Science Friday - Covid Update, Brain Fog Research, Toilet to Tap. Aug 18, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Youth Climate Activists Score A Win In MontanaThis week, a state court in Montana ruled in favor of a group of 16 youth climate activists, who argued that a state environmental law was in violation of a provision in the state constitution. The Montana constitution states: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”  The ruling will allow (but not require) regulators to consider climate impacts when evaluating proposed energy projects for approval.Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins Ira to talk about the decision and what it might mean for other climate-related litigation around the country. They’ll also discuss other science news of the week, including some strange particle physics from Fermilab,  the end of the road for the common incandescent light bulb, and how researchers decoded a snippet of song — using electrodes on a brain. COVID-19’s Summer Wave Raises New QuestionsStep outside into a public place, and you may experience some deja-vu: Masking is back up, the coughs and sniffles are echoing, and coworkers are calling in sick. It’s not just your imagination—hospitalizations from COVID-19 are up 14.3 percent for the week of August 5. This new wave has a name: EG. 5, named for the recent Omicron variant that is now the most prevalent.With new boosters on the horizon, Ira catches up with Dr. Angela Rasmussen, virologist at VIDO, the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, at the University of Saskatchewan. They answer questions about the new monovalent booster, testing guidance, and why COVID-19 is still a public health problem.New Research Suggests Neurological Culprit For COVID Brain FogAmong the most debilitating symptoms of Long Covid is brain fog, a condition which includes symptoms like confusion or inability to concentrate. A recently published study using mice cells in petri dishes suggests that brain fog might be the result of neurons fusing together. The results have yet to be tested in live animals or humans. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with study author, Dr. Ramón Martínez-Mármol, research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute, at the University of Queensland, based in Brisbane, Australia, about what his research might help us better understand about brain fog. Reno Is Preparing To Turn Its Wastewater Into Drinking WaterInside a water treatment plant in north Reno, Nev., on a recent Wednesday, recycled wastewater was running beneath a floor grate inside a small testing room. Inside the space is a system of serpentine-like PVC pipes with 19 different ports, used to test water samples at different intervals.“It’s about halfway through the treatment process at the wastewater facility,” said Lydia Teel, an engineer with the Truckee Meadows Water Authority, or TMWA, which serves about 440,000 people in the greater Reno area. “So, it’s clean, but there’s still some color, there’s bacteria in it, some solids.”Teel spearheads a demonstration project called OneWater Nevada, an effort to show that the region can recycle the water that flushes down people’s toilets and shower drains and – eventually – turn it back into clean, pure drinking water flowing from faucets, effectively creating a new water resource. The project is a collaboration between TMWA, the cities of Reno and Sparks, the University of Nevada, Reno, Washoe County, and the Western Regional Water Commission.The Reno area doesn’t have a history of threatened water supplies, and historic snowfall this past winter eased drought conditions in Nevada and across parts of the Mountain West. But that could shift quickly with climate change.To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. 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 Iroflato. And I'm Kathleen Davis. A bit later in the hour, Angela Rasmussen joins us for an update on COVID. It is not going away. We'll also talk about one specific symptom people with COVID can experience, brain fog, and what researchers are learning about it. And we'll take you to Reno for a look at their water recycling program. But first, this week, a state court in Montana ruled in favor of a group of 16 U.S. climate activists who argued that a state environmental law violated part of the state constitution. The ruling will allow but not require regulators to consider climate impacts when evaluating

proposed energy projects for approval. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Omeria Fon, science writer at Vox based in Washington. Welcome back. Good to have you. Thanks, Ira. This seems like sort of a really interesting and important decision. Tell me about it. Climate activists around the world have been exploring litigation lawsuits as a way of trying to get governments and oil companies to act on climate change. So far, they've been stalled in courts, but this recent decision in Montana is probably one of the earliest and most significant decisions in their favor. As you noted, Montana is kind of a unique case because they actually have a provision in their constitution that says that they have to maintain and

improve the environment for present and future generations. And these group of kids, they said that the state was violating that provision in their constitution because they were continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects without thinking about the climate change impacts. And so what does the state have to do now? Is it required to do something? Well, what's interesting is that previously there's this law in Montana called the Montana Environmental Policy Act. And under the previous misregulation, it said that they weren't allowed to consider climate change. So what this ruling does is it allows them to. It doesn't necessarily require legislators to look at climate change, but it creates that opening. And now the state legislature will have to come up with a way for how climate change will

factor into their decision. So there's still one more element here to see how this will play out. Do you get the impression of other states and other activists are looking at this decision? Oh, absolutely. You know, there are a number of climate lawsuits in a number of different states using different approaches and trying to tailor them to those specific states. You know, there was a case in Oregon, in Alaska, in Virginia, and so I know groups of kids have been using this approach in trying different strategies. And Montana is the first place that succeeded. And that might give them some wind in their sales as they pursue these lawsuits in other states. All right, that is really interesting. We'll stay with that. And staying on the climate theme, one of the comments, you know,

you sometimes hear from people who don't want to accept that climate change is a problem. They say, well, the CO2, it's good for plants. They like to eat it. But apparently there's a limit, right? That's right. You know, plants photosynthesize, which is where they take light, carbon dioxide, and water, and they use it to make their own food. And so it stands to reason.

If you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, the plants would grow better. And for a period of time, we did actually see that. There is a new paper that just came out this week that found that since 1982, plants have added enough leaf cover to cover an area, roughly the size of the continental United States twice over. But there's a limit to how much CO2 you can soak up because you also need the other ingredients, the water and the sunlight. And if those things are being restricted, then, you know, you hit a limit of what you can do with CO2. So those are the other limiting ingredients. Right. And, you know, since climate change makes the

planet warm up, it leads to more water actually being pulled out. of plants. This is a phenomenon called evapotranspiration. And as air temperature increases, it increases the amount of water it can hold on to. So while the plants are getting more carbon dioxide, at a certain point, they start losing more water and that starts counteracting any benefit. And so the researchers who studied this, they saw that between 2001 and 2016, the rate of new photosynthesis and leaf cover kind of leveled off. And so we're at the standstill now with the amount of plant growth. Wow, that is interesting to hear. You have one last story that's sort of climate adjacent, and it's the final demise of the incandescent light bulb. That's right. You know, this has been sort of a long time coming. This was actually a process that started under the Bush administration in 2007. Basically, they wanted to switch away from the Edison era light bulb, you know, those filaments and glass vacuum bulb. Those have been used for more than a century in the U.S. and in much of the world, but they actually produce more heat than light. And as we grew more concerned about energy efficiency, policymakers said that we should start trying to be a little bit more efficient. And finally, earlier this month, we got a regulation implemented that basically told retailers that most of these incandescent bulbs can't be sold in the U.S. anymore and people will have to buy more efficient bulbs.

But they're doing that anyhow. Yeah, that's right. You know, a lot of retailers have already stopped selling these incandescent bulbs. And that's because we have, for the most part, a better technology. and that's light emitting diodes. They've been gaining ground over the past decade, even though they were invented in the 1960s. Only recently have they started becoming very competitive

with incandescent bulbs in terms of how much light they can produce and also being able to have more features, things like being able to tune their brightness and their color temperature. And so there's a lot more versatility here, and they tend to last a lot longer. So there's a number of benefits that are going for LEDs, but the researchers that I talked to said that we still haven't,

availed ourselves of the full gamut of the benefits that we can get from LEDs. And so the future of lighting is actually going to look quite different. We've been trying to make LEDs imitate incandescent bulbs for a long time. And now if we actually let LEDs be LEDs, we can do some really interesting things like make them a lot smaller, weave them into fabrics rather than having distinct light fixtures. Imagine just an entire wall or a ceiling that glows. We can diffuse and use lighting more precisely. And ironically, perhaps one of the biggest.

benefits of LEDs is that we can tune it more accurately to our sleeping and waking cycles, our circadian rhythms. And this new generation of lighting could actually help us reclaim the dark and help us undo some of the unintended consequences of having so much lighting everywhere. I love it. Just another gadget I can play around with. Okay, this next story might make your hair heard a bit. It's a discovery and a tiny subatomic particle called a muon, but it might have big implications. That's right. Mewods are these subatomic particles, as you noted. They're similar to electrons, but about 200 times heavier. And researchers at Fermilab, this particle accelerator near Chicago, were studying these particles. They were moving them in an accelerator close to the speed of light. And they noticed that there was this wobble that they detected in these particles. And when they went back to their formulas and they did the math and crunched the numbers, they said this wobble could not be explained by the other forces of nature. There are four fundamental forces in the universe that govern basically everything that we interact with. That's gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. This is part of the standard model. But these new results seem to defy that.

There seems to be some other element at work. And the scientists are really intrigued in trying to figure out what might be going on. Is there a fifth fundamental force that we didn't know before? You know, it just shows you how little we really know about how the universe works. Right. It's a reminder for scientists to be humble, but also to leave their minds open to other possibilities. You know, for the long time, the standard model was the main thing that scientists were excited about because all the data kept lining up with it for a long time. And now they're seeing something that doesn't line up with it, which means they might have to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate just the fundamental makeup of the universe. Yeah, I love that. Well, we don't know what the dark energy and dark matter is, so small detail. Okay.

Let's move on to a milestone in xenotransplantation using organs from animals and people. You have an update on a pig kidney. That's right. These researchers at NYU Langone Health reported this week that they were able to keep a pig kidney alive in a human donor for more than a month. And they say that they're going to try to push that to another month. Now, this is a patient that was already brain dead, which means legally they are not alive, but the other parts of their body care are still viable. And so what they did was they transplanted this pig kidney into this person's body and saw that it continued to function.

This pig kidney, though, was a little bit special. It came from a genetically engineered pig so that it would be less likely to be rejected by the host. But the researchers here said that it was a very minimal genetic modification and also that they didn't have to use that many more drugs to try to keep the body from rejecting it. So what is the ultimate goal here? Is it to be, you know, able to create a source of kidneys that could be transplanted into people? That's definitely one possibility. You know, we're always hurting for viable organs that there are a lot more people that need donated organs than there are available in terms of our supply chain.

And of course, you know, when we talk about donated organs, you need to have it from a person that dies in a very specific way, in a way where their body does not have any kind of illness or infection and where their organs are kept alive, but their brain is dead. And so that's a very narrow donor pool. So if we can source our organs from animals that we already harvest for other reasons, then that could potentially save a lot more lives. Okay, finally, something you don't hear every day on Science Friday. We play Name That Tune.

So let's listen. Okay, Omer, what was that? Well, that ghostly little tune was actually decoded music read directly from someone's brain. Scientists reported this week in the journal Plas Biology that they were, able to plant electrodes directly into a patient's brain and using the readings, they could decode and decipher the music that they were listening to. We have the original clip. Let's listen to that.

That's the Pink Floyd song, another brick in the wall. That's what they played in, and then they listened to the brainwaves that came out, and this is what that sounded like. Now that you know what the words are, you can sort of. make it out. Exactly. So the researchers, they said that by looking and listening to the decoded brainwaves, they were able to pick up the rhythm guitar, the tempo, and even some of the words in this song. They studied 29 patients. These were patients who were already undergoing treatment for epilepsy. And they used a fairly invasive technique. This involved putting electrodes directly on the

surface of the brain. And so this is not something that they were doing just on a whim. They were doing this on patients who were already seeking treatment for something else. but this shows that they were able to actually understand what parts of the brain interpret music. And by looking at how those parts of the brain process the signal, we can actually decode that signal as well. So potentially in the future, we might be able to interface brains with devices and be able to tell, you know, when you're listening to a song in your head, could a computer maybe potentially play it back for you? That might be something that we could do in the future. Humair, we are now firmly into science fiction. I mean, not fiction anymore.

We're in the science future. That's a good way. O'Me, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Have a good weekend. My pleasure. Thanks for having you back, Ira. You're welcome. O'Mary Fon, science writer at Vox, based in Washington, D.C.

We have to take a break on when we come back and update on COVID and answers to your latest questions about it. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I am Ira Flato. I want to get personal. for a moment because last week, guess what? Maybe you can hear it in my throat. I got COVID-19 for the first time.

It's a very mild case, thank you. Very low fever I had. I finished my last dosage of Paxlovod on Tuesday. So please excuse my voice. It comes with the illness. You know, it was a bit of an eye-opening experience. It was a reminder that despite a lot of people acting like they were before COVID-19, well, it is still out there. And I'm beginning to mask up again. Statistics say COVID is on the rise, this new wave. So what's better than talking about the latest thinking on the vaccines and the diseases evolution? And to do that, I want to welcome back our longtime expert, Dr. Angela Rasmussen, virologist at Vito, the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization University of Saskatchewan.

That's in Saskatoon, Canada. I love to say that name. Welcome back. Thanks so much for having me back, Ira. and I'm sorry about the circumstances. What's the deal? Is there an outbreak, a new outbreak of it? Is there a new variant going around?

Because I have seen so many people getting it now. So I wouldn't call it a new outbreak. In many ways, the outbreak has been going on since 2020 when it first emerged. But there certainly is a rising cases compared to what we had several months before. There are also new variants around or really more accurately, their sub-variants all derived from the Omicron family. So we've been dealing essentially with the same variance of concern since late 2021. However, there is a new Omicron sub-varyant in town as well as several others that have been spreading for the last six to nine months or so. Now, I need a little bit of advice about getting tested because I'm testing myself every, just about

every day, and I have seen conflicting advice and how often you get tested after you get positive results the first time. Some people are saying keep testing until you're twice negative. On the other extreme, I've heard doctors say no need to keep testing as you will keep testing positive for a while. And you can go out after you tested positive. after five days? What's the thinking? What is the thinking here now? Yeah, so this is something that has been perpetually very, very confusing for people. And I think a lot of it stems from the CDC's guidance, which now says that you were supposed to wait and isolate for five days after you test positive. But then you can go ahead, essentially, and go back to your usual life. Although, certainly,

it's safer for other people if you do wait until you test negative. And there's all sorts of rules and guidelines for different scenarios. If you still have symptoms after five days and symptoms haven't gotten better, then maybe you should consider isolating for a longer period of time. But what do people really need to know? I mean, I think there's a lot of confusion here, because the tests themselves, the rapid antigen tests don't necessarily prove that you are infectious. that you're shedding actually infectious virus. What those tests look for is the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-2, which is a major component of the virus particle.

So if you have a positive test, that means you're shedding a lot of N-protein from your nose. A lot of people assume that that means that you're also shedding infectious virus, and that would be my assumption as well. But there's not a lot of numbers that clearly correlate when a person actually stops being contagious with a potential to infect other people. Now, to be really, really sure, you can, of course, test two days in a row or have two negative tests within 48 hours of each other, then you're pretty sure that it's not going to come back and you're not going to test positive. But at the same time, I would say that it's best and safest for everybody else around you to go ahead and wait until

you do test negative at least once. Okay. A question from Sam on three. who asks, how prepared are we for new waves or variants now that the government subsidies for free tests are gone? And boy, did I notice that, how much it's $10, a $20, a two pack of tests, the free tests are gone, although the Pax Lovit is free. Yeah, this is, this is another big issue, I think, and this may be part of the reason that the CDC continues to be somewhat unclear on their guidance or have at least multiple scenarios that you can kind of follow, because certainly not everybody's going to be able to afford to test constantly with the test costing so much and no free testing available. Without question, the loss of resources in general,

tests and even tracking in many public health departments in many communities, there's no funding for that anymore. And so that money did come from somewhere. It doesn't exist anymore. And it does make us less prepared and less capable of responding to increases in cases. So this is a problem in many places, including the U.S., and I don't see it unfortunately getting any better. I don't think that there's going to be all of a sudden more money to provide resources to people. And so unfortunately, that means that a lot of us just have to do the best we can. Because the assumption that we've been told recently is, well, COVID is now benign enough to be just as bad as any other kind of respiratory infection, the flu or something like that, unless you get it and you're a long hauler, right?

That's absolutely right. And I think, you know, for many people, the same thing is true with seasonal influenza. For many people, it can be a manageable disease. But for many other people, it's not. People who are at high risk of getting COVID, people who are immunosuppress, people who are elderly, people who have other comorbidities, can't necessarily expect it to be a walk in the park. Now, vaccines do work reliably at protecting against severe disease, but they don't protect everybody. So if there's a lot of cases in the community, even if the overall proportion is low, there will still be a percentage of people who are going to get very sick from COVID-19 because they are higher risk, and there will be a percentage of people who end up

with long COVID. And to me, I think that it's generally a bad idea to dismiss anything that is a persistent public health problem, which COVID-19 is. Just because it's not an emergency anymore, doesn't mean that it's not still a problem and doesn't mean that it's not something we should still take seriously and try to avoid. All right, you mentioned vaccines. Let's talk about vaccines. There's a new monovalent booster coming out? There is, yes. So because Omicron has been with us for the last almost two years, people have been discussing

changing and updating the vaccine. So previously, about almost a year ago now, we started looking at bivalent vaccines. So the bivalent vaccines were vaccine boosters that included one, dose of the old-fashioned original recipe SARS-Coronavirus 2 that was in the original vaccines, as well as a bivalent second dose, essentially, of BA5, which was the Omicron subvariant that was circulating primarily in the U.S. at the time. And so people were getting that, and that definitely does improve immunity, especially short-term immunity to B.A.5. But that Immunity is somewhat short term. After a while, the antibodies that those booster shots elicit

will go back down. You will still have the same protection against severe disease that all of the COVID shots have provided, but you won't necessarily have as good of protection against getting infected. And, you know, obviously that's something that a lot of people would like to avoid. So the vaccines have now been reformulated again to provide these updated boosters, which are going to be specific for, XBB 1.5, which is a variant that was up until very recently the dominant variant. Now, all of the variants that are circulating for the most part of the majority of them are derived from the XBB family. And we can talk about that in a moment, but that's the reasoning behind updating that booster. It's to make it a little bit more specific for the viruses that are currently

circulating now. Because I had heard a while back that they were going to combine the, the seasonal flu shot, right, with this new booster, but that's not going to happen. I don't think that's going to happen, at least not this year. The seasonal flu shot will be just like in previous years using the existing sort of flu shot technology, which is older vaccine technology. I think you can still probably get the flu shot at the same time as you get the SARS-2 booster, but they won't be combined into one vaccine. Okay. Now, Now, I'm just getting over COVID now. For everybody who's getting over it, do I have to wait a certain time to get that new vaccine?

So previously, you were asked to wait for a period of at least four weeks, and usually sometimes it would be more. So eight to 12 weeks, perhaps, after you've recovered from COVID or had a recent booster. And that varies depending on where you are and which, boosters will be available for you. But yes, in general, you do want to wait after you get a booster or you recover from COVID to get another one. The reason for this is that your immune system will respond to an infection or a booster shot. And that response can actually be fairly drawn out. It takes a while for the immune system to essentially internalize all the lessons that it just learned from that exposure and to go back to effectively a quiescent state where it's ready to

learn about the next new thing that it has to develop immunity against. Yeah, we want that. Okay, listener Kathy asks, why is the CDC saying yearly vaccines like flu shots when the vaccines are only good for six months and we get surges in the summer talking about the COVID vaccine? Yeah, that's a great question. And part of this has to do with the fact that we've been dealing with influenza, seasonal influenza, for a really long time for decades. That seasonality is completely well understood. It is not as well understood for SARS coronavirus too.

Now, I think it's probably safe to say that we can expect to see surges in SARS two cases or COVID cases in the fall and winter during cold and flu season. for the same reason that we see a lot of respiratory viruses surge during that time. The weather gets colder. People start spending more time indoors. People are engaging in behavior like family gatherings around the holidays, things like that that put them at higher risk for COVID. So I think that it's reasonable to expect that we will be experiencing this for winters to come. With the summer, it's a little bit trickier because there have been these summer surges or at least increases in cases, This year is no exception, although this increase in cases is smaller than it has been in previous years. So it's unclear, I think, really over the long term, whether this is something that we're going to be dealing with in every year and in every location.

Because some of this might also be reflective of people's behavior and the environment. So, for example, we've had terrible heat waves in many parts of the country, many parts of North America. and when that happens, people also spend a lot of time indoors together. So I think that some of it has to do with that. But the other thing is that there is a point of diminishing returns. The demand for boosters has continually gone down, asking people to go back and get boosters twice a year. For many people can be an issue of access.

And it can actually be kind of a heavy lift for people, especially when the boosters themselves and these vaccines are not completely protective against infectious. which is also the case for seasonal influenza. I mean, the flu shot does not prevent every influenza infection, but like the SARS-CoV-2 shots, they do protect against more severe disease. They can make it a lot less severe, and they can keep you out of the hospital and keep you out of the morgue. And I think that is really the focus with the COVID vaccines is now to make it an annual thing, which is, I think, a lot easier for people to do. It's less of an ask for people. and it can be combined with a visit to get your seasonal flu shot,

and it will provide that protection against severe disease for the entire year. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This question about getting vaccinated again raises a interesting point that Kavitt on Twitter asks and saying, we eliminated smallpox, why can't we eliminate COVID? That's a great question, and there's a couple answers, and not all of them actually have to do with vaccines. So smallpox eradication was incredibly effective for a couple reasons. One, the vaccine completely protects against actually contracting variole virus, which causes smallpox. And obviously, the COVID vaccines are very good at protecting against the disease that

SARS-Coronavirus two causes, but they don't completely protect against getting infected with the virus. So that's one problem. But another problem, has to do with the different types of hosts that the viruses can infect. So variole virus, smallpox, was very specialized to only infect humans. And it largely circulated only within the human population. SARS coronavirus too is a much less picky virus about what its host can be. So we already know that SARS coronavirus too can infect cats, dogs, actually all types of cats. So many big cats and zoos have been infected as well. So tigers, lions, panthers, cougars, things like that.

We know white-tailed deer have been infected, and wild white-tailed deer are transmitting variants that are no longer even present in the human population amongst each other. We know that many minks and other species of carnivores, including things that are farmed, which is how the mink infections were discovered, can get it. and they can pass it to each other. They can also pass it back to humans. So there's a lot of different potential hosts for SARS coronavirus too. And when SARS coronavirus two or any virus really gets into an animal population,

after it's been into the human population and it can be sustained in those animals, that means that it's going to be a lot more difficult to eradicate. Because there are going to be animals, especially since many of these animals are wild, that we can't vaccinate. We can't track down every single white-tailed deer in North America and give it a COVID shot, much less a booster. So unfortunately, we are stuck with SARS-Coronavirus 2 circulating in the human population, inner animal populations for the foreseeable future. It's really important, I think, if we ever do want to eliminate it, which is a little different than eradication, that just means that it's not actively spreading through the population.

but it's still out there. If we wanted to eliminate it, I think we are going to have to develop better vaccines that can produce more sterilizing immunity, so immunity that doesn't allow infection at all. And that will be one way that we will be able to potentially eliminate it and not have to worry about it so much. But it's very challenging to do that for respiratory viruses,

and I'm happy to chat about that a little more if you're interested. Yes, we'll get into next time because we've run out of time. This has just been terrific, Angela. It's wonderful being here, Ira. And as much as I'm tired of talking about COVID, it's always a pleasure to come talk to you about it. Well, thank you very much. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, virologist at Vito,

the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, that's at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. We have to take a break. And when we come back, an interesting new theory about the origin of one COVID side effect Brain fog. Yeah, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm Kathleen Davis. As we've been discussing, COVID unfortunately, is still very much with us. And with acute infections is also the risk of developing long COVID. One of the debilitating symptoms is brain fog. A new study using mice

cells in petri dishes suggests that brain fog might be the result of neurons fusing to together. Joining me now to tell us more about this fascinating new research and what it may mean in better understanding, brain fog is my guest. Dr. Ramon Martinez-Marmel, research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland. He is based in Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Martinez-Mormel, welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you very much, Kathleen. It's an honor. It's a pleasure to be here again with you guys. So let's start with the basics here. What exactly is brain fog?

Well, brain fog is this sensation that people that have had COVID especially may suffer in terms of they cannot think clearly, constant sensation of tiredness, not being able to focus perfectly. You know, like a little bit of a mixture between a hangover and when you cannot sleep properly in several days, like when you are a dad or a mom and you have your kid that is creaming all night and you have to wake up several times in the night and then the following day you feel like I cannot concentrate properly. That's a feeling that could describe better this brain fog. And for some people with long COVID, I mean, this is lasting a long time, right? Yes, that's unfortunately. We have had lots of feedback from patients that after experiencing COVID up to over a year ago or even more,

and after that, they couldn't get over this strange feeling. And that happened like sometimes that happens months after COVID. So that was very strange and that triggered us to try to find an answer and also force us to think a little bit out of the box. to find other explanations different from those that are commonly used. So let's talk a little bit about your research. Can you give us the big takeaway? In this latest work, we found that viruses like COVID and many other viruses too, they use a very specific machinery to enter the cells that are going to be infected,

called fusogens. So that is kind of the virus mixed with the cell that is going to be infected. It is well known that once the virus is inside of these cells and start all the processing of multiplication inside of the cells, the virus used the machinery from the cells to use its own vital component and create much more viruses. And among these components, they also create more. of these fugitives. But what we wanted to know is what happened when these viruses infect neurons

in our brain. Are they going to fuse or is this something that is exclusive from the epithelial tissue? And this was very surprising for us because since over 120 years ago, the father of neuroscience, a Spanish scientist called Santiago Ramonica Hall, he discovered one of the principles of neurons. They cannot fuse with other neurons. The principles of Santiago Ramonica Hall has been proven in all the organism, from the most simple ones until humans. So this is a basic principle.

For us, we wanted to challenge that principle and see, well, maybe there, is it possible that there could be some exemptions to this basic phenomenon? And this is a little bit what we found. What we discover is that once viruses like COVID infect neurons, somehow they start fusing one with enabling neurons. So why might this neuron fusion cause brain? Well, we think that this is because the neural activity is completely affected after this fusion. We obviously, we have not been able to demonstrate that in humans. We cannot do experiments, but we use mice. We use what we call stem cells, and we derive those stem cells, human stem cells, into mini-brains.

And we also use lifeworms to demonstrate that. And in all the different model that we studied, we found the same, which is once the neurons fuse, the activity is changed completely. So we have to understand neurons of two highly communicated cells. And this communication can be observed by electrical activity that goes from one neuron to the other and so on. And what happened is that once the neuron fuse, instead of one neuron fire and the other neuron response and so on, the neurons that fuse fire together. And this is, we believe that this will alter the whole circuitry in the brain. And this could cause the symptoms of brain fog at the long term, especially because once the neurons, once they are fused, they couldn't stay fused for a very long time. they seems fine except that their activity was synchronized.

But apart from that, the neurons were viable. They lived quite a lot. We stopped the research because we wanted to show our results to the public. Now the next steps will be like to check what happens to the mice and to see if we could translate better our findings to the humans. So because of the parameters of your study, you didn't. necessarily get to see if these neurons would heal themselves over time or something like that. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And maybe that's something that you explore in the

future. Yes, yes. That's one of the things that we want to explore. We want to do long-term experiments with mice and with our system with the mini brains and check how the overall circuitry is affected at the long term. This is going to give us more information on the effects and if this brain fog really depends on this neural fusion. There are other studies on COVID brain fog that have linked the brain fog to inflammation or some type of immune response. Does this research support that theory? We think that what's happening is complementary.

Definitely inflammation. It is another aspect that it's going to be behind brain fog. With COVID, what's happened at the long term is very common. complex and is a multifactorial phenomenon. In fact, interestingly, we found that not only two neurons or multiple neurons fuse, everything can be mixed up there. For example, when fusion happened between a non-neutinal cell and a neuronal cell, the activity stopped completely.

So this will be another cause of severe alteration in the normal function of the brain. So you talked about some possible next steps for the research into this. Do you think that better understanding this neuron fusion could potentially help us develop treatments for COVID brain fog in the future? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. You are completely right. So trying to block or try to neutralize the fusionic activity of these viruses for longer could definitely be helpful for us to prevent this brain fog.

That's all the time that we have for now. I would like to thank my guest, Dr. Ramon Martinez Marmal, research fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland based in Brisbane, Australia. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much, Kathleen. Thank you for this opportunity. It has been a pleasure and an honor to be here with you today.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm Kathleen Davis. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance.

As the effects from climate change intensify, some regions will need to get creative when it comes to sourcing drinking water, especially those in drier parts of the country. Coastal cities have the option to invest in technology like desalination plants. But what about communities that don't have easy access to a large body of water? In Reno, Nevada, they're exploring wastewater recycling as a solution, converting the water that flushes

toilets and showers into purified, safe drinking water. But will the public be on board for all of this? Joining me to talk more about these efforts is my guest, Caleb Radle, Mountain West News Bureau reporter for KUNR. He's based in Reno, Nevada. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Can you tell us a little bit about Reno and Nevada's drinking water availability in general? Yeah, so right now, Reno has plenty of drinking water. Most of it comes from the Truckee River, and this past winter was one of the wettest on record. So the river and the area reservoirs are pretty full right now. Down in southern Nevada, the Las Vegas area, there's more concern. That's because 90

percent of their water comes from the Colorado River, which some people call ground zero for climate change. It's been shrinking for decades because of overuse and drought. But again, because of the wet winter we just had, it's in better shape than in years past. So there's no immediate threat to drinking water there either. So in some ways, this project that you're going to tell us about is a way to maybe pat in the blow in the future. Is that right? Exactly. So six years ago, several agencies in the region started a pilot project called One Water Nevada. And the goal was to take the wastewater, like you mentioned, that flushes down people's toilets and recycle it into clean drinking water. Some people call this from toilet to tap. And they've worked on this for years on a

pretty small scale. And they consistently prove that it was meeting national and state safe drinking water standards. So now project leaders are in the process of designing a wastewater recycling plant that's scheduled to break ground next year. And that large-scale plants expected to recycle up to 2 million gallons of wastewater per day. Wow. So how is this wastewater recycling going to work? Well, I'll start by pointing out what makes this project different. Like you mentioned at the top, a lot of advanced purified water facilities are in coastal communities. And the technology they often use, like you said, desalination. Some use reverse osmosis. And that's a membrane that basically takes everything that's bad in the water and concentrates it into a brine. And then that brine gets dumped into

the ocean. Since Reno's nowhere near the ocean, they don't have that option. So they're using a newer technology to purify their water. It's a combination of charcoal filtering and ozone. Adding ozone to water breaks down organic compounds into smaller particles. Then they add what they call a coagulant, a chemical that causes those small particles to stick together so they can be removed easily. And that's where the carbon filtering comes in and removes them. So there's more to it, but those are the big steps to turn the wastewater into drinking water. So as you said, some people call this project from toilet to tap. I can imagine there might be a mental block for some people to getting on board with this.

I mean, what's the city doing to help warm people up to this? Well, that's a great question. They use the inside of a semi-trailer as a mobile treatment. lab. And they've been bringing that to community events around Reno so residents can see the treatment process and learn about the science and technology that goes into purifying the wastewater. The facility itself will also have a large demonstration area where people can see the process on a big scale and they'll even give tours for people to the plant. Because at the end of the day, the project leaders told me that the biggest hurdle isn't the technology. It's gaining public

trust and getting people over the, quote, yuck factor of drinking recycled wastewater. And if you're wondering, I didn't try the water because they didn't have a sample available. And I will say my wife suggested not to try any if I was offered. There might have been a veiled threat of never kissing me again if I did. Okay. Okay. So she lucked out and I guess I did too. But I seriously, I totally would have tried it. I was convinced that they were producing safe drinking water. Okay. I'm Kathleen Davis, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So as you said, I mean, the West has had a wetter year than we've seen in the past few years. Why invest in this now? So when they started this effort six years ago, the Reno area was in a stretch of very severe drought years. And at the same time, the population here was booming.

Now, six years later, Reno is still one of the fastest growing cities. We've had some wet winters recently. so that's helped stave off concerns of water supplies being affected, but that can shift pretty quickly in the age of climate change. Here's Lydia Teal. She's an engineer and project leader with the Reno area's water utility. We don't know if we would have years-long droughts. We don't know if there could be a catastrophic fire on the Truckee River where the quality is decreased for a period of time.

We don't know. And so having this is just one more drop in the bucket for the community. So when is Reno actually planning to integrate? this recycled wastewater into the drinking water? Well, the facility is expected to be finished by 2026. And during the first year that it's up and running, the purified water will be monitored and used to irrigate nearby alfalfa fields. And if it's meeting safe drinking levels during that time,

the next step will be injecting it into the groundwater. It'll be stored there for a few years in the aquifer. Then it'll be pulled up from the groundwater and tested some more. And if that water is still clean and safe for drinking, then they'll keep it banked underground for future use. Kind of like a rainy day fund that they'll keep adding to. And then that water could be available for use as early as 2029. But they obviously hope they don't need to send it to people's taps that soon.

In this case, it's the later, the better. So I imagine that nearby communities will be watching how this program in Reno develops. Do you think that these wastewater recycling systems are going to become more common in the next few decades? Yeah, experts I spoke with believe they will. In the West, there's largely more demand for water than there is supply. And using and recycling every drop of water could become a necessity as the planet continues to warm. This year, Colorado, for example, became the first state to adopt regulations for treating wastewater and sending it directly to people's taps. And California has been at the forefront of these wastewater recycling efforts. There's more than a dozen across the state. And right now there's a proposed facility in Los Angeles. Angeles County, that would be the biggest one yet. It would send up to 150 million gallons of recycled wastewater a day back into the drinking water supply. And right now, leaders of that project are in the phase of trying to convince policymakers and the public that it's a project worth supporting. That's all the time that we have for now. Thank you so much, Caleb.

Thank you. Caleb Radle, Mountain West News Bureau reporter for KUNR in Reno, Nevada. One more thing before we go. We'd like to say fair, Well to Chelsea Boodoo, our 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow, who is with us this summer. We love the stories she brought to us, including her recent segment on toxic plastics and older Barbie dolls. She was a pleasure to work with, and we wish her the best of luck in her journalism career. And that's about all the time we have for this week. Here's some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Our radio producers are me, Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Bucksbaum, D. Peter Schmidt,

and Rasha Airedi. B.J. Leaterman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You can email us too. The address is SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Ira Flato. Have a great weekend.