Learn about a medical mystery involving blindness and schizophrenia; a new bacteria scientists developed to help protect honeybees; and the surprising strength of helmets used in World War I.
Learn about a medical mystery involving blindness and schizophrenia; a new bacteria scientists developed to help protect honeybees; and the surprising strength of helmets used in World War I.
No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia by Andrea Michelson
Scientists have engineered bacteria to protect honeybees from colony collapse by Grant Currin
WWI helmets protected against shock waves as well as modern ones by Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/no-one-born-blind-has-had-schizophrenia-bacteria-engineered-to-protect-honeybees-and-the-surprising-way-wwi-helmets-beat-modern-ones
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 medical mystery involving blindness and schizophrenia; a new bacteria scientists developed to help protect honeybees; and the surprising strength of helmets used in World War I.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
No one who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and scientists don’t know why.
This medical mystery goes against everything that is known about blindness and psychosis. In an article for VICE, science journalist Shayla Love explained that most factors that cause people to be born blind should actually increase the risk of developing schizophrenia. Vision abnormalities that develop later in life also seem to have a link with schizophrenia — unusual eye movements or retina problems make it more likely for someone to develop the disorder. Still, scientists have scoured datasets encompassing as many as half a million children, and they have yet to find a single case of a person who was born blind developing schizophrenia.
But while scientists don’t have an explanation, they do have some theories. One theory? Blindness comes with some unique neurological advantages, and many of them match up with the deficits associated with schizophrenia. People born blind typically perform better on hearing tasks compared to sighted people, probably because their brains repurposed the space usually devoted to visual information for those other senses. That ability for the brain to adapt is called neuroplasticity, and it may explain why blind people might also have stronger working memories or quicker reaction times to sound or touch. And like I said, what’s interesting is how perfectly these skills map onto areas where people with schizophrenia might suffer. A University of Rochester psychiatrist named Steve Silverstein made a chart tracking these skills, and he found a clear inverse correlation between the advantages of being blind and the problems associated with schizophrenia.
Another theory deals with how people model the world around them to make predictions. One study of people who developed schizophrenia found that they were clumsy as children, almost as if their predictive modeling was off. On the other hand, people who are blind might have stronger mental models. Without any visual input, they have to create an internal model of their world based on other senses. Scientists recently argued that this model may be more stable than the one sighted people use to make predictions. For now, this science is purely theoretical. But it’s a promising way to learn more about what happens in the brains of people with schizophrenia. The answer might be somewhere in the dark.
There might finally be some good news for bees, thanks to two genetically modified strains of bacteria. Researchers say these new bacteria can protect bees from the dreaded Varroa mite [vuh-ROW-uh] and the viruses it spreads.
And we could use some good news in this area, because honeybees are in deep trouble. For more than a decade, a phenomenon called colony collapse has caused mass die-offs in hundreds of thousands of hives just in the United States. Last winter was the worst on record: U.S. beekeepers lost nearly 40 percent of their colonies when worker bees vanished. One of the culprits is the Varroa mite, a tiny parasite less than 2 millimeters long that survives by feasting on the liver tissue of honeybees. They’re also vectors for viruses, including the deadly deformed wing virus.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently announced that they’d created an ingenious solution to fight against these causes of colony collapse disorder. Bees have microbes in their guts just like we do, and these researchers have engineered bacteria that can live alongside the bees’ normal gut microbes. The new bacteria are designed to produce molecules that protect their hosts against Varroa mites and deformed wing virus. In other words, the bacteria make medicine for the bees they’re living inside of!
The researchers designed two strains of bacteria to protect the bees. One helps them fight the mites, and the other targets the virus. The bacteria haven’t been used at an industrial scale, but lab tests are promising. Bees with the mite-fighting bacteria were about twice as likely as normal bees to survive 10 days with mites feeding on them, and bees with anti-viral bacteria were more than 35 percent as likely to survive for 10 days after being exposed to deformed wing virus.
The bacteria both work by triggering the bees’ natural defense mechanism against viruses, called RNA interference. The antivirus bacteria gets this defense mechanism ready to fight viruses the moment they make their way into the insect. At the same time, the anti-mite bacteria hijack the mite’s own RNA interference system, which causes the parasites’ immune systems to go overboard and eventually kill them.
There’s still a lot of testing left to do. But the researchers say the bacteria are super-specialized to live in bee guts, so there isn’t a risk of spreading into the environment. They also believe that they can scale up their technique for use in agriculture. Here’s hoping these tiny drug factories can help honeybees find relief.
It turns out that combat helmets from World War I protected soldiers from shock waves just as well as modern helmets do. Surprised? So were the Duke University researchers who discovered this.
There are a lot of ways a soldier can be hurt on the battlefield. Helmets were originally designed to protect the head from penetrating objects like bullets and shrapnel, but not necessarily a shock wave from a nearby blast. After all, if a soldier was hit by a shock wave, the lung trauma would kill them long before the brain trauma would. But over time, improvements in body armor have tipped that balance. Now that soldiers’ chests are better protected, rates of lung trauma from shock waves are lower than the rates of brain trauma. As a result, we’re just beginning to understand the brain damage that shock waves can cause.
The thing is, soldiers a hundred years ago faced the same battlefield conditions as today — and in fact, trench warfare put them in prone positions that exposed their heads to more shock waves than their bodies. So biomedical engineering researchers wondered if those older helmets had any lessons to teach us. To find out, they pit modern helmets against ones from World War I.
The researchers equipped a dummy head with pressure sensors and dressed it in different helmets worn by French, German, British, and American soldiers during World War I, along with the advanced combat helmet that U.S. troops wear today. Then they placed the head under a shock tube and pumped helium into a membrane-covered section at the opposite end. When the membrane finally burst, it released a shock wave directly at the helmet. Scientists tested the helmets against various strengths of shock that corresponded to different types of German artillery shells exploding at different distances.
On average, all of the helmets performed about the same — regardless of whether they were cutting-edge models or a century old. They all reduced the risk of moderate brain bleeding by five to 10 percent. But the surprising part? The 1915 French helmet did a better job than any of them, at least on the very top of the helmet. That may be because this particular helmet had a crest on top, which might have deflected some of the shock waves.
That shows how important a simple design change can be for a helmet’s blast protection. With these new insights, scientists may be able to take advantage of modern materials to engineer even better protective gear to keep soldiers safer on the battlefield.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Andrea Michelson, Grant Currin, and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was 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!
