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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof with Jonathan McRae on Newstalk. Proudly supported by Research Ireland.
Hello and welcome to Future Proof, the podcast. This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us. I'm Jonathan McRae. Thank you for subscribing, downloading, rating. If you like the show, let people know. We really appreciate it. Coming up on this week's episode, we'll be speaking to a lightning expert about what happens when 100 million volts pass through your body.
If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us, scienceatnewstalk.com. We get to all of your comments at the end of the pod. First, though, it's time to look back at the more interesting stories from the world of science this week. We're joined by Dr. Jessamyn Fairfield from the University of Galway and science communicator Owen Murphy. You're both very welcome. Our first story.
It's got to be something else.
Lupus could cause... No. Lupus progresses slower. There'd be joint pain.
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Chapter 2: What happens when 100 million volts pass through your body?
So it's not a typical case. We should get an A&A. It's not lupus.
Has to do with lupus, Jess.
That's right, and a possible new cure for lupus, or at least a new treatment that can reduce its symptoms really dramatically, using immunotherapy. So lupus, if you're not familiar, is this chronic autoimmune disease. It affects about 5 million people worldwide, and it's a really nasty piece of work.
It's where your immune system basically attacks healthy tissue, which can result in lots of inflammation, fatigue, but also damage to your internal organs, like your kidneys, your lungs, your heart. It's a really, really...
a bad disease and a disease that's quite hard to treat as well because if you think about you know for very severe cases of lupus how could you reduce the sort of immune activity in your body if you reduce the thing that is causing lupus you then also reduce your immune system and its ability to respond to other stuff so
It's been a really persistent and difficult disease to treat for a long time. But this new kind of therapy that was trialed in a study by University College London and the NHS in the UK actually found incredibly good response using this new immunotherapy. So it's a type of therapy that's actually already been used to treat different types of blood cancers.
And basically what they do is they take your T cells, so these immune cells in the body, they take some of them out. And they teach them how to identify some of the like rogue B cells or the rogue immune cells that are causing the lupus itself. Yeah. They take them out. They sort of reprogram them. They put them back in.
And one thing that's amazing about this treatment is that it's a one time treatment. It's not like a medication that you have to take. It's not an ongoing thing. It is a one-time reinfusion of these modified T cells. It's called CAR T cell therapy. So the CAR is chimeric antigen receptors, which is the type of change that they're providing to the T cells.
But basically what they found is actually really, really good remission rates in the patients that have been treated with these modified T cells. And again, it's sort of their own body cells that are being taught how to not do the thing that they were doing when you had lupus. And the number of people in this trial was quite small.
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Chapter 3: How does lightning differ from electrical injuries?
I think it's tragic because essentially the parts of the natural system which we thought we could use to help heal the planet... are actually so badly damaged that they can't even work as they should anymore. In terms of this particular study, how representative do we think it is of trees generally?
So for example, we tend to think of the Amazon as being that major part of the world that is doing a lot of the carbon dioxide sequestering. So this study focused on oak trees, just oak trees. Right. But I guess the thing about oak trees are they're often seen as the great trees. They last a very long time as well. Okay. I think that is something to think about. Thanks very much, Owen.
Our third story, Jess, has to do with aliens.
That's right. If things are bad on our planet, just look to other planets.
No, no. Throw something at her.
Oh, no. Okay, this is my car now. So, no, this is a new study actually from SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in the U.S., who have been for decades looking at different signals from the universe as a whole looking for extraterrestrial life. famously so far have not found any. But this new study talks about maybe why that is.
So the way that SETI and other projects look for extraterrestrial life is by looking for these very narrow band radio transmissions that can propagate a really long way through the universe, but that cannot be produced by any sort of existing natural cosmic or astrophysical processes that we know about. And these are things that our civilization has been making for like 100 years or so now.
But basically the idea is if the band of radio emission is really, really narrow, then that couldn't have come from any sort of star eating another star or something. It has to have come from an advanced civilization. And we have not seen any of that yet. Right.
So this new study actually proposes a reason why, which is that when people look at these signals that have been presumably if they if they did exist, they would have been transmitted over large swaths of the universe. There has been a compensation for distortion that can come from that long transmission.
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Chapter 4: What are the common injuries from lightning strikes?
Which isn't necessarily true.
No, but it is. But, I mean, we are bounded by the physical world. We are bounded by the physical world. And energy is a universal thing as far as we're aware. So, I mean, it makes sense in a way, but I guess not knowing what you don't know is always the problem.
We're looking for the fingerprint of a civilization like ours. We haven't found it yet. And this kind of indicates one reason why. So this will change the way that these kind of signal search processes are done in the future. But there still could be lots of signals that we're not seeing.
Yeah, with Frank Drake's equation saying that, you know, the chances of us being alone in the universe are infinitesimal. But then the, whose paradox is it?
The Fermi paradox.
The Fermi paradox is like, well, okay, but then where the hell are they?
Yeah, where are they? And are they hiding? Because we live in a grim and horrible universe where everyone has to hide.
Would you want to meet us knowing what you know?
Give me another 10 years. We'll see.
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Chapter 5: Why do some people survive lightning strikes?
Yeah. Can it detect that direction and use that to follow an instruction? So I'm going to give you an example of speaking about car keys here today. Yeah. If you lost your car keys and I found them, I said, Jonathan, I have them here. The first thing you'd probably do is look to see where I'm standing. Yeah.
If you still couldn't see it and I say, look, they're over here, Jonathan, you'd look to see which direction I'm pointing. Yes. But what if I was obscured and you couldn't see where I was? Well, then I wouldn't know where you were pointing. Well, that's what I would have thought.
However, research has been conducted previously on infants and puppies, young dogs, that showed that by speaking excitedly in the direction of a treat bucket... when the researcher was obscured, the animals and the infants moved towards that. Ah, so it was like, even if they couldn't see you, they knew that you were pointing, or your face was pointing a certain, okay, all right.
So, what they did here was, they did the exact same study with 29 goats. Okay, now, why goats? Do you know, we often talk about basic research or, you know, like, you know, we learn the strangest things from just asking interesting questions. This is a good one. Okay, go ahead. So why goats? Well, okay, let's rationalise this one. Goats are one of the oldest domesticated animals we have.
About 10,500 years ago, we domesticated goats. So in this study, they used 29 domesticated goats, put them in a pen. They had a wooden screen in the middle of it, high enough and wide enough to cover the researcher. Two red buckets either side. One red bucket had a treat, uncooked pasta, it's a treat for goats apparently, and nothing in the other one. Three scenarios.
The researcher stood behind the wooden screen, closer to the empty bucket, but still obscured by the screen, and spoke excitedly towards the treat bucket. Right. Second scenario, it didn't say anything. The researcher said nothing, and the second researcher just released the goat. Third scenario, it turned its back to the wooden screen and spoke away, so not towards either of the buckets.
60% of the time, in the first scenario, when the researcher spoke excitedly towards the treat bucket, it went to that bucket. Hmm. 47% and 49% in the other scenarios. So it just looks like chance. Random. So why is this important? Yeah. So why is this important?
Do you know? Is that the end?
No, no, no. The reason they say is that it actually shows us that there's a lot more similarities between human and animal communication than we might recognize at times. So there's a lot more going on there. Maybe it'll help us understand how they see the world. Apart from dogs, it's possible that goats may be the greatest of all time at following human cues. Very good, very good.
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