Today we talk about how psilocybin from magic mushrooms can help those struggling with alcohol addiction, a new device that can detect Parkinson’s disease from breathing patterns, and how we can recycle wind turbines.
Today we talk about how psilocybin from magic mushrooms can help those struggling with alcohol addiction, a new device that can detect Parkinson’s disease from breathing patterns, and how we can recycle wind turbines.
Magic Addiction Fix
Parkinson’s Detection
Wind Turbines
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/magic-addiction-fix-parkinsons-detection-wind-turbines
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 psilocybin from magic mushrooms can help those struggling with alcohol addiction, a new device that can detect Parkinson’s disease from breathing patterns, and how we can recycle wind turbines!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, we’ve had a few stories about psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in many mushrooms, recently.
NATE: You mean magic mushrooms? Do we have another story? All the others seem to be about this compound being pretty effective for helping with mental disorders, right?
CALLI: That’s right! And I have another, similarly encouraging story about psilocybin helping with another medical issue, except this time it is alcoholism. A new study found that participants who both took psilocybin and engaged in talk therapy had an astounding 83% decline in heavy drinking!
NATE: Oh wow! That’s great. I’m not really a drinker myself but I know it can be really difficult to quit for those who struggle with alcohol dependency.
CALLI: Oh very hard. Nearly 15 million people in the US over the age of 12 have alcohol use disorder, or alcoholism. It's a disease where you become unable to control your drinking and have mental and physical dependence on alcohol. Each year 140,000 Americans die from alcohol-related causes. It's the third leading cause of preventable death! And yet, the effects of treatments and medications we have are usually pretty small. There’s only 3 approved conventional drugs, and there hasn’t been a new one in the last 20 years, so there’s definitely a need for new research.
NATE: Wow, those are some big numbers. So any sort of improvement in getting people away from heavy drinking would be a really big deal! What did this study look like?
CALLI: The researchers had 93 patients looking to fight their alcoholism. All of these participants had two medication sessions separated by four weeks, as well as 12 psychotherapy sessions, where they would talk with a therapist. They had four before the first dose, four after the first dose, and four after the second dose.
NATE: Were they all receiving psilocybin?
CALLI: No, the study needed a control, so, many of the participants received a placebo. Either way, all participants went to the medication session, took either the drug or the placebo, and laid back on a couch with eyeshaders and headphones playing a standardized playlist.
NATE: A study where you get magic mushrooms and they play the tunes? That doesn’t sound too bad. So what happened!
CALLI: About half of the participants who had the psilocybin stopped drinking entirely just eight months after taking that first dose! The therapy alone helped as well though, to lesser results. About a quarter of the placebo takers ended up quitting drinking as well.
NATE: That’s pretty promising. Do they know why it was so effective?
CALLI: Researchers aren’t sure what exactly it does to the brain. It might increase connections, or shift how our brains are organized, letting us find new ways and angles to address persistent problems. But even so, for some of the participants, the results were impressive. One said it saved his life and eliminated his cravings for alcohol entirely, and another woman who had been having more than 5 or 6 drinks a day said it made alcohol seem irrelevant to her.
NATE: But how did these people know they had gotten the psilocybin and not the placebo?
CALLI: That is one of the drawbacks of the study. Because psilocybin is psychedelic, most participants could guess which treatment they had which is a major limitation to the data. Some even described experiences of soaring over landscapes. I should also mention that the study also only had a 32-week observation period after treatment, so it doesn’t reflect any potential relapses.
NATE: Still, the results are so impressive. Will they continue the study?
CALLI: Yes! Next year they’ll be doing a multi-site trial with more than 200 participants. And they’re even hoping to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment.
NATE: Well let’s hope it all goes well! Too many people die each year from these alcohol-related causes and it sounds like we need some updated treatments for addiction.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, we’ve had some really interesting stories in the past few months about technology and AI helping us fight diseases, and today, I’ve got another one for you!
CALLI: What are we tackling today? Cancer? Huntington’s Disease? LUPUS?
NATE: Parkinson’s Disease! Researchers just created an AI empowered device that is able to detect the presence and severity of Parkinson’s in patients, all while they sleep. What’s even better, it doesn’t even have to touch the patient, it can just listen to their breathing!
CALLI: Oh wow! I can’t wait to figure out how it does that, but first, please remind me what Parkinson’s looks like.
NATE: Right, right. It's the fastest-growing neurological disease in the world, and the second most common in the US, behind only Alzheimer’s. It often causes uncontrolled movements like tremors, stiffness, or slowness. Often, these symptoms are the first clue that a patient has Parkinson’s, even though the disease likely set in years before. In the US alone, roughly 1 million people have the disease.
CALLI: And with all those people, we still haven’t found a better way to detect the disease than the onset of symptoms?
NATE: We’ve tried things like testing cerebrospinal fluid, or doing neuroimaging, but they’re both too expensive and difficult to do often enough to detect the disease early. And most of those tests require a robust medical center.
CALLI: So then what is this device able to detect that our biggest hospitals couldn’t.
NATE: Well they took inspiration from Dr. James Parkinson, who was the first to describe the disease. In 1817 he noted that patients with these motor function issues also had irregular breathing. So, the researchers decided to look at breathing patterns of 7,687 individuals, including 757 Parkinson's patients, while they slept.
CALLI: How did they do that without completely ruining the participants' sleep!
NATE: The researchers created a small device that could go in the participants' bedrooms. This device emitted radio signals, then analyzed the signal's reflections in the room, and then extracted the breathing patterns from these reflections, all without having to touch the participants.
CALLI: Extracted the breathing patterns from all the radio reflections in the room? That would take so much computing power!
NATE: That’s why they processed the data with what’s called a neural network which is a system of connected Artificial intelligence algorithms that work together and learn like a brain. By listening to all the participants, and those who had confirmed Parkinson’s Disease, the neural network was able to learn the breathing patterns of the disease. With this knowledge, the small device was able to detect Parkinson’s, its severity, and how it progressed over time, all without any effort from the participant, other than sleeping
CALLI: That’s incredible! So where do we go from here? Will we see these devices more and more in the near future?
NATE: Of course, there is more research that needs to be done, but researchers say this is a big step forward in evaluating the disease and how it affects patients. Soon it might be a way to provide early detection in underserved communities.
CALLI: With more than a million Americans already having the disease, this is a big deal.
NATE: Absolutely, thanks to AI and a little inspiration from James Parkinson himself.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, did you know that one day soon, we might be able to eat windmills?
NATE: What, is someone going to make a windmill with giant leaf blades?
CALLI: Nope, fiberglass. Researchers recently created a new resin, the material that holds the structural fibers in fiberglass together, that can be recycled into usable, and valuable, materials, including food preservatives. This new technology will cut down wind turbine waste, and make the green technology even greener.
NATE: Are we really all that worried about recycling windmills? I mean there can’t be that many of them, and they must last forever.
CALLI: You might think that, but wind turbine blades only last about 20 years. For a quarterback like Tom Brady, that's a long time, but for the thousands upon thousands of wind turbines around the country, each with blades over 170 feet long, that timeline is a problem. Researchers say that by 2050 we will create about 2 million tons of decommissioned turbine blade waste….every…single…year.
NATE: What! Can’t we just melt them down and make new things out of them?
CALLI: Ah see, Nate, I thought this at first too, but turbine blades aren’t made out of metal, they’re made of fiberglass which is both strong and light. We shape the glass fibers into the shape we want, and then set them with a resin. It is actually possible to recycle fiberglass at the end of its lifespan, but it's a complicated process. So more often than not, it's just cheaper to bury the big old blades.
NATE: That would be one big freakin hole. So why is this new material better? Didn’t you say it was still used in fiberglass?
CALLI: Right. But researchers created a new resin to help set the glass fibers. The whole time they designed the resin, they kept thinking about what they’d do with it when it was no longer strong enough to use as a turbine blade. How would they recycle it? Thankfully for all of us, they figured it out, and created a new resin made from plants.
NATE: And there is a way to recycle it, AND make money from what it gets recycled into?
CALLI: A few of them! The simplest is to just crush it up, and then add some sticky stuff to make a plastic material that can be shaped into things like computer cases, but that isn’t worth all that much money. You can also just remake the blades! Researchers found a way to dissolve the resin off of the glass fibers, collect it, and then reuse it to make new fiberglass with the same strength as the original! They also found that when you heat the resin up to super high temperatures, it transforms into a super absorbent material for things like diapers.
NATE: Ah so we could clean up the mess of recycling fiberglass, while cleaning up a whole other mess!
CALLI: Exactly! Researchers found that if they kept processing the resin after heating it, eventually they could make potassium lactate…a chemical used to preserve food…like gummy bears.
NATE: Gummy bears!? Made from wind turbines? That's like the softest food made from the hardest construction materials! I’m not sure I really want to eat that!
CALLI: Ha, I don't blame you Nate! And I don’t think the researchers would either. They said they don’t think food is the right path toward recycling our turbine waste, but they wanted to see how far they could push the boundaries to make people think creatively about recycling.
NATE: Well they sure got me thinking. If we aren’t going to make food, when will I see this new resin in diapers and computer cases?
CALLI: There is still a lot of work to be done, but whenever they do figure it out, you’ll still have to wait another 20 years. Because even though it can be recycled, this new resin has a full life ahead of it as a wind turbine first!
NATE: Well I hope other industries can follow this lead, and make our green world even greener!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: For those struggling with alcoholism, there may soon be a new hope: psilocybin from magic mushrooms. When combined with talk therapy, taking the psychedelic helped about half the study’s participants quit drinking entirely after only 8 weeks.
NATE: New hope is coming to the world of detecting and treating the country’s second most common neurological disease, Parkinson’s. Researchers have created a small AI-enabled device that is able to detect the presence and progression of the disease, all without even touching the patient, based on their breathing.
CALLI: Wind turbine waste will soon be a big problem, to the tune of 2 million tons of used blade material by 2050. Thankfully, researchers created a new fiberglass resin that can be recycled into some pretty surprising materials.