Learn about how to use focused attention to ease the memory of a traumatic event; why extreme temperatures mess with your batteries, and what you can do about it; and how researchers used machine learning to discover a powerful antibiotic for the first time.
Learn about how to use focused attention to ease the memory of a traumatic event; why extreme temperatures mess with your batteries, and what you can do about it; and how researchers used machine learning to discover a powerful antibiotic for the first time.
Researchers ease the memory of traumatic events by having patients focus on neutral details by Kelsey Donk
Why Extreme Temperatures Mess With Your Batteries by Ashley Hamer: https://curiosity.com/topics/heres-why-extreme-temperatures-drain-your-batteries-curiosity
A powerful antibiotic was discovered using machine learning for the first time by Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/new-antibiotic-discovered-by-ai-how-to-handle-traumatic-memories-and-why-extreme-temperatures-mess-with-your-batteries
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 a trick for easing the memory of a traumatic event; why extreme temperatures mess with your batteries, and what you can do about it; and how researchers used machine learning to discover a powerful antibiotic for the first time.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Researchers have identified a pretty effective way to ease the memory of traumatic events. And I mean, you know that bad things happen sometimes — that’s just a fact. Once in a while, the memory of a bad thing can do even more damage than the thing itself. But recent research suggests that a strategy called “focused attention” could help people recover from memories like this. Basically, if you focus your attention on neutral aspects of the scene, you might remember less about the most painful parts.
Strong emotions can make memories more vivid. That’s great when you want to remember your wedding day, but not so great when you want to forget a car crash. For some people, traumatic memories like those can play and replay in their minds for years. That kind of obsessive recollection can lead to PTSD or depression. That’s especially risky for people whose jobs require them to encounter some emotionally challenging stuff, like first responders, therapists, and teachers. But regardless of your occupation, this strategy could really take the emotional sting out of painful or traumatic memories.
There are two ways this “focused attention” strategy can help: when you experience an event in the first place, and when you recall it afterward. A recent study on the first approach had people take a look at some pictures of things that were either neutral, like trees, or negative, like bloody faces, and focus on either what was in the foreground or what was in the background.
Later, when the participants were asked to recall what they’d seen, the people who focused on neutral background details rated the photos as less negative — and they remembered them in less detail — compared to the people who’d focused on the disturbing foreground objects. Brain scans confirmed that activity in their emotion and memory centers was actually reduced.
That means that if you’re a first responder helping someone with an injury, your memory might carry less weight if you focusing on the color of the person’s shirt or the time on their watch.
The same is true when you remember something traumatic. The participants in a recent study who focused on non-emotional, contextual details of their memories found them to be less distracting and disruptive than those who focused on the more emotional aspects of their recollections.
So if there’s a memory that’s causing you pain, focus on the boring details. Over time, it might become less painful. Usually, people are focused on improving their memories. But in this case, forgetting is a good thing.
Why is it that extreme temperatures mess with batteries? If you’ve ever seen your phone battery go into the red on a winter hike or at a summer music festival, you know what I’m talking about. And no, it’s not just you — it’s science. Here’s what’s going on, and what you can do to extend your battery life.
Nearly every battery is made up of three basic parts: two electrodes, an electrolyte, and a separator. The electrodes sit on each end of the battery; the positive electrode is called the cathode, and the negative electrode is called the anode. The electrolyte sits between them. That’s some substance that contains electrically charged particles called ions, usually a liquid or gel. The separator keeps the cathode and the anode from coming into contact and short-circuiting.
When you put batteries in, say, a flashlight, you're completing a circuit. That is, you’re making it so the chemical energy in the electrolyte can convert to electrical energy, travel out of the cathode and into the light bulb, and return in a closed loop into the anode. That conversion into electrical energy happens thanks to a chemical reaction that takes place between the atoms in the electrodes and the ions in the electrolyte.
Got all that? Okay, so let’s get into what that has to do with battery life.
There's a particular rule in chemistry called the Arrhenius [uh-RAY-nee-uss] equation, which says that the higher the temperature, the faster a chemical reaction will take place. So when your phone is baking in the summer sun, the chemical reactions in the battery go into overdrive and drain your charge. Same goes for winter weather: colder temperatures slow down the reactions so much that the battery can’t keep up with your phone’s demand. The reactions are too fast when it’s hot, and too slow when it’s cold.
As for how you can deal with this, there’s not much you can do about a hot battery: once you cool it down, you’ll have to charge it back up. But if you warm up a super-cold battery, it’ll power your device just fine. In fact, that slow discharge rate in the cold is also the reason some people store batteries in the fridge or freezer, although that's not necessary. As long as your battery is in a dry place at normal room temperature, it’ll live a long, strong life.
Researchers at MIT say they’ve used artificial intelligence to discover a powerful new antibiotic. The drug is called halicin [HAL-iss-in], and it’s proven effective against dangerous strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Since more and more bacteria are showing antibiotic resistance, that’s a very good thing.
Here’s how it all went down. The researchers started off by teaching a deep learning algorithm what chemical features make for a good antibiotic. They did that by feeding it information on nearly 2,500 known compounds, including data on how effectively each of them could fight E. coli. Once it had learned the ropes, the researchers had the algorithm analyze a new database of more than 6,000 compounds — ones that had previously been identified as potential drugs. Importantly, the algorithm focused on spotting compounds that were likely to be effective but ALSO had a different molecular structure from the antibiotics we’re using today. It’s sort of like if you searched for the world’s best basketball players, but focused on the ones that shoot granny style. They’re still effective, even if their approach is a little different.
That different approach is important because a lot of the antibiotics doctors currently prescribe use similar plans of attack against bacteria. That means that once a strain of bacteria develops resistance to one antibiotic, it’s relatively easy for it to develop resistance to other antibiotics.
In this search for new drugs, the big stand out was a molecule called SU3327. The researchers renamed it “halicin” after the computer HAL from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The funny thing is that halicin wasn’t made to be an antibiotic. It was originally developed to treat diabetes, but it didn’t make it through the many rounds of clinical trials required for it to hit the big time.
Once the researchers identified halicin as a potential antibiotic, they pitted the drug against some nasty bacteria, like E. coli and the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. The new antibiotic was successful in both cases. They also tested whether halicin could help mice that had infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Again, the new drug was successful.
Now, this new discovery has its critics. Other scientists say that halicin is probably only good as a topical antibiotic, not as a treatment for more serious systemic infections. But many applaud this new AI method, and the researchers behind it are already hot on the trail of their next discovery. They’ve started using their algorithm to search through a new database with information on more than 1.5 billion compounds. After analyzing just over a million of those records, the algorithm has identified 23 of the compounds as potential additions to our antibiotic arsenal. Fingers crossed that AI can turn this antibiotic-resistant ship around.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Ashley Hamer, and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!