Everlasting Bubble: A World of Symbiotic Cultures

Richard Bradbury: Last week was a fun episode. Things got a little silly. We even managed to end on an upbeat note. Which means we must be in store for a double dose of misery and doom today.

Richard Bradbury: Are we talking about policy initiatives and curbing Big Tech today?

Matt Armitage:

• I know everyone’s still in holiday mode so I’m taking a beat before I come back to the hardcore stuff.

• I thought we could have some more good news tech and science stories today.

• No franken foods. No Algae rhythmic artificial intelligence. Or robots made from your own RNA.

• Are you a fan of kombucha?

Richard Bradbury: [replies]

Matt Armitage:

• I don’t really do fermented things. They don’t agree with me.

• But I’m okay with the stuff in principle.

• I know it’s another of those things the sneering set likes to write off as hipster.

• But unless you find some artisanal beard in your bottle I’d give it a chance.

• But the folks who don’t give a scooby about kombucha are really missing the point.

• Because it’s all about the Scooby. Well, SCOBY. symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast

• A bit like the starter that fuels sourdough. And I won’t hear a word said against sourdough. It’s the king of breads. And pizza.

• But it turns out, according to a story I found on Wired, that it may hold the key for an environmentally friendly approach to water filtration.

• Unlike a sourdough starter a kombucha Scooby, sorry, SCOBY. I’ve got that on the brain now.

Richard Bradbury: What is it? A jelly or a gel?

Matt Armitage:

• Pretty much. A SCOBY is a biofilm – a gel-like collection of cellulose fibre, to quote Wired.

• Early research by institutes like MIT and Imperial College London has demonstrated that it’s possible to breed a stable, lab grown SCOBY that could detect pollutants in water and help to break them down.

• Different strains of the SCOBY detect and break down different pollutants.

• Researchers at Michigan Technology University have used the breakthroughs at institutes like MIT and Imperial College London to create water filters that are a bit more environmentally sound.

Richard Bradbury: This is compared to the commercial polymer-based water filters many people use?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. All filters can quickly become clogged by the contaminants they filter out.

• And this also allows bacteria to grow on the filters themselves, which can be difficult to remove, or require chemical cleaning.

• That’s where kombucha and its SCOBYs come in – because they can be used as filters which inhibit rather than promote that bacterial growth.

• It seems that kombucha oxidises common carbon sources like sucrose, glucose and ethanol into acetic acid, which has known microbial properties.

• In tests, the biofilm filters, known as LFMs, living filtration membranes, became clogged more slowly than commercial polymer filters.

• But crucially, fewer potentially harmful microorganisms were found in those clogged LFMs,

• raising the possibility of creating these as commercial filtrations units.

• That’s pretty good going for something some of you probably just think of as a hipster fad.

Richard Bradbury: Do you have any more bacterial wonders for us?

Matt Armitage:

• I take it you don’t mean the secrets I share with my physician.

• Yes – phages.

• Thousands of people are either killed or made sick by food inhabiting bacteria like Listeria, e.coli, salmonella, shigella.

why they all have names like: 1960

• And a lot of these bacteria are really hard to kill. Some can live on in your fridge or freezer.

• Some can resist high temperatures. And they are evolving to resist both disinfectants and antibiotics.

• So they’re becoming harder to both protect against and cure.

• Some treatments, like ionizing radiation have been found to be effective but they can change the taste and texture of the food.

Richard Bradbury: You mentioned phages. Presumably you mean bacteriopahges?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. Bacteriophages are bacteria killing viruses.

• And before anyone gets upset about the idea of lab grown viruses, according to NS where I found this report,

• There are thought to be more bacteriophages on earth, than every other kind of bacterial entity combined.

• If you want to know a number, it’s in the quintillions. Ten to the power of 31 to be precise.

• And again, to give you context and to reassure you that scientists aren’t engineering a plague.

• There are estimated to be around 10 quadrillion bacteriophages, that’s a 10 with 15 zeroes,

• in the human gut, doing their best to keep our systems balanced and healthy.

• And before the widespread use of antiobiotics, phages were used to combat infections.

• They fell out of general use – and research – because you often have to find a specific strain that combats an infection.

• Whereas broad spectrum antibiotics cover a range of uses.

Richard Bradbury: How are these phages being used to kill bacteria on food?

Matt Armitage:

• They’re simply sprayed on. You use a cocktail of phages to target the strains.

• They’re already being used in a lot of countries, including US and Australia.

• They don’t count as an additive or pesticide, as they are naturally occurring.

• What complicates their use is that different strains of different bacteria are prevalent in different countries.

• The cocktail has to be tweaked. Especially as the bacteria are constantly evolving, so the phages have to be monitored

• and the formulation of the cocktail tweaked so that it remains effective.

• So this isn’t a product like Clorox or Dettol: a one size fits all, kills 99.9% of harmful bacteria type spray.

• And according to Wired – where I read this story – this is a problem for regulators who are used to dealing with single formulation chemicals rather than an ever-evolving disinfectant, so approvals and assessment protocols aren’t set up for it.

Richard Bradbury: Does it affect the shelf life of the product?

Matt Armitage:

• In many cases it actually extends it, because it’s also killing bacteria that cause the fruit or veg to degrade.

• But it isn’t a perfect story – this stuff is only effective if the food is effectively sprayed.

• And it doesn’t normally eradicate 100% of the harmful bacteria.

• So if the item isn’t stored properly or stored for too long, those colonies of bacteria may start to grow back.

Richard Bradbury: Are we looking at phages for human benefit as well?

Matt Armitage:

• We’ve talked about the search for the gut bacteria that could cause or combat conditions like obesity or depression.

• The US is rocketing ahead with research in this area – known as nutraceuticals.

• Belgium and Georgia are also pioneers in the fields of phage-based treatments and therapies.

• So rather than go into a lot of detail here, I think nutraceuticals is a topic we’ll devote more time to on a future show.

Richard Bradbury: More medical or bacterial marvels for us?

Matt Armitage:

• Well – and bear with me on this.

• Recently, I was watching a video of two people trying to play guitar while receiving electric shocks from a device that’s supposed to relive the pain of childbirth.

• Which was completely hilarious.

• I’ll put the links in the shownotes for the off-brand subscribers.

• But electricity and electrical fields – as mentioned in the pregnancy pain relief example – do have therapeutic uses.

• For example, electric fields applied across a wound can speed up its healing.

Richard Bradbury: Presumably that requires some kind of large, field generating equipment?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes – so scientists at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu

• wanted to create an electrostatic dressing that could be used like a regular dressing, but using those electrostatic properties to help the body heal.

• What they created is a four-layer dressing – and again this is coming from NS – measuring just 0.2mm thick.

• It consists of a layer of electrically charged plastic that creates an electric field through static contact with the skin.

• Then there’s a layer of flexible silicone gel that allows the dressing to follow the contours of the skin,

• a layer that pulls the edges of the open skin together,

• Which is covered with another layer of the flexible silicone gel.

• The product has yet to move into human trials, but lab tests have shown that the charged dressing is much more effective than traditional dressings.

• On circular wounds, skin was 96.8% closed with the charged product, and less than 80% closed with a variety of traditional dressings.

• The team is working on dressings that can work with a variety of different wound shapes.

• And hope to move into human trials soon.

Richard Bradbury: So we have no idea of what this might cost?

Matt Armitage:

• Sure, outside of hospital use, dressings need to be cheap.

• Going back to those bacterial stories – this isn’t just about getting patients up and about faster.

• It’s about getting those wounds closed,

• So that the kind of treatment resistant superbugs that have emerged in hospitals around the world can’t infect the patient.

• But the team in Chengdu is confident that the cost of the product will be low enough for it to be widely adopted.

Richard Bradbury: I think we still have time for a little one.

Matt Armitage:

• I’ve got another medical one but I’ll save that for after the break.

• It might take a bit longer than we have.

• Have you joined the wordle revolution?

Richard Bradbury: [rich replies]

Matt Armitage:

• In case you’ve been asleep, wordle is a simple word puzzle game.

• You have to guess the 5 letter word in six attempts.

• Each time you guess, it tells you if any of the letters are correct and whether or not they’re in the right position.

• But the key to the game is that there’s only one puzzle per day.

• So it rations how often you can play it – which is part of what is fuelling the obsession.

• There’s a slew of clones and imitators. Absurdle, which uses a neural net to change the words and make it harder to guess.

• There’s lewdle, which is a rude version, obviously.

• Wordle 2, which is exactly the same but uses six letter words instead of 5.

• I believe there’s even a Bahasa version, Katapat.

Richard Bradbury: And you’re telling us this because?

Matt Armitage:

• The game was originally invented by a chap called Josh Wardle, for his wife, who likes word games.

• Kudos also to the Mattsplained level play on his own name.

• So it’s self-funded. And I was worried that as its popularity spread, that Wardle might not be able or willing to foot the escalating traffic costs to maintain it.

• It was announced earlier this week that it had been sold to the New York Times,

• Which in addition to its venerated crosswords, has a slew of word games and puzzles behind a paywall on its site.

• Apparently the NYT has pledged to keep the game free for the time being, but I imagine it will either be used as a lure or eventually be absorbed into the paper’s paid for tier of services.

• So, I guess, good news that it isn’t going anywhere. Bad news that you might end up paying for it.

Richard Bradbury: When we come back – a Star Trek like visor enabling the blind to see.

BREAK

Richard Bradbury: You can’t tease Star Trek and then go into a break.

Matt Armitage:

• Do you want to sell advertising or not?

• And while I’m on the subject Deep Space Nine is just getting better and better.

Wish I’d spent more of the: 1990

• Those of you who remember Star Trek The Next Generation, which ran about the same time as DS9.

• Will remember Geordi La Forge, the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise, played by LeVar Burton.

• The character was blind from borth but used a spectral array visor and implants that allowed him to see.

• The idea was that the visor scanned the electromagnetic spectrum and transferred the spectral images into the optic nerves.

• So the character didn’t see in a traditional sense – it was more like the way a radio telescope sees the universe.

Richard Bradbury: [some comment about me taking more time to talk about something fictional than I spend on the real stuff]

Matt Armitage:

• Because it’s always momentous when someone creates something Star Trek like.

• Whether it’s deliberate or accidental.

• Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have created a set of 3D printed infrared goggles that can help people with sight impairments to see and negotiate their surroundings.

• I don’t know if anyone remembers a story we covered about a decade ago – yes we’ve been doing this stuff for that long.

• Which used cameras that were linked to a kind of lollipop, which would transmit a kind of sensory map to the users tongue.

Richard Bradbury: Which is not entirely user friendly…

Matt Armitage:

• It was a great advance technologically but maybe not practical in terms of user experience.

• But time is its own great innovator and tech marches on, so this story in NS really caught my attention as I’d never forgotten about the seeing eye lollipop story.

• The German development uses a pair of infrared cameras that create a stereoscopic image.

• Computer processors then turn those stereo images into a map.

• That image is then turned into a low res image which is then translated into a 5x5 grid.

• The grid corresponds to 25 vibrating sensors that the user wears as an armband.

Richard Bradbury: How does that translate into visual information for the user?

Matt Armitage:

• It’s basic for sure. If you’re walking along a pavement say, the pads vibrate more strongly along the edges.

• If there’s an obstacle in front of you, a pad will vibrate to show you where and how far in front of you it is so that the user can walk around it.

• So, if a walkway was narrow, more than one row of the pads on each side would vibrate.

• There have only been basic tests so far – with five volunteers – but the system was easy enough to use that the volunteers were able to complete a test route on their first try.

• I mentioned that this was 3D printed – it’s very much a prototype system at the moment.

• There are still challenges and tweaks to make the armband more user friendly.

• AS NS points out – it has to be large enough that each of the pads is easily distinguishable from another.

Richard Bradbury: [comment about it needing to be wearable]

Matt Armitage:

• Exactly. One of the potential advantages of this system is its usability.

• Some visual aids require a lot of expensive equipment or robots.

• Others interpret visual cues audibly, through headphones.

• Which, just like the lollipop, is taking a sense from the wearer. The lollipop makes it harder to talk.

• The audio devices prevent you from hearing.

• This device doesn’t detract from your other senses, it’s only adding inputs.

• So, I hope we’ll be able to follow up on this story and report on a more market ready solution soon.

Richard Bradbury: We’re a long way into today’s show without you mentioning AI. How are you going to keep this one light and positive?

Matt Armitage:

• Not all of our AI stories are negative.

• We’ve been talking more recently about hybrid working methods.

• Letting AI do the boring and repetitive stuff, or to rule out all the various combinations in models.

• And humans get to work on those shortlisted or completed tasks.

• Research chemists at Canada’s University of Toronto has come up with a more targeted way to create hybrid human-AI teams that make the best use of the strengths of each.

• Chemistry labs are already highly automated – self driving labs feature robots doing the mixing and chemistry stuff.

• The results are then analysed by AI which can flag the most promising avenues for the human chemists to explore.

• It saves chemists a huge number of hours in terms of both completing the experiments and comparing the data.

Richard Bradbury: But it could be more efficient?

Matt Armitage:

• Of course. And part of that is also identifying the parts of those processes that are currently being handed to robots or humans that their respective partner could better handle.

• The Canadian team has devised a system called RouteScore. Algorithms analyse every possible combination creating a target molecule could take.

• So that’s number of hours by a robot or a human. The cost of those hours and the wear and tear costs.

• Costs of the raw materials. Even variables like how much equipment will need cleaning, how long it will take and what it will cost.

• In tests, the system was able to accurately predict the correct cost-benefit analysis of producing various molecules.

Richard Bradbury: The hope is that this will make labs more flexible as well as increasing their efficiency?

Matt Armitage:

• Again, I think I read this in NS. But automation is habit forming.

• We use the machine because we’re used to using the machine.

• Not because it’s necessarily the most optimal solution.

• Because RouteScore is dynamic, it responds to fluctuating costs of materials and labour.

• It can give chemists a more accurate indication of which parts of the process should be automated and which should be human driven on a given day.

• Of course, as machines get better, we will see more and more of those processes routinely being the domain of the machines.

• But as we edge towards that future, tools like this, not just in chemistry, can help us to figure out the best balance between the two as we move forward.

Richard Bradbury: Can we squeeze one more in? One of your more off the wall discoveries?

Matt Armitage:

• I’ve saved the best till last today. This is a story I found on Wired.

• Everyone likes blowing bubbles, right? We pretend it’s for kids but really…

Richard Bradbury: [rich replies]

Matt Armitage:

• And there’s always that one bubble that you catch or lands on you and it doesn’t pop.

• So you stay still to see how long

• Which is when someone who is destined not to be your friend or partner for long thinks it’s funny to pop it.

• I may only be speaking for myself here, but there’s that sense of sadness when it pops.

• Like that might have been the one bubble that could last forever.

Richard Bradbury: This is a story about an everlasting bubble?

Matt Armitage:

• You can already see it as a Pixar movie, right?

• But yes, this is actually something that mathematicians and physicists are concerned with.

• In: 2018

• It’s a lot more complex than we think. Yes, there’s the formula, but the size of the wand and of course the speed and volume of the air.

• In: 2020

• The polymers essentially knitted together – allowing them to stretch without breaking.

• Allowing the team to create truly enormous bubbles.

• We’ve got perfect bubbles. We’ve got giant bubbles. But they all suffer from the same problem.

• Gravity pulls the liquid in the soap formula down, and at the same time it’s evaporating.

• Your bubble shrinks and it pops, usually within a few seconds.

Richard Bradbury: Someone has invented bubble wrap?

Matt Armitage:

• I’m giving away all the best gags today.

• Back in: 2017

• They called them gas marbles.

• Researchers at the University of Lille, also in France,

• Decided to see how long they could make the bubbles last.

• Obviously, the soap formula bubbles only lasted a minute or so.

• But when they used water-based gas marbles they could push that to between 6 minutes and an hour.

Richard Bradbury: [rich replies]

Matt Armitage:

• Because evaporation is still an issue. So they added glycerol.

• It has the advantage of creating strong hydrogen bonds with water but also it absorbs water from air.

• So it offsets a lot of the evaporation effect. Obviously different combinations of water and glycerol created a different effect.

• Do you want to take a guess at how long the bubbles lasted?

• Bearing in mind we’re looking at a best time of about an hour with the water based gas bubbles.

Richard Bradbury: [rich replies]

Matt Armitage:

• Depending on the mix it ranged from 6 days – which is huge – to an incredible 465 days.

• I imagine that’s the kind of bubble that most parents will grow tired of.

• A lot of hamsters have failed to live as long.

• It’s not just bubbles.

• The Lille team has also used the solution to create other shapes as well.

• A 3d pyramid structure they created has lasted for over 380 days and at the time of broadcast it was still going strong.

• So that’s my goal for: 2022

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