Today you’ll learn about how scientists are using a drug meant for arthritis to mimic blood transfusions, how cinnamon could potentially be improving our brain’s health, and how a new filter is capable of removing 99% of microplastics from water.
Today you’ll learn about how scientists are using a drug meant for arthritis to mimic blood transfusions, how cinnamon could potentially be improving our brain’s health, and how a new filter is capable of removing 99% of microplastics from water.
Young Blood
Cinnamon Memory
Microplastic Filter
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/young-blood-cinnamon-memory-microplastic-filter
[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 how scientists are using a drug meant for arthritis to mimic blood transfusions, how cinnamon could potentially be improving our brain’s health, and how a new filter is capable of removing 99% of microplastics from water!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: It's a recurring trope in media that rich old people will try and find a way to stay young and beautiful forever. And usually that's through nefarious means, like using a young person's blood, which sounds terrifying. But today, we actually have some science that suggests that young people's blood can, in fact, help keep you healthier.
CALLI: Okay. Are we going in the direction of, like the blood countess, or are we going into like Mad Max is now a documentary?
NATE: Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a documentary. Fortunately, I may or may not be storing up some gasoline, but that's not the point. There is some truth to it. When an old person gets a blood transfusion from a younger person, the health benefits are tenfold. Longer life, better quality of living, improved cognitive abilities, less tired, more energetic. The list goes on. But good news. We're not actually talking about blood transfusions today. We're talking about how doctors have discovered a way to mimic the effects of these transfusions without having to spill any actual blood.
CALLI: Okay. So this is actually good news because of how the topic of old people stealing young blood has some actual nasty connotations with some awful conspiracy theories. So what's actually being done here?
NATE: It's an arthritis medication, specifically a drug called Anakinra, that blocks a signal in the blood known as IL-1B, which is a signal that is linked to other inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Blood cells are created by stem cells located in the bone marrow. So the team explored the environment or niche where these stem cells exist within mice and how that niche changes during aging. They found that over time the niche deteriorates and becomes overwhelmed by inflammation, which harms the blood stem cells leading to worse aging.
CALLI: Okay, what happens when an Anakinra blocks the signal?
NATE: It returns the blood stem cells to a much younger, healthier state, nearly identical to how they would in the blood transfusion. The niche’s state improved as well as how the blood stem cells functioned and even how often the blood cells were generated. But it shouldn't just be a one time solution. Anakinra worked best whenever the mice took it for the entirety of their lives, and not just when they were already old.
CALLI: Interesting. All right. So what did inspire this study like with somebody watching Mad Max and was just like, hey, you know, it's a great idea?
NATE: No, not at least what they've said. It wasn't Mad Max. Okay. It was the revelation recently that most societies have added over 30 years to the average life expectancy over just the past century. And this got the team behind this study thinking of how important it is to conduct the science to create meaningful health care across the entirety of these much fuller lives. And one of the ways to do that is to understand how people age, why people age, and what can be done to ensure that aging happens comfortably. And yes, part of this involved looking into the effects of younger blood transfusions.
CALLI: Going to play devil's advocate here for a second. What if someone does prefer, as creepy as the sounds, young blood.
NATE: Okay. Well, transfusions can help, but they are transient, meaning they only treat the symptoms of aging temporarily. And you would need to keep transfusing blood over and over again to replicate the short term restorative effects. On the other hand, in Anakinra has the potential to rejuvenate the entire blood production system permanently. So think about it like this: An aging blood system is constantly passing along proteins and cells for their entire lives, slowly damaging itself as the system transfers something from one point to another, but Anakinra repairs that damage, while the transfusion is a way to just ignore that damage. It's kind of like replacing a tire on a car with a new one instead of just adding patches every time it gets a new hole.
CALLI: Okay, so we are cars and we run until our batteries run out, of course. So has this been tested on humans?
NATE: No. So these tests are still in the early days of trials. And it is always worth noting that results in animal tests do not always translate to humans. But the team is quite optimistic that clinical testing is right around the corner because Anakinra is already being used by people to treat arthritis. So they. Believe it's kind of a no brainer that if Anakinra can block IL-1B function for rheumatoid arthritis, it should be able to block that same function in the context of age restoration.
CALLI: Huh. All right. Well, I, for one, am looking forward to living forever.
NATE: Cheers.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: I personally love cinnamon. I love the taste of it. I love the smell of it. It's amazing in cookies. It's amazing in most things, in my opinion. But it turns out that it can actually also help with brain health.
NATE: Today's story brought to you by General Mills.
CALLI: No, no, I swear, this is a real thing. All right. So there have been listen, there have been a number of studies over the years suggesting that the active compounds within cinnamon could improve brain health, possibly even acting as a dementia preventer. Unfortunately, those benefits weren't verified in humans until now.
NATE: Okay. Why cinnamon? What is so special about it?
CALLI: It has a number of bioactive compounds known as cinnamaldehyde, coumarin and tannins. And we've known for years that some of these can enter the brain and once there may reduce oxidative stress or inflammation. So to get a better read on the restorative powers of cinnamon, a team of doctors from Birjand University of Medical Sciences conducted a study on the relation between cinnamon consumption and memory. The study began on different databases like PubMed and Google Scholar to find similar studies, and to their surprise, they found 2605 other cinnamon studies.
NATE: Wow. People really like learning about cinnamon, I guess.
CALLI: Well, obviously they needed to narrow their scope down a bit, so they extracted and analyzed data from the studies on types of cinnamon used, study populations, how big a dose of cinnamon and what results were obtained in each study. And then they were able to narrow it down to a scope of 40 studies, 33 of which were in vivo studies, which are studies of living beings like humans or rodents, five of which were in vitro studies, which are done through cell cultures or postmortem tissue studies. And two of the studies were clinical studies performed on live medical patients.
NATE: That seems like quite a bit of studies. What did they find?
CALLI: Well, most of the studies found a link between cinnamon consumption and the significant improvement of cognitive learning and memory. For example, the in vivo studies found that cinnamon could positively impact cognitive function, which was supported by the in vitro studies results. Those studies unanimously found that adding cinnamon or the compound cinnamaldehyde to a cell growth can increase the viability of a cell and reduce instances of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease.
NATE: This is making cinnamon sound like magic.
CALLI: I mean, have you ever put it in a fire? True, Totally off subject. But the clinical studies found similar results. One of those studies was conducted on teens and asked them to chew cinnamon gum for a certain amount of time. That study suggested that chewing cinnamon gum improved subjects memory while also reducing anxiety.
NATE: Good news for people who suffer from anxiety and have a craving for Big Red.
CALLI: Yeah, but I will say it's important to note that the other clinical study was performed on pre-diabetic adults 60 years of age or younger, and had the participants put three fourths of a tablespoon of ground cinnamon on white bread every day and then just eat that.
NATE: I mean, I love cinnamon toast, so unless the sugar negates the effects of the cinnamon, I might have to start trying that. Wait, did it help?
CALLI: Here's the thing. It didn't. There was no significant changes one way or the other in the cognitive function of the studies participants, which is interesting considering the results of the other studies. But that being said, this study was an outlier compared to the rest.
NATE: All right, so where we leaning is cinnamon good for your brain health or not?
CALLI: Unfortunately, the team ended up right back where they started with the analysis in that last clinical study. It's really not clear if cinnamon, a specific compound in cinnamon or even just certain people's reactions to cinnamon that are causing this uptick in cognitive function. So their conclusion was that more studies need to be performed. That being said, they're hopeful that this review will inspire other scientists to look further into the association between Cinnamon and some of its active components when it comes to how the human brain functions, especially in relation to boosting memory and learning and slowing down cognitive impairment.
NATE: I guess for now I'm just going to have to eat cinnamon because I enjoy it, not because it's making me smarter or something.
CALLI: Oh no, we have to eat cinnamon. Shame.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: I've got some good news. There are a few different topics that we've hit on several times in this podcast, and some of those are problems. Well, today we're going to talk about one of those problems and how it might now be solved.
CALLI: Okay. Well, I'm going to go ahead and guess that it's not climate change because we still have a lot of work to do there. And unfortunately, one of our other long standing topics is poop pills. Please tell me we're not talking about food bills. And for those of you who are new, the poop pills were for gut health. But still, I'm tired of that one subject.
NATE: No, I'm sure we'll get back to poo pills at some point in the future. But today we talking about microplastics and the development of a filter that might finally make them a thing of the past. And we have talked about microplastics several times in the past. This is stuff that breaks off of bigger plastic objects like water bottles, jugs, or synthetic T-shirts, and they are tiny five millimeters or less long fragments of plastic that have ended up in virtually every water source across the world. Now, microplastics are infamously hard to filter out and maybe even harder just to track down and see them. And there have been a lot of efforts in recent years to create effective microplastic filters, but nothing has really panned out until now.
CALLI: We have actually talked about microplastics a lot. It's true. Do you remember the the robo fish that collects microplastics? How's he doing?
NATE: I did look up to see if there were any updates on the robot fish, but no dice, by the way. Did not. No, you didn't tell me that. The fish’s name was Gilbert, which is fantastic.
CALLI: His name was Gilbert.
NATE: All right. You did? Yes. The fish is named Gilbert. Anyway, science sometimes moves slowly, and unfortunately, Gilbert is still just a proof of concept, with no news popping up since he was announced back in October of 2022. But that does lead me back to the next best thing. A less flashy but far more effective microplastic filter developed by researchers in Korea.
CALLI: I am a little bit disappointed that it's not another robo fish, but I am curious as to how effective this new filter is.
NATE: Well, Gilbert, as a proof of concept, was only able to float on water surfaces with the researchers admitting that a lot more work needed to be done for their filtration system to even be practical in removing microplastics. But the team out of Daegu Jeong Bok, Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea has revealed filtration system that is capable of removing more than 99.9% of not only microplastics, but all pollutants from the water.
CALLI: Holy crap, that sounds like magic. How is it? How does it do this?
NATE: The trick is a material known as a covalent triazine framework or CTF for short. It's this very porous material, but it's also very large, which means there's a lot of room that can store the molecules that they captured. And they're really similar to those filters that have become huge in recent years that can remove organic dyes from industrial wastewater. As for how it works, it's pretty simple. Water goes in, water comes out. But after 10 seconds of filtration, all of the microplastics and other pollutants stay within the CTF, which can be reused multiple times without losing any effectiveness.
CALLI: So I don't go backpacking often, but I do remember when I did those little filtration systems that you would use to make sure your water was clean. That's about the only thing I'm picturing. I can't really wrap my head around what this CTF looks like.
NATE: All right, let's think of this material for a covalent triazine framework as a sort of mesh honeycomb design. We've got thousands of microscopic filters, and each one of those is made up of even tinier filters. And each of these tinier filters is focused specifically on capturing water. And as the water makes its way down through the mesh, it leaves behind every pollutant. But the water itself just drips down below. And that's why the process takes 10 seconds. It needs to seep through the material and into whatever water collecting receptacle is being used. Something else fascinating is that the team also discovered that the material can absorb sunlight.
CALLI: Cool. But why would that matter?
NATE: I mean, for water filtration, it actually doesn't. But it does prove how versatile this filtration system is because the CTF can convert sunlight into heat, then release steam that purifies an airborne pollutant known as volatile organic compounds or VOCs and VOCs are emitted as gases from certain soldier liquids, and some may have short and long term adverse health effects. They're emitted from all sorts of common products like paints and cleaning supplies, pesticides, building materials, and even some office equipment like copiers or printers. When the CTF does its magic, though, it was able to remove 98% of VOC toxicity from the air surrounding it.
CALLI: Okay, so I was kidding. But it actually is magic.
NATE: It might be like I'm not really sure this was an accidental side effect that they discovered for the experiment, but it's also a good side effect. I mean, this material as of right now is completely unrivaled for this. It's got high efficiency, it's got low cost to produce, and there's really no known downsides whatsoever. Professor Park Chi-Young, the lead author of the study, hopes that this will become a universal technology that can purify contaminated water and supply drinking water even in areas where there is no power supply.
CALLI: I love that. I love it when we get to end on a happy story.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Mad Max was right: old people receiving blood transfusions from young blood will develop healthier blood systems. But a team of researchers discovered a way to emulate this effect without spilling any blood: arthritis medication. If somebody takes the drug anakinra for their entire life, they will maintain a healthy blood network and improve their quality of living tenfold! The experiment hasn’t been tested on humans yet, but once it passes trial, Mad Max will go back to the Science Fiction shelf where it belongs!
CALLI: It’s time to enter the Cinnaverse: new research reveals there might be a link between eating cinnamon and improving your brain health! Some studies show a link between cinnamon and a reduction in neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s. More research needs to be conducted for a clearer answer, but this is good news for all the Big Red gum fans listening!
NATE: Could this finally be the last time we talk about microplastics on Curiosity Daily? Signs point to “Maybe,” with the development of a microplastics filter that is capable of removing over 99% of all pollutants in any water supply - including microplastics. This filter also has the added bonus of removing common airborne pollutants known as VOCs, meaning that it’s not just microplastics that will soon be a thing of the past - it could be MOST pollutants!