Learn about how plants could help us solve the superbug crisis; and how engineers set a world record for internet speed.
Learn about how plants could help us solve the superbug crisis; and how engineers set a world record for internet speed.
More from leading medical ethnobotanist Dr. Cassandra Quave:
Japanese engineers achieved a world record internet speed of 319 terabits per second by Briana Brownell
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CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. I’m Cody Gough. Today, you’ll learn about how plants could help us solve the superbug crisis, with renowned medical ethnobotanist Dr. Cassandra Leah Quave. You’ll also learn about how Japanese engineers achieved a ridiculously fast world record for internet speed.
Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Medicines don’t just come from laboratories — and that includes some of the best medicines. Plants! Are the basis for a lot of lifesaving and health-improving medicines. And in fact, new medicinal plants could help us save millions of lives every year, by helping us fight the “superbug crisis.” See, right now, antibiotic-resistant microbes cause untreatable infections that lead to the loss of 700,000 lives every year — and that number is projected to increase to 10 million a year by 2050. And today’s guest is a leading medical ethnobotanist who’s working on ways to stop this from happening. Dr. Cassandra Quave is on a quest to find nature’s next medicines. And she’s doing that by working with researchers around the world on figuring out how certain plants fight infections, and which of their compounds could be used in new treatments. I interviewed her with my esteemed colleague Ashley Hamer, and I kicked off our conversation by admitting that I thought we made medicines in the lab, and I had to ask: why is nature the best place to look for medicines?
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So yeah, coming up with new medicines isn’t just about finding a single molecule. There’s a lot of work to be done, and fortunately, researchers like Dr. Cassandra Quave are on the case. If you want to learn more about her work, then you can pick up her new book, “The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s New Medicines.” It’s really kind of a memoir that weaves together science and botany to tell her extraordinary story. She talks about her travels by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, to do field research in jungles, mountains, and volcanic islands. And it’s a very personal story, because Dr. Quave was born with multiple congenital defects of her skeletal system — which is why she’s done it all of this work with just one leg. Yeah, I know. Mandatory disclaimer that she did not pay us to appear on Curiosity Daily, we just got in touch with her publicist because this book is an educational and VERY inspirational story. So, feel free to check out “The Plant Hunter” using the link in today’s show notes.
Have you ever been frustrated by internet lag while playing your favorite online video game or streaming a new movie? That won’t be a problem for a research team in Japan. They’ve just broken the record for the fastest internet speed ever recorded -- at 319 terabits per second. With an internet speed that fast you’d be able to download 80,000 movies in one second.
And if you have a lot of time on your hands…. According to the Internet Movie Database, IMDB: from 1880 to today, about 589,000 theatrical and 133,000 TV movies were made — and that means you’d be able to download every movie ever made in less than 10 seconds.
Before I talk about when this technology is coming to your neighborhood, let’s talk about how they made it happen.
In order to transfer data that fast, the research team had to create a new kind of cable. Typical fibre-optic cable has a core surrounded by what’s called “cladding”. The cladding has a different refractive index compared to the core. That means that light waves bounce off the cladding and stay in the core of the cable.
The optical cable for this new record had four cores instead of just one. They also made additional upgrades to the setup. They outfitted the cable with a laser that pulsed at various wavelengths, and a series of amplifiers made from rare-earth elements erbium and thulium [THOO-lee-um] to make the signal travel farther faster.
It resulted in a breakneck speed that’s about 7.6 million times faster than your internet speed at home.
Most of the time, it’s hard to maintain a high speed of transmission over long distances. That’s because the signal can degrade and the light can escape ever so slightly as it bounces around between the core and the cladding.
But the research team was on it. Using this new method, they successfully transferred the data over 3,000 km with no reduction in quality. The previous record was just under 200 terabits per second over a distance of 2,000km in August 2020.
The cable they used was about the same size as those that deliver fibre optic internet now: a tiny 0.125 mm. That means that it could be integrated into our existing internet infrastructure with few adjustments. So, superfast internet could be on its way in the not-so-distant future. If only internet service providers could upgrade their systems that fast, right?
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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CODY: The writer for today’s world record internet speed story was Briana Brownell. Today’s episode was produced and edited by me, Cody Gough. Curiosity Daily is distributed by Discovery.
[AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join me again next time to learn something new in just a few minutes.
And until then, stay curious!