Daniel Yakuboff

The Secret to Clustering? Unveiling the Mystery Behind Spinal Cancer Clusters

Biotech, Medicine, Science, Technology / By

According to the CDC, over 600,000 people passed away from this leading cause of death, making it the second greatest claimant of casualties. Upon being diagnosed, one experiences a lifetime of stress and a load of rigorous treatment in the form of chemotherapy in an attempt to kill all the cells before the illness could spread to the remainder of the body. It doesn’t always stop at this point though, many go on to have progressing stages that may either require more treatment, a verdict of ‘X months to live,’ or the first followed by the second. This illness is cancer. 

There are over a hundred and fifty types of cancer, ranging from the head to the toe and everything in between. Some cancers are heavily influenced by gender (such as breast cancer), others by age (such as prostate cancer), and so on and so forth. The specific one that ought to be highlighted though for its increased presence (clustering) of cancerous cells relative to the body is spinal cancer. Although most (if not all) cancers have the ability to cluster its cells in a couple of specific areas, this one can cause cancer cells to become three to five times more apparent in the spine relative to other limbs.

Without the assistance of modern medicine and technology necessary to probe deeper, scientists just considered this specific clustering of cells a medical mystery.

But we have access to that technology now. At least, researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York do. With these resources, they were available to figure out what exactly causes these clusters to emerge: vertebral skeletal stem cells in the spine. What makes these stem cells unique relative to other ones is their production of a protein that attracts these tumor (cancerous) cells to come to them.

So what can be done with this? Excellent question. 

Through identifying what may exactly cause this clustering, researchers can work on targeting these vertebral skeletal stem cells to disrupt their function (i.e., attracting cancerous tumor cells to them). 

That seems like the perfect plan, no? However, when an experiment on mice where these cells are targeted took place, it didn’t completely eliminate the amount of bone (and, by extension, the number of cancerous cells) in that area. This then begs the question: is there a second stem cell type that we aren’t accounting for? Or is it something else?

Sources

  • https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
  • https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/11/28/new-stem-cell-spine-cancer/
  • https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37704733/

Sleep Paralysis: Conscious Yet Frozen

Medicine, Psychology, Science / By

You are in your bed after a long day, about to fall asleep. You finish reading your book, scrolling on your phone, sending an email, and hit the hay. Then, you wake up the next day in your bed. You might have been dreaming about frolicking in a field, cleaning your house (I hope not), going on vacation, or a variety of other things. But… you wake up in your bed. Not in a different country, not in a different area outside of your home, not even in a different room in your home. You wake up in the exact same place where you went to sleep: your bed. How is this possible?

Sleep paralysis is a deeply researched phenomenon in which, during sleep, you are unconscious and yet unable to move (prompting the apt name). Now, you can still curl your toes, flex your hands, or twist and turn, but you can’t actually get out of your bed and say, clean your house (provided you don’t have night terrors or some other conflicting sleep disorder). But how does sleep paralysis occur? Why can’t we just do our chores when we are dreaming, or rather dreading, them the next day? 

Our brain is considered to be one of the most complex objects there is. From being able to have half of it removed and still function just about perfectly (in another phenomenon referred to as plasticity, or the brain’s ability to repair itself), to being able to not feel pain and yet regulate pain for all the other parts of the body, it’s a pretty unique and powerful organ. Millions of neurons and hundreds of parts within it work to make it function as it does, all without making us sweat even a little. But there are three particular things that explain sleep paralysis: the brain stem, the motor cortex, and movement signals. 

The motor cortex is responsible for initiating your movements. Whether it’d be raising your arms to stretch, climbing a step with your legs, or even scrolling on your phone, you can thank your motor cortex. In all of these actions, the motor cortex sends movement signals to your brain in order to actually cause you to, well, move. During sleep, although you are not conscious, your brain still is active (as it doesn’t ever ‘shut off’). The body acknowledges this and programs your brain stem to block all movement signals from the motor cortex in an effort to protect you by preventing you from wandering off and, say, doing some chores. 

You might be wondering why you can still curl your toes, toss and turn, or even move away from something unpleasurable. After all, the motor cortex is responsible for movement, no? Well, that’s true to an extent: it’s responsible for all voluntary movement, that is. Remember your last doctor’s appointment where they used the tiny rubber hammer to test your knee’s reflexes? That wasn’t voluntary, so instead of going up to the brain, it is only sent to the spinal cord, which the brain stem does not block movement signals from. As such, all reflexes (and certain small movements) are permissible by the brain because, well, they don’t actually go through it.

The brain is an intricate thing. It’s responsible for every single facet of your life, and yet does its job so seamlessly that we hardly even think about it. It even protects us at night when we are sleeping. What else can the brain do that we haven’t discovered? What else does the brain do that we marvel about? 

Sources

  1. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/parasomnias/sleep-paralysis
  2. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21974-sleep-paralysis
  3. https://sleepdoctor.com/parasomnias/sleep-paralysis/

Miniature Marvels: The Nobel-Winning World of Quantum Dots

Nanotechnology / By

The subatomic particle trio: the proton, the electron, and the neutron, all of which are responsible for each element working exactly as it should. All of which is the exact reason why each substance has its specific properties and not others. As far as everyone knows, these three tiny particles dictate properties and contribute to the behavior of elements and substances. 

However, there is a limit to how much influence these particles have over other substances. All things have limits, a person’s temper, an asymptote in calculus, even temperature. Subatomic particles are no exception. What’s ironic about this particular limit though is that the only thing that can best these remarkable intricacies of chemistry is what takes its most humbling feature to a whole new level: size. 

When something is shrunk to a size that mimics the size of these subatomic particles (albeit a bit larger), they effectively lose their impact on a substance’s properties. In that (quantum) realm, size dictates the properties, behaviors, and colors of a substance (known as a quantum dot). Yes, you heard (or I suppose read) that right: the colors of a substance are determined by its size. But first, let’s review how all of this came to light. 

It was early into the 1980s, the technological advancement race was fast progressing. Alexei Ekimov, a Russian physicist, stumbled upon a ‘eureka’ discovery, perplexed about how the color of these quantum dots can change depending on how much they were shrunk. This massive discovery at the time prompted Louis Brus (an American physical chemist), only a few years later, to tirelessly invest countless hours into discovering the next big revelation: the size of a quantum dot can even dictate its properties, defying the natural rules of chemistry (where subatomic particles dominate the property and behavior scene of substances). But, this research was all theoretical: there was no application to it. After all, how can you take these transformative particles and turn them into something that could be used? 

In 1993, Moungi Bawendi, an American-Tunisian-French chemist, took that question to the battlefield as he discovered the way to chemically engineer these particles in a near-perfect way, enabling these quantum dots to be responsible for lighting up your computer monitors, illuminating your TV, adding the shades of gray to LED lamps, and even play a role in modern medicine through allowing doctors to map out biological tissue. 

In 2023, three decades since the last of these three great scientists made these discoveries, they were all awarded the Nobel Prize of 2023 in Chemistry. It’s ironic: the smallest things oftentimes become the biggest, we just don’t realize it yet. From finding out that color changes by size to discovering how properties are impacted by shrinking or expanding these quantum dots to making them adorn our electronics and be found in our medical laboratories, quantum dots have had quite a journey. 

Image Credit: CNN, images of the three scientists who won the Nobel Prize (Bawendi, Brus, Ekimov, in that order).

Sources

  1. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/press-chemistryprize2023.pdf
  2. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/04/europe/nobel-prize-chemistry-quantum-dots-bawendi-brus-ekimov-intl-scn/index.htm
  3. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/oct/04/nobel-prize-in-chemistry-winners-2023l

Unlocking Limb Regeneration: The Salamander’s Clue to Ending Phantom Pain

Biology, Biomedical, Engineering, Medicine, Science / By

You wake up in the morning with some arm pain. Sounds pretty normal, no? But what if you were told that that pain was all in your head? Alright, well obviously it’s in your head, your brain is what detects the pain, but bear with me. What if your arm wasn’t… there? What if your arm hadn’t been there for years, only for you to still feel it being there despite this objective truth? If all of that applies to you, then you are a victim of phantom pain. 

Over 500 people lose their limbs each day, whether it’s through the brutality of warfare, a freak accident at a job, or otherwise. Of these individuals, approximately 80% of them experience phantom pain. Not to mention that all of them suffer some degree of reduction in quality of life and even mental health for some. For what seems like its conception, limbs and their loss seemed like an unfortunate reality of the world. We all are only given one pair of parts, if we lose them somehow, that’s on us. That’s it. No redos, no replacements, no takesies-backsies. 

But what if there were redos? What if there was a way to replace the irreplaceable? What if there was a way to grow the ungrowable? That may very be possible through researching an animal that most of us have yet to encounter in the flesh: the humble salamander. 

What makes the salamander so special lies in its capability to regrow its limbs in its entirety. It could lose all of its arms and legs: as long as the stump is not destroyed, it can regrow them again and again without fail. These were only possible through the salamander’s natural capabilities to salvage what was left and prevent the wound from festering. The blood vessels quickly contract and a layer of skin cells swiftly encase the wound site. This wasn’t what made the salamander’s capability to regrow limbs so odd though, it was that it had other parts of its body (namely the opposite side of the missing limb) chip in to regrow the lost part. Although it would sometimes appear in a slightly different place, it would, for all anatomically sound purposes, be a perfectly functional limb. 

Although humans and salamanders are not the same, we both possess some form of a regeneration factor (with the former resorting to healing and the latter resulting in completely regrowing a limb). It is just a matter of time before we transform our natural capability to heal into being able to regrow lost limbs, perhaps indefinitely. No more will those who are missing an arm or a leg through horrid circumstances have to suffer a poor quality of life. No more will they have to make do with painkillers and accept the never-ending pain. No more will they have to live their life to a fraction of their potential all because of an unfortunate sequence of events. With the help of some salamanders, these circumstances may very well become a thing of the past. 

Image Credit: CAS.org, depiction of limbs regenerating.

Sources

  1. https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/programs/2021-04/llam-infographic-2021.pdf
  2. https://www.montefiore.org/limb-loss-facts
  3. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/12092-phantom-limb-pain
  4. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2014/jun/limb-regeneration-do-salamanders-hold-key

How Did Life Itself Come Into Existence?

Bio Chemistry, Science / By

If you’re reading this right now, you have a personal stake in answering the above question, that is, how did life come into existence? From the concepts of evolution (progression of life) to the origin of innovations meant to improve the quality of living a thousandfold, this is one of the few things that has been debated by scientific communities worldwide for centuries. 

Before we delve into this topic, we need to address what exactly is life for us to understand how it can be identified. Now, this may seem obvious as you can just point to yourself and shout “life!” with a fervor akin to an eureka moment, but just bear with me. There are thousands of definitions all-encompassing this topic, so we’ll cover the black-and-white one necessary to understand this article: “Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not. […]” (Wikipedia, para. 1). 

Now that we addressed what we’ll be talking about, let’s touch upon the ideas that have been supported by members of scientific communities. There have been a slew of these theories, each one as different as the next. Some have ignored evolutionary standpoints in favor of supporting biblical citings that God created Adam and Eve and demanded that they procreate to foster future generations. Others have speculated mind-altering possibilities like life being formed out of stardust. There are even people who give into the idea that one day life just happened to occur, defeating the odds in a 1:4^300 fashion (in short, basically a near zero possibility). 

But, for all the struggles of science, there has been a rising, consistent trend about one theory that encompasses quite a couple of already acknowledged objective realities about other environments: the assembly of cells to function like a team, the concepts of natural selection and evolution, and a really, really, really small chance. 

First and foremost to this journey is the building blocks. Whether it would be a massive skyscraper or the physiological needs of human beings, life itself is no exception. In this case, its building blocks are cells, or “[…] the smallest, basic unit of life that is responsible for all of life’s processes […]” (BYJUS, para. 1).

Image credit: American Chemical Society, depicts cell clusters under a microscope.

Now, the concept of a really small chance is where this first comes in. While the possibility of a human just appearing fully formed is practically zero, the chance of an extremely improbable chemical reaction occurring is considerably more likely. After all, the universe’s formation and all it entails follows a similar line of reasoning, but that’s a digression.

Then comes the theory of evolution. Although we all know that chimpanzees turned into humans eventually (displayed by likeness in genes and similarities in physical features), cells undergo the same transformation. With the help of natural selection, that is, ‘survival of the fittest’ in short, these cells were able to continuously evolve and progress until they couldn’t do so anymore.

Although these cells didn’t have as much to differentiate themselves as other fully functioning species that we see currently, they still were able to adjust through replacing what they utilized to function as a means to enhance their efficiency. For instance, cells chose to swap out its original genetic material, RNA, with Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) given its improved stability and suppleness. If that’s not all, cells even incorporate other molecules like proteins to speed up the catalysts of chemical reactions, in other words, what’s the intermediary between them and them attaining their goal at performing their designated function. Their capabilities to evolve and adapt makes it known that they were the original pros at becoming the lean, mean, efficient machines that are in every living thing. 

Finally, we arrive at how we went from microscopic cells to actual fairly visible matter. Although cells reach a limit when they form individually, that same limitation is overcome when multicellularity (or the combination of cells to perform a function) occurs. When this happens, cells finally quit going their separate ways and instead collide, enabling larger formations (such as complete organs) to come into existence.

Ironically, the formation of something as volatile and unpredictable as life came through a series of just as unlikely events, from extremely improbable reactions to survival of the fittest mantras in cells that can’t even speak to one another (or maybe they can and we just don’t know). But it does make some wonder as to what else has yet to be discovered? What else has yet to be formed from a series of unpredictable and yet possibly fated events? 

Sources

  • https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-we-really-made-of-stardust.html
  • https://en.wikipehttps://www.science20.com/stars_planets_life/calculating_odds_life_could_begin_chancedia.org/wiki/Life
  • https://www.science20.com/stars_planets_life/calculating_odds_life_could_begin_chance
  • https://byjus.com/biology/cells/
  • https://evolution.berkeley.edu/glossary/natural-selection/
  • https://evolution.berkeley.edu/from-soup-to-cells-the-origin-of-life/how-did-life-originate/

Battling Plastic Pollution: Unveiling Nature’s Tiny Heroes

Biology, Ecology, Editors Pick, Science / By

Polyethylene, plastic for short. It’s used everywhere, from the humble water bottle to grand and towering airplanes. We all hear that plastic doesn’t decompose, but many of us adopt an “out of sight, out of mind” thinking process. But, all because you can’t see a problem doesn’t mean that it’s not there. 

Over 170 trillion plastic pieces are in our oceans currently, with that number exponentially skyrocketing. This causes several issues, primarily a negative impact on wildlife and ecosystems within the ocean (colloquially referred to as plastic pollution). 

Fish (among other aquatic creatures) run the risk of being constricted by plastic rings, eating miniature pieces of them, or even having them cut against their skin. Not only this, but the plastic itself is toxic, with it containing thousands of chemicals that are harmful for aquatic life but also anyone else who comes in contact with contaminated water, humans included.

Image credit: https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/plastic-research-toxins-carcinogens/, depicts a gigantic pile of empty plastic containers. 

Since the dawn of its creation, it was just assumed as an unfortunate reality that we had to accept: gain a powerful, versatile, and cheap material and sentence the oceans and all the life it maintains to the guillotine. After all, it would cost an arm and a leg (upwards of $150 billion specifically) to remove the majority, not even all, of the plastic. 

But what if human hands combined with those of Mother Nature? What if we called upon the meek insects that scurry on the floors we stepped on to remove this pollution? What if we found a solution to this problem, a cheap and readily available cure for this illness? Well, that may just be possible.

October of 2022 brought more than just the welcoming of Halloween, it also was the time of a critical discovery: a type of caterpillar whose spit could decompose plastic. This was oddly enough discovered by a hobbyist beekeeper named Federica, who placed these caterpillars (wax moth in particular) into a plastic bag and found out briefly afterward that they had escaped, leaving multiple holes as their tunnels to freedom. 

But first, let’s review how they were able to do that. They utilized two specific enzymes, or proteins designed to cause a biochemical reaction, named Ceres and Demeter. These were considerably faster at decomposing plastic than traditional means (e.g. fungi or general bacteria), which could take weeks at a time. 

Scientists are currently looking to harvest and mass-produce these enzymes to decompose plastic at a more global scale. Although this is still in the beta phase of testing, it does offer a multitude of questions. How much faster do these enzymes decay plastic than conventional means? Are there other enzymes like this? How long will it take before it can be synthesized and ready for mass engineering? 

But, it does offer something important: a step in the right direction. With the capabilities of science and the will of those who desire clean water free of plastic residue, anything is possible, just maybe with the help of some little bugs by our side. 

Self Healing Metal might be a reality

Engineering, Physics / By

Every single day, humans utilize objects that contain metal in them. From the joints that make a phone function to cars that drive through bridges that are suspended off of metallic pipes and tubes, it would make sense that metal is just about ingrained into everyday life. 

Just as this is completely undeniable, so too is the logic of deterioration, or wear and tear after usage. As we use our phones, it slows down and eventually shuts itself off permanently. As we drive our cars, they eventually break down, only to never be salvaged again. As we walk on bridges, each step causes the metallic tubes to bear even more weight upon their shoulders, struggling to hold on and eventually collapsing.

All of these issues cause an eventual loss of life within these objects, resulting in billions of dollars and millions of hours being spent to replace them. This was seen as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice: we gain the ability to use these things, so it’s only fair that eventually, we lose (and need to replace) them. 

But what if wear-and-tear would cease to exist? What if this fundamental law of nature that humans have accepted as common sense was broken? That may just be possible. 

July of 2023 brought more than just sunny weather and humidity (at least in New York): it also brought the impossibility of self-healing metal to life. Although you might imagine this like T-1000 in Terminator Two: Judgement Day, in which the robot repaired itself no matter what it was hit with, you’d be a little off.  In reality, this healing happens in a realm the human eye could hardly even fathom: the nanoscopic level. That’s not to say that you can’t see the repair eventually, but it’s not as prominently quick as you may initially believe so. 

Onto the process that was used. This method (known as cold welding), was ironic by nature, and yet successful by design. The metal had to have the ends of its tiny metallic pieces pulled rapidly (approximately 200 times per second). This resulted in cracks forming and expanding, but around 40 minutes into the utilization of this process, the metal began to fuse back together.

Red depicts the pulling apart (tensile stress) of the metal, whereas the green represents the repairing of itself. 

Although this may seem insignificant at first (after all, it’s just recombining some metal), it does call into question the possibilities. If harnessed and mastered to the point where it was automated, it would enable anything, from bridges to cars to cell phones to microchips and everything in between to repair itself. 

This not only reduces the cost and time of fixing it manually but would also usher in a new era of engineering: with less to fix, there’d be more opportunity to create. If we can break the laws of nature and make inanimate objects heal themselves, what else can we do?

  • https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.145501
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06223-0
  • https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/healing_metals/

Defeating Time: A breakthrough in Aging.

Bio Chemistry, Medicine, Technology / By

Something you can’t see or hear until years go by. Something you recognize as simple and yet impossible to avoid. Something that is known as both the cruelest and most beautiful law in all of nature. Something that neither the richest nor poorest person can escape from. That something is time. 

Throughout mankind, humans have been able to conquer just about everything, from their minuscule problems to global affairs. However, with all of our minds combined, we still failed to defeat the toughest opponent of all: time. For what seems like since the origin of the universe, it appeared as the one unstoppable force that nobody could fight.

That is until 2022. While this year beckoned the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also brought along news about a case study conducted by David Sinclair, a molecular biologist who spent the vast majority of his career (twenty years) searching for ways to reverse aging and undoing time in the process. While the beginning of his journey was unsuccessful, he didn’t give up. 

The study split up two different mice (siblings born from the same litter) and genetically altered one of them to make them considerably older, something that was a marked success. While this alone is not indicative of a reversal in aging, it does bring up an important question: if time could be sped up, could it also be slowed down or even undone altogether? However, before we get to that, we need to understand just how the mice were genetically altered and why. 

Image credit: https://www.cnn.com, depiction of two mice from the same litter being drastically different in age appearance.

Many believe that aging is caused due to cell damage, but that’s not exactly accurate. That is one of the reasons, yes, but that’s not the main cause. Instead, we should look at the heart of the matter: the epigenome. It is what determines what each cell becomes and how it works, an instructional manual of sorts for each cell. When the epigenome malfunctions, the “instructions” of the cells are lost, thus resulting in the cell failing to continue functioning. 

So, Sinclair utilized gene therapy to get the cells their instructions to continue working and the results were shocking. Sinclair wasn’t only able to display success in accelerating aging, but also reversing it as well by nearly 60%. What’s more, this appears to be limitless, with Sinclair even citing that “[he’s] been really surprised by how universally it works. [Him and his team] haven’t found a cell type yet that [they] can’t age forward and backward.”

This expands beyond mice: it has already been utilized to reverse aging in non-human primates through the use of doxycycline, an antibiotic with gene reprogramming potential, with rapid success. There has even been some human experimentation, with gene therapy being done on human tissues in lab settings. 

The ability to reverse aging across the board brings up more than just stopping time, it also enables the possibility of halting sickness relating to aging. In retrospect, these illnesses (like dementia and Alzheimers among others) are caused due to cell malfunction. If the reversal of aging is potent enough, it runs the risk of also undoing these illnesses. 

With the potential to halt aging and enable people to live into their hundreds without fear of age-related illnesses, it does bring up countless possibilities. If we can already undo aging on a small scale, imagine what the future ten, fifty, or even a hundred years from now can behold.

  • https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01570-7
  • https://time.com/6246864/reverse-aging-scientists-discover-milestone/
  • https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/02/health/reverse-aging-life-itself-scn-wellness/index.html

Stopping the Energy Crisis Clock?

Engineering, Technology / By

Less than 120 years. That’s the duration in which all nonrenewable energy will be fully exhausted. Although that sounds like a long time away, a whole lifetime away, in fact, this is a problem that needs to be addressed. 

Part of the reason as to why this issue needs to be solved is because of the exponential growth of fossil fuel usage. Compared to 1950, approximately 70 years ago from the date of this article, gas consumption has risen nearly twenty times as much, a staggering increase. 

Image Credit: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels, depiction fossil fuel consumption rates over the years.

It’s not unrealistic to say that, as time progresses, consumption of fossil fuels will continue to rise and thus, reduce their supply and hasten their end.

Thankfully, people have been paying attention to this issue (dubbed the energy crisis). Many have even made adjustments in varying degrees, from installing solar panels and foregoing nonrenewable resources (a relatively minor contribution) to proposing bills such as the Green New Deal, which would implement a gradual nationwide swap into renewable resources (a massive commitment). These are just two examples of how humans have been attempting to solve this problem.

Unfortunately, many of these potential methods have posed their innate issues. When it comes to adopting renewable energy resources, they either run the risk of being too costly (such as hydroelectric and solar) or unreliable (such as wind and solar), which are only available around 30% of the time. 

In addition, there has been extreme pushback against any means to delay (if not outright prevent) the energy crisis when it comes to large legislation such as the Green New Deal, with some citing that it’s too expensive (with a $93 trillion, twelve zeroes worth, price tag) and will submerge the U.S. into debt they can never get out of. With all the energy crisis efforts, both large and tiny, being fought against, it begs the question of whether there is any sort of renewable energy that can check all (or even most) of the boxes that would make everyone happy. 

That question was answered positively at the end of 2022. Beyond beckoning a new year, December also welcomed a new (or rather, improved) renewable energy source: nuclear energy. For the first time since the history of its experimentation, nuclear fusion/fission (the process of achieving nuclear energy) had reached a net gain, producing more energy than what it receives.

This discovery checked many boxes at first: it was reliable (with nuclear fuel being abundant in the environment) and exceptionally efficient, with a single gram of uranium being able to produce as much energy as a ton, 2,000 pounds that is, of coal. It also is a clean source of energy, an award that non-renewable energy fails to achieve. 

However, like all the benefits of discovery, there are bound to be drawbacks, and this was no exception. The first major issue is the extremely advanced technological nature of fusion: it makes it tough to master and replicate easily. The second vice ties into the first perfectly, with it being simply too expensive to sustain due to the immense amount of energy needed. Finally, the stereotypical reason why people fear nuclear energy: the danger. Although this stereotype is grossly exaggerated, there is some truth to the matter. Both malfunctioning accidents (like Chernobyl and Fukushima) and long-term radioactive waste that must be stored securely are issues that just cannot be ignored. 

Although nuclear energy does have some (rather large) issues, it’s important to not forget about its boons as well. From its efficient nature to being reliable and clean simultaneously, fusion is not a renewable energy source to underestimate. Regardless of what side you are on, nuclear energy brings up an important thing to think about: imagine what could be possible over the next century when it comes to technological innovation?

  1. https://group.met.com/en/mind-the-fyouture/mindthefyouture/when-will-fossil-fuels-run-out
  2. https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
  3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2019/04/29/five-practical-problems-for-the-green-new-deal/?sh=5892345f3e8a
  4. https://stacker.com/science/22-biggest-scientific-discoveries-2022

Who Would You Trust More: AI or Doctors?

Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Must Read, Science, Technology / By

For as long as the profession existed, doctors have been working diligently to perfect their craft and refine any rough edges, diagnosing, treating, and eventually curing their patients in the most efficient way possible in their eyes. However, mistakes are frequently made: medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in the United States, with over 250,000 deaths occurring yearly. Despite the rigorous education doctors undergo to officially practice their craft, they too still make mistakes. It’s human nature to err sometimes, even in life-or-death scenarios. For the majority of time, it appeared as if this was just a sacrifice that had to be made to keep one of the world’s oldest, and most vital, professions stable. 

But what if the risk of human error was eliminated by having humans removed from the equation when it came to distributing medical care?  This would dynamically pivot the medical industry and the person-to-person interaction we all know today, in a completely different direction. Some speculate that this is possible, through the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI). 

Artificial intelligence has permeated throughout the medical field briefly, but it’s been shut down due to a variety of complications, whether it’d be availability, cost, unreliability, or a combination of these factors (among others). This was especially true of Mycin, an expert system designed by Stanford University researchers to assist physicians in detecting and curing bacterial diseases. Despite its superb accuracy, being even as reliable as human experts on the matter, it was far too rigid and costly to be maintained. Despite not being medically affiliated, Google image software is another example of just how unreliable AI is: it assessed, with 100% certainty, that a slightly changed image of a cat is guacamole, a completely incorrect observation.

However, as modern technology rapidly advances, with special emphasis on machine learning (the ability of a machine to function and improve upon itself without human intervention), some believe that AI can now pick up the slack of physicians. 

This claim isn’t entirely unsubstantiated: artificial intelligence can already assess whether or not infants have certain conditions (of which there are thousands of) by facial markers, something doctors struggle with due to the massive variety of illnesses. MGene, an app that has Ai examine a photo taken of a child by its user, has over a 90% success rate at accurately detecting four serious, potentially life-threatening syndromes (Down, DiGeorge, Williams, and Noonan). AI even detected COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2, within Wuhan, China (the origin of this virus) a week before the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it as a new virus.

With every passing day, it appears that more and more boxes that are needing to be checked, enabling the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming a dominating presence within the medical field to become one step closer to turning into a reality.

That isn’t to say that there are issues with having artificial intelligence enter the medical industry: beyond the previous problems (of cost and unreliability) being possible, Ai being ever-changing also opens up the doors to bias, ranging from socioeconomic status to race to gender and everything in between. In addition, the usage of AI also is uncomfortable to many due to the removal of the person-to-person interaction that is commonly known to people, another big issue that needs to be addressed to ensure the successful implementation of artificial intelligence into the healthcare sector. 

Regardless of what side you are on, there is a common ground: artificial intelligence will continue to get more and more advanced. While it is uncertain as to whether the general public will want AI to replace doctors, have them serve as back-end helpers, or not exist whatsoever in the office, it is clear that artificial intelligence is a tool that has both a lot of benefits and drawbacks. Whether AI is implemented or not is a question that is left to the future.