Even though modern medicine has come a long way, there are still a number of things we’re
not very good at.
Chief among them: fixing brain injuries.
But a case study published this week in the journal Current Biology might start to change that.
Because a group of French researchers took a patient suffering from unresponsive wakefulness
syndrome — what’s sometimes called a vegetative state — and figured out how to make him
responsive again.
Unresponsive wakefulness isn’t quite the same as a coma.
Instead of being asleep and unresponsive, the patient is awake and unresponsive.
So their body is working fine, but they’re not showing signs that they’re aware of anything.
The neurons in their brain just aren’t communicating with each other the way they should be.
Sometimes awareness can come back, because the brain is pretty good at fixing itself.
But sometimes it doesn’t.
Scientists still aren’t sure exactly how and why that works for some people and not
for others.
But most will agree that after about a year of unresponsive wakefulness, the chances of
recovery are very, very slim.
So these researchers were trying to find a way to bring people back.
Earlier research has shown that patients with minimal levels of consciousness improved a
bit when a certain nerve was stimulated, so the team wondered if the same thing could
work for someone with even less awareness.
The patient in the study was a 35-year-old man who’d been unresponsive for 15 years
because of a car accident.
The researchers decided to try stimulating his vagus nerve, one of the most important
nerves in the body.
It sends signals from your brain to pretty much every other organ, and is responsible
for things like maintaining blood pressure, regulating mood, and even making you feel
drowsy after you eat too much.
It’s also very involved in keeping you alert and awake, so the team wanted to see if stimulating
it electrically could help get the patient responsive again.
And … it worked.
After about a month of treatment, the man actually started reacting to things.
He turned his head when someone asked him to.
He could follow movements with his eyes.
He even reacted with a sort of fear when one of the researchers moved suddenly.
The results of this treatment are nothing short of incredible.
This guy was unresponsive for 15 years.
That said, this was only one case.
And most scientific conclusions need to be made with a few more than that.
The researchers say that they want to test this on more patients in a similar state and
see if it helps them recover faster.
And if it does, doctors might someday have more options when it comes to treating people
stuck in unresponsive wakefulness.
In the meantime, other researchers have been looking for new solutions to a totally different
problem: how to power our excessive electrical needs in a way that won’t make climate change
ten thousand million times worse.
Researchers from Columbia University have been working on a new way to harness energy
from a process that’s happening somewhere around you right now.
And in a paper published this week in the journal Nature Communications, they’ve shown
that it might be way more powerful than they thought.
Every year, more than 500,000 cubic kilometers of water evaporates from the oceans, lakes,
rivers, and creeks all over the world.
And when that much water changes from a liquid to a gas, it uses an enormous amount of energy.
A few years ago, the researchers wondered if that energy could be turned into a renewable
source of power — what they called an evaporation engine.
And in 2015, they developed some working prototypes.
Strangely, it’s all powered by a property of bacterial spores — a kind of tough outer
shell that bacteria form when conditions get rough.
The bacteria will sort of go to sleep and just chill there, waiting for their environment
to get better.
The researchers discovered that these spores will expand when you hydrate them but then
contract again when the water goes away.
When they put drops of the bacterial spores onto tape and dried them out, the tape curled
itself up, and when they exposed the spores to humidity or moisture, the tape expanded again.
In other words: the spores were using the energy from evaporation to power movement.
There are a few versions of the evaporation engine.
One sits on top of a pool of water and uses natural evaporation to move shutters back
and forth.
Another uses differences in humidity to spin a turbine and power a tiny lego car.
They’re super cute!
But the technology is seriously new and hasn’t really had enough time to develop into something
that can actually be used.
So in this week’s paper, the team demonstrated the engine’s potential using math.
By developing new computer models that looked at how much water is available, along with
surface area information and meteorological data, the researchers calculated that the
technology could generate up to 325 gigawatts of power.
That’s 69% of the total power used in the United States in 2015, which is huge.
They also calculated that from one reservoir in Texas, they could get 178 megawatts of
electricity a year.
That would be enough to power more than 130,000 homes.
That’s the best case scenario, though.
Covering an entire reservoir or lake with an evaporation engine has its drawbacks, because
covering water sources can dramatically change the chemistry of an ecosystem.
Plus, lots of bodies of water are really important for communities.
Who doesn’t want to picnic by the water and go out on the boat and then you’re just
in the shade of your weird evaporation engine.
But the evaporation engine could be useful because it has an advantage over other forms
of renewable energy.
Both wind and solar power rely on some sort of weather, but the water cycle is always
going on in the background.
So, give it some time and your lights could be powered by bacterial spores getting a little moist.
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