 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, we're back, we're live here in the one o'clock block on a given beautiful Monday morning afternoon with likeable science. And we have Ethan Allen, of course, he is our likeable science host and special scientist person who helps us understand the world around us. Hi Ethan. Hi Jay. Good to be here. This is going to be a very interesting discussion. We've titled this, Advances in the Realms of the Invisible and Ephemeral. It's only fair to say what in the world we're talking about. The invisible refers to viruses and the ephemeral refers to brain waves. And so we're going to find out some really extraordinary scientific discoveries about both of those things today with Ethan. Wow. This comes from the MIT News. We like the MIT News because it always tells us about science at the frontier. So let's talk first about viruses, Ethan. Okay. First, what is a virus? Right. So viruses are these peculiar things, we'll just call them things for now. And they lie right on that edge of living versus non-living. For much of the time this existence of virus really shows no sign of being alive. It's basically a protein shell, some genetic material inside that shell and some sort of little hooks on the end that it can grab on to another cell with. And that's all it is. It's not respiring, it's not metabolizing, it's not using any energy, it's not producing any waste, it's not doing anything. Just a piece of DNA. That's what it is. Yep. Surrounded by some protein, just floating around. But it is physical and it can hook on things and give you a terrible headache sometimes. Once it grabs on to a cell and injects its genetic material into the cell, that genetic material basically hijacks the cell's own machinery and gets that cell to start producing viruses instead of producing stuff for the cell. It replicates the original virus that came and injected it. So it multiplies the virus and it's the multiplication that gives you the headache. Well in some cases it's the rupturing of the cell that may produce 100 or 1000 copies of that virus and then explode because it's basically burned out now. And now there are 1000 more viruses around, in fact new cells and this. Very rapidly if those are, if they're your cells in your head, that could be very bad, right? Yeah, sure. And a couple of things that, you know, just to deal with the public understanding here, viruses mutate, right? How does that work? Well, all life forms can mutate because all life forms basically... It's not just viruses. No, no, no. Genetic material, eukaryotes, we can mutate, you know? So yeah, viruses by virtue of their very simple structure, if they get their genetic material zapped by a random ultraviolet photon that comes in and knocks out a base out of their genetic material, I mean it will show up right away. They'll inject that genetic material into a bacteria or another cell and probably the whole system goes down and it doesn't do anything because it's no longer effective. 99 times out of 100 probably. So let's visit that. I mean a virus doesn't have a metabolic process, it doesn't stink, it just has these sort of chemical DNA characteristics and it replicates itself too, doesn't it? No, it does not replicate itself. It relies on a cell for everything. The host, so to speak. Exactly, it simply sort of floats around and when it comes in contact with the suitable host cell, it latches on that cell, injects its genetic material, that's the one thing it really sort of does, is injects its genetic material and that you can again think of as sort of a chemical reaction almost once its receptors are engaged, it says everything's primed and ready, shoot that stuff in. So there's various kinds of viruses, I mean you get cold virus, you get flu virus, I mean you get all kinds of really ugly viruses, what's the difference? Well different viruses do different things, cold, flu, lots of different things, viruses specialize on different kinds of organisms, there are viruses that go after only plants, there are viruses that go after only fungi, there are viruses that go after only bacteria. And that was the intriguing thing about this MIT work is they found this virus in the ocean water, it's incredibly common as in there are 10 million of them per milliliter of water. A milliliter is like a thousandth of a quart of water, like less than a teaspoon, a little tiny tip of your finger, a tip of your finger or worth of water, 10 million of these viruses probably in every single milliliter of ocean water and nobody knew they were here. Every sample of ocean water, probably that you could ever take will probably show something like 10 million of these things. So we didn't know this before. That's this huge, yeah and these are huge, it's a whole class of viruses and one difference, these viruses typically just have a shell, they don't have any apparent tail, most viruses have an extrusion, a tail of some sort that's part of their whole grouping mechanism. These guys don't have that in any obvious sense and that's why apparently they missed on a lot of the screen, they haven't been picked up. Because they didn't, we were looking for the tail, we didn't see a tail, we assumed no viruses there. Right. How can you see this now, I mean how can they see it without the tail? Well you can, if you look, you can, with electron microscope, a transmission electron microscope or even scanning E.M. these days, you can actually see. You can see DNA with electron microscope. Yeah, so you can certainly see a virus. So this is a piece of DNA. Wrapped up in some protein, yes. Yes, yes. And the protein is typically bigger than the DNA in some sense. So yeah, you typically will see a structure, a capsid is what they call the head of the virus, the thing, the chamber that holds the DNA basically. Here we are, we've solved the DNA, what do you call it, the genome, the genome for so many type organisms including the human organism. And we have had science moving at a breakneck speed for, gosh, at least 100 years really. We have done amazing, amazing things with science and only now, only this week we have found this completely ubiquitous new kind of virus we didn't even know existed until now. What's going on here? Well, it's really actually typical because it's sort of the big flashy stuff that catches our attention, right? So everyone's aware of, you know, the pandas, the tigers, the elephants, you know, all these big things catch our attention, the redwood trees, right? And we tend to ignore the little stuff, but the little stuff is really, makes up a whole lot of the living world. So in a typical area of temperate forest, the mass of ants is equal to the mass of mammals. Now if you think about that, I mean, so an acre of forest may have a few dozen squirrels and some chipmunks and a weasel or two, maybe a deer, how many ants do you think that is? That's a whole lot of ants, right? I mean, it's a whole lot of ants just to make up the weight of one's whole chipmunk. And much of the world, the whole world really runs that way. It's the little stuff, the little tiny microbes that are everywhere that are really controlling a lot of the world, really running the world for their benefit, you know, they're reproducing themselves and trying to get by. Yeah, and they have lasted for what billions of years these little protein things with DNA inside these viruses. And many of them have teamed up with bigger things and our cells are full of stuff that probably started out as independent organisms that some years ago found they could happily live together. All the little energy packets, a little mitochondria, each of our cells probably used to be independent organisms. They still reproduce independently within your cells. So, you know, are they only in the ocean or are they in other things too? Are they in us, for example? That's what's as yet unknown about this new class of viruses. These things are interesting. They go after bacteria, which makes them potentially useful, right? Because we're always fighting new strains of bacteria and a lot of our antibacterial drugs are losing their efficacy because of the virus. These particular viruses are rather intriguing because they can often a single type of this virus will go after multiple types of bacteria, which is very unusual. Viruses have tended the ones we knew up to be very specialized. One type of virus will go after one type of bacteria, a different virus, a different bacteria. These guys, a single type of this virus can go after a very different bacteria and kill them. And so... How do they do that? They typically latch on. Again, they latch on, they shoot their genetic material in and co-op the bacteria's genetic material. So, it now starts producing viruses. Neutralizes the DNA of the bacteria. Well, it makes that DNA start working to produce viruses instead of producing bacteria. Oh, okay. Right, right. And so, suddenly that bacteria gets filled up with these viruses until it bursts open and... Kind of a cancer of the bacteria. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's really interesting. What they don't know yet, they found this in the ocean where we're finding all kinds of new things. So, the ocean microbiome is just immense. This is really a new thing. Yeah, it's a whole new thing here. And so, okay. So, you have certain kinds of viruses that will attack only one species, the right term. Right. One species of bacteria. And you have other kinds. This new kind, I suppose. What do you call the new kind? It's got a long... I'm going to forget that. Another kind, the new kind, just discovered this fancy kind, which will kill a lot of different kinds of bacteria. Right. Yeah. So, a big question I put to you. I hope you're ready for this one. Can we control what kind of bacteria this new virus will attack? Yes. And that's a very interesting point. And the real lovely potential of this, if we can sort of chemically dissect this virus well enough and see what it is, what makes up its latching mechanism, as well as what its general structure is, and of course, sequence its DNA or RNA, not clear which it is, then we should presumably, with CRISPR technology, be able to switch in a few things and change that around and say, go after Staphylococcus aureus instead, you know? Or go after the... Yeah. You know, whatever bacteria we want, you know? Yeah. Suddenly, you've got a potent new tool that the bacteria probably is utterly unprepared to deal with. Yeah. So, a couple of things flow out of that. So we have MIRSA. Every hospital is terrified about MIRSA because they can't stop it. And it seems to be found in hospitals. And gee whiz, that's very threatening. I suppose if we are able to control this new kind of virus, the one without the tail, what not, then we can say, go after them, go after all of the different kind of MIRSA virus, bacteria, sorry, kill them all. Right. Yeah. And a new kind of antibiotic emerges, a biotic as narrow or as wide as you want. We can create a new, but just using nature itself. Right. Again, just like we found CRISPR, I mean CRISPR was basically developed by bacteria as an antiviral mechanism. And now we're looking at using a virus to go after bacteria. I mean, there's a beautiful symmetry there. It is. It's beautiful. But you know, I mean, what's interesting is it's so ubiquitous at the same time we didn't know anything about it. And that means we don't know exactly how to do this or what the side effects are in doing this. But the amazing thing is that the rate, our technology is now evolving. So I'm guessing within two or three years, things will start coming out, there'll be clinical applications from this discovery. Whereas two decades ago it would have taken a decade or more to get anything out to begin testing it. Yeah, tests are better. Yeah. But you still have to do human tests and the FDA doesn't let you do that so quick. Yeah. But somebody could come up, somebody in another country, for example, could come up with a, I mean, China, take China, because they're very good at this kind. They could take these special newly discovered viruses and make an anti-bacteria kind of thing. A new flu vaccine. Let me take it one step further though. So some bacteria are synergistic with the human... Many, many, many. Many, many, many. We are a composite of human cells and also lots and lots, millions of bacteria, millions of virus apparently, and it's a balance and it's a delicate balance and if anything goes out of balance then we go the wrong way and we don't survive. So if I use this new, a tailless virus to kill what I think are bacteria that are detrimental to the human being, but they're in fact synergistic in some way, maybe I didn't fully understand, then I could be killing the same human being. Knock off the bacteria but kill the person. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot we don't understand yet. You know, the same, the staff bacteria that live harmlessly apparently on our skin day in and day out, perhaps even doing good things for our skin for all we know are the same bacteria that if they get into you and out of control are deadly. So yeah, you want to be very careful about sort of when you start tweaking with mother nature at some stage. What do you know when you pull on this thread what's going to unravel and it's usually just no, we haven't a clue. So some scientists in some place around the world, maybe not the U.S. I don't think the U.S. has the same primacies that used to have in this kind of science. They say, well, we're going to develop this not just to ideally kill bacteria that are harmful to human beings. We actually want to kill human beings. We want to weaponize this thing. Right. Well, there is that too. In theory, take use of CRISPR technology in some sense and tweak it around to produce one of these viruses that went specifically after people and decided that, you know, it would infect skin cells and make your skin cells start producing viruses instead of producing more skin cells. And suddenly if you release that, and we all start it, either intentionally or inadvertently. And then, of course, the whole thing about the spread, like H1, what is it, N5, whatever, it could be spread in any number of ways that surprise you. And then we could have an epidemic the size of humanity. But we've never seen before. Right now. And on that happy note, Ethan, I'm going to take this finger which could contain water with 10 million of these tailless viruses. I'm going to shake it at the screen. Watch what happens. Good afternoon. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at 3 o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Hey, baby, that's you. I want to know, will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at 1 o'clock and it's out of the comfort zone. And I'll be your host, R.E.B. Kelly. See you there. It's a beautiful Monday. I'm Jay Fidel. We just came back from our break with Ethan Allen. He's a scientist and we're on likeable science talking about advances in the realms of the invisible, namely viruses, and the ephemeral, namely brainwaves. So we're in the second part of our journey today and let's talk about brainwaves. MIT News came up with something on brainwaves, too, didn't it? Yes, indeed. So brainwaves are basically patterns that show up about how our brain cells are firing. Our brain cells all work by shooting electrical impulses around. We don't tend to think of them that way, but that's how every neuron in your body actually works. If it gets enough stimulus, it shoots an impulse that goes down. It's axon that causes a release of chemicals into little synapse. If they're receiving neuron, that synapse gets enough input. It then fires another little spike and this gets repeated and a thought occurs or action occurs or whatever. But it works differently in your arm where it's a muscular or a sensory kind of message and in your brain where you have thoughts, right? Well, basically the neuron part of it is all the same. The question is whether the neuron is connected to other neurons or as in your arm to muscles. The way it's wired. Yeah, exactly. And so when you start looking at any given little one neuron is blitzing away at its own little rate of speed depending on what inputs it's getting. But if you put a sort of skull cap of electrodes on, you know, sensors for electrical activity, you can watch patterns of firings that are sort of big summations of millions and millions and millions of cells firing. And what they've known for years, scientists have known, is that there are a set of patterns. There are patterns that occur when you sleep. They're very regular kinds of ones called slow waves sleep. There's another called rapid eye movement sleep, which when your eyes are twitching and the spiking of the electrical patterns in your brain are different. And they've named a number of these after Greek letters. And what they've discovered is this one called beta, the beta wave activity, which I've known about for some while and I felt it's been associated with the consolidation of memory. But now they've found really what it's doing or what it's really, what the fine point is. Basically, serving as a gateway function in short term memory. So they've, they gave people tests to say, if you see a sequence of A and then B, and that sequence occurs again, you know, press a button, but don't press a button until A then B occurs. So what the, this beta activity is associated with, if you see A, B, and then A comes up again, immediately get this big spike of beta, because it's waiting to see. Now, okay, I'm holding this in mind because I've seen one of the primary cues is the next thing going to be B or not. If some other stimulus in A shows up, there's no, no spiking of beta activity. Okay, so you're looking at thinking. Yeah, exactly. And so, so we have the skull cap. The skull cap sort of takes a picture and it gives me a graphical image of the firing of the synapses. And if I look at the picture, you know, like with artificial intelligence, I can tell, you know, what, what that all means, whether it's selecting A, selecting B, whether it's a positive or negative, whatever. And I can get a look into brainwaves. And with those brainwaves, I can also, I can find out, at least in gross terms these days, what you are thinking. In some sense, yes, probably the skull cap and watching the brainwaves isn't the most sophisticated way these days. The functional magnetic resonance imaging machinery these days is getting a lot of press for being a tool that people can discern real thought patterns. Yeah. But that's only a matter of time, isn't it? But soon enough, we'll have these MRI machines that are just like skull caps. Yeah. Very likely that that will be able to discern patterns of brains in very, brain activity in very subtle ways, such as MRI can now do. Okay. So what you really, you know, you really got my attention when you started telling me about people who have been unconscious or beyond the reach of communication, apparently, for years and years, such as Robin Williams was in the movie Awakenings. And then he was a doctor. And he came up with some dopamine drug and a certain protocol of dopamine drug which actually woke Robert De Niro, who played the patient in that movie. It's a powerful movie. And it was a true movie, too. It didn't work forever. It worked for a while. But it showed that you could awake somebody like that. Yes. Now, this whole thing about brain waves, you know, gets into that realm, doesn't it? Right. You can have somebody who is sleeping for 20, 30 years, completely, apparently unconscious, but not necessarily. So how does that work? Right. Right. So a few years ago, they began looking more close at these people in so-called persistent vegetative states, you know, or now it's called locked-in syndrome. Because what are these people experiencing? What are their brains actually doing? And at that point, a few years ago, they actually had a good deal of information when they would put normal people into a functional MRI machine. What their brains did? What they did when they were resting? What they did when they were reading? What they did when they were asked particular questions? You could ask a person lying in a machine, for instance. Imagine you're out playing tennis. And certain parts of your brain, like your motor cortex, all starts firing in rhythmic patterns and other kinds of patterns, very typical of, you know, fairly consistent from person to person to person in terms of the types of areas that light up. So hold for a minute, okay? So I'm asking you, and you can't communicate this to me, but I'm asking you to imagine playing tennis. And then I have my MRI, a skull cap on your head, and I can get a picture of the way the synapses are firing. More active, less active. And I use artificial intelligence to translate that picture of firing, that graphical image of the firing, you know, over time, we'll have a library of what this firing sequence tells us and what that one tells us. After a while, we'll know that what you're talking about, what you're thinking about, your brain is envisioning playing tennis. Yes. We'll know. We'll know what you're thinking. Exactly. Exactly. This is actually a very important thought. Right. Yeah. We're not anywhere near there. We're beginning to get a few pages in the first book to put into that library at this point. But, you know, it's now we can see it's there. But the amazing thing when they found, when they stuck these persistently vegetative state people in an MRI, was how normal their brain activity looked. And they're very puzzled, the scientists were very puzzled, because they sort of thought these people would show nothing, that they'd show very grossly abnormal brain activity. But some of them, not all of them, some of them did show indeed grossly abnormal activity. But some of them showed very remarkably normal activity. And they went to some of these people when they were in the machine and said, So imagine you're out there on the tennis court playing tennis. And what they would see in these people is exactly what you would see in a normal person. Suddenly, the same motor cortex areas light up and the same other areas suppress. And you see the same kinds of pattern of activity that, again, your AI machine would immediately say, oh, this person's thinking about playing tennis. Suppose you've got the skull cap on, you can't communicate with me, you're Robert De Niro in the movie. And I say, Ethan, how much is two and two? And you come back and say, I'm giving you the picture for four. Or, you know, is the answer yes or no? And you come back and give me an answer, yes or no? Now I'm talking to you. Right, in some sense, as these technologies evolve, yes, we'll be able to start doing that. And the locked-in people will actually gain a communication channel back. So I'm having a conversation. Even though you're out of it, completely out of it. Right, because this is why they call it locked-in syndrome. These people are actually normal in every sense, except they're locked in, they cannot respond. That was the case in the movie. Yeah, they can't blink an eye, they can't twist an eye, they can't raise a finger. Nothing, no way. But now, we can know what they're thinking. Yeah, yeah. Right now, it's clumsy. I mean, fMRI machines are huge, expensive machines. They're hard to operate. You can't really keep people in them very long, yeah. But someday, they're not too far distant future, right? They presumably like almost all rest of our technologies, yeah. One pound. They shrink down with cost drops. And suddenly, yeah. So now I know what the locked-in person is thinking. And because I have a library by that time, using artificial intelligence of really any thought, I can figure it out. And then meanwhile, of course, if you think then you go full circle and you stick stimulators back on their main motor tracks, so they think, like, I'm going to get up and walk. And then although their brain can't really do it, they've made this thought pattern, their library, I said, oh, he wants to walk. I'm going to stimulate the walking. But you're going to have an apparatus, though, to make him walk. Wow. His muscles may not do anything. Well, if he's been. Well, maybe you could talk to his muscles. Yeah, exactly. You could say, muscles do something. You're talking to the nerves that run the muscles, basically, that's what you're doing, yeah. And it's proven he hasn't been lying there for 30 years and his muscles are all atrophied. Yes, then he would be able to get up and walk. It's pretty sexy stuff. Yeah, I mean, again, great potential. We're dreaming here. It's down the road, not tomorrow, not the next day. But you know. I want to talk about the truth serum. I want to talk about lie detectors. And a few years ago, there was a professor at the university who was able to tell the nature of your heartbeat through a brick wall. He was trying to sell that to the military so they could see the bad guys in Central Asia through a wall. They would know they're there by virtue of hearing the heartbeat. It was a sound, OK? And one of the side effects of that is if I can hear your heartbeat in a certain speed and rhythm, then I know whether you're telling the truth. It's sort of like a lie detector, but more sophisticated. And truth serum makes you speak the truth somehow. I don't know if that really works, but we've seen a lot of art about that. So in this case, I could actually tell whether you're telling the truth. I could find in my library, I could find the pattern of the Synapse connection to tell me whether you're lying or not. You could be answering my questions whether you like it or not. Is this possible? Yeah, it gets trickier because lying isn't a simple thing. Some people, most people, are reasonably truthful and to tell a lie, a particular lie of something significant, actually causes physiological changes, which is how the lie detectors actually work. A person has to really sort of concentrate on telling a lie to some extent. And this is why, yes, the pulse goes up, the palms start sweating, you know, da, da, da. There are people who are very good at lying, who like to lie, who lie without compunction and have no. And those people, you'd have to do a whole sort of separate library with them, right? Because they're not going to necessarily follow artificial intelligence. Yeah, again, right, hopefully an AI system could pick up, this person is really a sociopath who doesn't care whether they're telling them to lie. Maybe so, maybe the picture is deceptive that way. But I want to just point out that we're not talking about somebody who's locked in now. We're talking about an ordinary person. We're talking about a person perhaps we're interrogating in Birobisian or in the Gulag. We want to find out exactly what this person is thinking and God knows where that could go, right? And we could ask him a question and we could find out exactly what his reaction is right down to the core. This in terms of dystopia, in terms of dictatorship, in terms of 1984, George Orwell, this is pretty scary stuff. I mean, you might be able, the combination of chemicals, hypnosis and pointed interrogation techniques, you might be able to get that person to reveal all sorts of information about imagine yourself walking to your next meeting of your group, you know, dot, dot, and suddenly in their mind they are pinpointing where this is, even if they don't want to ever say it. Yeah, this is not torture. This is noninvasive. Doesn't hurt. It's just reading your mind, really reading your mind. Yeah, when you're going that deep into someone's mind. So it goes for the proposition in our time, the 21st century, that there is no Walden Pond. There is no, you know, Great Pacific, and there are no secrets at all. You know what's happening here. Getting harder and harder, I think, Kaila. Thank you, Ethan. Thank you, Jay. Great discussion, as always. Fun to talk with you. Would you really say that? I mean it.