Latest news with #RachelFeltman
Scientific American
2 days ago
- Health
- Scientific American
Megalodon Diets, Teeth Sensitivity and a Bunch of Vaccine News
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! It may technically still be spring, but with Memorial Day firmly in the rearview mirror and June upon us, let's be real: it's spiritually summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and we hope you're enjoying it. For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Let's kick off the month with a quick roundup of some recent science news you may have missed. First, a measles update: the good news is that the massive outbreak we've been following for the last few months in Texas seems to be slowing down, though it certainly isn't over. While cases in the West Texas-centered outbreak appeared to be leveling off last week, there have been other concerning incidents of recent measles exposure around the U.S. In mid-May, someone attended a Shakira concert at MetLife Stadium while contagious. Also in mid-May, a traveler with measles flew through the Denver airport. Meanwhile, Canada and Mexico are both dealing with measles outbreaks of their own. A public health doctor told the CBC that Ontario is now reporting more measles cases every week than it previously saw in a decade. Health officials told ABC News and other outlets that they think an increase in vaccination rates contributed to the slowdown of the Texas outbreak. That leads me to a big caveat in the good news about measles case counts: last week Texas lawmakers approved a bill that would make it easier for parents to get exemptions for standard vaccinations against illnesses such as measles, polio and whooping cough when enrolling their kids in school. There's already a legal process in place that allows parents to skip vaccinating their children based on religious and personal beliefs, which requires them to contact state officials to request a physical form by mail. During the 2023–2024 fiscal year parents filed almost 153,000 exemption requests, which was almost double the number of requests seen in 2019. The proposed new law, which was still pending approval from the Governor as of the time of our recording on Thursday, would allow parents to download the required form instantly using a computer or smartphone, making the process quicker and easier. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Speaking of vaccines: Last Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer recommend COVID vaccines for children or pregnant people without underlying health conditions. This could impact whether insurance companies will pay for COVID vaccines, making it harder for people who want the jab to get it. Steven J. Fleischman, a physician who serves as president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement that the organization was 'extremely disappointed' by the announcement, citing ob-gyns' firsthand knowledge of the danger of COVID infections during pregnancy and in newborns, who can receive some protection via a pregnant parent's vaccine. In less troubling vaccine news, officials in England and Wales recently announced the world's first rollouts of a gonorrhea vaccine. The shot, called 4CMenB, isn't new; it's used in a number of countries globally to prevent meningococcal disease in infants, children and other high-risk groups. Because the bacteria that causes meningococcal disease is closely related to the one that causes gonorrhea, the proteins in the shot also provide some protection against the STI. Studies suggest the vaccine is roughly 30 to 40 percent effective against gonorrhea. That might not sound like a huge deal, but given the rise of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, experts say the jab could have a big impact. Now we'll slide from health news to animal news with a study that's right smack dab in the middle. According to the authors of a recent Nature paper, if you have sensitive teeth you might be able to blame an ancient armored fish—which you were probably already doing, right? The research suggests that dentin, the layer of material just beneath the enamel of our teeth that encases the soft dental pulp, first evolved in fish exoskeletons hundreds of millions of years ago. Back then, dentin was contained in bumps along the tough, bony skin of armored fish. Just like modern invertebrates with exoskeletons, these fish would have needed some sensitivity in their shell-like outer layer so they could pick up information about the waters they swam through such as temperature and pressure. So it's possible the unpleasant zap of pain you might sometimes feel while drinking ice water is an evolutionary holdover from a time when sensitive dentin helped fish navigate the world. In other toothy animal news a study published last Monday in Earth and Planetary Science Letters attempts to puzzle out the dietary habits of the long-extinct megalodon. These sharks, which have reached near-mythical status thanks to the hard work of Jason Statham, may have grown up to about 80 feet [24.3 meters] long, with teeth that could reach roughly seven inches [18 centimeters]. One 2022 study estimated that megalodons would have needed to consume more than 98,000 kilocalories a day to sustain themselves. That certainly suggests the sharks ate some massive sea creatures during the almost 20-million-year period when they dominated the ocean, and this new study doesn't dispute that—scientists have the massive fossilized bite marks to prove it. But a close look at the zinc content of megalodon teeth suggests that the predators weren't too picky about the place their meals occupied on the food chain. This paints a picture of an opportunistic carnivore that often munched on relatively small critters and that probably had lots of overlap with other, smaller predators. One of the researchers told CNN that the study supports the theory that the megalodon's eventual competition for food with the sleeker, likely more nimble great white may have contributed to the prehistoric creature's extinction. That's all for this week's science news roundup. We'll be back on Wednesday with a look inside a shocking investigation about the Dakota Access Pipeline. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Scientific American
5 days ago
- Health
- Scientific American
Global Flourishing Study Reflects Youth Struggles and Ripple Effects of Childhood Challenges
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. How are you doing today, listeners? Would you say you're flourishing? I'm guessing you probably wouldn't—unless you have a particularly florid vocabulary. But researchers are increasingly focused on the idea of 'human flourishing,' a multifaceted measurement that aims to take a holistic look at our collective well-being. Basically, humans who are flourishing aren't just happy. They have lives that are good across the board—and scientists want to get better at measuring that so they can figure out what factors contribute to this desirable state. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Today's guest is Victor Counted, an associate professor of psychology at Regent University in Virginia. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and part of the team behind the Global Flourishing Study, a five-year longitudinal survey of more than 200,000 individuals from 22 countries. Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today. Victor Counted: Thank you. I'm really honored to, you know, be here. Feltman: So tell me about the concept of flourishing. What does it mean to researchers? Counted: I think it means kind of different things. In the past some people might call it our 'well-being,' some could also say it's our 'quality of life,' but I think it's kind of a construct that [has] been studied for centuries. But essentially I think it's about how aspects of a person's life [are] good, right? But the flourishing dimension emphasizes the need to think about a context, how aspects of our life are good in relation to our environment, and—which I think is very important. That extension or that definition allows us to think about flourishing as something that is multidimensional, that involves different things. Let's say with the PERMA model—positive emotion, engagement, [relationships], meaning and accomplishment—you could talk about flourishing from that lens, but also I think the current framework that we're using, the one from Tyler VanderWeele, I think it's more comprehensive in the sense that it goes beyond just positive emotions and, you know, the idea of [relationships] to touching things like our happiness and life satisfaction as a dimension, meaning and purpose as a dimension, character and virtue as a dimension, physical and mental health at—as a dimension, social relationships as a dimension, but also financial well-being and stability. And so when you take that multidimensional approach it allows you to think about flourishing as something that encompasses different aspects of life—you know, particularly the idea of meaning and purpose, which, really, it's not often talked about within the broader definition of flourishing. Feltman: Mm-hmm. Counted: You could talk about these dimensions of flourishing; it's also important to think about what some might even call, let's say, pillars of flourishing or pathways of flourishing. Currently one of the things we've done is to identify at least four pathways: one is work, the other is family, the other is education, and the last pathway would be religious communities. And when we think about it—and in each particular culture or context the pathways to flourishing would differ, you know—but, like, for example, the four pathways that I mentioned are at least ones that we think that are universally, you know, agreed-upon and almost in any cultural context people would identify with this, although they might, you know, look at it in different ways. And the same thing with the dimensions of human flourishing that I mentioned earlier that are universally desired and to some degree an end in themselves. Feltman: So how did you personally get interested in, in studying human flourishing? Counted: I did my Ph.D. I looked at adult attachment and health and quality of [life] outcomes, and when I did this, you know, I knew I was always interested in health and quality of life and well-being [constructs], and during the time that I was studying this I kind of got involved and started collaborating with a colleague that was a part of the Human Flourishing Program, and, you know, I kind of came to the realization that all the things that I've actually been studying, it's actually about human flourishing—that's really what drives it, what [is] the crux of my work—and of course, I started to rethink how I look at things like health and quality of life outcomes. And also I'm also interested in how our environment ultimately shapes us and the psychological processes that kind of undergirds that. And so I think human flourishing became that very—well, that captures that. Feltman: Mm-hmm, and you're involved in the Global Flourishing Study. How does it work? Counted: So essentially it's a five-year study, and we have almost—about over 200,000 participants from 22 countries, and the interesting thing about it, these are nationally representative samples across 22 countries, and the plan is, we're working with Gallup to collect this data. We've just collected Wave 1 data, and the papers for Wave 1 [are] already out. And we're currently, with the Wave 2 data as well, it's also out. And, you know, we have a team of about 40-plus researchers from different disciplines and cultures and institutions, but mostly the project is hosted by Baylor University and Harvard Human Flourishing Program. A team of scholars, the brightest [minds] from around the world, and just, you know, doing, I think, one of the biggest social science research [projects] in modern history—I think it's been wonderful. And of course, I would be remiss not to mention Tyler VanderWeele and Byron Johnson for their leadership in the project itself. So it's, it's been incredible, yeah. Feltman: And were there any surprising findings in your first wave of results? Counted: Yeah, we actually got some really interesting findings. One of them that really stuck out most would be the fact that young people are struggling ... Feltman: Mm. Counted: Especially when you compare that to the past. There's a U-shaped well-being curve that is often used to talk about well-being and how it develops or evolves over a lifespan, but one of the things that we found was that that is not really what is happening. We [found] that young people were not [flourishing as much] as we had anticipated or hoped. Of course, that could be due to a number of reasons. Either some would say that it's due to COVID-19, the impact of that. Some would also say the mental health challenges, even financial insecurity that came as a result of COVID, but also the loss of meaning as well, it's also a part of that, and most of the individual papers in the study would point to some of those things, you know? But I think that overall the disruption of the U-shaped traditional curve of well-being, it's one thing to pay attention to, and what that simply means now is the fact that the curve itself is flat until about 50 years old, and that has huge implications for the mental health of young people and policies that shape that. The other finding was also—you know, it's not necessarily surprising—the fact that married people and those that were in [relationships], they were flourishing better compared to those that were not. And of course, you know, we can get a sense of why that is the case: because of the fact that they're in supportive [relationships] and the social connection that they have in those relationships kind of, you know, helps [as well to] drive or sustain their well-being. The other finding that I think also is interesting to point to would be the area of employment. Flourishing somehow reflects the status of one's job. For example, people that are retired scored the highest in the flagship paper that we had compared to those that were not employed. Those that were also self-employed, you know, followed suit [with] those that were also employed by someone else. And it kind of tells you something: those that are—have some kind of stability in, in terms of their career or job stability tended to kind of feel more secure and happy compared to those that are maybe seeking for a job. But also [interesting] as well would be the area of religious-service attendance; remember I mentioned that religion is also an important construct when we talk about a flourishing life and the idea that it's not necessarily the fact that—and when we talk about religion most people will point to institutional religion ... Feltman: Mm-hmm. Counted: But [talking] about religion broadly, in terms of the psychological aspect of religion. In fact, some of my colleagues, we talk about this as the 'four Bs.' That religion helps us with the idea of belonging, right—when we form social support with people in our congregation that's very important for our well-being and flourishing. Also the bonding that comes with that as well ... Feltman: Mm. Counted: Whether it's through the spiritual connection with the divine or the sacred. The behaving component: the moral component, the cultivation of character and virtue through, whether it's religiouspractices or dogma or [theology], this engagement with one's life. And also the believing part as well: [meaning that] religion, in some sense, helps us to form or embrace things like hope or forgiveness, you know, have some kind of certain spiritual convictions that help us to believe that we can do the impossible. All those things become really fundamental, especially when we look at the results on religious attendance: that for most people that were frequently attending religious services ... they scored higher on flourishing compared to those that never did or maybe attended [a] few times in a year, but that weekly attendance was really very fundamental to their well-being. And interestingly, also, across all the studies, all the individual papers—I'm talking about almost 100 papers, individual papers—it's still pointing to the same thing, regardless of the culture, regardless of the context, even in secular contexts like Sweden. That was also very interesting. But I do wanna say this, though: because some people who actually attended religious services also reported more pain and suffering, which is ... Feltman: Mm. Counted: Kind of interesting as well. And, you know, we could think about why this is—might be the case. In some sense we know that religious communities would often provide support for people during hard times, and [many] people are drawn to ... a religious community or faith because they're seeking some kind of relief for their suffering or pain, but also, theologically, for most people, the way they conceptualize suffering, it's also very different as well. Suffering could be something that is part of an embodiment of one's faith, you know? So the fact that they are suffering doesn't necessarily mean they're not flourishing, if that makes sense. Feltman: Mm. Counted: So that, you know, kind of interesting. But beyond this we also try to look at some of the childhood predictors or experiences that kind of predispose one to a flourishing life when they're adults. Of course, people that had excellent health at a very young age, we noticed that they were flourishing as adults. Again, people that were attending religious services at a very young age—at the age of 12, for example—were flourishing as adults. People that had good relationships with their mother or their father, we saw them flourishing as adults. But interestingly, though, we noticed those [whose] parents were divorced were not [flourishing as much], you know, as adults. And the same thing with those that were exposed to abusive relationships, whether it's physical or sexual, were also really quite struggling to flourish. And also those that grew up in financially difficult [households], with families that were struggling financially, we saw them also struggling to flourish later as adults. Now what this tells us is that flourishing is a lifespan thing, right? And so the way we raise our kids, the early experiences that we have ultimately become the foundation that kind of shapes what a flourishing life would be, you know, and just have implications in many ways, I think. Feltman: Yeah, and how were the U.S.'s results in the beginning of the flourishing study? Counted: Yeah, I think we found some, particularly with most of the Western context, we found some sort of interesting findings. One of the surprising results was the fact that [the] U.S. [was] not flourishing ... as well as some others. For example, countries like Indonesia, Philippines, most of the non-Western countries, were really doing well across all the different dimensions. But for the U.S., for example, they were also doing well on financial stability, but unfortunately, the United States scored lower when it came to meaning and [relationships], right? And, and this has [implications], and it, it does, in some way, [tell] us that having more money doesn't necessarily mean people are happy or they're doing well in life, and hopefully that kind of shapes or challenges the way that we kind of understand what aflourishing life is. You know, it's not necessarily about success. It's not about money; it's not about material stuff. At the heart of that, it's meaning and [relationships]. And also you could think about, politically, how the political landscape or dynamics within the U.S. might also be contributing to the breakdown of [relationships], right, and also tension around meaning. It's very terrifying in many ways. Feltman: So you've talked about, you know, some of the factors that might be out of our control or might be systemic that impact flourishing ... Counted: Mm. Feltman: But to wrap us up, you know, what about things that we can control? You know, what are your takeaways in terms of what our listeners should learn from the flourishing study? Counted: One of the [challenges], I guess—or [limitations], rather—from the Global Flourishing Study, I think, is the fact that most of the things that we studied, you know, we did it from an etic lens, we took an etic approach, which it essentially meant that we were looking at it universally, right? One of the things that can help us to better understand some of these findings would be the need to kind of take a more emic, context-sensitive approach, where we're looking at individual cultures and societies to ask the question around: 'Why are they scoring this on that? What might be happening? What are the underlying contextual factors that might be shaping what is happening in this context?' But most importantly, also, I think it's important that we think about the different areas or contexts to which we see that most societies or people are suffering, particularly with young people, particularly around issues or questions around purpose and meaning and [relationships], especially in the Western context, not just the U.S., but also in Europe, even in Australia. [Thinking about questions] around meaning and purpose—how can we create initiatives or support research or ideas that can help us accelerate and promote, really, the pursuit of meaning and purpose—I, I think that will go a long way [in] helping people to flourish and do well. And really, also, I think this study is just a starting point. It's kind of opened a door for more studies to kind of engage some of these ideas and, and topics. And my hope is that, you know, somehow we can come to the point where we can start to think about: 'What would a flourishing goal look like for this community, for this context, or this particular continent or country?' Right? And as we start to talk about that it also means that we—it challenges the way that we look at: 'What does flourishing look like for us?' And to understand that it has to be context-sensitive; not just that—also it has to kind of focus on the values, the things that we value, and start from there to kind of make changes and define what really shapes us and [makes] us happy. Feltman: Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat today. This has been really interesting. Counted: Thank you so much. Feltman: That's all for today's episode. We'll be back with our usual news roundup on Monday. Before you log off for the weekend, we'd be super grateful if you could take a minute to fill out our listener survey. We're looking to find out more about our listeners so we can keep improving Science Quickly. If you fill it out during the month of May, you'll be eligible to win some awesome Scientific American swag. So head over to while there's still time! Thanks in advance. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Scientific American
23-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Building an LLM for Dolphin Chatter
A large language model for dolphin vocalization could let us better understand these beloved marine mammals By , Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. There are a few animals that pretty much everyone likes: fluffy pandas, cute kittens and regal tigers. Dolphins would probably make the list for most folks; they're intelligent, playful and have that permanent smile on their face. Watching them darting around in the water kind of makes you wonder: 'What are those guys thinking?' It's a question many scientists have asked. But could we actually find out? And what if we could talk back? On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Freelance ocean writer Melissa Hobson has been looking into a new project that's making a splash—sorry!—in the media: what's being billed as the first large language model, or LLM, for dolphin vocalizations. Could this new tech make direct communication with dolphins a reality? Here's Melissa to share what she's learned. [CLIP: Splash and underwater sounds.] Melissa Hobson: When you dip your head under the waves at the beach, the water muffles the noise around you and everything goes quiet for a moment. People often assume that means the ocean is silent, but that's really not true. Underwater habitats are actually full of noise. In fact, some marine animals rely heavily on sound for communication—like dolphins. [CLIP: A dolphin vocalizations.] If you've ever been in the water with dolphins or watched them on TV, you'll notice that they're always chattering, chirping, clicking and squeaking. While these intelligent mammals also use visual, tactile and chemical cues, they often communicate with each other using vocalizations. Thea Taylor: They have a really, really broad variety of acoustic communication. Hobson: That's Thea Taylor, a marine biologist and managing director of the Sussex Dolphin Project, a dolphin research organization based on England's south coast. She's not involved in the dolphin LLM project, but she's really interested in how AI models such as this one could boost our understanding of dolphin communication. When it comes to vocalizations, dolphins generally make three different types of sounds. Whistles for communication and identification. [CLIP: A dolphin whistles.] Hobson: Clicks to help them navigate. [CLIP: A dolphin makes a clicking noise.] Hobson: And burst pulses, which are rapid sequences of clicks. These tend to be heard during fights and other close-up social behaviors. [CLIP: Dolphins make a series of burst noises.] Hobson: Scientists around the world have spent decades trying to find out how dolphins use sound to communicate and whether the different sounds the mammals make have particular meanings. For example, we know each dolphin has a signature whistle that is essentially its name. But what else can they say? Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist at England's Girton College at the University of Cambridge. He's an expert in animal communication, particularly among predatory species like dolphins and wolves. Arik's not involved in the dolphin LLM work. Arik Kershenbaum: Well, we don't really know everything about how dolphins communicate, and the most important thing that we don't know is: we don't know how much they have to say. They're not all that clear, really, in terms of the cooperation between individuals, just how much of that is mediated through communication. Hobson: Over the years researchers from around the world have collected vast amounts of data on dolphin vocalizations. Going through these recordings manually looking for patterns takes time. Taylor: AI can, A, process data a lot faster than we can. It also has the benefit of not having a human perspective. We almost have an opportunity with AI to kind of let it have a little bit of free reign and look at patterns and indicators that we may not be seeing and we may not be picking up, so I think that's what I'm particularly excited about. Hobson: That's what a team of researchers is hoping to do with an AI project called DolphinGemma, a large language model for dolphin vocalizations created by Google in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the nonprofit Wild Dolphin Project. I caught up with Thad Starner, a professor at Georgia Tech and research scientist at Google DeepMind, and Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project, to find out how the LLM works. The Wild Dolphin Project has spent 40 years studying Atlantic spotted dolphins. This includes recording acoustic data that was used to train DolphinGemma. Then teams at Georgia Tech and Google asked the LLM to generate dolphinlike sound sequences. What it created surprised them all. The AI model generated a type of sound that Thad and his team had been unable to reproduce synthetically using conventional computer programs. Could the ability to create this unique dolphin sound get us a step closer to communicating with these animals? Thad Starner: We've been having a very hard time reproducing particular types of vocalizations we call VCM3s, and it's the way the dolphins prefer to respond to us when we are trying to do our two-way communication work. Hobson: VCM Type 3, or VCM3s, are a variation on the burst pulses we mentioned earlier. Denise Herzing: Traditionally, in experimental studies in captivity, dolphins, for whatever reason, mimicked whistles they were given using a tonal whistle, like [imitates dolphin whistle], right, you would hear it. What we're seeing and what Thad was describing is the way the spotted dolphins that we work with seem to want to mimic, and it's using a click, or two clicks, and it's basically taking out energy from certain frequency bands. [CLIP: A dolphin vocalizes.] Starner: And so when I first saw the results from the first version of DolphinGemma, half of it was, you know, the—mimicking ocean noise. But then the second half of it was actually doing the types of whistles we expect to see from the dolphins, and to my surprise the VCM3s showed up. And I said, 'Oh, my word, the stuff that's the hardest stuff for us to do—we finally have a way to actually create those VCM3s.' Hobson: Another way they will be using the AI is to see how the LLM completes sequences of dolphin sounds. It's a bit like when you're typing into the Google search bar and autocomplete starts finishing your sentence, predicting what you were going to ask. Starner: Once we have DolphinGemma trained up on everything, we can fine-tune on a particular type of vocalization and say, 'Okay, when you hear this what do you predict next?' We can ask it to do it many, many different times and see if it predicts a particular vocalization back, and then we can go back and look at Denise's 40 years of data and say, 'Hey, is this consistent?' Right? It helps us get a magnifying glass to see what we should be paying attention to. Hobson: If the AI keeps spitting back the same answers consistently, it might reveal a pattern. And if the researchers found a pattern, they could then check the Wild Dolphin Project's underwater video footage to see how the dolphins were acting when they made a specific sound. This could add important context to the vocalization. Herzing: 'Okay, what were they doing when we saw Sequence A in these 20 sequences? Were they always fighting? Were they always disciplining their calf?' I mean, we know they have certain types of sounds that are correlated with certain types of behaviors, but what we don't have is the repeated structure that would suggest some languagelike structures in their acoustics. Hobson: The team also wants to see what the animals do when researchers play dolphinlike sounds that have been created by computer programs to refer to items such as seagrass or a toy. To do this the team plans to use a technology called CHAT that was developed by Thad's team. It stands for cetacean hearing augmented telemetry. The equipment, worn while free diving with the dolphins, has the ability to recognize audio and play sounds. Luckily for Denise, who has to wear it, the technology has become much smaller and less cumbersome over the years and is now all incorporated into one unit. It used to be made up of two parts: a chest plate and an arm panel. Starner: And when Denise would actually slide into the water there's a good chance that she could knock herself out. Herzing: [Laughs] I never knocked myself out. Getting in and out was the challenge. You needed a little crane lift, right? 'Drop her in!' Starner: 'Cause the thing was so big and heavy until you got into the water, and it was hard to make something that you could put on quickly. And so we've iterated over the years with a system that was on the chest and on the arm, and now we have this small thing that's just on the chest, and the big change here is that we discovered that the Pixel phones are good enough on the AI now that they can do all the processing in real time much better than the specialty machines we were making five years ago. And so we've gone down from something that was, I don't know, four or five different computers in one box to basically a smartphone, and it's really, really changed what we can do, and, and I'm no longer afraid every time that Denise slides into the water [laughs]. Hobson: The researchers use the CHAT system to essentially label different items. Two free divers get into the water with dolphins nearby. If the researchers can see they won't be disturbing the dolphins' natural behaviors, they use their CHAT device to play a made-up dolphinlike sound while holding or passing a specific object. The hope is that the dolphins might learn which sounds refer to different items and mimic those specific noises to ask for the corresponding objects. Herzing: You wanna show the dolphins how the system works, not just expect them to just figure it out quickly and absorb it, right? So another human and I, another researcher, we are asking each other for toys using our little synthetic whistles. We exchange toys, we play with them while the dolphins are around watching, and if the dolphins wanna get in the game, they can mimic the whistle for that toy, and we'll give it to 'em. [00:08:53] Hobson: For example, this is the sound researchers use for a scarf. The dolphins like to play with scarves. [CLIP: Scarf vocalization sound.] Hobson: And Denise has a specific whistle she uses to identify herself. [CLIP: Denise's scarf vocalization sound.] Hobson: But could the team be unintentionally training the dolphins, like when you teach a dog to sit? Here's what Thea had to say. Taylor: I think my hesitation is whether that's the animal actually understanding language or whether it's more like: 'I make this sound in relation to this thing, I get a reward.' This is where we have to be careful that we don't kind of bring in the human bias and the 'oh, it understands this' kind of excitement—which I get, I totally get. People want to feel like we can communicate with dolphins because, I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to talk to a dolphin? But I think we do have to be careful and look at it from a very kind of unbiased and scientific point of view when we're looking at the concept of language and what animals understand. Hobson: This is where we need to pause and get our dictionary out. Because if we're trying to discover whether dolphins have language, we need to be clear on exactly what language is. Kershenbaum: Well, there's no one really good definition of language, but I think that one of the things that really has to be present if we're going to give it that very distinguished name of 'language' is that these different communicative symbols, or sounds or words or whatever you want to call them, need to be able to be combined in different ways so that there's really—you could almost say almost anything, you know; if you can combine different sounds or different words into different sentences, then you have at your disposal an infinite range of concepts that you can convey. And it's that ability to—really to be unlimited in what you can say that seems to be what's the important part of what language is. Hobson: So if we understand language as the ability to convey an infinite number of things, rather than just assigning different noises to different objects, can we say that dolphins have language? At the moment Arik thinks the answer is probably no. Kershenbaum: So they clearly have the cognitive ability to identify objects and distinguish between different objects by different sounds. That's not quite the same, or it's not even close to being the same, as having language. And we know that, that it's possible to teach dolphins to understand human language. If I had to guess, I would say that I think dolphins probably don't have a language in the sense that we have a language, and the reason for that is quite simple: language is a very complicated and expensive thing to have—it's something that uses up an awful lot of our brain—and it only evolves if it provides some evolutionary benefit. And it's not at all clear what evolutionary benefit dolphins would have from language. Hobson: To Arik this research project is not about translating the sounds the animals make but seeing if they appear to recognize complex AI sequences as having meaning. Kershenbaum: So there's that wonderful example in the movie Star Trek [IV]: The Voyage Home where the crew of the Enterprise are trying to communicate with humpback whales. And Kirk asks Spock, you know, 'Can we reply to these animals?' And he says, 'We could simulate the sounds but not the language. We would be responding in gibberish.' Now there's a couple of reasons why they would be responding in gibberish. One is that when you listen to a few humpback whales you cannot possibly have enough information to build a really detailed map of what that communication looks like. When you train large language models on human language you are using the entirety of the Internet—billions upon billions of utterances are being analyzed. None of us investigating animal communication have a dataset anywhere near the size of a human dataset, and so it's extremely difficult to have enough information to reverse engineer and understand meaning just from looking at sequences. Hobson: There's another problem. When we translate one human language to another we know the meanings of both languages. But that's not true for dolphin communication. Kershenbaum: When we're working with animals we actually don't know what a particular sequence means. We can identify, perhaps, that sequences have meaning, but it's very, very difficult to understand what that meaning is without being able to ask the animal themselves, which, of course, requires language in the first place. So it's a very circular problem that we face in decoding animal communication. Hobson: Denise says this project isn't exactly about trying to talk to dolphins—at least not yet. The possibility of having a true conversation with these animals is a long way off. But researchers are optimistic that AI could open new doors in their quest to decode dolphins' whistles. Ultimately, they hope to find potential meanings within the sequences. So could DolphinGemma help us figure out if dolphins and other animals have language? Thad hopes so. Starner: With language comes culture, and I'm hoping that if we start doing this two-way work, the dolphins will reveal to us new things we'd never expected before. I mean, we know that they dive deep in some of these areas and see stuff that humans have never seen. We know they have lots of interactions with other marine life that we have no idea about. Hobson: But even if it's unlikely we'll be having a chat with Flipper anytime soon, scientists are interested to see where this might lead. Humans often see language as the thing that sets us apart from animals. Might people have more empathy for cetaceans—that's whales, dolphins and porpoises—if we discovered they use language? Taylor: As someone who's particularly interested, obviously, in cetacean communication, I think this could be [a] really vital step forward for being able to understand it, even in kind of the more basic senses. If we can start to get more of a picture into the world of cetaceans, the more we understand about them, the more we can protect them, the more we can understand what's important. So yeah, I'm excited to see what this can do for the future of cetacean conservation. Feltman: That's all for this week's Friday Fascination. We're taking Monday off for Memorial Day, but we'll be back on Wednesday. In the meantime, we'd be so grateful if you could take a minute to fill out our ongoing listener survey. We're looking to find out more about our listeners so we can continue to make Science Quickly the best podcast it can be. If you submit your answers this month, you'll be eligible to win some sweet SciAm swag. Go to to fill it out now. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and co-hosted by Melissa Hobson and edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Scientific American
21-05-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
Could Mitochondria Be Rewriting the Rules of Biology?
Rachel Feltman: Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, right? Well, it turns out they might be way more complicated than that, and that could have implications for everything from diet and exercise to treating mental health conditions. For Scientific American's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Our guest today is Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University. He's here to tell us all about our mitochondria, what they do for us and how they can even talk to each other. If you like to watch your pods instead of just listening, you can check out a video version of my conversation with Martin over on our YouTube page. Plus, you'll get to see some of the aligning mitochondria we're about to talk about in action. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Martin, would you tell us a little bit about who you are and where you work? Martin Picard: Sure, I work at Columbia University; I'm a professor there, and I lead a team of mitochondrial psychobiologists, so we try to understand the, the mind-mitochondria connection, how energy and those little living creatures that populate our cells, how they actually feed our lives and allow us to, to be and to think and to feel and to experience life. Feltman: Before we get into the details, most people know mitochondria as the 'powerhouse of the cell'—which, fun fact, Scientific American actually coined in the 1950s—but what are mitochondria, to start us off with a really basic question? Picard: [Laughs]Yes, 1957 is the ' powerhouse of the cell.' That was shaped generations of scientists, and now the powerhouse analogy is expired, so it's time for a new perspective. Really, mitochondria are, are small living organelles, like little organs of the cell, and what they do is they transform the food we eat and the oxygen that we breathe. Those two things converge inside the mitochondria, and that gets transformed into a different kind of energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, right? It's a fundamental law of thermodynamics. So mitochondria, they don't make energy; they transform the energy that's stored in food from the plants and from the energy of the sun and then the oxygen combining this, and then they transform this into a little electrical charge. They dematerialize food—energy stored in food—into this very malleable, flexible form of energy that's membrane potential, so they become charged like little batteries and then they power everything in our cells, from turning on genes and making proteins and cellular movement; cellular division; cell death, aging, development—everything requires energy. Nothing in biology is free. Feltman: Well, I definitely wanna get into what you said about the powerhouse analogy not working anymore 'cause that seems pretty huge, but before we get into that: you recently wrote a piece for Scientific American, and you referred to yourself as, I think, a 'mitochondriac.' I would love to hear what you mean by that and how you got so interested in these organelles. Picard: Yeah, there's a famous saying in science: 'Every model is wrong, but some are useful.' And the model that has pervaded the world of biology and the health sciences is the gene-based model (the central dogma of biology, as it's technically called): genes are the blueprint for life, and then they drive and determine things. And we know now [it] to be misleading, and it forces us to think that a lot of what we experience, a lot of, you know, health or diseases, is actually determined by our genes. The reality is a very small percentage [is]. Whether we get sick or not and when we get sick is not driven by our genes, but it's driven by, you know, emergent processes that interact from our movement and our interaction with other people, with the world around us, with what we eat, how much we sleep, how we feel, the things we do. So the gene-based model was very powerful and useful initially, and then, I think, its, its utility is dwindling down. So the powerhouse analogy powered, you know, a few [laughs] decades of science, and then what started to happen, as scientists discovered all of these other things that mitochondria do, we kept getting surprised. Surprise is an experience, and when you feel surprised about something, like, it's because your internal model of what that thing is, it was wrong, right? Feltman: Right. Picard: And when there's a disconnect between your internal model and the, the reality, then that feels like surprise. And I grew up over the last 15 years as a academic scientist, and, like, every month there's a paper that's published: 'Mitochondria do this. Mitochondria make hormones.' Surprise! A, a powerhouse should have one function: it should make, or transform, energy, right? This is what powerhouses do. Mitochondria, it turns out, they have a life cycle. They make hormones. They do transform energy, but they also produce all sorts of signals. They turn on genes; they turn off genes. They can kill the cell if they deem that's the right thing to do. So there are all of these functions, and, and I think, as a community, we keep being surprised as we discover new things that mitochondria do. And then once you realize the complexity and the amazing beauty of mitochondria and their true nature, then I think you have to become a mitochondriac [laughs]. You have to, I think, be impressed by the beauty of—this is just a—such a beautiful manifestation of life. I fell in love with mitochondria, I think, is what happened [laughs]. Feltman: Yeah, well, you touched on, you know, a few of the surprising things that mitochondria are capable of, but could you walk us through some of your research? What surprises have you encountered about these organelles? Picard: One of the first things that I saw that actually changed my life was seeing the first physical evidence that mitochondria share information ... Feltman: Mm. Picard: With one another. The textbook picture and the powerhouse analogy suggests that mitochondria are these, like, little beans and that they, they kind of float around and they just make ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is the cellular energy currency, and once in a while they reproduce: there's more mitochondria that come from—mitochondria, they can grow and then divide. So that's what the powerhouse predicts. And what we found was that when—if you have a mitochondrion here and another mitochondrion here, inside the mitochondria, they're these membranes ... Feltman: Mm. Picard: They're, like, little lines. They look, in healthy mitochondria, look like radiators, right? It's, like, parallel arrays. And it's in these lines that the oxygen that we breathe is consumed and that the little charge—the, the food that we eat is converted into this electrical charge. These are called cristae. And in a normal, healthy mitochondria the cristae are nicely parallel, and there's, like, a regularity there that's just, I think, intuitively appealing, and it, it looks healthy. And then if you look at mitochondria in a diseased organ or in a diseased cell, often the cristae are all disorganized. That's a feature of 'something's wrong,' right? And I've seen thousands of pictures and I've taken, you know, several thousands of pictures on the electron microscope, where you can see those cristae very well, and I'd never seen in the textbooks or in articles or in presentations, anywhere, that the cristae could actually, in one mitochondrion, could be influenced by the cristae in another mitochondrion. And what I saw that day and that I explained in the [laughs], in the article was that there was this one mitochondrion there—it had beautifully organized cristae here, and here the cristae were all disorganized. And it turns out that the part of this mitochondrion that had beautifully organized cristae is all where that mitochondria was touching other mitochondria. Feltman: Mm. Picard: So there was something about the mito-mito contact, right? Like, a unit touching another unit, an individual interacting with another individual, and they were influencing each other ... Feltman: Yeah. Picard: And the cristae of one mitochondrion were bending out of shape. That's not thermodynamically favorable [laughs], to bend the lipid membrane, so there has to be something that is, you know, bringing energy into the system to bend the membrane, and then they were meeting to be parallel with the cristae of another mitochondrion. So there was these arrays that crossed boundaries between individual mitochondria ... Feltman: Wow. Picard: And this was not [laughs] what I, I learned or this was not what I was taught or that I'd read, so this was very surprising. The first time we saw this, we had this beautiful video in three dimension, and I was with my colleague Meagan McManus, and then she realized that the cristae were actually aligning, and we did some statistics, and it became very clear: mitochondria care about mitochondria around them ... Feltman: Yeah. Picard: And this was the first physical evidence that there was this kind of information exchange. When you look at this it just looks like iron filings around a magnet. Feltman: Mm. Picard: Sprinkle iron filings on the piece of paper and there's a magnet underneath, you see the fields of force, right? And fields are things that we can't see, but you can only see or understand or even measure the strength of a field by the effect it has on something. So that's why we sprinkle iron filings in a magnetic field to be able to see the field. Feltman: Right. Picard: It felt like what we were seeing there was the fingerprint of maybe an underlying electromagnetic field, which there's been a lot of discussion about and hypothesis and some measurements in the 1960s, but that's not something that most biologists think is possible. This was showing me: 'Maybe the powerhouse thing is, is, is, is not the way to go.' Feltman: Did you face any pushback or just general surprise from your colleagues? Picard: About the cristae alignment? Feltman: Yeah. Picard: I did a lot of work. I took a lot of pictures and did a lot of analysis to make sure this was real ... Feltman: Mm. Picard: So I think when I presented the evidence, it was, it was, you know, it was clear [laughs]. Feltman: Right. Picard: This was real. Feltman: Yeah. Picard: Whether this is electromagnetic—and I think that's where people have kind of a gut reaction: 'That can't be real. That can't be true.' Feltman: Mm. Picard: The cristae alignment is real, no questioning this, but whether this—there's a magnetic field underlying this, we don't have evidence for that ... Feltman: Sure. Picard: It's speculation, but I think it, it hits some people, especially the strongly academically trained people that have been a little indoctrinated—I think that tends to happen in science ... Feltman: Sure. Picard: I think if we wrote a grant, you know, to, to [National Institutes of Health] to study the magnetic properties of mitochondria, that'd be much harder to get funded. But there was no resistance in accepting the visual evidence of mitochondria exchanging information ... Feltman: Yeah. Picard: What it means, then, I think, is more work to be done to—towards that. Feltman: If, if we were seeing an electromagnetic field, what would the implications of that be? Picard: I think the implications is that the model that most of biomedical sciences is based on, which is 'we're a molecular soup and we're molecular machines,' that might not be entirely how things work. And if we think that everything in biology is driven by a lock-and-key mechanism, right—there's a molecule that binds a receptor and then this triggers a conformational change, and then there's phosphorylation event and then signaling cascade—we've made a beautiful model of this, a molecular model of how life works. And there's a beautiful book that came out, I think last year or end of 2023, How Life Works, by Philip Ball, and he basically brings us through a really good argument that life does not work by genetic determinism, which is how most people think and most biologists think that life works, and instead he kind of brings us towards a much more complete and integrative model of how life works. And in that alternate model it's about patterns of information and information is carried and is transferred not just with molecules but with fields. And we use fields and we use light and we use, you know, all sorts of other means of communication with technology; a lot of information can be carried through your Bluetooth waves ... Feltman: Mm. Picard: Right? Fields. Or through light—we use fiber optic to transfer a lot of information very quickly. And it seems like biology has evolved to, to harness these other ways of, of nonmolecular mechanisms of cell-cell communication or organism-level communication. There's an emerging field of quantum biology that is very interested in this, but this clashes a little bit with the molecular-deterministic model that science has been holding on to [laughs]—I think against evidence, in, in some cases—for a while. Nobody can propose a rational, plausible molecular mechanism to explain what would organize cristae like this across mitochondria. The only plausible mechanism seems to be that there's a—there's some field, some organizing electromagnetic field that would bend the cristae and organize them, you know, across organelles, if that's true. Feltman: Right. Picard: It was a bit of an awakening for me, and it turned me into a mitochondriac because it made me realize that this is the—this whole thing, this whole biology, is about information exchange and mitochondria don't seem to exist as little units like powerhouses; they exist as a collective. Feltman: Yeah. Picard: The same way that you—this body. It's a bunch of cells; either you think it's a molecular machine or you think it's an energetic process, right? There's energy flowing through, and are you more the molecules of your body or are you more the, the energy flowing through your body? Feltman: Mm. Picard: And if you go down this, this line of questioning, I think, very quickly you realize that the flow of energy running through the physical structure of your body is more fundamental. You are more fundamentally an energetic process ... Feltman: Hmm. Picard: Than the physical molecular structure that you also are. If you lose part of your anatomy, part of your structure, right—you can lose a limb and other, you know, parts of your, of your physical structure—you still are you ... Feltman: Right. Picard: Right? If your energy flows differently or if you change the amount of energy that flows through you, you change radically. Three hours past your bedtime you're not the best version of your, the best version of yourself. When you're hangry, you haven't eaten, and you, like, also, you're not the best version of yourself, this is an energetic change. Right? Feltman: Yeah. Picard: Many people now who have experienced severe mental illness, like schizophrenia and bipolar disease, and, and who are now treating their symptoms and finding full recovery, in some cases, from changing their diets. Feltman: Mm. Picard: And the type of energy that flows through their mitochondria, I think, opens an energetic paradigm for understanding health, understanding disease and everything from development to how we age to this whole arc of life that parallels what we see in nature. Feltman: Yeah, so if we, you know, look at this social relationship between mitochondria, what are, in your mind, the most, like, direct, obvious implications for our health and ... Picard: Mm-hmm. Feltman: And well-being? Picard: Yeah, so we can think of the physical body as a social collective. So every cell in your body—every cell in your finger, in your brain, in your liver, in your heart—lives in some kind of a social contract with every other cell. No one cell knows who you are, or cares [laughs], but every cell together, right, makes up who you are, right? And then together they allow you to feel and to have the experience of who you are. That kind of understanding makes it clear that the key to health is really the coherence between every cell. Feltman: Mm. Picard: If you have a few cells here in your body that start to do their own thing and they kind of break the social contract, that's what we call cancer. So you have cells that stop receiving information from the rest of the body, and then they kind of go rogue, they go on their own. Their purpose in life, instead of sustaining the organism, keeping the whole system in coherence, now these cells have as their mind, like, maybe quite literally, is, 'Let's divide, and let's make more of ourselves,' which is exactly what life used to be before mitochondria came in ... Feltman: Mm. Picard: Into the picture 1.5 billion years ago, or before endosymbiosis, the origin of, of multicellular life. So cancer, in a way, is cells that have broken the social contract, right, exited this social collective, and then to go fulfill their own little, mini purpose, which is not about sustaining the organism but sustaining themselves. So that principle, I think, has lots of evidence to, to support it. And then the same thing, we think, happens at the level of mitochondria, right? So the molecular-machine perspective is that mitochondria are little powerhouses and they're kind of slaves to the cell: if the cell says, 'I need more energy,' then the mitochondria provide and they kind of obey rules. The mito-centric perspective [laughs] is that mitochondria really drive the show. And because they're in charge of how energy flows, they have a veto on whether the cell gets energy and lives and divides and differentiates and does all sorts of beautiful things or whether the cell dies. And most people will know apoptosis, programmed cell death, which is a normal thing that happens. The main path to apoptosis in, in our bodies is mitochondria calling the shot, so mitochondria have a veto, and they can decide, 'Now, cell, it's time to die.' And mitochondria make those decisions not based on, like, their own little powerhouse [laughs] perception of the world; they make these decisions as social collectives. And you have the hundreds, thousands of mitochondria in some cells that all talk to each other and they integrate dozens of signals—hormones and metabolites and energy levels and temperature—and they integrate all this information; they basically act like a mini brain ... Feltman: Hmm. Picard: Inside every cell. And then once they have a, a—an appropriate picture of what the state of the organism is and what their place in this whole thing is, then they actually, I think, make decisions about, 'Okay, it's time to divide,' right? And then they send signals to, to the nucleus, and then there're genes in the nucleus that are necessary for cell division that gets turned on, and then the cell enters cell cycle, and we and others have shown in, in, in the lab, you can prevent a cell from staying alive [laughs] but also from differentiating—a stem cell turning into a neuron, for example, this is a major life transition for a cell. And people have asked what drives those kind of life transitions, cellular life transitions, and it's clear mitochondria are one of the main drivers of this ... Feltman: Hmm. Picard: And if mitochondria don't provide the right signals, the stem cell is never gonna differentiate into a specific cell type. If mitochondria exists as a social collective, then what it means for health [laughs] is that what we might wanna do is to promote sociality, right, to promote crosstalk between different parts of our bodies. Feltman: Hmm. Picard: And I suspect this is why exercise is so good for us. Feltman: Yeah, that was—that's a great segue to my next question, which is: How do you think we can foster that sociality? Picard: Yeah. When times are hard, right, then people tend to come together to solve challenges. Exercise is a, a big challenge for the organism, right? Feltman: Mm. Picard: You're pushing the body, you're, like, contracting muscles, and you're moving or, you know, whatever kind of exercise you're doing—this costs a lot of energy, and it's a big, demanding challenge for the whole body. So as a result you have the whole body that needs to come together to survive this moment [laughs]. And if you're crazy enough to run a marathon, to push your body for three, four hours, this is, like, a massive challenge. Feltman: Sure. Picard: The body can only sustain that challenge by coming together and working really coherently as a unit, and that involves having every cell in the body, every mitochondria in the body talking to each other. And it's by this coherence and this kind of communication that you create efficiency, and the efficiency is such a central concept and principle in all of biology. It's very clear there, there have been strong evolutionary forces that have pushed biology to be evolved towards greater and greater efficiency. The energy that animals and organisms have access to is finite, right? There's always a limited amount of food out there in the world. If there's food and there are other people with you, your social group, do you need to share this? So if biology had evolved to just eat as much food as possible, we would've gone extinct or we wouldn't have evolved the way we have. So it's clear that at the cellular level, at the whole organism level, in insects to very large mammals, there's been a drive towards efficiency. You can achieve efficiency in a few ways. One of them is division of labor. Some cells become really good at doing one thing, and that's what they do. Like muscles, they contract [laughs]; they don't, you know, release hormones—or they release some hormones but not like the liver, right? Feltman: Sure. Picard: And the liver feeds the rest of the body, and the liver is really good at this. But the liver's not good at integrating sensory inputs like the brain. The brain is really good at integrating sensory inputs and kind of managing the rest of the body, but the brain is useless at digesting food or, you know, feeding the rest of the body. So every organ specializes, and this is the reason we're so amazing [laughs]. This is the reason complex multicellular animals that, you know, that, that have bodies with organs can do so many amazing things: because this whole system has harnessed this principle of division of labor. So you have a heart that pushes blood, and you have lungs that take in oxygen, and that's the main point: [it's] the cooperation and the teamwork, the sociality between cells and mitochondria and, and organs that really make the whole system thrive. So exercise does that. Feltman: Yeah. Picard: It forces every cell in the body to work together. Otherwise you're just not gonna survive. And then there are other things that happen with exercise. The body is a predictive instrument, right ... Feltman: Mm. Picard: That tries to make predictions about what's gonna happen in the future, and then you adapt to this. So when you exercise and you start to breathe harder the reason you breathe harder, the reason, you know, you need to bring in more oxygen in your body, is because your mitochondria are consuming the oxygen. And when that happens every cell has the ability to feel their energetic state, and when they feel like they're running out of energy, like if you're exercising hard and your muscles are burning, your body says, 'Next time this happens I'll be ready.' [Laughs] And it gets ready—it mobilizes this program, this preparatory program, which, which we call exercise adaptation, right—by making more mitochondria. So the body can actually make more mitochondria after exercise. So while you're exercising, the mitochondria, they're transforming food and oxygen very quickly, making ATP, and then cells—organs are talking to one another; then you're forcing this great social collective. Then when you go and you rest and you go to sleep, you lose consciousness [laughs], and then the natural healing forces of the body can work. Now the body says, 'Next time this happens I'll be ready,' and then it makes more mitochondria. So we know, for example, in your muscles you can double the amount of mitochondria you have ... Feltman: Wow. Picard: With exercise training. So if you go from being completely sedentary to being an elite runner, you will about double the amount of mitochondria in, in your muscle. And ... Feltman: That's really cool. Picard: Yeah. And this seems to happen in other parts of the body as well, including the brain. Feltman: I know that your lab does some work on mitochondria and mental health as well. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Picard: The ability to mitochondria to flow energy supports basic cellular functions, but it also powers the brain [laughs] and powers the mind, and our best understanding now of what is the mind—and consciousness researchers have been debating this for a long time—I think our, our best, most parsimonious definition of the mind is that the mind is an energy pattern. And if the flow of energy changes, then your experience also changes. And there's emerging evidence in a field called metabolic psychiatry that mental health disorders are actually metabolic disorders ... Feltman: Hmm. Picard: Of the brain. There's several clinical trials—some are published, many more underway—and the evidence is very encouraging that feeding mitochondria a certain type of fuel, called ketone bodies, brings coherence into the organism. And energetically we think this reduces the resistance to energy flow so energy can flow more freely through the neurons and through the structures of the brain and then through the mitochondria. And that—that's what people report when they, they go into this medical ketogenic therapy: they feel like they have more energy, sometimes quite early, like, after a few days, sometimes after a few weeks. And then the symptoms of, of mental illness in many people get better. The website Metabolic Mind has resources for clinicians, for patients and, and guidance as to how to—for people to work with their care team, not do this on their own but do this with their medical team. Feltman: And I know that mitochondria have kind of a weird, fascinating evolutionary backstory. Picard: They used to be bacteria, and once upon a time, about two billion years ago, the only thing that existed on the planet that was alive were unicellular, right, single-cell, bacteria, a single-cell organism. And then some bacteria—there were different kinds—and then some bacteria were able to use oxygen for energy transformation; that was—those are called aerobic, for oxygen-consuming. And then there are also anaerobic, non-oxygen-consuming, bacteria that are fermenting cells. And then at some point, about 1.5 billion years ago, what happened is there was a small aerobic bacterium, an alphaproteobacterium, that either infiltrated a larger anaerobic cell or it was the larger cell that ate the small aerobic bacterium, the large one kept it in, and then the small aerobic bacterium ended up dividing and then became mitochondria. So mitochondria used to be this little bacterium that now is very much part of what we are, and what seems to have happened when this critical kind of merger happened is that a new branch of life became possible. Feltman: Yeah. Picard: And animals became possible. And somehow this acquisition, from the perspective of the larger cell, enabled cell-cell communication, a form of cell-cell communication that was not possible before. And this seems to have been the trigger for multicellular life and the development of, initially, little worms and then fishes and then animals and then eventually Homo sapiens. Feltman: Yeah, and that was really controversial when it was first proposed, right? Picard: Yeah. Lynn Margulis, who is, like, a fantastic scientist, she proposed this, and I think her paper was rejected [15] times ... Feltman: Wow. Picard: Probably by Nature and then by a bunch of [laughs] ... Feltman: [Laughs] Sure. Picard: A bunch of other journals. Fourteen rejections and then in the end she published it, and now this is a cornerstone of biology. So kudos for persistence ... Feltman: Yeah. Picard: For Lynn Margulis. Feltman: And mitochondria have just been shaking things up for, for decades [laughs], I guess. Picard: Mm-hmm, yeah, there've been several Nobel Prizes for understanding how mitochondria work—specifically for the powerhouse function of mitochondria [laughs]. The field of [molecular] mitochondrial medicine was born in the '80s. Doug Wallace, who was my mentor as a postdoc, discovered that we get our mitochondria from our mothers. The motherly nourishing energy [laughs] is passed down through mitochondria. There's something beautiful about that. Feltman: Yeah. Thank you so much for coming in. This was super interesting, and I'm really excited to see your work in the next few years. Picard: Thank you. My pleasure. Feltman: That's all for today's episode. Head over to our YouTube page if you want to check out a video version of today's conversation. We'll be back on Friday with one of our deep-dive Fascinations. This one asks whether we can use artificial intelligence to talk to dolphins. Yes, really. While you're here, don't forget to fill out our listener survey. You can find it at If you submit your answers in the next few days, you'll be entered to win some free Scientific American swag. More importantly, you'll really be doing me a solid. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!
Scientific American
12-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Sinking Cities, Waving Cuttlefish and Falling Spacecraft
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Let's catch up on some of the science news you may have missed last week. First, a space-junk update. By the time you listen to this a Soviet-era spacecraft may or may not have crash-landed on Earth. Kosmos-482, which the U.S.S.R. launched back in 1972, was meant to follow the successful probes Venera 7 and Venera 8 in landing on and studying Venus. But a suspected engine malfunction meant that Kosmos-482 never achieved enough velocity to escape Earth's orbit. It's been orbiting our planet ever since and losing altitude along the way. Some of Kosmos-482 already fell back down to Earth decades ago, but one last big chunk has held on for more than half a century. Last week researchers said Kosmos-482 would probably make its uncontrolled descent over the weekend. Its potential landing zone stretched from 52 degrees north to 52 degrees south latitude, which covers pretty much everywhere except for Antarctica and, like, places where you can see the northern lights. There's a chance that the 1,000-ish pound [495 kg] lander, which was designed to withstand Venus's atmosphere, will hit Earth in one piece. That could be bad if it happens to crash in a populated area, but it's statistically more likely to hit the ocean or some uninhabited patch of land. And there's still a chance the craft will break up into smaller pieces in the friction of our atmosphere or even burn up entirely. We'll update you on how everything went down next week, or you can check for the latest space news. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Now, the sky may not be falling, but our biggest cities are sinking. A study published last Thursday in the journal Nature Cities found that all of the 28 most populated cities in the U.S. are sinking, regardless of how far inland they are. In 25 of those cities, the researchers say, at least two-thirds of their respective area is losing height. The researchers called out Houston as the fastest-sinking city, with more than a third of its area going down by upwards of five millimeters [about 0.2 inches] each year. Around 12 percent of the city is sinking twice as fast as that, and some spots are dropping by five whole centimeters [roughly two inches] a year. While natural forces and the sheer heft of buildings can play a role, according to the researchers behind the study, the extraction of groundwater is largely responsible for all of this sinkage. The researchers tied the removal of groundwater for human use to as much as 80 percent of the sinking they observed. They noted that in Texas, gas and oil extraction likely exacerbates this problem. One obvious consequence of a city sinking is that it makes the area more prone to flooding. But the study also sounds the alarm on the unique risks brought on by uneven sink rates within a city. If some areas are sinking faster than others, that raises the likelihood that structures like building foundations and rail lines will start to tilt. The researchers noted in a press release that increases in water needs and population, along with climate-change-induced droughts, are expected to add to the problem, making it crucial that cities start adapting to these risks now. If you're looking for someone to blame for that—for the climate-change-related part, anyway—consider your millionaire or billionaire of choice: A study published last Wednesday in Nature Climate Change concluded that the wealthiest 10 percent of the global population is responsible for two-thirds of climate-change-related warming as a result of their consumption and investments. The top 1 percent of people are responsible for one-fifth of all warming all on their own. If you're in the top 10 percent, you're an estimated six times more responsible for droughts in the Amazon than the average person is. According to a recent article in Forbes, a net worth of at least $970,000 puts you in that percentile in the United States, while one-percenters have net worths of at least $11.6 million. If you're looking at your own robust bank account and feeling a little hot under the collar about this study. It does point out a major area for improvement: investments. The authors concluded that the richest among us primarily contribute to climate change through investments tied to high-carbon industries. So if you haven't cleaned up your stock portfolio, now's a great time to do so. As long as you're not, say, flying a private jet everywhere—or worse, taking jaunts into space for fun—then that should make a big difference. And hey if you are doing those things, girl stop. We'll wrap up with a fun story that takes us under the sea. In an unpublished study recently posted to the preprint server bioRxiv, scientists claim that cuttlefish wave to one another to communicate. The researchers observed four distinct arm waves: 'up,' 'side,' 'crown' and 'roll.' These movements are a bit more complicated than our one- or two-armed human gestures. In the 'roll' move the cuttlefish tucks all its arms beneath its head as if it's about to try to somersault forward. The 'side' signal has it move its arms to one side of its body. The 'crown' looks a bit like someone steepling their fingers—if their fingers were several squishy tentacles. The 'up' sign is complicated, with some arms extended up and others twisting in front of the cuttlefish. The scientists observed cuttlefish trading these signals back and forth and occasionally responding to one signal with a different one. That makes them suspect these moves are a form of communication. What's even wilder is that when the scientists recorded cuttlefish signing with an underwater microphone and played the same vibrations for another cuttlefish, that second individual would start signing. So the creatures could be sensing the vibrations of this sign language, in addition to seeing visual cues. Researchers will have to directly connect these signals with certain behaviors or actions to prove that this is actually communication, but for now it is pretty cute. That's all for this week's news roundup. Before I let you go I just wanted to plug our ongoing listener survey real quick. We're looking to learn more about you—yes, you—so we can keep making this show better and better. You can find the survey at It should only take you a couple of minutes, and folks who submit their answers this month will be entered to win some Scientific American swag. More importantly, you'll really be helping out me and the rest of the Science Quickly team. So make sure to check out whenever you get the chance. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
