Science Friday - Hurricane Helene's Effect On The Global Tech Industry | A Stretchy Band-Aid For The Heart

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

The storm flooded mines in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, which supply the tech industry with some of the purest quartz in the world. Also, researchers developed a 3D-printable material, inspired by worms, that can act as a Band-Aid for damaged heart and cartilage tissue.Hurricane Helene’s Damage Could Affect The Global Tech IndustryAfter making landfall on September 26, Hurricane Helene devastated regions in the southeastern US. Over 200 people are confirmed dead so far. About a million people are still without power, and many lack clean water.As climate change intensifies, hurricanes like Helene are expected to occur more often and be more intense. What’s become very clear in the last few years is that due to the interconnectedness of the modern world, extreme weather in one place can have global implications.For example, Spruce Pine, North Carolina, home to around 2,200 people, flooded during Hurricane Helene. The town is also home to several mines that produce some of the world’s purest quartz, an ingredient necessary to make solar panels, smartphones, semiconductors, and more.Ira talks with Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, about this and other science news of the week, including a completed map of a fruit fly’s brain, how scientists in the United Kingdom are screening newborns for rare diseases, and how octopuses and fish are hunting as a team.A Strong, Stretchy, And Sticky Band-Aid For The HeartThe heart is an impressive organ that has to beat constantly for years. But what happens when heart tissue is damaged? Or when cartilage in joints like our knees wears out? These constantly moving tissues don’t regenerate easily, and there aren’t a lot of great treatment options.To address these kinds of problems, a team at University of Colorado Boulder invented a new strong, stretchy, and sticky hydrogel material that could act as a Band-Aid to heart or tissue lesions. They were inspired by masses of worms that tangle and untangle themselves, behaving almost as both a solid and liquid. The team was able to replicate that in a molecular structure with the help of a new 3D-printing technique. And it could have applications far beyond medicine, including for manufacturing and improving the 3D-printing process itself. Their research was published in the journal Science, and their lab has filed for a provisional patent for the material.Dr. Jason Burdick, professor of chemical and biological engineering at CU Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute, joins Ira Flatow to talk about the new material and how it could improve future tissue and cartilage treatment.Transcripts for each segment will be available 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.

A research team invented a material that could be a band-aid for heart lesions, and it was inspired by worm blobs. They kind of behave like a liquid or a solid under different conditions, just like our materials. It's Friday, October 4th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer D. Peter Schmidt. There are parts of our body that are in constant motion, like your heart, or your cartilage joints, your knees, hips, and elbows. And these parts can wear out or become damaged.

This constantly moving tissue doesn't regenerate easily, and there aren't a lot of great treatment options. But a team at University of Colorado Boulder has invented a new, strong, stretchy, and sticky material that could act as a band-aid to heart or tissue lesions. And it could have applications far beyond medicine. We'll find out how it works in a bit. But first, here's Ira Flato with the top stories and science this week.

One week ago, Hurricane Helene devastated regions in the Southeast U.S. More than 200 people are confirmed dead so far, and about a million people are still left, without power, many without clean water. As climate change intensifies, hurricanes like Helene are expected to occur more often and be more intense. And that's what's becoming very clear in the last few years. And what's becoming very clear in the last few years is that due to the interconnectedness of the modern world, extreme weather in one place may turn out to have

global implications. For example, Spruce Pine, North Carolina, home to around 2200, people flooded during Hurricane Helene. And this town is also home to several mines that produce some of the world's purest quartz an ingredient necessary to make solar panels, smartphones, semiconductors, and more. Here with this story and other science news of the week is Omer Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox based in Washington, D.C. Welcome back, Omer. Hey, Ira. Thanks for having me. All right, let's start right in with this story.

What happened to the mines? Well, as you noted, Hurricane Helene has been drenching a big chunk of inland parts of Western North Carolina, including this area around this community of spruce pine. And it's put like about two feet of water there. And it has stopped the operations of these mines because now they're soaked and they've been closed indefinitely. And why are these mines so important to chip making? Well, as you noted, they're big sources of quartz.

but what's special is the quartz they have there is very pure. It has very few impurities. And while mining quartz is expensive, it means that it needs less processing. And so these mines around spruce pine account now for about 70% of the global market for high quality quartz. And these quartz, this quartz material is actually used to make crucibles, which is then used to melt down polysilicon that you then use to make microprocessors, solar panels, and other kinds of like. But these crucibles wear out over time. And so you need to be constantly replacing them. And that's why you need a constant supply of fresh, high quality quartz in order to continue making all the chips that the world needs. So I'm imagining this is going to have an effect on the price of chips somewhere along the line. Yeah, a lot of analysts are anticipating that this is going to raise the cost of electronics because it's raising a lot of the processing costs.

but it's also going to force a lot of people in the supply chain to start looking elsewhere. So they may start, you know, prospecting for other sources of high-quality quartz, or they may invest a lot more in trying to get these mines back up and running. You know, this reminds me of the unintended consequences or the unknown consequences of climate change. Like last year when the Panama Canal's water supply was so low because of a drought. and the entire global shipping network was disrupted. And as we know, as the effects of climate change intensify, we're going to even see more of these localized disasters having global implications.

Right. You know, our economy is so interconnected. And we just keep finding out that there's all these little choke points that are built in. You know, we've been talking a lot recently about, like, the global semiconductor industry and how so many of them are made in Taiwan and why we need to make sure they're made in other countries. But now we're finding even further upstream of, those microprocessors, just the raw materials we need to make them, also have their own choke points. And so we need to start thinking a lot more carefully about what it is that we need to make all the

things that make the world run and then start coming up with backup plans because we can't count on them to survive some of these disasters that we're facing. All right. Let's move from minds to minds. Scientists completely map the brain of a fly. Omer, tell us about this. Why is this important? For the first time, scientists have been able to be able.

to actually conduct a super detailed analysis. And this is the most complex brain that they've mapped out so far. So a fly's brain typically has around 130,000 cells and about 50 million connections. And by cutting a fly's brain into slices and taking these high resolution microscopic photographs and then stitching them together with computer programs and AI, scientists were actually able to sort of develop an atlas of how a fly's mind actually. is wired, and from there, they're hoping that they can actually understand how a lot of these neural processes work. Interesting. I think it's safe to say that our brains are a little more complicated, right? A little bit. We're talking about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses,

so a little bit more complex there. But that doesn't mean we can't learn anything. Well, that's right. And so, like, we use flies as a model organism in a lot of science, in genetics and so forth. But here, we can start seeing how some of the simple processes work, like how it has refurals and how it makes decisions. And from there, we can perhaps scale that up and understand more complex things, like how thoughts form, how we make decisions and how we, you know, feel emotions and other complex things that go on in our brains. Right, right.

Let's move on to some cutting-edge medicine. I'm talking about a program in England that is starting to screen newborn babies for rare disease. How is that going to work? Babies already often get this heel-prick blood test that typically looks for a about nine diseases. And the United Kingdom's National Health Service is now going to sequence the genomes of about 100,000 babies completely to try to look for even more diseases. They're trying to develop a test that can find more than 200 rare genetic disorders. And the idea is that some of

these disorders can actually be treated or mitigated early in life if they're caught early. Wow. We're not going to have that in this country anytime soon. I don't. Well, in the U.S., you know, we're always concerned about patient privacy. It's also cost and getting a lot of people to opt in. And there are also some ethics concerns here as well, because some genetic diseases and genetic markers, for instance, can show the risk of a disease, but it doesn't necessarily manifest. And sometimes, you know, giving people information about a disease that they have no control over and no treatment for may not necessarily help them. And so there's a question of how useful this information may be in some circumstances. Fascinating. Okay, let's pivot to outer space where some

NASA spacecraft are feeling their age. Let's start with the Curiosity rover on Mars. Feeling a little old there? Yeah, you know, it's been there since 2012. It's covered more than 20 miles, which is fairly long distance by Martian standards. And NASA this week was taking some photos of the spacecraft itself to do a status check. And they posted these photos of its aluminum wheels and found that there's some big gaping holes in the tread there, showing that the terrain there is quite rough and quite hard on the vehicle. Yeah. So what does that mean for the spacecraft? Well, it means that it has to be a lot more careful for how it gets around. You know, it uses these aluminum wheels and it weighs about 2,000 pounds. And because, you know, conventional tires don't work in such a low-pressure environment. And so NASA engineers are trying to do some wayfinding and pathfinding to avoid some of the more nasty terrain. They can actually make the spacecraft reverse over certain regions to try to minimize damage.

But this is just kind of the phenomenon that they're just going to have to deal with as these craft continue to age. Now, well, speaking of age, and let's talk now about the Voyager 2, which is billions of miles away, and it seems it's running out of power, finally? Right. So it's using this plutonium-powered reactor that sort of decays at about four watts of power each year as its nuclear fuel burns up. And so over the years, scientists have been trying to manage that diminishing power supply. And then recently they said that they're going to be switching off the plasma science instrument. This is a device that they use to measure the amount and direction of plasma. And this is kind of how the probe situates itself in the solar system and finds out whether it's still within the sphere of the sun's influence or into interstellar space.

Yeah, this is one of NASA's most beloved probes, isn't it? Yeah, you know, as you mentioned, it's 12.8 billion miles from Earth. It's the furthest away a human-made object has ever gotten. And scientists say that there is still enough juice in there to keep it running until the 2030s. So it'll be interesting to see just how much more information and how much more life they can squeeze out of this spacecraft that's, you know, almost 50 years old. Let's wrap up this roundup with some funny sea creatures, starting with dolphins. You know, they always look like they have a natural smile on their face, but it may turn out that they actually know how to smile, right? Right.

So researchers who were observing dolphins in captivity, they were filming them and they so noticed that while dolphins do have that sort of upturned grin, they actually do this open mouth behavior that's, scientists say that actually does sort of convey the emotion of happiness because they see them engage in this when they're playing with other dolphins or when they're doing playfighting and when they're interacting with other dolphins and with human caretakers. And they've also seen other dolphins reciprocate that. So it seems like this is a form of facial communication among the dolphins to sort of indicate that they're engaging with each other but not in a hostile way. How did they figure this out? Well, they were filming them over a long period of time in these different aquatic parts in Europe. And they saw their behavior and looked at 80

hours of footage and saw that, you know, dolphins would kind of shove each other there and push each other away, but then immediately look at each other and say, basically with their mouths open, as a way to sort of indicate just kidding, not trying to be hostile, take it easy, just messing around. And so we see the similar behavior in primates. So it's kind of interesting to see this also happening in dolphins, too. Now I understand that cameras also caught octopus is doing some funny behavior. Divers studying the octopuses in the Red Sea captured about 13 instances of octopuses recruiting fish to help them hunt. They basically work with different species of fish to sort of forage for other smaller fish or for mollusks. And the octopuses were actually kind of

serving as commanders sort of as like generals here, sending their troops out to look for prey to hunt. So the octopus is sort of keeping this little army of fish in line. Yeah, exactly. So as the octopus sort of advances on the sea floor, the fish would advance with it. They would forage in an area. They would pause for a while. And then when the octopus moves again, they would move with it. And interestingly enough, the octopus could also recognize which fish were actually doing their part and which fish were freeloaders, the ones that were just sort of scavenging and not really helping out. And it would react to those fish by actually kind of punching it with their tentacles. So trying to keep everybody in line and working. Never ceases to amaze me just how smart

those octopuses really are. Thank you, Omer. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Ira. Amerifan is a senior correspondent at Vox based in Washington, D.C. You know, the strength of science is that it's rooted in data, and you can help nourish the roots of science Friday by helping us collect some key data from you. Yeah, we're surveying listeners to this podcast and our radio show, folks who attend live or virtual events,

those who follow us on social media, and those who use our materials in the classroom. We want to hear from you. So please go to sciencefriady.com slash survey. Don't worry, it only takes a couple of minutes. It helps you as it helps us. That's sciencefriiday.com slash survey. There are parts of our bodies that are in constant motion, right?

Like your heart or your cartilage joints, your knees, your hips, your elbows. And these parts can wear out or become. damage. Tell me about that. Well, this constantly moving tissue doesn't regenerate easily, and there aren't a lot of great treatment options. But a team at the University of Colorado Boulder has invented a new, strong, stretchy, and sticky material that might be able to act as a band-aid to the heart or tissue lesions, and it could have applications far beyond medicine. Dr. Jason Burdick is Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at C.U. Boulder's Bio Frontiers Institute. His team's sticky material research was published in the journal Science.

Dr. Burtig, welcome to Science Friday. Great. Thanks for having me. All right, but before we get into the research itself, tell me about the need for this kind of material. Yeah, you know, there's so many applications where new materials are needed to treat different injuries or diseases in the body. So my lab is particularly interested in things like the heart and the joints. So dynamic tissues that have a lot of loading on them. And so imagine that you have a defect in your cartilage due to some traumatic injury. If you just leave that alone, you're going to end up with things like osteoarthritis. Or if you have a heart attack, you're going to have damage to that tissue. And it just won't pump like it needs to. And so we're really trying to develop new therapies

to help these patients that don't really have current options. So you would use the tissue, let's say, in the heart, in what way? Yeah. So biomaterials can be maybe implanted, for example, as a patch on the surface of the heart. So once your heart is damaged through something like a heart attack, there's a lot of things that happen biologically. And sometimes you can restrain it through a biomaterial or you could deliver drugs or therapeutics like cells using biomaterials. And so we're looking for those types of situations where we can implant a material to then hopefully help patient outcomes. And presently, the treatments are what if you have a heart lesion? Yeah, there's very little right now. So lots, lots being explored, many examples.

of things like stem cells delivered to the heart. But right now, we try to, one, prevent a heart attack from happening by improving things like patient health. And then we give them some drug therapeutics, and we try to restore blood flow to the heart as quickly as possible. But if the heart attack is so damaging that there's no treatment available, it'll just kind of slowly go on to things like heart failure. So it's those patients that we're looking at trying to help. And people who have joint problems, ACL tears or are. arthritis, can this help them also? Yeah, we hope so. You know, it's kind of the same idea. So like the heart, cartilage doesn't have some sort of natural way for it to regenerate itself. So we need therapeutic.

So right now in the joint, if you can do things early on after damage, you can prevent some things from occurring long term. So we're trying to help those patients that have some damage to prevent the onset of things like osteoarthritis and the need eventually for something like a total joint replacement. So if we can implant materials that can maybe help grow new tissue, hopefully those patients have a better outcome. Okay, so much for the wind-up. Now let's go to the pitch. All right. What was your big breakthrough here in creating this material and tell us what it is? Yeah, the invention, I think, is really a new way to process materials.

So we're looking at 3D printing techniques. And so this is the way that we can build up materials of any really shape or structure by applying materials, maybe layer by layer, with controlled positioning. So that was really the technology that we wanted to use. But over many years, we were disappointed with the material properties of those materials that we were 3D printing. So we kind of had to step back and think about the material design. And so this is where we got excited about this idea of how molecules entangle together.

And it's that entanglement that then leads to improve properties. So we want things that are really tough. So you can apply load on it, stretch it, squish it. and eventually they can then bear that load without failing. And the structure for this tough hydrogel is unique. I understand that your team was inspired by worms, right? Yeah, let me talk about these worm blobs. In many years, there's been some interest in the polymer physics community

of thinking about how molecules. So polymers are just these long molecules and how they entangled together. And, you know, often we look to the environment around us and how organisms interact. And so on a much larger scale, if you think about worms, a single worm is going to behave in one way. But if you gather lots of these worms together into what's called a worm blob, and they do this naturally, it's kind of a protective mechanism to respond to things like temperature and light. So this really then leads to a collective behavior of these worms, these kind of entangled structures. And so at this molecular level, so shrink this kind of phenomenon down.

to molecules. So if we can entangle them together, then they will behave differently when we load them. So in our case, we want these polymers to slide past each other. So if we just lock them all together, if we'd apply to it, it would just fail if we apply a load. But with these entanglements, they start to slip and slide past each other when you apply a load. And that really gives us a lot of these interesting properties like toughness. So it's like a blob of worms, repeatedly tangling and untangling itself. That's right. See, if like a squirrel, squishy solid and a liquid when you need to have it. That's exactly right. So yeah, they kind of behave like a liquid or a solid under different conditions, just like our materials.

That is cool. And you were able to replicate this structure in a 3D printer. That's right. So this has really worked by a fantastic graduate student, Abyshech Donned, and a great research associate in my lab, Matt Davidson. They took this idea and they looked at what others had done to make polymers entangled. Unfortunately, there was this kind of incomprehensive. compatibility with how we 3D print, which means really fast reactions and how people had made entangled polymers, which are really slow reactions. And you want them to grow slowly so that they build those entanglements. So there's this mismatch. And so what Abyshech and Matt had then really developed is a way to do both. So our idea was that on the 3D printer, then we use light

to design the object, but then we use this slow secondary reaction to increase then that entanglement over time. So it was just a new idea about how we process materials that then gives rise to these new interesting properties, as well as the ability to 3D print, any shape, any structure. And for our listeners, tell us, describe for us what does this material look like? Can you hold it in your hand? Is it like accordion? Is it like a stretchy, holy thing, like Swiss cheese? Yeah, you know, so the 3D printing lets us really design it of any structure. But you think of it just kind of as a solid kind of plastic material. These are hydrogels, which mean that they have a water content to them. So you think like a contact lens, but a contact lens is going to break if you pull on it. These are really strong

materials. But depending on the application, if we want to make a patch, often we'll print it within a lattice structure, so a bunch of holes in it, so it'll conform well to the tissue surface. We want to make a scaffold to repair cartilage. We'll put a lot of kind of perosity into it. So we can really make it into any shape that we want, but it's a stretchy material that you can really stretch many times its length without it failing. Well, now that you have the material, has anybody actually tried to apply it to these things, these techniques that we're talking about, the uses? Yeah, we've started to. One area that we were excited about was the idea of adhesive materials. So if you think about a material that goes onto the heart, you want it to stick to it or

attached because we wanted to stay there to provide that function. And so most materials, you would just put it on the heart and it would just fall off. So we were excited to think about making it adhesive by changing the molecules at that interface between the material and the tissue, which can guide that adhesion. And again, if you think of a heart beating, if you didn't have a material that was stretchy and could respond to that beating, it would just fall off. Same as the joint. Like if you load it and it is too rigid or too soft, it's going to fall off. So that's where these material properties were really important. So we're starting to apply it to some of these different applications in both cardiovascular

and musculoskeletal systems. So has anybody been using it yet in tests on people? No, we're very early on that. We've actually founded a startup company that's exploring it to make patches that would go on your disc in your back. So if you've had a surgery, could you actually apply the system as an adhesive? to prevent things like re-herniation. So early stages on that, definitely doing the early studies on tissues,

and then slowly it will move towards patient applications. Well, our listeners are going to be happy to hear about, you know, everybody has back pain or some sort of back injury. Yeah, very relatable. Very relatable. I heard a student of yours did a kind of informal test to see how strong it was. Tell me about that. Yeah, that's right.

You know, usually in the laboratory we make these really defined, kind of shapes and we stretch it on an instrument so we can get, you know, the quantitative values for things like material properties. But, you know, we live in Boulder, Colorado. Everyone's out on their bikes. And so one of my research associates and Meg Cook, she just took one of these that we had printed and just kind of ran it over on her bike. And you see it squished down and then it just recovers. So if it can withstand the load of a bike in Boulder, Colorado, hopefully it can withstand some of these loadings on tissues. Well, if you're going to run over with a bike, I'm thinking there's got to be other uses for it outside of the body, right?

That's right. Yeah, we, you know, because again, the invention is really the method to 3D print and trying to improve these properties. So we see lots of applications. So 3D printing and the types of technology that we're using has really also transferred into the manufacturing space. So anytime you want to make something with specific structures, you know, custom parts, precision components, 3D printing is a great way to do that. And right now, they use technologies like exposing these printed materials to a lot of heat, a lot of light, to then improve its properties. Our technique kind of avoids that. It inherently can improve the properties just through the way we make these materials. So we see lots of value towards non-medical

applications as well. So to use it then you would just, people would just buy the squishy stuff, put it in their 3D printer and then print what they'd like. Yeah, you kind of develop maybe a new resin, which is the precursor. So if people are familiar with 3D printing, usually you start with a resin or an ink. So you'd buy that with the right components to it. Put it on your 3D printer and then you'd be able to have these types of properties. All right. So when can I buy this stuff from my 3D printer? Well, hopefully the company does well and we can start to manufacture this. Of course, raising funds and such. But you know, this, especially in the manufacturing space, could be something that's useful within, you know, within a year or two.

The biomedical space always takes a longer time because you have to do the right test to kind of develop it for a specific application. But, yeah, we hope this technology makes an impact very soon. Sounds terrific. Thank you for taking time to be with us today, Dr. Burdick. Yeah, thank you so much, Ira. Dr. Jason Burdick, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And if you want to see images of this material in action, it's pretty cool, head over to our website at ScienceFriday.com slash printed. Friday.com slash printed. That's all the time we have for today.

Lots of folks help make the show happen, including John Denkoski. Annie Niro. Jason Rosenberg. Rasha Uridi. Shoshana Bucksdown. On Monday's episode, astrophysicist Mario Livio ponders the most likely places we could find other life in the universe.

I'm Cyfry producer Dee Peter Schmidt. See you then.