Discover a new x-ray giving us incredible sight into ourselves, the future of weather prediction, and a surprising potential link between dementia and vitamin D.
Discover a new x-ray giving us incredible sight into ourselves, the future of weather prediction, and a surprising potential link between dementia and vitamin D.
Ultra visible insides.
Hotter summers are coming.
More vitamin D please.
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Calli and Nate — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/super-x-ray-seeing-future-weather-vitamin-d-ementia
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 a new x-ray giving us incredible sight into ourselves, the future of weather prediction, and a surprising potential link between dementia and vitamin D.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, we are about to see things within our bodies at a ridiculously tiny scale. That’s because researchers at the European Synchrotron Research Facility, ESRF for short, have developed a new imaging technology called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography that can view blood vessels only five microns in diameter.
CALLI: Five microns? How small is that?
NATE: About a tenth the diameter of a human hair. The tech, which we can call HiP-CT, is giving us an entirely new view into the human body.
CALLI: How does it work? Is it like a CT scan? X-ray? MRI?
NATE: It uses x-rays to capture images of organs one narrow slice at a time. A computer then combines all these slices to create 3D images. It's like how a CT scan works, but it can capture details 100 times smaller than a CT scan can. Much of this was made possible when ESRF upgraded the component within HiP-CT that creates the actual x-rays that helps make HiP-CT so precise.. The Extremely Brilliant Source, as it is called, makes the brightest x-rays in the world 100 billion times brighter than a standard hospital X-ray.
CALLI: So what kind of detail does all that x-ray tech give you?
NATE: Well it allows doctors to get extremely detailed 3D images of organs, not just an organ as a whole, or even a blood vessel, but you can zoom into these models to see things as small as individual cells at work. It’s giving doctors and researchers an incredible ability to see how an organ functions, even at the cellular level.
CALLI: Oh wow, that's incredible. What have they been using this tech to do though? It sounds pretty powerful.
NATE: Researchers were able to use it to see how Covid-19 infections affected the tiniest capillaries in our lungs. They looked at those that oxygenate blood in our lungs, and the ones that bring blood to the lung tissues themselves. The fine detail allowed them to see that these two separate capillary systems were crossing over into each other, preventing blood from being properly oxygenated. Researchers had thought this might be happening, but until now, there was no way to prove it.
CALLI: Are they only looking at lungs or does it work with other organs?
NATE: Researchers are currently using the HiP-CT to create the “Human Organ Atlas”. They’ve already created extremely detailed 3D scans of the brain, lungs, kidneys, and spleen from donated control organs as well as those from people who died from Covid 19. They’re putting these images online to make them available to doctors, surgeons, and even the curious public. And they already have plans to eventually do a scan like this of the whole human body; organs, muscles and all.
CALLI: The brain sounds particularly interesting to study with this kind of imaging.
NATE: Oh absolutely. And some HiP-CT brain scans have already shown micro-details in the brain like highlighting singular cells that control our motor functions. Researchers are actually getting so much information from these images, that they often have trouble interpreting all of it.
CALLI: What kind of insights do they hope to get as we get better at decoding all this information?
NATE: The hope is that the Human Organ Atlas can eventually have a robust catalog of disease research. The neat thing is the accuracy means you could look at a whole organ, or zoom way in to the cells to try to identify patterns and learn how diseases affect our organs.
CALLI: Is there any way we can get there faster?
NATE: There’s some discussion about implementing AI technology with it to create even faster, more accurate diagnosis. If we can optimize this tech, the possibilities for using HiP-CT in fighting diseases are endless.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, did you know our weather prediction might soon be more accurate than ever?
NATE: Oh that’d be great. It’d be way easier to plan vacations and weekend plans. How are they doing it?
CALLI: The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory has created a new predictive weather model, Seamless system for Prediction and Earth system Research or SPEAR for short, that is able to predict weather on a seasonal level. And North American summers are looking pretty hot.
NATE: Predicting weather months ahead of time? That sounds like science fiction. Can’t things change rapidly from month to month or even day to day?
CALLI: The systems are complex, but we have created dynamical models that use supremely complex equations to predict the future. They’re so complex in fact, that they have really only been possible in the last few decades as we finally have supercomputers powerful enough to work through all the information. These systems rely on data like temperature, pressure, and wind from all over the world. One of the big challenges though, is that our world is chaotic.
NATE: Like things are happening at random?
CALLI: More accurately, small seemingly insignificant differences can make enormous changes.
NATE: Oh sure, you mean like the “butterfly effect.” One butterfly flaps its wing in South America and it causes atmospheric changes that lead to a tornado forming in Texas weeks later.
CALLI: Exactly. Did you know that this “butterfly effect” is a term that actually comes from one of the pioneers of dynamical weather models? Edward Lorenz was experimenting with these early models in the 1950s. To his surprise, when he re-ran an experiment and tried to simplify his work by shortening his inputs from six decimal places to three decimal places, he found the model’s results varied greatly, even though the change only took place in the 4th, 5th, and 6th decimal points! He used the phrase to explain how tiny changes can have major impacts on complex systems.
NATE: That was in the 50s, I imagine SPEAR is a bit more complicated than one researcher inputting his data by hand?
CALLI: Much like Lorenz’s system, SPEAR runs models by slightly altering initial conditions, but unlike these early systems, SPEAR is able to use complex stats like changing rates of greenhouse gasses and aerosols over time. To create forecasts, researchers run 30 models, with 30 slightly different input sets, and then average these predictions to create a single vision for the future.
NATE: Like making a bell curve of weather to find an accurate prediction, interesting.
CALLI: And SPEAR researchers are using these models and experiments to improve our climate predictions and projections not only in the short term, but for predictions decades into the future. They’re putting particular attention on the weather extremes that are sure to come with climate change. These predictions could help us better prepare for things like hurricanes, drought, and heat waves.
NATE: But how can we be sure these predictions are more accurate?
CALLI: A recent study showed SPEAR accurately predicted North American summer heat extremes several months into the future, and the more information we collect, the more accurate the system can get.
NATE: Well if that information was correct, what can I expect for future summers?
CALLI: We should expect continent-wide increases in heat extremes. There is still a lot of research to do, as the sample size for these experiments is small, but SPEAR is telling us this trend is likely to continue. It's going to get hot. It's concerning info, but knowing ahead of time will help us better prepare for the short, and long term, effects.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Hey Calli, I’ve got a story that might have you looking to eat more vitamin packed foods like salmon!
CALLI: You don’t have to give me more reason to eat salmon, but I’ll take them. What do you have?
NATE: Well salmon is a great source of vitamin D, and recent studies have shown that a lack of Vitamin D can lead to some pretty nasty developments later in life, like brittle bones. But a new study revealed that it can also contribute to early onset dementia.
CALLI: What do you mean when you say dementia? Is it a single disease or is there a Vitamin D variant?
NATE: So, dementia is an umbrella term for a number of symptoms, including memory loss and difficulties with cognition that impact daily life. The most well-known form of dementia is Alzheimer’s; currently, almost 6 million people in the US live with Alzheimer’s or a similar dementia.
CALLI: Okay, but how did they track down a vitamin, or lack of it I should say, to these conditions?
NATE: Well, it’s long been known that Vitamin D is linked to brain health, but researchers at the University of South Australia wanted to see if there was a link between vitamin D deficiency and an increased risk of dementia and stroke. They gathered data from over 294,000 participants in the UK Biobank, a long-term study that tries to track down the sources of various diseases, and looked at numbers for people with dementia and people with a severe lack of vitamin D.
CALLI: Oh wow. How little Vitamin D did they have?
NATE: So a normal Vitamin D level is around 50 nanomoles per liter. One nanomole is one-billionth of a mole. When researchers looked at people who had low levels, below 25 nanomoles per liter, or half of what they should have, those people were around 54% more likely to have dementia.
CALLI: That’s a huge increase. But vitamin D isn’t rare, does that mean these people could have changed their diets and…avoided dementia?
NATE: Researchers discovered that up to 17% of these dementia cases could have likely been prevented by increasing vitamin D intake.
CALLI: That’s fascinating, Nate. But to me, it sounds like there’s a correlation, a relationship between vitamin D and dementia. But do we have any real proof that a vitamin D deficiency CAUSES dementia?
NATE: Researchers say we have to do a lot more research to identify if it goes beyond correlation to causation. That being said: if future experiments do prove causation, we might be able to develop new ways to lower the risk of dementia moving forward.
CALLI: Do they know what something like that would look like?
NATE: They’re looking into whether we could identify high risk Vitamin D deficient people, and focus on raising their vitamin D levels by getting more sunlight, changing their diet, or taking supplements.
CALLI: Well it seems to me that while we wait for proof of causation, it might not be a bad idea to make sure we are all getting enough vitamin D. It's an easy bit of potential prevention.
NATE: Absolutely, and researchers say that even though these studies are inconclusive, supplementing Vitamin D likely has some great health benefits beyond preventing dementia, including keeping your bones strong!
CALLI: Better safe than sorry, especially when being safe includes eating more salmon.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Revolutionary new imaging technology is giving us extremely detailed 3D images of human organs. With the ability to view organs down to their individual cells, this technology could bring us a whole new understanding of the human body and the way diseases affect it.
NATE: New weather prediction models are allowing us to accurately predict weather trends, seasons, and even years ahead of time. While the research is encouraging, the results are concerning, our summers are about to get a lot hotter.
CALLI: Recent studies show that a lack of Vitamin D could lead to a much higher risk of dementia. Even though researchers say there is more work to be done, making sure you get your proper amount of vitamin D is an easy way to potentially avoid the disease, while keeping your bones strong!