Stuff You Should Know - How Ultrasound Works

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Sure you know all about ultrasound. You can see pictures of little babies right there cozy in the womb just by waving a magic plastic stick over the mom’s tummy. And magic is basically right. Believ...e us. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.
Starting point is 00:00:17 We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass
Starting point is 00:00:37 and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.
Starting point is 00:00:57 Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends, and we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff You Should Know book, Chuck. That's right, what's the cool, super cool title
Starting point is 00:01:15 we came up with? It's Stuff You Should Know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing, and just the look of the book,
Starting point is 00:01:31 it's all just, it's exactly what we hoped it would be, and we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can't, and you don't have to wait, actually. Well, you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre-order the book right now, everywhere you get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for pre-ordering,
Starting point is 00:01:50 which we're working on right now. That's right, so check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, flying solo, batching it up. It's a stag party up in this piece.
Starting point is 00:02:15 Wow. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Do you remember the happy days where they had a stag party? Richie and Patsy and Ralph Malf went to a stag party with I think Richie's older brother, who I believe is named Chuck. I think his name was Chuck,
Starting point is 00:02:33 but I don't remember what happened. I sort of remember that episode. I think they just got a little freaked out, a little titillated aroused, and then freaked out, I think. It sounds like what would happen. Did Fonzie fix a jute box by hitting it with his fist? I think that even may have been pre-jute box Fonzie.
Starting point is 00:02:49 I don't even know that he was wearing a leather coat at the time. He may have just been wearing that weird gray jacket that he wore at first. Yeah, like the mechanics jacket. And that would make sense because I think Chuck was only in the early days of the happy days, the happiest days.
Starting point is 00:03:03 Right. But then remember they killed him off pretty graphically. He suffered from dysentery for basically three straight episodes. That's all they focused on. And then he finally just died. And they said, man, this is called happy days. I think we need to just get rid of them.
Starting point is 00:03:19 Yeah, I think they changed their showrunner after that. Yeah. So we're talking about ultrasound right now. And if you had dysentery, I'm not entirely convinced that ultrasound would help. But let's say you had a kidney stone instead. Okay. A friend ultrasound would help with that kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:03:39 Yeah, they could sniff out a kidney stone. Yeah, they can. As a matter of fact, well, what's funny is they do everything but sniff. Yeah. They use sound and they use vision. I use the wrong, huh? They don't sniff or taste.
Starting point is 00:03:52 Yeah. Oh boy. That was great. It should be good. So ultrasound, everybody knows what ultrasound is. Just about everybody's seen an ultrasound picture. You see little babies like in the womb developing and they're getting all cute and everything.
Starting point is 00:04:08 Or else you see them really early on and they're not at all cute. But either way, I think everybody's pretty familiar with ultrasound. And I was too, but I still learn quite a bit from this incredibly outdated article by Craig Freud and Rich, PhD. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:26 And you're speaking specifically of what's known as a sonogram when a device that, you know, we're going to talk about this in more detail, but a device called a transducer probe. He's so great. Is either put on you or in you, depending on what. Preferably on you. Depending on what they're after.
Starting point is 00:04:48 Or how close they need to get. Sure, yeah, absolutely. And then what? Well, I mean, you know, I can speak from experience. One of the best things in the world is when you see that first little picture of a baby in heart beating. Oh, bet.
Starting point is 00:05:07 And then the worst moment is when you go in there and get one and that heart isn't beating. Yeah. And it's a unnerving moment when you go in there for that stuff. And like I said, it can be, it can, it feels both great and terrible and I've experienced all. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:21 But the thing is about ultrasound, Chuck, is most people think that that's what it's used for. It's just check on babies, but it's used for a whole bunch of other stuff. Yeah. As well, which we'll talk about. And they're starting to find even more cutting edge techniques for it too.
Starting point is 00:05:38 So it's actually pretty interesting stuff. And the whole thing magically is centered on crystals that are actually hidden in the incredibly greatly named transducer probe. And they actually, you know, in a way, squeeze these crystals. And when you squeeze crystals, especially ones that have an irregular shape, they do something amazing.
Starting point is 00:05:59 They produce energy, vibrations in this case. And so by squeezing the crystal of vibration, the sound goes out a very high frequency sound. Ultrasound, what might you say? It is ultrasound. On the order of something like, this article says one to five megahertz, but I saw a two to 20 is much more standard.
Starting point is 00:06:21 Oh yeah. And a hertz is how many of the same part of a wavelength of, you know, sound or something like that would pass by a space, a point in space every second. So in this case, say like the crest of these wavelengths, these ultrasound wavelengths, the something like 20 million of their crests would pass by one point in space in one second.
Starting point is 00:06:49 Very, very high frequency, very, very tight, which makes them very, very energetic. So those are the vibrations, the sound that is produced by squeezing crystals. And you would think just squeezing crystals is pretty, pretty great. Let's just give this thing a blue ribbon for being a wonderful piece of technology,
Starting point is 00:07:09 but it gets even better than that. Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about the fact that there's a machine that then calculates these distances from the probe to whatever it's trying to measure, and then basically can create a two and now even three dimensional picture of that, it seems like magic. It does, especially because those sound waves
Starting point is 00:07:34 that propagate from the crystal being squeezed, which I like to think of as the crystals being squeezed and it's making the sound into the light. It's not like a painful sound that it's making. It's just like, yay. That feels great. So those sound waves, when they travel into the body, they hit all sorts of stuff.
Starting point is 00:07:54 They hit tissue, they hit liquid. They hit everything and it's back. Everything, bone, yeah. And the higher frequency of a wave, the more likely it is to bounce back. So a lot of that stuff bounces back. And when it bounces back, Chuck, it comes right back into those crystals.
Starting point is 00:08:16 And when it hits those crystals, it actually produces electricity. And then that electrical impulse is what's converted into, through some sort of black magic that I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around, into images. So sound gets translated into images via electrical impulses.
Starting point is 00:08:34 And at the heart of it all are those crystals. Yeah, I think if you were to ask your average person, if an ultrasound, like just a yes or no question, like an ultrasound, does it use actual crystals to produce an image? You would probably get laughed out of the room by nine out of 10 people and say, of course it doesn't. That's some sort of weird Wiccan hokum.
Starting point is 00:08:58 Right. That you're trying to sell me on. It's not real, but it's remarkable. I had no idea that it uses crystals. Yeah, I think this machine is actually second only to the breathalyzer machine. Oh, God. In surprising complexity. Yeah, man. And I presume the ultrasound machine was pretty complex,
Starting point is 00:09:20 but yeah, I had no idea that they were squeezing crystals in there. Yeah, in 1942, there was a neurologist who used ultrasonic waves as a tool, as a diagnostic tool for the first time, named Carl with a K. Dusik. And he was trying to search for brain tumors through someone's skull.
Starting point is 00:09:40 And I think it was not until the 1950s, so about 16 years later, 58, that it was first used for a sonogram with Dr. Ian Donald. Yeah, and the great advantage of ultrasound is that you're just, you're sending sound waves, which are mechanical in nature, into the body. You're not using ionizing radiation like X-rays.
Starting point is 00:10:03 So you're not going to produce tumors necessarily. There's not, you're just not exposing, being exposed to radiation energy. You're being exposed to mechanical energy. Again, just acoustic waves of sound. But what's amazing about this is that that sound, those echoes from that sound that bounce off of the different barriers
Starting point is 00:10:22 or what they're called, say like between blood and tissue and tissue and bone, as they bounce back up and they're converted into images, you can see into the human body without using X-rays and without cutting somebody open. So it was an enormous advance that I think really gets overlooked, at least by the general public,
Starting point is 00:10:45 as far as medical advances go. Like it was huge when we figured out how to do this. Yeah, and that's why if you ever go to get a sonogram or something like this and they show you an image of your little bread loaf baking in the oven and you catch yourself in your head thinking, it looks kind of cruddy to me,
Starting point is 00:11:06 just put your foot in the door and slam it real quick and make sure you don't say that out loud in front of anyone in the room because it is truly a little miracle machine, just to get an image that looks that cruddy. Right, especially don't say it in front of Carl Dusik. No, no. It would really hurt his feet.
Starting point is 00:11:23 And all of this, I mean, this stuff is remarkable because it's the same concept of just the sonar that we use in the military and the sonar that bats use. Yeah, and as a matter of fact, like our understanding of echo location, which is ultimately what it's based on, it's shooting out sound and then listening for the echoes
Starting point is 00:11:43 and then taking the information that those echoes bring back to judge things like distance, shape, size, all this stuff. You can get a lot of information from sound if you know how to use echo location. That's what's happening. We're squeezing crystals to make the sound and then in turn after they shout, they turn into ears listening for the echoes that come back
Starting point is 00:12:03 and the echoes that come back ultimately become those white or bright or light areas on a sonogram that form like the shape. Those are the echo. Yeah, and it's way better, the very first sonograms, they would get boxes of bats, they would open the lid and throw it over the pregnant belly very fast,
Starting point is 00:12:25 let them fly around for a couple of minutes and then take those bats into another room and give them pads of paper and pencils and said to draw what you heard. And bats are actually pretty good at drawing most of them aren't surprising. Honestly, it looks about as good as the current sonogram. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:12:42 So I guess you're not super impressed by the resolution. You know, it's fine. Like I said, when you realize what's going on, it's truly a miracle. And the 3D ones, I mean, those are kind of creepily accurate. Right, they are, they have a little uncanny valley thing going on and not sure why, but they definitely do. But that's a huge advance in ultrasound
Starting point is 00:13:06 because like originally in ultrasound, especially if you just see the flat one that almost looks like a grainy x-ray or something like that, but you're seeing something like soft tissue. That's another advantage of ultrasound over x-ray. X-ray typically shows much harder stuff, whereas an ultrasound can show you even like blood. Something is non-dense, denseless.
Starting point is 00:13:31 Sure. What's the opposite of dense? Viscous, loose, loosey-goosey? Yeah, loosey-goosey. Even as something as anatomically loosey-goosey as blood, the ultrasound can capture that because of the high frequency. And the other great thing about using high frequency is that, or the other reason we use high frequency
Starting point is 00:13:54 is the higher the frequency, the greater the resolution. And it's not a perfect analogy, but it's similar to how if you increase the magnitude of a microscope, you can see smaller and smaller stuff. It's very much similar to higher the frequency of say sound in an ultrasound machine, the more finely detailed, the more resolution you can have. The problem is, is that those higher energy wavelengths
Starting point is 00:14:25 tend to bounce back, tend to reflect very easily. Lower energy travels further and further through the body. So what they figured out is you can combine these and that's how you ultimately get 3D imaging, which we'll talk a little more about in a minute. You wanna take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about all the parts of this.
Starting point is 00:14:44 I was about to call it the Wonder Machine, but we already have one of those. So the Miracle Machine? Miracle Machine's good. All right, right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses
Starting point is 00:15:12 and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever.
Starting point is 00:15:32 Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper
Starting point is 00:15:45 because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app,
Starting point is 00:15:59 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,
Starting point is 00:16:16 what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS
Starting point is 00:16:30 because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.
Starting point is 00:16:43 Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts,
Starting point is 00:17:04 or wherever you listen to podcasts. [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing
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Starting point is 00:34:46 [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing [♪ Music playing This is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. [♪ Music playing You know, Chuck, it really gives me a tremendous amount of comfort, hope, goodwill, all sorts of stuff like that, that we've come up in our 12th year with another name for a machine. Yeah. Like we had Wonder Machine basically from the beginning. I think so. And here we are in year 12 and we've just named another machine. The Miracle Machine. Yeah. So we talked enough, I think, about, well, we're going to talk a little bit more about it, about obstetrics. Oh man, I knew I was going to do that. Obstetrics.
Starting point is 00:37:21 Yeah. And when you go in there, like I said, part of it is to delight parents to be and say, here it is. Everything's going. Heartbeat is strong. Everything's happening. But they're also doing all sorts of things. They measure the size of the fetus. They use a mouse to sort of click around and measure different distances. They determine due date. They want to make sure that fetus is in the right position. They want to make sure the placenta is in the right position. They want to see how many fetuses there are in there. That's when you get the old, by the way, did not know if you knew this, but there are actually three living things inside of you right now. Or eight. So growth rate, you can detect the ectopic pregnancies this way. Yeah, that's a big one. That's a very big one. That is when the baby is implanted in the fallopian tubes instead of in the uterus. And that means it is not a viable pregnancy. Right. Is it a life threatening for the mom? What else? Amniotic fluid? You've got to make sure that there's enough cushion around that baby. Yeah, for the pushing. Well, yeah, actually. Eventually, yeah. And then if you want to, say, go in and take a sample of the amniotic fluid, which you can do a lot of things by sampling amniotic fluid to test. So there's a lot of reasons to go in and draw some amniotic fluid. I don't know why I'm trying to convince everybody that there's reasons to take samples of amniotic fluid. Just trust me, there is. But at the same time, you can sit there and look into the womb. The womb is okay, right? I'm not using some archaic and now offensive term, am I?
Starting point is 00:38:59 Geez, I don't think so. Okay, I don't think so either. If I am, please forgive me. I'm genuinely unaware of that. So school me if I'm wrong. I don't think so anyway. It's called a baby box these days, my friend. Right, exactly. So if you want to keep an eye on the baby box while you're getting a sample of the amniotic fluid to make sure you're not accidentally poking the baby, the ultrasound is really effective for that too. Man, can you believe they used to do that blindly? I was reading an article about using ultrasound to guide spinal tap insertions and this article said that the authors believe that even though that you can use ultrasound for this now, that the technology is widely available, most neurosurgeons prefer to just go in blind because it's more thrilling. Seriously? This was an academic journal article that I was reading and they just said it. So they crack open some amyl nitrate, sniff it and then go in there. Yeah, wow.
Starting point is 00:40:05 Wearing a Hawaiian shirt. What else can you do? You can use this for cardiology. We talked about the blood flow, but you can also literally say, hey, is there something going on inside of your heart? Let's go look. Yeah, and especially with 3D and real-time stuff. It's one thing to say, okay, well, the shape of your heart looks pretty good or the flow of your blood looks pretty good, but thanks to that M-mode so you can see it in motion, you can actually see, make sure that the valves are opening and closing correctly in the right time. It's basically just peeking in real-time onto the operations of your body using M-mode. It's pretty amazing stuff. It's amazing. We also said, of course, you can see kidney stones, which by the way, I think we should do an episode on kidney stones eventually. Have you ever had one? I don't want to say because I don't want to jinx myself.
Starting point is 00:40:57 Okay, so you haven't, but you fear it. Yes, that's a way to put it for sure. Yeah, I've never had a kidney stone either or gallstones. I've never had any stones inside me. I've heard that getting those out is quite the ride. Yes, you can also measure blood flow through the kidneys too. You can detect prostate cancer. You can see lumps on the prostate. That's one of those instances where they'll be using the wand. Yeah, so I also said earlier on, Chuck, that they're getting smaller and higher resolution and more portable. And one of the places that ultrasound machines are showing you to pop up more and more,
Starting point is 00:41:38 and I think now it's probably just a matter of course based on how old this article is. But in emergency rooms, they're starting to really become kind of par for the course. So if somebody shows up and says, they're doubled over in abdominal pain rather than sending them to surgery or even up to radiology, they will just apply an ultrasound there and be like, oh yeah, you've got a ruptured stomach. So we need to get that fixed pretty soon. And they say, now I wish I would have rushed you into surgery. I need a second opinion. Yeah, ultrasounds are safe. There have been questions because anytime you're applying heat and energy near organs,
Starting point is 00:42:25 like very close to organs sometimes, you got to really kind of consider this. And there have been some reports here and there of low birth weight babies if you have had frequent ultrasounds during your pregnancy. But they have basically come out and say ultrasounds are safe, but sort of like an x-ray, you don't want to come in here every other day and get one. You want to only do it when it's necessary because there is heat. And apparently the formation of bubbles because of this heat, when dissolved gases come out of that solution, that's a thing, but they are safe. Yeah, I mean, we've been using them for 60, 70 years now.
Starting point is 00:43:06 And there's been plenty of chance for, if that's an issue for it to become obvious and evident. I mean, it just seems like it's very safe. I did see that this article says that there's not been any documented studies that show harm in animals. That's not true actually. There are animal studies that have shown that exposure to some kinds of ultrasound, typically a continuous wave, which is just a concentrated beam of energy. That can actually cause thermal heating, which is not good. And then I found another study from 2017 that said some kinds, especially continuous wave, but also super quickly pulsed ultrasound has shown that it can break up DNA strands.
Starting point is 00:43:59 Oh, interesting. Which is weird because that's one of the things that people have always pointed to is, well, this is just mechanical energy. It's not going to damage your DNA like ionizing radiation is. It's a pretty startling revelation. And they actually said in the article, again, it was an academic journal article. I can't remember which one, but it said like this is going to be of like a lot of interest to a bunch of different fields because we didn't know this before. Yeah, that is interesting.
Starting point is 00:44:27 It is. Is it time to read the Franz Kafka guide to getting a ultrasound? Yes. I also want to say, Chuck, before we do, though, again, there's basically no evidence that there is harm that comes from ultrasound exams in obstetrics, especially when it's done by a trained person. Oh, sure. Yeah. It doesn't sound like it's anything to be worried about overall.
Starting point is 00:44:58 Yeah. I didn't want to scare anybody unnecessarily. No, you shouldn't. Or people should not be. Right. And you shouldn't. Both. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:45:07 All right. So Franz Kafka's guide to getting an ultrasound. Number one, man, if we could get Werner Herzog to read this list, that would just be amazing. We've got a pretty good runner up in the room. Null does a great job. We should get Null in here. Okay. We can double him in.
Starting point is 00:45:25 Number one is to remove your clothes. Okay. Number two is the ultrasonographer drapes the cloth over any exposed areas that are not needed for the exam. All right. Okay. Check. Number three, we should really get Paul if Tompkins if we want to do this right, actually. Why?
Starting point is 00:45:47 What would he do? Well, he does a great Werner Herzog. Oh, okay. Yeah. We should just get Werner Herzog. Oh, man. He's down for whatever it seems like. What stuff should I know?
Starting point is 00:46:01 The ultrasonographer applies a mineral oil-based jelly to your skin. All right. He doesn't say this or to the condom on the probe. Okay. The jelly eliminates air between the probe and your skin to help pass the sound waves into your body. Yeah. And if you're lucky, they're using a Siemens Sequoia brand ultrasound machine, which has an onboard gel heater. That's right.
Starting point is 00:46:23 Are they giving you money? No. Okay. I want some of that Siemens money. Hey, man, they're loaded. They're one of those companies that kind of make everything, right? Yeah. If they did hear this and reached out to us and were like, hey, we really appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:46:40 We're sending you guys each an ultrasound machine. Hey, man. It can go with my, I've got a Siemens brand car charger, electric car charger. There you go. I'll bet that's something that was left off this list. You can charge a car with a decent ultrasound machine. Yeah. Or at the very least, jump one off.
Starting point is 00:46:59 Yeah. It's got jumper cables. The ultrasonographer covers the probe with a plastic cover. That's the condom. He slash she, and I'm going to add slash they. Nice. Pass the probe over your skin to obtain the required images. Depending on the type of exam, the probe may be inserted into you.
Starting point is 00:47:21 You want to finish up here with the last few? Oh, no, you're doing great. All right. Number six, you may be asked to change positions to get a better looks at the area of interest. Okay. Here's 2008 popping up again. Number seven, after the images have been acquired and measurements taken, the data is stored on a disk. You may get a hard copy of the images.
Starting point is 00:47:44 They may write in Sharpie what it is on the disk even. And then the two bets. This is where it starts to take kind of a dark turn. Number eight, you're given a towelette to clean up. And number nine, I can't believe this is actually on the list, you get dressed. It's just like the grimace list of procedures you've ever heard of. And they stop at nine. Number 10 should have been, then you go give them your credit card and pay your copay.
Starting point is 00:48:17 Number 11, you walk out to the parking lot. Number 12, walk back in because you forgot to get validated. Number 13, check your back seat and make sure there are no creeps there. Number 14, remove the creep that you found. Wow. Quite a list. So we were talking about the future of ultrasound and this article doesn't really capture it. So I started to look around.
Starting point is 00:48:40 I found weirdly enough a list of cutting edge ultrasound stuff in the Daily Mail of all places. And the list was actually terrible because it was Daily Mail article. But one thing that they did talk about was tractor beams that they figured out that you can actually lift something as small as a bead at this point using sound waves. Like in Star Wars? You would think kind of like Star Wars, but no, not at all. It's actually levitating more than a tractor beam. A tractor beam makes it sound like you're pulling something upward toward you. This is actually raising it up away from you.
Starting point is 00:49:14 But there are all sorts of applications for this, especially in water because you can use these sounds in the different configurations of arrays to move something left or right. It's called steering the beam and they actually use it for ultrasound imaging too. But you can actually move things like say an oil slick. You could kind of basically drive it into shore away from shore to some other place where you want to capture it. That's amazing. There are pretty cool applications for it. In medicine, they figured out that if you give somebody a drug, say like a chemotherapy drug, some of those chemotherapy drugs only partially cross the blood-brain barrier. So they're only partially effective.
Starting point is 00:49:58 The rest just gets metabolized and you pee it out or whatever. So they figured out that if you give somebody a chemotherapy drug and then blast their brain with an ultrasound machine, they will push the drugs past the blood-brain barrier into your brain and they'll be that much more effective. I thought that was pretty cool too. There was a man who was awakened from a coma because the doctor for some reason blasted his hypothalamus with a continuous wave beam of ultrasound. But even the doctor was like, this may have been coincidence, but I don't know. Man, it seems like there are all sorts of applications that they're just starting to tap into. Yeah, I've got a couple more.
Starting point is 00:50:43 Let's hear them. Ultrasound assisted liposuction, basically burning up fat cells. Driving it out of there? Yes, but that really kind of points out that, yeah, this actually can create heat because that's what they're doing is melting fat cells using sound, which is the thing. But then they've also figured out that depending on the frequency of the sound of the sound wave, it can actually stimulate growth and function in cells. So they found that like persistent wounds like ulcers and things like that, you can actually stimulate them to heal by hitting them with sound waves. Wow. Yeah, I love it.
Starting point is 00:51:21 Is there anything an ultrasound machine can't do, Chuck? I don't know. I do know, and I'll tell you what the answer that is, and it's no. You got anything else? I got nothing else but a listener mail. Okay, well, that's it for ultrasounds. 47 minutes. That's impressive.
Starting point is 00:51:38 It is. Since I said it's impressive, it's time for listener mail. Hi, guys. I am an 11-year-old boy from the West Coast. My parents introduced me to your podcast a few years ago, and I became interested in podcast and podcasting because of you. Nice. I've recently started my own podcast called A Child's Perspective of Current Events. Nice.
Starting point is 00:52:03 This sounds wonderful. Yeah, it does. I'm going to check it out. I haven't had a chance to listen yet, Dagen, but he said, I would love it if you had mentioned my podcast during your listener mail section. It would really help boost my audience slash monthly listeners. Thank you for your time. I really hope you will consider mentioning me on your podcast. That is from Dagen Hofeld. Nice name.
Starting point is 00:52:24 Again, it's called A Child's Perspective of Current Events. I love that straightforward name. It's like stuff you should know. It says it all. Yeah, it definitely is in the same wheelhouse for sure, but it's not derivative in any way. No, no, no. Not like it. It's just in its perfect simplicity.
Starting point is 00:52:39 I love it. I'm going to give that a listen this afternoon, Dagen, and see how you're doing. If you need any other advice, just let us know. So far, you've done the smartest thing, which was to get someone on a super popular podcast to talk about your podcast. Exactly. That's step one. It helps. Hopefully, you'll get a SYSK bump out of this, and I'm going to go listen to Dagen.
Starting point is 00:53:00 Thanks for letting us know. Right? Yeah. If you want to go check out Dagen's podcast, go do that. It's called A Child's Perspective on Current Events. It's so great. In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email like Dagen did. Wrap it up. Spank it on the bottom.
Starting point is 00:53:46 Of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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