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Guess what Mango?
What's that will?
It's day four of our countdown of the twenty five greatest science ideas from the past twenty five years. Can you believe it? Just a few short days ago it was day one of our twenty five greatest science ideas in the past twenty five years.
I'm pretty sure you know you're doing something right when you've got four sequels. What do you mean by that, Well, George Lucas stars Star Wars basically with the fourth film, right. Henry the fourth was such an interesting king that Shakespeare wrote a play about him. But you didn't even bother with Henry the Third, No not worthy and Rush Hour four was so good at made Toy Story two seem like Spider Man three.
I'm pretty sure you're just saying things now.
Yeah, you're right, but maybe you should just get into the episode. Today we are covering ideas eight through five, and if you want to know what makes us try to various sounds so good, how a HeLa monster is helping the world, and why a single injection might help paralyze people walk again. You're gonna love this one. Let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and of course I'm here with my friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and over there in the booth gazing wistfully at a portrait of David Dukovney. I don't know where he got this thing, but it's a it's an interesting portrait. It's our PALIN producer, Dylan Fagan. I mean, I can't tell if this has anything to do with today's episode.
They just like slax Files apparently.
Oh okay, well enjoy that, Dylan.
But speaking of fun, you your podcast listening life will be a lot more fun if you're subscribed to Part Time Genius on whatever app you use. And you can make sure our lives are more fun by leaving us a nice review.
We really appreciate everyone who takes the time to do that. But all right, well let's get back to the countdown. So one day in the early two thousands, a man named Kai Ching Lee was strolling down in Oregon beach right, and Lee is an engineering professor at Oregon State University, and he was just enjoying his walk washing the Pacific Ocean, just waves roll in and now, and suddenly he noticed something along the coast. There were hundreds of muscles clinging
to rocks, and Lee was impressed with their strength. No matter how violent the waves were, no matter how strong the pull of the tide was, the muscles just stayed in place there and when you actually tried pulling one away, it wouldn't budge. And that got Lee thinking about plywood. M had he also been to an Ikea recently that might have.
I mean, maybe I don't know, but I do know that plywood is everywhere, not just furniture and cabinets, but also walls, boats, fencing, toys, and for good reason. Like plywood is super affordable because instead of a single solid chunk of wood, it's made from thin layers glued together into a slab. But it turns out the glue that
holds the plywood together is really kind of nasty. It's often made with formaldehyde and other chemicals that you don't want to breathe in, and in fact, there's research suggesting that people who work in plywood manufacturing plants are at increased risk of developing leukemia and other cancers. And that's what Kaiching. Lee was thinking about that day on the beach, how to make a better, safer plywood glue.
And if muscles can stick themselves to rocks, maybe they could stick wood together too.
Yeah, so muscles. Natural adhesive has two big advantages over traditional plywood glues. First of all, it's non toxic, and secondly, it's waterproof. So if you've ever gotten plywood furniture wet, you know what a pain it can be because if the water isn't dried quickly, the wood layers can start peeling. This is a known problem with industrial adhesives, like many of them lose their stickiness in the presence of water, but not muscle glue.
Right, but how do you get glue out of a muscle?
Yeah, it's a good question. So Lee realized right away that would be difficult and expensive, not to mention unpleasant for the muscles. But he headed to his lab to see if he could cook up a synthetic version of the muscle glue, and one day, while he was eating his lunch, he had another light bulb moment. He realized, soybeans, I love how this daily life was just handing him the scientific answers that he needed. I know, it's just
inspiration is everywhere anyway. People have been making adhesis from soy for decades. The problem is, soy based glues tend to be weak and they're not waterproof. But Lee knew that soybean, flower and muscle glue were made from similar makeup of proteins and amino acids, and he wondered, what if I altered the chemical profile of soybean glue to
make it more like the kind made by muscles. So, with the help of a grant from the US, Lee started tinkering with soy's chemical makeup, and by modifying the amino acids in the bean, he successfully created an adhesive that was just his waterproof and just as strong as the glue made by muscles. In fact, the soybean based glue was twice as sticky as hot glue, three times stronger than Elmer's glue, and had about the same adhesive power as contact cement.
And has this revolutionized the plywood industry or what? Yeah?
So it's definitely changed things. Like Lee presented his discovery to Columbia Forest Products. They're a major plywood manufacturer, and they quickly signed on. So fast forward to today, the company has converted all of its factories from formaldehyde glues to soy, and pollution rates that some of these plants have dropped by as much as ninety percent. Wow, isn't that insane? And other companies have joined them too, so today soy based plywood is an option at most hardware
and home improvement stores. Other big companies like Ikea and General Motors now use soy for some of their plywood products because it's safer, stronger, and better for the planet. Anyway, in honor of Lee's incredible discovery that changed home DIY forever, we're running a contest on Instagram today. We're giving away a home Depot. Gifts are to the get, and our lawyers want to make it very very clear that this
is no way sponsored by Home Depot. But head over to Instagram at part time Genius to get all the details in enter.
All right, So I'd like to dedicate this next one to all the violinists who have dreamed of owning a Stratavius violin but can't stomach the instruments two million dollar price tag. They're just not that serious about it, magat they don't want to spend the two million, so here we Yeah.
I would love to know how many professional violinists listen to the show. But two million dollars is obviously a steep price tag for a three hundred year old violin that you're probably too scared to play anyway.
Indeed, but thanks to research from Swiss arborist Franz Schwartz, there's now a cheaper alternative. And while the new instruments don't carry the distinction of having been crafted by Italy's most revered violin maker, they do boast a tone quality that many experts consider to be just as good and in some cases may be better, a claim that might seem stunning enough, but the real shock is who's responsible for the superior sound? Are you ready for this?
It's fungus like Geseppe fungus, the famous Italian violin maker. Nope, nope, actual fungus that infested the wood used to make the instruments. It is totally bizarre because in most cases, a fungal attack destroys wood cell walls and it results in this kind of loose soft wood that doesn't sound very pleasant if it's made into an instrument. But at Schwartz discovered in the late two thousands. There are rare cases where fungal infections have a milder effect on the wood's density
and actually make it sound better. So what happens is they thin out the wood cells structure just enough to improve its acoustic properties. And so how did he figure this out? Exactly? Like do arboris just go around knocking on trees to see what sounds they make?
I'm sure that's not how they describe, but it is kind of like that. Scientists really do bounce sound waves off of trees to gauge their health. The funkier the echo, the more widespread the wood rot. And so Franz Schwartz was using this method himself when he hatched the idea for his fungal violin. He wondered how gentler kinds of fungus might affect the sound of a wooden instrument, so he partnered with Swiss violin maker Michael Ronheimer to find out.
They selected two different species of wood eating fungi for the job. And while I won't bother to pronounce their scientific names, I can tell you their nicknames their Rusty crust and dead mule's fingers. So those are both.
Pretty good I'm not sure which is grosser, but I think i'd go with rusty crust.
That is the right answer. But anyway, the top plate of the violin, which was made of spruce, was inoculated with rusty crust, and on the bottom, the sycamore plate was treated with dead mule's fingers. Both plates were submerged in a box of water to stimulate the fungui's growth, and a few months later, after killing off the spores, Ronheimer put the two halves together to create the world's
first bio violin. So Schwartz was blown away by the instrument's sound, which he described as warmer and rounder than that of a conventional violin, and he was so pleased with it that he decided to stage a blind sound test at an annual forestry conference in Germany, so on September first, two thousand and nine a jury of acoustics experts and conference attendees. They listened carefully as British violinist Matthew Trussler played five different instruments from behind the curtain.
Four of the violins were made by Ronheimer, two of them with fungus treated wood and the other two with untreated wood. From the same trees, but the fifth instrument came from Trustler's own collection, a violin made by Antonio Strativeris himself way back in seventeen eleven.
So I guess the goal was to identify which one was the true strat in the mix.
That's exactly right. So attendees were asked to rank the sound of each instrument they heard and to guess which one of them was over three hundred years old. Schwartz later admitted that as good as they sounded, he never expected one of the fungal violins to be confused for a multi million dollar instrument. But in the end, that
is exactly what happened. Out of more than one hundred and eighty attendees, one hundred and thirteen of them thought that one of Ronheimer's violins, which had been covered with fung gui for nine months, was produced by stratuv Areas.
So it wasn't It wasn't even close.
No, I mean, the real strat came in a distant second, but the other fungus violin claiming third place, and the two untreated instruments pulling up the rear so like it really does show the difference that it made I mean.
I get that, like a fungus could change the wood and the sound of a violin, but like, why are they comparable to stratavarius.
It's a good question, and honestly, no one can really say for sure why is violin sound as good as they do. The best guess is that it's due to the weather in Italy during his lifetime, so strata areas happened to live through what people knew as central yuar rops little ice age. This happened in the seventeenth century, and it brought long winters and cool summers to the region.
So the unusually chilly temperatures would have slowed the cell growth of the local trees there, causing their wood to develop more slowly and uniformly, which was the perfect recipe for producing wood with stellar acoustics. So, according to Schwartz, the fungi treatment he used was able to recreate that same ideal structure.
That's really cool. But if a fungus violin produces a richer sound, why don't they do that for all violins now?
Well, partly because not every violin needs the same tonal quality as the strativarius. Like it's nice to have different options, but the main reason is that Schwartz and his colleagues are still working out the details on how you'd actually mass produce these. Once they do, the plan is to sell the instruments for about thirty thousand dollars each, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually about what you'd pay for other high quality violins.
And a lot less than two million dollars.
Definitely, you're good at math.
We've got a pause for a quick break, but we'll be back more great science ideas right after. Welcome back to part time genius listeners, and we are counting down to number Okay, So I'm not going to beat around the bush on this one. This research totally blew my mind. So scientists and Northwestern University have developed a new treatment for spinal cord injuries that allowed paralyzed mice to walk
again after a single injection. Not only that, the treatment has loads of other applications, potentially impacting the way we treat everything from bone loss to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
I can't I've never heard of this. I mean, it sounds like a real life cure. All yeah, I mean, it's still early days. From the research perspective, the team's big breakthrough was only back in twenty twenty one, but so far the data is really incredible and promising. So just to give a little background on why this is such a big deal, They're currently about three hundred thousand people living with a spinal cord injury in the US alone, and in the most severe cases, less than three percent
of them will ever recover any basic physical functions. The reason for that is that the neurons and their spinal cords have been completely severed, and thus far as scientists haven't been able to find therapeutics that can successfully trigger spinal cord regeneration. But that changed with the study from Northwestern University. So researchers were able to reverse paralysis and mice by injecting them with something they called dancing molecules.
I've actually never heard of that either, so I'm curious that are the molecules themselves dancing or is it that they can restore the mouse's ability to dance? What are we referring to?
Yeah, so no word on whether the mice can dance before or after the treatment, but the molecules that were injected absolutely can dance. So after being injected as a liquid, the molecules coalesced to form tiny synthetic nanofibers that surround the spinal cord. And the fibers were composed of tens of hundreds of thousands of molecules, and the researchers found that by changing their chemical structure, they could control the
molecule's collective motion. This allowed them to fine tune the synthetic molecules movements, speeding them up to match the motion of biological molecules within the spinal cord. It turned out that the most hyperactive molecules, the ones that were dancing the most, were able to connect more effectively with receptors in neurons and other cells.
So once the molecules made that connection, they were able to like tell the cells to repair the damage neurons.
Yeah, So the dancing molecules triggered to bioactive signals. The first prompted the tails of the neurons to regenerate and that effectively restored communication between the body and the brain, and the second signal promoted the regrowth of lost blood cells that feed the neurons and other cells related to tissue repair, and the result of this intervention was that after just four weeks, these paralyzed mice could regain the ability to walk, which is just stunning.
Yeah, and it's also kind of a testament to the power of dance if you think about it, because it sounds like the approach didn't work so well when they tried it with more sluggish molecules.
Yeah, that souped up molecular motion really was the key factor in all of this. The cells and receptors within the body are constantly moving, so once the team was able to match that speed or vibration, the fast moving molecules encountered the receptors much more often, and that allowed
them to send their signals again and again. The breakthrough therapy actually has obvious implications for improving the spinal injuries of both humans and animals, but there's reasons to hope that the underlying discovery could also be used in other treatments,
as we allude to before. According to the studies, lead researchers Samuel Stupp quote, the central nervous system tissues we have successfully regenerated in the injured spinal cord are similar to those in the brain affected by stroke and neurodegenerative diseases such as als, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Beyond that, our fundamental discovery about controlling the motion of molecular assemblies to enhance cells signaling could be applied universally across biomedical targets.
Okay, so they're thinking they could fine tune molecules to match the motion of other damage cells, not just the ones in the spinal cord exactly.
And the most amazing part is they've already done it. So just last year, the team from Northwestern applied their strategy to damaged human cartilage cells and they found some success. Now, normally there's no way for humans to regenerate the tissues in our joints once we reach adulthood. So if you have a disease in which cartilage breaks down over time, you eventually get to a point where the bone is
grinding against the bone with no cushion between them. And currently the only treatment for this is joint replacement surgery, which is extremely invasive and also very expensive. But once again, the team here has found a much better solution. So using their injectable therapy, they were able to spur cartilage regeneration and damaged cells within just a matter of days, and once again it was the molecules dancing that triggered
the process. So building on that second success, the team's next goal is to test the therapy's effectiveness at regenerating bone and from there the sky's limit because, as Stuff explained, quote, now we have observed the effects in two cell types that are completely disconnected from one another, cartilage cells in our joints and neurons in our brain and spinal cord. This makes me more confident that we might have discovered a universal phenomena and it could be applied to many other tissues.
That really is amazing. So what's the status of the spinal cord repair?
Like?
Have they been able to test this in humans yet?
Fortunately not. The team's been petitioning the FDA for approval to start clinical trials, but so far it's yet to be granted.
Well, I hope it does come through sooner rather than later, and it sounds like something that could seriously change people's lives and of course the lives of mice as well.
Yeah, we'll have them all dancing again soon.
Well, our next breakthrough is a reminder that medical advances can truly come from anywhere, even from inside the mouth of a venomous lizard. Now we know this for a fact thanks to the work of doctor John Aang. He's an endocrinologist and VA researcher who found a way to stimulate the insulin producing cells in the pancreas using a hormone found in wait for it, the saliva of a HeLa monster.
I feel like there's no way to make that not sound crazy.
Yeah, Well, just to be clear, helo monsters are not, in fact, spased monsters or aliens. They're big, desert dwelling lizards native to the southwestern United States. They can grow to be about twenty inches in length and are easy to recognize thanks to their splotchy orange and black coloring. No, it's rare to see one in person, though, since they spend about ninety percent of their lives underground and only come to the surface when it's time to eat.
I mean, if you dc one, you should probably clear away, right because they're pretty venomous.
Well, you really don't want to mess with one of these guys. They have a pretty powerful bite, and because their main defense is to pump you full of venom, they tend to hang on to whatever they chomp on for as long as possible, and the venom glends are inside their mouths obviously, right yeah, and they're they're lower jaws, I think. So the longer a helo monster clamps down, the more venom is injected through their teeth and into
the bite wound. It was unfortunate enough to have been bitten, say the venom stings like molten lava, So these people have not only been bitten, but they also have experienced molten lava. Apparently are unlucky to keep rough, but for people with type two diabetes, it actually can be a life saver.
Which is wild. So how did doctor Ang even think to try this? Like, like, why was messing around with helo monster spit like the first thing you was thinking about?
I actually wondered that too. But keep in mind that medications derived from animal venom aren't that unusual. Sure, the venom of snakes, scorpion, spiders, even the world's only other venomous lizard, the komodo dragon. They've all contributed to different treatments over the years, and some of the existing research is what convinced doctor Ng that helo monsters might be
helpful for treating diabetes. So let's go back to the nineteen eighties, when doctor Ng was practicing as a physician and a researcher at the VA Hospital in the Bronx. He was working to discover new animal hormones with medical potential, and since he was an endocrinologist, he was especially interested in ones that might treat diabetes. This eventually led him to an article from the National Institutes of Health about the effects of certain snake and lizard venoms on the pancreas.
Studies showed that some venoms, including that of the Helo monster, could trigger inflammation in the pancreas where insulin is produced. Now, this convinced doctor Ing that the HeLa monster venom was worth a closer look, and so in nineteen ninety two he discovered a new hormone in the animals, salivam, which he called extendin four Now. When he tested the compound on mice, he was shocked to find that it reduced their blood glucose levels by stimulating the insulin producing cells
in the pancreas. In fact, it worked very similarly to the GLP one hormone found in the digestive tract of humans, with one other important difference. Extending four degraded in the body much slower, so for reference, a diabetic would have to inject GLP one every hour to keep an effective amount of insulin in the bloodstream, but extending four would only need to be injected once a day, which obviously
sounds like a game changer. It absolutely was, but unfortunately it took quite a while for doctor Ang's discovery to get the attention it deserved. Although the VA had funded his initial research, it showed very little interest in his findings, and neither did big pharmam. Injecting diabetics with proteins from lizard venom was just kind of deemed too weird for mainstream medicine, so doctor Ang's research wound up languishing for years until this small biotech startup with a focus on
diabetes finally took notice. So the resulting drug, exenotide, was approved by the FDA in two thousand and five, and it's now used by millions of diabetic patients worldwide.
I do love that these like venomous lizard creatures are you know, these things that like everyone is afraid of, are responsible for saving humans lives.
Yeah, and they don't even know it the lizards or the people.
Yeah, also, the lizards might not be too happy about it. I read that HeLa monster numbers are way down in recent years because we keep destroying their habitats, and if we aren't careful, we might lose those little guys completely.
Which would be a huge loss, even from a self serving perspective. I mean, if they prove this to be useful and humans wants, who's to say other medical secrets might be hiding in there.
I also think it's kind of a branding problem, Like if we renamed them helaqds instead of Heala monsters, I feel like they'd have more of a chance.
I think that's a great idea. Maybe we should push for that.
Anyway, that's it for today's episode. Be sure to tune in tomorrow for our big, big finale, where we'll be counting down to the number one greatest science idea of the past twenty five years. And don't forget to check out our Instagram at part Time Genius. For today's contests, you could win a home Depot gift certificate, which again is very much not sponsored by Home Depot, but from Gabe Dylan, Mary Will Lucas Riley and myself. Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production
of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongais Chatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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