Science Friday - Coronavirus Genetics, Prosthetic Hands. March 6, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

A New Trick For Dexterity In Prosthetic Hands Researchers working on the next generation of prosthetic limbs have a few fundamental engineering problems to overcome. For starters, how can people using prosthetic limbs effectively signal what motions they want to perform?  A team of researchers may have a solution: A surgical technique that uses muscle tissue to amplify the nerve signals. Participants fitted with prosthetic hands after this surgery, described in Science Translational Medicine this week, reported being able to manipulate objects with a degree of control and dexterity not previously seen. Electrical engineer Cynthia Chestek at the University of Michigan explains why this muscle graft seems to be solving the engineering problem of reading nerve signals and what the next generation of prosthetic hands could be capable of.  Looking To The Genome To Track And Treat The New Coronavirus As of Thursday, March 5, Washington state has reported over 30 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. To better understand the pathogen and the disease, scientists have sequenced the genome of the virus from two of the patients. Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research who uses genomics to track the spread of diseases, discusses how the genetic information from these patients can help determine the spread of the virus globally. Plus, Ralph Baric, a coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, talks about developing vaccine and drug candidates for COVID-19 and how the genomic sequences from this outbreak can be used to help create treatments. Can You Name That Call? Test Your Animal Sound Trivia Can you differentiate the cry of an Antarctic Weddell seal from the song of an emperor penguin? How about the bellows of a howler monkey from a warthog’s rumbling roar? The animal kingdom is filled with diverse calls and sounds, and for World Wildlife Day earlier this week on Tuesday, we curated them—in a quiz. SciFri’s digital producer Daniel Peterschmidt teamed up with Google Earth to create an interactive quiz that hops you around the world and highlights the many (sometimes surprising) sounds that species make. Daniel challenges Ira to an animal sound showdown.  Test your knowledge with the Science Friday Google Earth Animal Sound Quiz! What You Don’t Know About Well Water Could Hurt You Residents in Kansas who use private wells face uncertainty about what’s in their water. Environment and energy reporter Brian Grimmett for KMUW in Wichita tells us the State of Science.  A Human Trial For CRISPR Gene Therapy This week, researchers announced that they have started a clinical trial of a treatment that uses the CRISPR gene-editing technique on live cells inside a human eye. Plus a satellite rescue mission, parrot probability, and more in this week’s News Roundup. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we'll have an update on the coronavirus outbreak and talk about how geneticists are helping to monitor its spread. But first, this week, doctors started the first human trial of a gene therapy involving the gene editing technique CRISPR, hoping to combat a form of congenital blindness. It's a tell more about that and other selected short subjects in science. It's our own, Charles Berkwitz. Welcome back, Charles.

Hi, Ira. Let's talk about this. Yeah, so this week, the researchers announced that they've started a clinical trial of a treatment that would use the CRISPR gene editing technique on live cells inside a human eye. They're trying to treat one variant of a condition called Lieber congenital amurosis. It's a retinal disorder that causes severe visual impairment from infancy, basically. And so they're injecting this treatment under the retina inside a living person's eye. And why use CRISPR for this? So standard gene therapy, you'd try and sort of swap out the gene by ferrying a replacement gene inside the cell.

The messed up gene in this case is too big to fit in that viral payload. So instead what they're trying to do is use the CRISPR technique just to sort of delete the problem section of the gene in the hopes that it will allow the cells to function normally. So what kind of time frame are we talking about? So this is a phase one-two trial. They're testing both safety and efficacy. here. In animal tests, they were able to correct about half of the cells in the eye. It'll be a few weeks to maybe a month before they find out whether this particular patient has any benefit

from treatment. Let's move on to the continuing bad news about climate change. The outlook for the world sandy beaches disappearing? Yeah. So this is a study that was published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. And the researchers used satellite images, collected over a period of 30 years to track the progression of sandy beaches around the world. And then they used that data to simulate what might happen with global warming and rising sea levels, more erosion, bigger storms, things like that. And they found that across the world? We're losing sand on those beaches. You're losing a lot of sand. They're estimating that it may be 30 years or so, erosion will

have destroyed over 22,000 miles of sandy coastlines around the world. Different places around the world were hit differently in their simulations. Australia was one of the worst. The United States would probably lose thousands of miles of beach, according to this study. And of course, is there anything you can do about? You know, it's a good news, bad news situation here. The bad news is that they're saying that this is a conservative estimate. They think it could possibly be worse than they are predicting.

But they also say that if greenhouse gas emissions are moderately controlled, it might be able to prevent some of this effect. Let's look up into space. I know there's a story that you really were talking about earlier this week, and a satellite servicing mission? I know. This is just such a geeky, fun story. So space junk is a big deal, right? And when you've got an aging, broken satellite, you've basically got two options of what to do with it. You can either deorbit it, as they say, and let it burn up in the atmosphere, or you can push it up into this graveyard orbit and let it rot up there. Last Last week, Northrop Grumman decided to try something else, and they launched a satellite that

basically came up to a aging communication satellite called Intel Sat 901 and latched onto it, and now is going to be serving as a backup propulsion system for that satellite. You mean, it's like a tow truck sort of thing? Yeah, tugboat, maybe. How would that work? So, you know, the satellite wasn't designed to be docked with. So the new servicing satellite kind of came up behind it and inserted itself into the thruster nozzle, basically, of the old satellite. And grabbed on there and is they're now using the motors and thrusters from the new satellite to push the other one around like a tugboat.

So it's going to stay with it while it's in the new orbit? Yeah. So the contract is for five years. So it will ferry this other satellite around for five years, and then the plan is that it'll shove it up into the graveyard orbit. But the cool part is the servicing satellite can then detach, find another satellite to help out, and they're saying that they can keep using it for another 15 years or so. Oh, there's a whole new business that's satellite. That's right, you know, satellite repair. Satellite repair.

In other space news, just released yesterday, right, a new name for the Mars Rover 2020? Right. You know, it had been going by the name Mars 2020 Rover, which is sort of dull, but they officially now have named it Perseverance. It was suggested by Alex Mather, a seventh grade student from Virginia. There was a contest, right? Yeah, it was a nationwide contest, and people sent in lots of names. There were some that were more creative than others, but they went with perseverance.

That's a good name. Yeah. I like that. They like these multiple syllable names, too. And what is it, what's its mission? When's it going up? What's it going to do? So it's supposed to be launching late July, early August of this year, arrive in Mars next February, and once it's on Mars, the rover is going to be looking for what they call biosignatures,

signs that maybe once upon a time there was living material in some of these rocks. They're looking specifically in areas where they think there might have been water and decent conditions for life. And it will be able to collect samples, actually chip off pieces? It will have a container that it can, if it finds something super cool that it wants to save for later, it can stow it. And, you know, they're talking about maybe some kind of sample return mission down the road. We'll see. That'd be great. Actually, just to go there and find this rover and pick up this stuff.

Finally, there's news about a New Zealand parrot that can understand probability. Right. So this is a paper that was published this week in the journal Nature. communications. And researchers in New Zealand were working with a kind of parrot called a Kia. And they say that this bird seems to have an ability to understand probability, which is something that normally you would only attribute to humans or other great apes. What they did is they first they trained the parrot that if it got a black poker chip, that was good. It could trade that for a treat. And then they showed it two jars

It's filled with a mix of orange and black chips. And the researcher would reach into the jar and fiddle around and pull out a chip from each jar and offer closed hands to the parrot, and the parrot got to choose, which hand is more likely to have the treat chip in it. And they found that the parrot would consistently pick the more probable hand to receive the treat. Why? How did it know what to choose? So they tried a couple different things, and, you know, mixing the, the, the, the, the, the, the numbers of the different colored chips within the jar, the blend. So they're fairly confident that it's not looking at just, oh, that jar has more black chips.

It's actually somehow being able to calculate, I've got a better chance at getting my treat chip out of the jar on the left. Does it watch what the preference of the scientists did? Another, yeah, another fun part of the study was they had some researchers who were biased. and they made a big show of digging around in the jar and looking, oh, I'm going to find the right chip here. And the parrots learned that, you know, if Bob picks it, I'm more likely to get the treat. And so he would go with him. So they're saying it's a sign that there's more complicated things going on in there, you know, not birdbrain. Thank you, Charles.

Charles Berkowitz, Science Friday's director. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERN. For W. St. Louis Public Radio. KKU.AW. Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. In Kansas, major municipalities are provided with public water,

which is monitored by the state for harmful contaminants. But in more rural areas of Kansas, many people still use private wells to access groundwater, and responsibility for testing is left to the well owner. And as many residents are finding out testing well water for possible contaminants, all kinds of stuff like VOCs, coliform, nitrates, radon is not required by their localities. Yet to tell us more about this story is Brian Grimmett, Energy and Environment Reporter with KMUW, Kansas State News in Wichita. Welcome back, Brian.

Hey, thanks for having me. Where are these people with the private wells getting the water from? Why isn't it getting tested? So it really depends on, and this is one of the complicating factors, it depends on where you are. So they're getting their water from underground aquifers, and there are a couple of big ones here in this state, and they pump it up in their private well. And I don't think Kansas is alone in this. There's just not really regulations requiring that to be tested. It's just one of those things where it's left up to the individual owners, and a lot of people like it that way, honestly.

Yeah, and because I know a lot of people with wells, and it's up to you to test your own water. I mean, there's no way to set standards then for what happens or to have it? help people pay for the testing because it costs, I know, it cost a hundred bucks or more to do that. Yeah, there have been talk in the past about doing that, and some municipalities and counties have provided some of that help in the past, but over time, some of that budget money just went away, and it just, it wasn't enough of a priority. And so certainly there are mechanisms to do that, and for public water system, so if you live in a larger city, that gets tested all the time. And so there are federal standards declared out there for what makes safe drinking water.

Because there's some nasty stuff in well water. It couldn't there be? There could be. So one of the big issues in Kansas is nitrates, and that is as a result of some of the fertilizer that gets put out on the agricultural fields. And depending on how high the groundwater is in your area, that nitrates can leach pretty easily into the groundwater where you're pumping your water from. Are there some researchers recommending that the state required testing of private wells? So it gets a little complicated when it comes to that. There are some public health researchers who spent a year.

They talked to a lot of stakeholders, and they came up with these 18 recommendations. They didn't go as far as saying that it should be required, but they did come up with a bunch of other ideas, including one of the big problems here is letting residents know, when their water might be contaminated. We've got a good idea of where some of these hot spots are, or maybe you live close to an underground gas storage tank, but it's hard to make that connection between, we know that there's an underground gas storage tank there

and letting nearby homeowners know, well, maybe you should be checking your well, you know, more frequently than you are. Yeah, it's just simple telling people to do this go a long way. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. The recommendations, and I talked to a lot of people, they know that they should test their well on an annual basis, but, you know, it's like changing the oil in your car or getting your air conditioning unit checked out. It's just because you know you should do it, doesn't mean you do it. Been there, done that, Brian.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Brian Grimmett, Energy and Environment Reporter with KMU and Kansas State News in W. Thank you. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll have an update about the coronavirus, and look at how scientists are using the genome of the virus to track and possibly develop treatments. They are able to look at people who have contracted the virus, look at the genome that they have in there, and actually look at the parts and see what commonality there is about where it came from or where it might be around the whole world. There's really interesting stuff also looking at it for coming up with ways to fight it.

We'll talk about lots of stuff after the break. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Currently, there are a little over 200 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., affecting 18 states with New Jersey and Tennessee to be the latest to report cases. Washington State alone has 70 confirmed cases. Scientists were able to sequence the genomes of two of those patients in that state, and even since the beginning of the outbreak in China, researchers have been, quickly putting together genomic data and sharing it with one another. We're going to talk about what we know about the genome of the virus, how it can be used to track spread, and how that information might be helpful when developing drug and vaccine treatments. If you have questions, we'd like to hear from you.

844-8255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. Let me introduce my guests. Christian Anderson is an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. Welcome back. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me back. You're welcome.

Ralph Barak is a virologist who has studied coronaviruses for 30 years. He's a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, Ira. Pleasure to talk with you. Thank you. Christian, Washington State, as I say, has 70 confirmed cases of COVID-19, as we mentioned. scientists sequenced the genomes of the viruses from two of those patients.

Well, what does the data tell us about how the virus is spreading in that community? Yes, this is a very interesting study from the Seattle flu study led by a travel Bedford at the Hodge. And what they did here was that they had a travel-associated case back in January of this year, and that was sequenced by the CDC. And then later on here in February, the flu study started looking at flu suspected cases to see if they could find any COVID-19 cases in that. And they came up with a single positive case that they then sequenced.

And then once they sequenced that, they realized that this linked back to this very first case that they had sequenced in January. So what that data really strongly shows is that the virus has been circulating in the Seattle area for at least six weeks. We have sort of just been missing cases all up until now. And how can we stop missing cases?

Yeah, so one of the main issues in the United States here is that we've really been woefully unprepared to take this virus on. Our testing capacity has been much, much too low. And sort of the test case were saying, how could you get tested with this up until recently included travel to China? But of course, the problem is that we have many COVID-19 cases all across the world. And all the tests until very recently also had to be done by the CDC. So our ability to test for cases has been very, very, very lacking all the way sort of down to similar to what we have seen in Iran.

So for a while, we have simply just been missing cases because we haven't been able to look for them. So we really don't have a good idea, even outside of Seattle, how this spread has happened? No, I think one of the main concerns that we see is that we have seen early on in the outbreak of detecting cases here. we have a lot of fatalities and when we start seeing fatalities it really means that you have significantly more spread in the community than you are currently realizing so the estimates in the seattle area is probably you know maybe a thousand to a couple of thousand by now but of course what we have to remember is that this virus tends to like the outbreak tends to double about every week or so so we're going to see a long as sort of a stark increase in the number of cases as we are now

starting to look for them. And would it be would it be helpful to test everybody, you know, because we keep hearing that the virus may be asymptomatic, right? Yeah. So I think yeah, so currently that's definitely not possible because it's, you know, that will require way more testing capacity that we do have. But I think anybody with a fever sort of flu-like symptoms at this stage should be tested, of course, for flu and other infectious diseases, but if possible also for COVID-19. talk about this coronavirus. As I said, you've been studying it for 30 years. What makes, is this virus different from any other coronaviruses? Well, of course, the model coronavirus was SARS coronavirus, which emerged in 2003, caused about 8,000 cases and had a 10% mortality rate. The major difference

between the sort of the ancestral stars, coronavirus strain, and SARS-2, which emerged in 2019, was that most of the SARS-coronavirus 2003 strain infections were extremely serious. Anyone who became exposed became very ill, and then they didn't really transmit until they had serious disease. And so the outbreak was very vulnerable to contact tracing and quarantine. In this case, this virus can have asymptomatic infections, very mild infections. it can transmit prior to development of severe disease. And so it has many more flu-like characteristics. And this makes it much more transmissible in the community setting

and much more difficult to control. And the fact that I understand or I've heard that the incubation period is, what, two weeks? That's two to 14 days with an average of around five to seven days. Does that make it hard to track or also diagnose? Well, the initial CDC sort of screen was at five major airport portals of entry based on temperature with a four or five-day incubation period where you're infected without fever, then those people would slip through the screening. Then the fact that you had asymptomatics that may not develop fever or low-grade fevers, which would be subject to fever reducers, they would slip through the system

as well. So the system that was set up was porous. It was unfortunate, I think, that they didn't set up secondary screening at major hospitals that look for transmission networks that had been, became established early in the outbreak. If I go to my doctor or if I go to the emergency room and they suspect that I may have it, can they just phone up a test kit? Christian, Ralph? Well, right now, I think 700 people have been tested in the United States. The main problem was that the initial test that was rolled out by the CDC had a performance issue and gave false positives, so they had to start over. This led to a huge backlog, and then it was further complicated in that the case definition

required some linkage to travel from China. And as the virus began to appear in other regions of the world, that obviously allowed people to slip through the network. So we don't have enough cases. I think the projections are we would have about 75,000 cases of it, kits available to screen people in the U.S. at the end of this week. In contrast, a place like South Korea is screening 10,000 cases or 10,000 patients a day. Why can't we get their kids? That's a good question. Have they got so many kits?

Why can't we just import them? Pay them for it. That was a serious question. If they know how to do it, why don't we just take their stuff? Well, the WHO also has tests. New York City then has recently developed and certified its own test.

I think it was a fundamental error in pandemic preparedness. Christian, you agree? Yeah, I absolutely agree with this. The fact is that the WHO and China as well have had very functional tests for months now while the US was trying to develop its own test, which unfortunately turned out to be faulty in the beginning.

And then the rollout has also been problematic. So for the first two months of the epidemic, where we really should have done everything we could to prepare, was sort of used trying to develop tests and roll them out that then turned out not working. It's very unfortunate because this is really the most critical first step when it comes to preparedness. I agree completely. Let's talk about the following the disease around the world. Christian, let me ask you.

I know that Italy is reporting quite a few cases, right? Do we have any genomic information or any idea of how the virus, that Italian virus is spreading globally? Yeah, so we have a little bit of, so yeah, as you're saying, Italy have about 4,000 cases now described cases. It's really important to make this distinction between what is described and the true number of cases, because that's going to be much different in places like Italy and certainly also in a place like the United States. Italy themselves, unfortunately, haven't produced a lot of sequencing data, but we're starting to see travelers from Italy traveling to places like Brazil, Mexico, Finland, Germany, and other places.

and it sort of gives us a sense of what's actually going on in Italy. And some of the things that we can see is that Italy has multiple clusters of transmission chains. So there are multiple introductions into Italy itself, and then these introductions sort of launched their own chains that we're now seeing circulating in Italy. And then, of course, because there's so many infections and people traveling to Italy, we're now seeing these exportations out of Italy to other countries as well. Ralph, you've been working, as I said before, on coronaviruses and treatments for decades. Where do we stand with treatments?

I remember back in 2009, I just started throwing out old boxes of Tamiflu this week, right, for the H1N1 virus. That was a pandemic. Do we have any treatments in the works for not just precautionary like a vaccine, but something that will work? So there's been several drugs that have been clinical trials, both for SARS, the closely related Middle East respiratory coronavirus that emerged in 2012. And there's even been clinical trials going on with the SARS-2 viruses in China. One drug that's been tested quite a bit is HIV protease inhibitors, latinevere and retinivir. their efficacy is mixed and still debatable within the field. Our own group worked carefully and closely with Gilead over the past five years

as part of a center for excellence in translational research that's run out of University of Alabama with a fellow named Rich Whitley. And we screened a large number of drugs from Gilead and identified a drug called Remdissevere, which is very effective against SARS and murder. and also the new SARS-2 strain, as well as a large panel of related SARS and MERS-like viruses from bats as well as and for contemporary human coronavirus strains. So that drug is currently in trials in two different cohorts in China, and there's a clinical trial study with cases and controls here in the United States as well.

Would they speed up that trial at all? Well, the bottleneck is always the availability of cases that can be enrolled. The mathematical modelers argue that there should be fair numbers of cases available over the next two weeks. No shortage of cases is what you're saying. I think that's true. Anthony Fauci from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases put the timeline for a vaccine at 1 to 1⁄2 years, Ralph. How does the process work when there's a current outbreak of disease? That sounds like, and he said this many, many times, he's been contradicted by the White House.

How does that work? So the process begins when either the sequence or the virus becomes available. So when the Chinese first published the sequence of the new virus on January 9, 2020, many labs and many companies, including my own, synthesized the spike-like approach, which is the major surface glyca protein that gives the virus its unique appearance in the electron microscope. And then they place that in expression vectors or synthesize it as a recombinant protein. And then they, within about two to three weeks, have candidate vaccines that are ready to go. So the next phase is then to demonstrate that you can produce sufficient quantities of that material

that is in the right confirmation. So in other words, the neutralizing epitopes that are going to be and the T-cell epitopes that are going to be critical for protective immunity need to be properly presented in the context of the host. And so that means in vitro work has to be done. And then you have to go into animal models to assess, is it immunogenic? Does it make a protective immune response, which is typically associated with neutralizing antibodies for coronaviruses? And then those animals need to be challenged with a virus in a lethal challenge model that recapitulates many of the disease features of the virus. I hear you saying it's a long process. Yeah, it takes about a year, and then you have to move into phase one trials in humans and phase two trials.

And there are complications in SARS-coronavirus vaccine design, which could delay the process further. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios talking about the coronavirus. Let me see if I can get one call in before we're right out of time. There's so little time. Let's go to Rebecca in Cambridge, Mass. Hi, Rebecca. Hi, how are you? Hi there. Thank you. Go ahead. Thanks for taking my call. I had a question. With all these cases that have broken out in this country and across the world, how come we're not hearing of any school-age children or younger children getting the illness? Are there any thoughts or reasoning behind that that we know of? Good question. Christian Ralph? Yeah, so I think this is a really

peculiar thing. There's now been studies showing that they actually do get the virus that just don't seem to get the disease. What exactly is going on there is unclear, but coronaviruses in general, we are exposed to a lot as children, the cold, common cold type of viruses. So whether there could be any potential cross-protection there for those sort of exposures is an open question. But I think it's very, very interesting that we really don't seem to see the disease, but the infection does occur in children. I have a quick tweet from Lisa in Sacramento who asks, do UV satinit sanitizing wines affect the DNA? Could they help disinfect surfaces instead of the alcohol that we're telling people? You said UV? Yes, ultraviolet. Yes. Ultraviolet, yes. Ultraviolet will neutralize

virus infectivity. We use it to sterilize hoods sometimes in the BSL-3 facility. So where do you see this happening or ending up? Or is this just going to be a slow drip-drip of cases, Ralph, that you see happening more and more in the U.S.? Well, I think the model globally is that there will be a slow increase of cases followed by almost explosive increases in cases like has occurred in Italy and South Korea and in Iran. And I guess the question is, is the U.S. at the sort of the apex of that massive increase of cases or not? most of the epidemiologists who do mathematical modeling and disease prediction about how case rates are going to increase, argue that we may be facing some very, very difficult times ahead.

Because we're talking a geometric progression here, right? That's correct. Right, Christian? Do you agree? Yeah, I agree. I think we'll probably see an exponential increase in cases in the United States here or the next few weeks at least. And I think, again, the really, really critical thing here is that we need to ramp up that diagnostic testing capacity. All states need to be able to do this. Hospitals need to be able to do this. And right now, this is just not in place. So I really think a lot of focus need to be put there so we can try and understand how big a problem are we actually dealing with here.

Thank you, gentlemen. Christian Anderson from Scripps in La Jolla, Ralph Barrett at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Thank you both for some great talking to us about it. After the break, what will it take for people with amputated arms to have intuitive to use prosthetic hands? A new surgical technique that may solve an engineering problem. Really interesting new research on this. Stay with us. We'll talk about it after the break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The quest continues for an artificial hand that can do everything a biological hand can. And while robotic hands can perform impressive feats when guided by computers, amputees still have limited options for communicating with those hands, especially in a way that gives them nuanced mobility. Simple open and closing motions, yes, of course, but nothing near that, you know, that three-dimensional dexterity that biological hands are capable of.

But new research out of the University of Michigan this week could give the field a chance to get much, much closer with a surgical technique that makes nerve signals strong enough to control an artificial hand's robotic fingers. Surgeon Paul Sederna, part of the research team explained. A small piece of muscle, three centimeters by 1.5 centimeters by 5 millimeters thick. And you can take that small piece of muscle from anywhere, wrap that around the end of the nerve. what happens then is when that nerve then starts sprouting those branches like it does when it forms a neuroma in this case it sprouts those branches but the branches go in and re-innervate the muscle now you have a piece of muscle on the end of the nerve so we've known for decades that muscles create huge huge signals so then when your brain thinks move my thumb the signal comes from the brain down the spinal cord down along the peripheral nerve and that signal gets

to the muscle, that little muscle on the end of that nerve contracts, and it creates a huge signal. So we have then the ability to amplify those peripheral nerve signals 10 to 100-fold. Surgeon Paul Sederna, the University of Michigan. I'm here to explain more about why that's exciting and what the future generation of prosthetics could be capable of is Dr. Cindy Chesterak, Associate Professor of Biomedical and Electrical Engineering, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much for having me. You probably were listening along with us as co-author Paul Soderna talked about his surgical technique in which he was amplifying the nerve signal that people used to communicate with their limbs. tell us how this improves people's experience with prosthetic limbs.

Yeah, so as Paul mentioned, adding that piece of muscle around the end of the nerve just makes it so much easy around us as the engineering team to listen to that signal. It makes it 10 or 100 times bigger. And we've known how to listen to muscles, so as long as we've had cardiac pacemaker leads. So that's a very solved problem. So what that means is that, you know, there's always muscles that are missing in the amputation, and now from the nerves we can start to get those signals. So a really important signal, for example, that you're missing is if you look at your hand and you start moving your thumb, a lot of the muscles that move your thumb are actually in your hand.

So if you lose your hand, it's very hard to control a prosthetic thumb. If we listen to some of these muscle graphs that now have these nice big signals, we've been able to restore thumb movement. And, you know, both of our participants, Joe and Karen, were able to, for example, orient their thumb around an object. And it's really hard to pick something up if you can't move that thumb. Wow. So it actually was working in your test cases. Yep, absolutely. Our participants come into the lab.

We're so grateful for them to participate, and they have a small connector on their arm that we record those signals. We apply machine learning algorithms in real time and then drive that into a prosthetic hand. You know, I remember seeing a video of Dr. Hugh Hare at MIT showing him showing a patient that was fidgeting with his foot. He had a prosthetic foot that was fitted, and I understand your study participants show the same kind of now. adaptation or adoption of the prosthetics. They don't even know that they're sort of like fidgeting, do they? Yeah. No, I think that, you know, on a normal day, we ask our participants to do, you know, a lot of fairly boring tasks. They're touching targets with their fingers. And some of the coolest things we've seen is, you know, between experiments where we're sort of leaving the camera running.

So, yeah, now our participant, Karen, she does tend to talk with their hands a lot. And so if we leave the hand running, she will gesture with it. Other participant, Joe, he, Phil, my student, left the camera running, and he was, you know, playing with the thumb and touching it to different spots on the index finger and was like, this is nuts. Wow. I can put it wherever I want it to be. And we asked him if it felt natural, and he said it did. Okay. Let me give you the $64 question, which is how soon can everybody who needs one?

Yeah. So right now, you know, for safety reasons, we're only doing this in the lab. and, you know, all of our people are within six feet of a cart at all times. And we're using, you know, medical grade amplifiers. But honestly, nothing that we're doing here couldn't be done on an implantable device. So we do want to get that, you know, the connector off of their arm and make this something that they can take home. But we do need to have an implantable device that can record these signals and then, you know, use that to drive the prosthetic hand. But there's nothing we're doing on this cart that wouldn't fit on an implantable device.

But first, once you need to teach surgeons how to do that muscle transplant, too, when they're working on a patient. Yeah, and I should say that, yeah, Paul is an excellent teacher. He's been evangelizing this technique far and wide. And it's also really helpful to people who are having phantom limb pain, for example. So there's actually, he's done this on over 200 people, and I know he's been teaching it all over the place. Do we need a new prosthetic that would go along with this, or do the ones that we have, or in the works good enough? So I think we do.

I think we just passed what we can do with existing prosthetic hands. So one of our participants was able to use the Deca Hand, which is a marvel of engineering and moves nice and fast. But unfortunately, it's pretty heavy. And, you know, so it's really hard to use outside the lab. Our other participant, she's able to use the Osir Ilam. And she can control all of the five fingers. But interestingly, the software modes on the hand aren't even really set up to do that right now.

So we're hoping we can work with them and, you know, unlock those capabilities. But we need more from the hands and we can make the hand do a lot more in animation than the prosthetic hand can actually do at this point. We can have people spread their fingers now since that's also something you can get from the nerves. So if you're doing that in animation, how do you translate that into the patient? Well, so that's actually how we started doing these experiments. At first, we have them come in, and they're controlling an animated hand. And the animated hand does exactly what we tell it to. There's no delays or anything.

So at first we have them, you know, learn to move the fingers around. So I should say our algorithms are doing the learning. We just check that it works. And so they move the fingers around in animation, and then we were able to have them fit with sockets. It's our prosthetist. Does a great job, Alicia. And then they were able to also use those algorithms to walk around and control the hand. So a couple of challenges to you then to make this really practical device is one.

You have to shrink the electronics down in size, make it portable, wireless, and improve the hand itself, the artificial hand itself. Absolutely. Yeah. And so I think that we have more signals available. If, you know, I can challenge the engineers out there to give us a lighter, faster hand with more degrees of freedom. And are they meeting that challenge? Well, I mean, I think these signals haven't been available until recently. I mean, I think this is the highest amplitude signals previously recorded from a nerve in a human being to my knowledge.

So, you know, I'd like to think that we just sort of, you know, edged past what's available right now. And your patients must be ecstatic about it. something like this. Yeah. I mean, I think they, we, we ask them all the time, like, how's it feel? How does the control feel? And, I mean, I think they, they like it a lot better than what they can sort of walk out of the clinic with today. And I think both of them would be really, you know, happy to be able to use this at home. All right. I'm going to give you the Science Friday blank check question. If you could have a blank check, I have it right here in my back pocket, not signed yet. For any amount of money, what would you do with it? What do you need to make?

So I need a high channel count wireless implantable device. So that's, yes. White bandwidth is what you're saying. Yeah, no, I need more signal. So as you, you know, right now, I think everything you saw in the videos could be done with 16 channels of I.O. But, you know, machine learning's good, but nothing helps you more than having more signals in the brain. You know, we also do this research and we have, you know, 100 signals, give or take. And so, yeah, we need more signal.

And with neural interfaces broadly, if we, as you see the channel count of these systems expand, what we're going to be able to do with them will expand greatly as well. Well, we hope we can give you more signal, Dr. Chesdak. Great. Up to us. We would help you out. Thank you very much. Sure thing.

Be with us. Dr. Cindy Chesdak, Associate Professor of Biomedical and Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Case you missed it this Tuesday. World Wildlife Day, and we know you can't pass up a good charismatic creature story, but how good are you at identifying the sound of your favorite animal? To test your knowledge, we put together an interactive animal sound quiz that you can play. It's up on our website at Science Friday.com slash animal quiz. SciFright Digital producer Daniel Petershmidt and quiz creator is here to talk about our Google Earth

Animal Sound Quiz. He's going to test my recall skills. sorry. He's joining us by Skype. Hi, Daniel. Hey, Ira. How's it going? Okay, let's talk about why animals sounds. How did you come up with this idea? Yeah, so the idea came from our events producer, Diana Montano, who made a version of this for our last Cypriot trivia night, which you co-hosted. You were there. Yeah, it was great. Yeah. So animals have an incredible diversity and how they look, but they also have an incredible diversity and how they sound and how they look might not match up what their calls. So we made a quiz to see if you can match that animal sound with an animal.

And you built this as part of Google Earth's Voyager platform. Can you describe how you built it and what's the quiz like? Yeah. So Voyager is this editorial platform in Google Earth and they work with different publishers to make these cool, sciencey interactive stories using their 3D imagery and street view. And we have another cool project we did with them where we made a tour of Ness's launch pads at Cape Canaveral. But with this Animal Sounds quiz, we picked animals from all over the world, so you'll be hopping around the globe a lot in this. And it takes you, when you guess it correctly or incorrectly, it takes you to their habitat.

We tried to find these animals in street views, so I was just like Googling Bald Eagle in Street View. And I only found a few of the Bald Eagle that we ended up going with was from a zoo in Germany. I found a hyena, but it was kind of off in the distance. But it is there. Stuff like the Katie did, which is this small green insect. It's kind of hard to find those since they're so small.

But we did our best. All right. I'm going to get ready by telling everybody I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I am ready for the short version. Let's play a little short version of the quiz right now. Go for it. Okay.

Yeah. So this first animal sounds like a synthesizer or a Game Boy. It does not sound organic at all. I know I'm joining by Skype, but I promise this isn't those like bloopy sounds that plays when you're connecting to someone. So I'll play it and give you a multiple choice guess after it plays. All right, let's play clip number one. Okay, Daniel. Okay, yeah.

So is that A, a giant golden crowned flying fox bat? B, is it a Baffin Bay Narwal? C, Weddell Seal? Or is it a clip from Pink Floyd's album Animals? You know, you could not have picked a... better sound from my first sound because I know exactly what that is. I thought you took it off of my cassette tape that I took. When I was in Antarctica in 1979, I watched people investigating Weddell seals under the ice with a microphone. They stuck it down in the water, and that is the exact sound

the Waddell seal makes. So, yeah, you got it. C, ding number three. Yeah, C is correct. All right, I am not going to give you multiple choice for this next one. Okay. But this next one is a bird, and can you guess which bird makes this call? Wow. I'm thinking of my bird feeder in my backyard, and I'm thinking of three or four birds, and one of my favorites is a nut hatch. So I know it's not, but I'm going to guess it anyhow. Yeah, good guess.

You probably wouldn't find this bird in your backyard. This is actually the sound a bald eagle makes. No kidding. Yeah, so that sound you hear in movies and stuff. That's usually like a red-tailed hawk or something. like that, you know, the fearsome caw or screech. I was like looking on the, I was looking for these sounds on YouTube, and I was looking in the comments, and someone said in the comments, like, and this is why you don't hear

these sounds, why you don't hear the bald eagle sound in movies. I'm calling Stephen Colbert right up and telling me get rid of that on it. Yeah, I know. All right, you have another sound for it. Yeah, let's go for it. Let's go for it. We don't. That's it. Two sounds. All right, well, I can, like, imitate the sound for you. if you want. Yeah, I would. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Okay. Okay. So sounds something like this. And just going back and forth like that. One more time? It's an animal in the wild, huh? Yes. You stepped on your cat's tail.

You're on to it. Oh, come on. So, yeah, no. It's called Canadian Links. Ooh. And they. And they sound not dissimilar to, like, humans if they try to make that sound. But they make that sound so that, like, you know, they have the big teeth and big claws.

Right. And instead of getting in fights, they just yell at each other, kind of like humans. So how many sounds do you have up there on the website? Yeah, so we have nine of them. And we have birds, mammals, fish, everything. We got it all. And it's up on our website. and what's the address, ScienceFriety.com slash animal quiz.

Animal quiz. And you must have had a lot of fun doing this, Daniel. Yeah, it was a lot of fun listening to the first drafts and hearing the sounds that Google picked, and it was great. Okay, well, we'll have you on for the next round. Thank you. Thanks a lot for this. It's Daniel Petersman, a SciFri Digital Producer and creator

of our Google Earth Animal Sound Quiz. Thank you, Daniel. Great talking to, Ira. And you can play it, as he says, up on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash animal quiz. Charles Berkwist is our director or producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather, technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim,

Kevin Wolfe and Lisa Gosselin, B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music. And if you missed any part of the program, you can hear it again, subscribe to our podcast. And we have our Science Friday Vox Pop app with the question this week. Does climate change make you anxious or sad? I know the answer to that one.

But we probably understand what it is. But tell us, does it help you with our, you know, what does it do for you? It's our next degrees of change segment. We're going to be talking about that. Tell us how you're adapting emotionally to climate change. That's our Science Friday Vox Pop app. Does it make you anxious or sad? It's the topic on our next degrees of change segment.

Tell us how you are adapting emotionally to climate change. Maybe not eating just more ice cream. how I start doing stuff like that. Have a great weekend. I'm Myriff-Lado in New York.