Today you’ll learn about the SpaceX Dragon Capsule, which recently landed back on Earth after visiting the ISS, how scientists are trying to build robots with a brain, and how a potential new treatment for cancer is seeing success in Israel.
Today you’ll learn about the SpaceX Dragon Capsule, which recently landed back on Earth after visiting the ISS, how scientists are trying to build robots with a brain, and how a potential new treatment for cancer is seeing success in Israel.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/spacex-crew-returns-robots-with-brains-cancer-treatment
SpaceX Crew Returns
Robots With Brains
Cancer Treatment
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[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 the SpaceX Dragon Capsule, which recently landed back on earth after visiting the ISS, how scientists are trying to build robots with a brain, and how a potential new treatment for cancer is seeing success in Israel.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: So Floridians recently reported a fireball streaking across the sky.
CALLI: Was it a D and D campaign gone wrong? Was it a video game that got lost or was it a UFO?
NATE: More. More like an IFO.
CALLI: Oh, well, that's. Boring, but identified Flying Object. All right, so what was it?
NATE: It was the SpaceX Dragon capsule, the C 210 endurance coming home from the International Space Station after spending the past five months orbiting the planet.
CALLI: Okay, I take it back. That is not boring. That is awesome. Also also five months! That is a long time in space.
NATE: 157 days to be exact. They conducted some 200 science experiments and tech demonstrations while they're up there, including experiments with heart muscle cells, a study on how liquids move under simulated lunar gravity, and an attempt to grow dwarf tomatoes called the Veg-05 investigation.
CALLI: So sounds like the kind of stuff you'd need to know if you wanted to. I don't know.
CALLI: Live on Mars.
NATE: Right. But while the experiments were pretty great, the coolest part of this mission had everything to do with the craft and the crew. The four members were.
CALLI: Out of this world.
NATE: Oh, boy. That was astronomically bad.
CALLI: But thank you.
NATE: But yes, they were out of this world. Mission Commander Nicole Mann became the first Native American woman in space and Anna Kikina became the first Russian to catch a ride on a private American spacecraft.
CALLI: Dude, that is incredible.
NATE: That's not even all. It was Mann, Kikina and American pilot Josh Cassada's first trip into space, and Japanese crewmember Koichi Wakata became the only Japanese astronaut to log five trips to orbit. And he's lived a total of 505 days in space.
CALLI: And you mentioned that this was a private spacecraft.
NATE: Right. The famous Dragon spacecraft is built by SpaceX and flown in partnership with NASA. It's really amazing. You can see videos of it all over the place. And right now, it's the only spacecraft that can carry such heavy loads back to Earth, including up to seven passengers. It's also the first private spacecraft to shuttle people to the ISS.
CALLI: And this wasn't its first trip to the space station, right?
NATE: Not even close. It's been there 34 times and counting. In fact, this was the Crew five mission and the Crew six mission is already docked at the ISS.
CALLI: Were they there at the same time?
NATE: Yes. The Crew five team spent their final week in space handing over the keys, as it were, to the crew six team. We're planning on a six month stay.
CALLI: That is a lot of space time.
NATE: It really is. And traveling close to five miles per second, They orbit the Earth every 90 minutes or so.
CALLI: Okay, so what's next?
NATE: Kind of a lot. The partnership between NASA and SpaceX continues to develop, but there are other private spacecraft companies vying for contracts, including a little outfit called Boeing.
CALLI: I've heard of it.
NATE: You have, most people have, their Starliner spacecraft is docked with the ISS in the past and is looking to schedule a manned mission sometime this year. Not to be outdone, SpaceX is working on a massive spacecraft they call the Starship, and they are designing for extended space travel.
CALLI: Okay, so maybe they'll be growing those dwarf tomatoes on Mars. After all.
NATE: That is the plan. Although I wouldn't skip dinner just yet. The trip to the ISS might be one giant step, but a trip to Mars is one giant leap.
CALLI: You said my jokes were bad.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, the robots are coming.
NATE: I have to go. Headed my secret bunker. I don't have a secret bunker. What are you. What are you talking about?
CALLI: I mean, you don't need to, like, go dive into your secret bunker just yet.
CALLI: This is actually an awesome story. Dr. Russell Brinkworth is an associate professor for Autonomous systems at Flinders University, and he says he is developing robots that can interpret the data they intake.
NATE: So they can understand what they're seeing.
CALLI: Basically, yes.
NATE: Why am I not in my bunker, like, know about like the Terminator, Right.
CALLI: This is more like RoboCop.
NATE: Really? Not much better.
CALLI: Okay, I guess you're right. But before you panic, let's talk about what's really going on here and why it's a big deal and really, really cool.
NATE: Okay, I'm all ears.
CALLI: Dr. Brinkworth sees a problem with Current. Robots or automated systems, and that is that they sort of just perform the same thing over and over. He uses the example of the car assembly line, which uses robotics to essentially build cars. Each robot performs the same motion over and over and over, which is great, but only in a controlled environment where everything happens the same way every time.
NATE: Okay, but what about those robot dogs that are all over YouTube? Those seem pretty smart.
CALLI: And they're so cute. Oh, my gosh. Yes. The Boston Dynamics dog, the Robot Spot. That's an incredible bit of tech and it definitely uses A.I. to help it adapt to its environment. So it's making decisions in order to navigate in its environment, which is absolutely a step in the right direction, so to speak. But Spot sees everything in its path as either an obstacle to avoid or a possible direction forward. Dr. Brinkworth says that the robots will see an obstacle and understand that it's not just an obstacle, it's an Amazon delivery you've been expecting or it's your Uncle Joey.
NATE: That seems like a subtle difference.
CALLI: Yeah, okay. The difference is actually pretty huge. Imagine seeing the world is either a massive jumble of shapes versus seeing the world as it really is.
NATE: Okay. Yeah, that is a huge difference. But why do robots need to know who my hypothetical Uncle Joey is?
CALLI: Because current autonomous robots are only really good at navigating. But navigating is a very tiny part of the work humans could use help with.
NATE: What else do we need them for?
CALLI: All right, here's an example. Let's say a crime was just reported on a city street and law enforcement needs help identifying suspects. A human cop could stand at the scene of the crime and look around for people exhibiting unusual behavior who fit the description given by witnesses and make a judgment call. But an autonomous robot could observe the entire scene and sort through trillions of subtle changes, variables and anomalies to give the officer a pretty precise list of possible subjects.
NATE: Okay, so it's a narc bot?
CALLI: It's actually pretty cool. Okay. The Boston Dynamics dog spot is an amazing piece of tech, but it still needs a human to oversee it. Dr. Brinkworth sees a world where robots are given a set of tasks and they just get it done.
NATE: I got to say, I can imagine a million uses for something like that.
CALLI: Oh, exactly. And he gave the example of counting koalas in the forest.
NATE: Flinders University being in Australia.
CALLI: Yes, exactly. Conservationists can trudge to the forest and never get an accurate count because it actually turns out koalas are very hard to see. But an autonomous robot can spot subtle changes in landscape and identify all the koalas in the forest.
NATE: Wow.
CALLI: Yeah. And one of the coolest things about the story, he modeled his robot cameras on the biology of insects.
NATE: What?
CALLI: Yeah, he said he studied how insects like dragonflies, viewed and understood their surroundings and reverse engineered a robot that can understand the world it's seeing.
NATE: Oh, man, I can't wait to use this thing to read a Where's Waldo book. It's going to find him so fast.
CALLI: Oh, my gosh. Those I spy books. This is going to be great.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Israeli scientists think they've found a way to stop secondary cancers in their tracks.
CALLI: That's incredible. I mean, I knew cancer research has been making huge strides in the past few years, but what. What is secondary cancer?
NATE: Those are the cancers that spread from the primary site to other parts of the body. When a cancer metastasizes a word, we've all come to fear, secondary cancer is spreading to other organs and that's not good.
CALLI: So how did scientists stop it?
NATE: To understand that, let's talk a little bit about how cancer spreads in the first place. So solid tumors is a bit of an awkward name, but is fine, are what they call all cancers except for blood cancers or those of the bone marrow or lymph nodes in these solid tumors. Cells develop something called invadopodia. Little feet shaped structures that stick out of the tumor. Eventually, they push their way through tissues and into the bloodstream, which takes them to other organs.
CALLI: So do all solid tumors do this?
NATE: No. But research shows that 12% of breast cancer patients will go on to develop what they call metastatic disease. And the five year survival rate for that is about 26%.
CALLI: That's so sad.
NATE: Compare that to the five year survival rate for non metastatic breast cancer, which is around 91%. And you can see why researchers are so excited about these findings.
CALLI: Okay. Yeah, this this is a game changer.
NATE: It could be. What they found was that the invadopodia, those little feet shaped structures. They have to be activated in order to go into action. And that only happens when these two proteins come together and give them a little boost. Professor Jordan Chill, a coauthor of the study, said that the breakthrough involved finding a peptide that stops these proteins from meeting up in the first place. You know what a peptide is, right?
CALLI: I think so. It's a peptide is just a molecule that contains at least two different amino acids. You you get enough of them together in a chain and you have a protein.
NATE: Right. Right. And anyway, they found this little peptide that can basically just stop the two proteins from hooking up, which in their study had an effectiveness of 90%, which means that those who received the peptide were at least 90% less likely to experience metastatic cancer.
CALLI: So this is absolutely incredible. Does this count as a cure?
NATE: In short, no. But it could dramatically reduce mortality rates from solid tumors like breast cancer. Researchers see this as a new tool to be used alongside current treatments like radiation therapy and chemotherapy. And the thing is, treatments to prevent metastatic illness just don't exist right now. So this is huge.
CALLI: When will these treatments be available?
NATE: That is unclear. So far, research has only been done on mice with breast cancer. But because of the nature of solid tumors and the mechanisms involved in it's spread throughout the body, the study's authors believe the treatment will work on all solid tumor cancers.
CALLI: But not blood cancers.
NATE: Right. Or bone marrow cancers or cancers of the lymph nodes. They said the next step will be to turn the peptide into a drug that can be delivered straight to the part of the body where it's most needed. Obviously, it can't come soon enough and this study is a start, but it could take years to develop.
CALLI: Still, I mean, this just shows that progress is out there just waiting for curious minds to find it.
NATE: To Curiosity.
CALLI: Daily.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Recently the SpaceX Dragon Capsule returned from its trip to the International Space Station. The crew spent 157 days in space before handing over the keys to the ISS and returning to earth safely.
CALLI: An issue with robotics is that currently, they can take in visual information but they can’t necessarily process what they are seeing. Enter Dr. Russell Brinkworth, who caught some inspiration from insects to create robots that are able to understand the world they see!
NATE: Researchers in Israel have found a way to stop secondary tumors in their tracks. This new treatment showed a 90% effectiveness rate, meaning that those who received it were at least 90% less likely to experience metastatic cancer.