Exactly! And that was the thing completely by accident. In the early stages of this experiment, researchers didn't optimize the chip for study yet, and they could, to quote, “Some of the characteristic parameters were achieved by coincidence and not by design.” So, again, I cannot get over the fact that this was an accident. However, it thankfully was something that they were able to do again, They were able to successfully reverse engineer the process so they could emulate it.
NATE: In addition to being this fantastic chip that's good for sending more data, there are other benefits. This could actually make the Internet as a whole more energy efficient just across the board. We talked a little bit in a past story about how some cryptocurrencies are considered unsustainable because of how much power they use. Well, the Internet as a whole also uses a lot of power and if Internet hubs and data centers that guzzle power and generate heat at high rates could have parts replaced, you could be replacing hundreds of thousands of lasers being used in these centers across the world, you could actually start making a dent in helping curb climate change.
CALLI: Yeah, and as always, with this sort of research, further development is needed before the chip can be used practically. But it's still really cool that it exists and it works. This is a huge find that researchers think is going to be kind of a no brainer for how communication systems are designed in coming decades. They are even developing a sort of theoretical model for a chip that might be able to transfer, get this 100 petabytes. So you can look forward to that.
NATE: I can't wait for this to be implemented because I have a library of 75,000 films that I need to be able to transfer in one second. And it sounds like this is what's going to let me do it.
CALLI: How many?
NATE: Don’t worry about it.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Surprise Calli! It's the Curiosity Daily pizza party. Ah, yeah. I hope you like your pizza. Extra saucy.
CALLI: Okay, first off, no. Um, so you might think you're kidding, but I actually think the sauce is the best part of a pizza. The problem for me, though, is that it normally gives me heartburn.
NATE: Ooh. Okay, well, let me tell you why maybe you should be willing to risk the heartburn. I'm throwing this particular pizza party in honor of a new study that has revealed what two weeks of a tomato heavy diet can do to your stomach. You got to ignore the heartburn, tomatoes can actually make you healthier, not just in the present, but in the long term, too.
CALLI: Okay, I am listening.
NATE: So it turns out tomatoes increase the diversity of gut microbes and they change your gut bacteria in a favorable way. This is coming from some researchers out of Ohio who got 20 pigs together and then they separated them in ten were fed a standard diet, and the other ten were given a diet of 10% tomato. They made sure that both sides had similar fiber, sugar, protein, fat and calories, and they made sure that both the control and study pig populations were living separately. Like these, researchers spent a lot of time making sure that the only real change that could be affecting any microbiome differences would be the diet and the amount of tomatoes they were consuming.
CALLI: Okay, What happened?
NATE: First, to start off the study, the researchers took fecal samples before the study and then another sample at weekly intervals to compare. They used a technique called shotgun metagenomics to sequence microbial DNA in the samples, and the results showed two main changes in the microbiomes of pigs given the tomato heavy diet. Firstly, the diversity of microbe species in their guts increased. And second, the concentrations of two specific types of bacteria shifted to a more favorable profile.
CALLI: I feel like I followed most of that, but I'm actually not familiar with what a favorable profile means.
NATE: Right. So these bacteria are known as bacteroidota and bacillota.
CALLI: Those are made up.
NATE: All words are made up. Yeah, someone made them up. I'm sure it's got a good scientific basis. That's what matters. So if a microbiome has more bacteroida than bacillota, you have a healthier gut, a healthier heart, and a healthier brain. So the pigs who eat a lot of tomatoes, this 10% of their diet was made of tomatoes. They developed growth of bacteroidota and a loss of bacillota, a.k.a. a more favorable bacteria profile.
CALLI: I feel like I've heard a bunch of old wives tales that date back hundreds of years where people have actually thought that tomatoes are bad for you, not just from like acid content, but for other reasons too.
NATE: I mean, that's more of a case of mistaken common knowledge than anything. So previous studies found two important factors that actually inspired this particular experiment. The first tomatoes account for 22% of the entire vegetable intake of a Western diet. And the second thing is consuming tomatoes is actually linked with reducing the risk of conditions like cardiovascular disease and certain cancers. So the researchers saw these two factors and thought, well, if it's good for those things, what about the gut?
CALLI: But you said we tested this on pigs. So what is the result for humans?
NATE: That is a good question and it is important to think about because pigs' GI tracts are more like that of a rodent’s than of a human’s. There are plenty of experiments we’ve performed on pigs, in lieu of humans, before. But the GI tract is one area that doesn't fully match up with ours. That said, the researchers do have high hopes that any research conducted on how tomatoes affect our GI tracts would be similar.
CALLI: Okay, so what I'm taking away from this is the pizza party we're about to have might leave me with heartburn and not a healthier gut.
NATE: We got to focus on the bright side. We do know that tomatoes are healthy and you'll be lowering the risk of some cancers, and you might get a healthier gut as well.
CALLI: All right. I mean, might is better than never. So I'm game.
NATE: Pizza time.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: So, Nate, did you do the taking medicine at different times of day will actually influence how well that medicine works and maybe even if it harms you?
NATE: You know, I did not know that. I'd never heard of that. Why is medicine harming us?
CALLI: So this actually has to do with the relationship between circadian rhythm and drug efficacy. And the relationship that is studying this through is called chronotherapy. This is the study of how the body responds to drugs at different times throughout the circadian clock. Chronotherapy discovered that the body produces different proteins at different times of day. So if you're taking a medication that relies on protein, it's obviously going to be more effective when you take it at a time the protein is already developing.
NATE: All right. I got to admit, I have never heard of chronotherapy before. Is this like a medicine that turns back time?
CALLI: Okay. No, not quite. And the thing is, is it's actually kind of a relatively new science. We've only been studying this since about the 1970s. And part of the problem with chronotherapy is many scientists aren't aware some drugs work better during certain parts of the day. Only four of 50 most commonly used medicines in the U.S. have directions at all, recommending usage at a specific time. The other issue is that most drugs haven't been studied for different effects at different times. But with recent innovations in chrono therapy, that's all going to change pretty dramatically, likely soon.
NATE: Why? What changes are in chronotherapy that are going to be advancing it? It still doesn't stop or slow down time, right? That's not the change.
CALLI: No, time doesn't change. I know. I'm so sorry. So chronotherapy’s actually made sort of a splash in mainstream in recent years because of one study from 2019 that looked at how tumor growth can ebb and flow due to circadian rhythms. So the conclusion was that certain breast cancer drugs should be administered in the morning to maximize drug efficacy. Another study investigated immune system activity and circadian cycles, wondering if NSAIDs could negatively affect bone healing if taken at the wrong time. And yes, they discovered that over-the-counter pain medicines may actually slow the rate of bone healing if taken too late in the evening.
NATE: Okay. I don't think I have any bones that need healing at the moment, but I'll definitely keep that in mind. What's the current study that they're learning new stuff about?
CALLI: The newest study is actually the one that concerns me the most. They were focused on a common preoperative sedative called midazolam. And in the past, midazolam was thought to suppress important protein development during circadian rhythms known to protect the heart from damage. So when the researchers took a closer look at nearly 2 million health records to see what the rates were like for post-operative heart complications in patients that were given midazolam at different times of day. It's a little bit bleak.
NATE: Bleak. How what did they find?
CALLI: Well, administering midazolam is associated with an increased risk of myocardial injury and noncardiac surgery during surgeries occurring at night. So what that breaks down to mean is that midazolam is really bad for your heart when you take it at night. And that means that midazolam interferes with the circadian rhythm in humans.
NATE: How bad is this? I don't have a medical degree. I'm not an anesthesiologist.
CALLI: That's fair.
NATE: What does this mean?
CALLI: All right. So analysis divided surgical procedures between the day 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and the night 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. for healthy patients. This is where it gets a little scary. Patients, given midazolam during nighttime surgeries were three times more likely to suffer heart damage. And again, remember, these weren't surgeries that people were going into that had anything to do with the heart whatsoever. It was just damaging them. Researchers admit more work is needed to better understand the specific midazolam circadian rhythm relationship. But these findings are a perfect example of how important it is to consider what time of day drugs are most effective.
NATE: So how can I know what the best time to take, you know, any given medication is?
CALLI: Okay. So unfortunately, other than NSAIDs like we talked about an anti-inflammatory drug, you shouldn't be taking those too late in the evening. But other than that, I don't know. Part of the challenge facing chronotherapies right now involves retroactively going back and creating optimal times to administer hundreds of medications. So there's a lot of work in figuring out what's already been laid out by the current research into the drug's effect on the circadian rhythm. For now, you can rest easy if the medication you're taking isn't actually causing you any harm.
NATE: Hopefully we can get a time travel drug later.
CALLI: We'll work on it.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Rest in peace, download times: your greatest enemy has arrived in the form of a computer chip that’s capable of sending information at a rate that’s DOUBLE the speed of the entire world’s internet. Experts believe that implementing a chip that can transfer data this quickly will also have the pleasant side effect of severely curbing climate change, since it would reduce energy emissions from data centers across the world!
NATE: Would you believe me if I told you that a diet rich in tomatoes could make your gut healthier? That’s what research out of Ohio suggests after a multi-week look at the gut microbiome of pigs fed a diet rich in tomatoes, which suggests that this sort of diet might actually lead to long term health benefits! Experiments haven’t yet been done on humans, but we might soon discover that a pizza-rich diet is healthier for us than we previously believed!
CALLI: Did you know that the time of day you take your medication might increase how good it is for you - and even, how harmful? Thankfully, a relatively new science known as Chronotherapy has developed that studies the link between drug efficacy and the body’s circadian rhythm and it’s constantly evolving to find new, more effective ways to take medicine. It may take a long time to retroactively schedule ALL medicines, but for the time being, rest assured that the work is being done to more effectively administer treatments for everybody!