Today, you’ll learn about a new drug that could help you safely lose up to a fifth of your body weight, a new, non-hormonal birth control pill that is made for men, and how drones may hold the key to reforestation.
Today, you’ll learn about a new drug that could help you safely lose up to a fifth of your body weight, a new, non-hormonal birth control pill that is made for men, and how drones may hold the key to reforestation.
Weight loss five times faster.
Men entering the world of birth control.
Seed bombing may not be what you think.
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/wait-less-weight-loss-birth-control-for-men-seed-bombing
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 drug that could help you safely lose up to a fifth of your body weight, a new, non-hormonal birth control pill that is made for men, and how drones may hold the key to reforestation.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: Intro Music/Whoosh]
CALLI: We’ve talked about maintaining a healthy lifestyle here before, right Nate?
NATE: Sure, things like getting enough exercise and eating right are a great way to keep yourself feeling your best.
CALLI: Absolutely. But for those who struggle with their weight, and those with type 2 diabetes, researchers just found something pretty incredible.
NATE: What’s that?
CALLI: Tirzepatide. It’s an approved drug that doctors use to help treat Type 2 Diabetes patients. Recently, researchers completed a 72-week study that looked into the drug’s effects on weight loss, and what they found was pretty remarkable: with the help of the drug, people with diabetes lost a good amount of weight, but people without diabetes lost even more.
NATE: How much weight are we talking here, Calli? 10 pounds? 20?
CALLI: Try 60 pounds, Nate. Each of the non-diabetic subjects who took the highest dose of the drug lost up to 21% of their body mass. And even though the study was 72 weeks long, some of the participants reached this goal in just ten months.
NATE: Oh wow! That’s just over halfway through the study! Have we ever seen those kinds of results from any drug or treatment except surgery?
CALLI: Not at all! There was another experimental drug last year called semaglutide that averaged around 15% weight loss, which is also great… but what the doctors are seeing with tirzepatide is quite revolutionary. It suppresses hunger by sending signals from the gut to the brain to tell the brain that you’re already full from a meal. Most studies tell us that it takes our bodies about 20 minutes to feel full, but with this drug, participants experienced that same feeling in half the time or less!
NATE: That sounds amazing, Calli! Is it available already? Can people dealing with these issues get the treatment?
CALLI: Well, there’s a little catch right now, Nate. Tirzepatide isn’t yet approved for weight loss. But researchers are hopeful they’ll get an updated timeline soon from the FDA on when that might happen.
NATE: I mean even if that does happen though, it still sounds too good to be true, like a miracle drug. Are there any side effects?
CALLI: Well Nate, you’re right. There ARE side effects. And the worst one is… mild nausea. But thankfully it is the kind you can treat with an anti-nausea drug.
NATE: Wait, really? That’s it? What about the potential for people to build up a reliance on this drug? If people go off the drug and gain their weight back, can they go back on the drug to lose it again?
CALLI: As of right now, that’s one of the biggest mysteries of tirzepatide. Researchers believe that patients are going to need to stay on tirzepatide indefinitely. It’s believed that if the subjects reach a lower weight for a certain amount of time, they can wean themselves off of the drug, but unfortunately, that hasn’t been studied yet.
NATE: I’m sure adding a new drug indefinitely will scare some folks away, but it seems like a small price to pay for results this dramatic. No nasty side effects, quick weight loss, easy treatment in general. There has to be something! It still sounds too good to be true!
CALLI: Just like everything in life, Nate, nothing good ever comes cheap. And in this case, tirzepatide is both effective AND unfortunately expensive. The version of this drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes retails for $1,000 a month.
NATE: Whoa! And if you have to stay on it indefinitely, that's a whole lot of money!
CALLI: It’d add up pretty quickly. And this hiccup gets even worse when you realize that that other weight loss drug we talked about, semaglutide with 15% body weight loss, has been in short supply and heavy demand since it hit the market. And that's even with a whopping price tag of $1,600 a month. And it isn’t even covered by most insurance providers!
NATE: Oh man. Fascinating to think that even at that cost the demand is still so high!
CALLI: Absolutely, but hopefully as the technology improves, and these treatments become more common, the price tag will come down. Either way, it’s incredible news for those with type 2 diabetes or persistent weight issues.
[SFX: Whoosh]
NATE: Calli, today we’re going to talk about a new form of birth control.
CALLI: Contraceptives? There are lots of types already, though I would like to point out that basically all the ones not used during the act are made for women. What makes this one special?
NATE: Well, you’ll be interested to hear that researchers have recently made big strides towards an effective, non-hormonal, male birth control that is heading toward clinical trials this year.
CALLI: Male birth control? You mean men are going to start pulling their weight in family planning?
NATE: You make a good point. There are many ways to prevent pregnancy, abstinence aside, and vasectomies, or male sterilization, are relatively rare. Otherwise, women have borne the brunt of birth control responsibility for about as long as we’ve had modern methods. Including all the side effects of hormonal birth control.
CALLI: Right, right. A lot of options for women, not many for men. Do we know why?
NATE: Oddly enough, hormonal side effects have derailed past efforts at male hormonal birth control.
CALLI: The same side effects present in most female hormonal birth control—
NATE: The same ones! I know, it’s weird! But even forget about pharmaceuticals for a minute, let’s talk surgical sterilization. Men can get vasectomies, and women can get tubal ligation.
CALLI: That’s getting your tubes tied, right?
NATE: Yeah, that’s what people often call it. And it’s an invasive surgery, whereas vasectomies are a minor surgery. Despite all that women are more likely to go the surgical route than men.
CALLI: Wow. I didn’t know that.
NATE: Right? And, okay, let’s talk about vasectomies. Again, it’s a minor surgery. The vas deferens—the tubes that carry sperm from the testicles to the urethra—are cut and sealed. Other than this, the only other male birth control option on the market is condoms.
CALLI: How is it 2022 and we are still stuck with only these two options? What else have we tried?
NATE: Well there have been other trials, but nothing came from them, often because of the hormonal side effects thing, which I mentioned earlier.
CALLI: Serious side effects, huh?
NATE: Not quite. Most of the past efforts have targeted testosterone in an attempt to create a temporary sterility. But since those treatments are hormonal, they also often come with depression, weight gain, and decreased libido, among other side effects…
CALLI: Things many women on hormonal birth control will be familiar with...
NATE: You’re absolutely right, Calli. And so, this new human trial—which doesn’t target testosterone—is so promising. If it goes through, it could help us even out a supremely uneven playing field.
CALLI: Well if it's not hormonal, how is it keeping swimmers from swimming?
NATE: This new treatment is an oral pill, which targets Vitamin A, also known as retinoic acid. A compound in the pill prevents proteins from binding with Vitamin A.
CALLI: And that works because...?
NATE: Well, mammals need retinoic acid to make baby mammals! It’s used to help sperm become sperm during a process called cell differentiation. Researchers found this protein-blocking method was ninety-nine percent effective in making mice sterile, temporarily. No sperm cells, no baby mice. And also, it had no obvious side effects.
CALLI: No side effects? At all?
NATE: Well these were mice, not a bunch of dudes in a room who could say, “I'm feeling a bit down today,” or “Why am I so tired?” but nothing the researchers could see, even when they gave mice one hundred times the effective dose.
CALLI: That’s incredible. Effective contraception, without side effects. And it’s not permanent?
NATE: That’s right. Researchers found that mice could produce offspring in about 4-6 weeks after they stopped taking the contraceptive.
CALLI: Wow. This could be boon for public and sexual health. So when are we going to see it?
NATE: Well, researchers hope to start human trials late this year.
CALLI: That’s great. Is this the only male contraceptive coming? Or are there others?
NATE: There is currently another male contraceptive in the works. It’s in human clinical trials. It’s called NES/T. A big difference is that it lowers sperm and testosterone levels, through a topical gel.
CALLI: So the pill we were talking about earlier, the non-hormonal, non-surgical option, that’s a big change.
NATE: Exactly, it could lower the barrier of concern for men who are interested in birth control but wary of side effects.
CALLI: That’s huge for both men and women hoping not to alter their natural hormones.
NATE: Absolutely, so let's hope the human trials go well!
[SFX: Whoosh]
CALLI: Nate, have you been hearing about wildfires in the news lately?
NATE: Yes! It seems like they’re always in the news, but I don’t quite get it. Aren’t they natural? Why are we hearing so much more about them if they’ve always happened?
CALLI: They are a natural phenomenon, but we are hearing more about them because climate change and human activity have made them more frequent, and made them burn more severely than ever. Plus, losing our forests actually compounds climate change and its effects because we lose a valuable carbon sink and a lot of topsoil that, without vegetation to hold on to, slides off hillsides and into our waterways. Thankfully I have some good news coming out of Canada.
NATE: Did the Canadians find ways to prevent massive forest fires like we have down here in California and Colorado?
CALLI: Prevention is important, but I’m talking about forest restoration, which has been getting harder as forest fires get more severely. The Forest Enhancement Society of British Columbia, a government organization that stewards the forests, recently teamed up with a Seattle startup to try a new way to reseed hard to reach areas after fires. American researchers are watching intently as, if it's successful, the new method could change how we approach forest fire restoration the world over.
NATE: I always thought forests were designed to be able to withstand natural phenomena like forest fires? Can’t the trees’ own seeds survive and replant the forest?
CALLI: Trees usually rely on wind and animals to spread their seed filled pine cones across the forest, but the more severe fires now burn so hot that even the pinecones can’t survive. Without seeds, the trees can’t grow back.
NATE: But what if we brought seeds in ourselves?
CALLI: That's actually the current system. Humans walk through the forest with a shovel and a bag of infant trees and plant one every few steps. A human can plant about 1,000 to 3,000 trees a day.
NATE: That’s a lot of trees!
CALLI: It is, but humans can’t get everywhere a fire can. Sometimes an area is too remote, inaccessible, or on a steep incline. That's what happened in Canada. One 2017 fire, the Plateau Complex fire, burned more than 1,800 square miles, that’s about the size of Delaware, and a lot of it was inaccessible to human planters. So that’s where Canada unleashed their new restoration force: a fleet of massive flying drones.
NATE: Drones? That's incredible! The meeting of the natural world and cutting-edge technology. So do the drones dig small holes or something?
CALLI: They use a different approach. The society bought pine and fir seeds and sent them to a Seattle startup, DroneSeed, that turns them into pucks packed with soil and nutrients. They then load the pucks, 50 pounds at a time, into 8-foot wide drones. In this first round, the drones dropped over 500,000 seed pucks over a hard-to-reach area of about 50 football fields.
NATE: That’s incredible! They’re going to put human planters out of a job!
CALLI: Well don’t count humans out yet. This is just the start of the first trial, and it's unclear how successful the seeds will be at sprouting into trees. But there is a lot of interest; American states like Washington are watching intently to see how successful the program is over the next few months. And even if it is wildly successful, it's likely we still use humans for areas that drones have a hard time reaching, like low elevations.
NATE: So, do you think it will work?
CALLI: For now, we are just taking in data and learning where the drones might be a good solution. But researchers say that even if not a single seed sprouts, it's still worth it. These forests are important, and we should try all we can to help them recover. Not only for the forests themselves, but for our air quality, our water quality, and to protect communities from climate change events, like landslides, that can compound when we lose our forests.
NATE: Well any step is a big step. I know I’ll be watching and rooting for our neighbors to the north. I hope the trial is successful and we start seeing flying tree planters stateside.
[SFX: Whoosh]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Researchers found that a drug used to treat Type 2 Diabetes may soon be used as a weight loss drug for those with or without diabetes. With tirzepatide, you could lose up to 21% of your weight safely in under a year. But buyer beware - similar drugs cost $1,600 or more per month, so there’s no guarantee this miracle drug will be affordable for those who need it most.
CALLI: A new male birth control pill is entering human clinical trials. Unlike previous attempts at developing contraceptives to be taken by men, all of which had mood-related side effects, this male birth control will target the bond between a vitamin and protein, rather than affecting male testosterone. This non-hormonal approach showed great efficacy in mice, whose fertility returned four to six weeks after going off the pill.
NATE: A new program launched in British Columbia hopes that the solution to reforestation comes from the sky. Researchers are using drones to drop “seed pucks” across large swaths of forest destroyed by severe forest fires. If the program succeeds, it could revolutionize how we respond to natural disasters.