[Jingle]
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
You’re listening to the Nature Podcastand this week a new way of charging your gadgets on the move.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
A compound that’s tough on infection but gentle on the body’s good bugs.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And what we could learn about music from a group of rather special prodigies. This is the Nature Podcastfor June the 15th2017. I’m Kerri Smith.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
And I’m Adam Levy.
[Jingle]
Interviewer: Adam Levy
First this week, Shamini has been imagining a world where her phone never runs out of juice, where wireless charging is the norm.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Electricity is great. I’m personally a big fan, but getting hold of it can be a bit inconvenient. My mobile phone sometimes runs down before I can get to a plug socket to recharge it. My wall clock at home is permanently at ten past two because I never get round to putting new batteries in and when I one day purchase that electric car, that I will definitely be able to afford, I’ll need to make sure I charge it before every big trip. Wouldn’t life be easier if electricity was wireless? You could charge devices by being close to a power source instead of actually having to plug it in. that would mean you could power your phone or car from public charging stations as you travel along the streets. It seems like a bit of a distant dream at the moment and it’s a dream that goes all the way back to Nikola Tesla.
Interviewee: Geoffrey Lerosey
One century ago he was convinced that wireless charging was the future.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
This is Geoffrey Lerosey, a physicist who’s working on new ways to manipulate electromagnetic fields. Unfortunately, Tesla’s idea for wireless charging, using electromagnetic waves to transfer the energy, wasn’t very practical.
Interviewee: Geoffrey Lerosey
You need to send a lot of energy so there’s a good chance you’re going to burn everything that’s in between your antenna and the receiving point.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Not ideal if you’re trying to charge your smart phone on the move, but since then, scientists and engineers have been considering less hazardous alternatives and in recent decades they’ve made some progress. Take electric toothbrushes for example: sure, the toothbrush and base need to be close to each other but there are no wires connecting them. In other words, it’s wireless power transfer, but there are limitations with existing technologies.
Interviewee: Geoffrey Lerosey
Pretty much all of them are very short range technologies. You need to place your device right on top of the charger.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
This is all very well for things like toothbrushes and phones, but some technologies need a more flexible approach to charging.
Interviewee: Geoffrey Lerosey
There are lots of biological implants, like medical implants in the body, which need to be powered but the problem is that in the body the implants are always moving, so it’s quite difficult to power these objects in real time with the current technology.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Being able to charge a moving object is a key limitation of the current systems so Geoffrey was excited to see a paper in this week’s Naturewhich describes a simple way to charge devices dynamically.
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
In other words, being able to wirelessly empower, as well as efficiently, through an object that’s actually moving.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
This is Shanhui Fan who led the study. I rang him up to find out how the wireless charging that already exists, works.
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
If you basically take these two resonant coils, place them in somewhat close proximity to each other, then you can basically get power to go from one to the other.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
And is this like the physics experiments you might do in school where you use electricity to induce magnetism or magnetism to induce electricity? Is that how these two coils are inducing each other?
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
Right, the current inside of each of the coils generates a magnetic field and the magnetic field is then felt by the other coil generating the current air and the power transfer.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
And how far apart can these coils be to get energy transferred from one to the other?
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
You could actually get a few metres but in many practical scenarios, being able to transfer in up to a metre scale is probably sufficient.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
And it sounds like the basic physics is there: you get two coils; you use them to induce each other and transfer energy between them, so what’s the problem with the existing technology for wireless power transfer?
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
It is efficient but for every distance where you have efficient transfer, you need to reconfigure some part of the circuit to do so.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
So for each distance that the thing that you want to charge is away from the power source, you have to tune it to make sure that the energy is being optimally transferred so you’re not wasting and losing lots of energy.
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
Exactly, so let’s say I’m carrying a cell phone and I’m walking around in my room and I want to charge my cell phone as I’m walking around, I will basically need to retune the circuits. In principle, right, you can do it, but it adds to the complexity of the entire system.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
It might be possible to have a constantly retuning circuit with the current technology to enable you to move your phone or move your car while still charging, but you guys have come up with a slightly different solution?
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
Yeah, what we have shown is a way so that you can move around but the system basically self-adjusts and they self-tune into the optimal condition for efficient wireless power transfer.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
And the way you’ve done it is actually quite different from the way that the exciting technology does it, isn’t it?
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
In the standard way of doing many of these wireless power transfer schemes they will have a radio frequency source which provides the power to one of the coils, to drive one of the coils, and then that coil through the magnetic induction, drives the other coil. And then you can adjust, for example, the frequency of this source. As it turned out, if you put an amplifier on the source soil, then under the right condition the system will start to generate and oscillate an electromagnetic field and the frequency of that oscillation happened to be exactly the optimum frequency for efficient wireless power transfer.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
So if you move the two coils slightly further apart, then the natural frequency of oscillation that they fall into is the optimum for that distance?
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
Exactly. So, instead of imagining an external tuning circuit, now the system basically just takes care of it by itself.
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
So have you solved all the problems of wireless energy transfer now?
Interviewee: Shanhui Fan
I think, actually, there are a lot of interesting new opportunities that our work will open up. For example, one can imagine more complicated transfer schemes involving multiple coils to cover a wider range of areas, so I think actually there are a lot of interesting things that can be done. The point is not necessarily enabling wireless transfers, but making it more flexible and more usable.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
That was Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering at Stamford University, talking to Shamini Bundell about him new paper on wireless power transfer. You also heard from Geoffrey Lerosey, at the Langevin Institute in Paris who’s written a News and Views article on the new research. You can find both of those at nature.com/nature. And still to come, musical thinking and mental health research in the US goes back to basics.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
But first, a couple of things you already know. Number one: lots of infections are resistant to antibiotics. Number two: this is a big problem. Yes, scientists could develop new antibiotics, or they could find entirely different ways of battling these bugs. And this week we have an example of that second approach. Regular antibiotics work by killing the bugs, by making their cell walls leaky, for instance, or stopping them making proteins. A team from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, had a different idea. They didn’t try to kill the bacteria; they figured they’d stop them physically clinging to the areas they infect. They were working with E coli which can cling to the bladder and cause urinary tract infections which are very common. There are 150 million UTIs worldwide every year, and they’re often resistant to antibiotics. I spoke to Caitlin Spaulding and Scott Hultgren about their results. Scott first…
Interviewee: Scott Hultgren
One of the key events in the critical stages of most bacterial infections is the ability of the bacteria to stick to and colonise the various habitats and tissues in the body, because if the bacteria can’t stick, they get washed away by the fluids and materials that vade those surfaces. So to stick they often use these hair-like fibres called pili that are tipped with adhesins and adhesins recognise receptors on tissues like a lock and a key.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Caitlin Spaulding, Scott was just telling us that bacteria have ways of kind of sticking to the gut and being kept in the gut against the tide, if you like. What is it exactly, if we zoom in on a cell, what is it exactly that would allow them to stay there?
Interviewee: Caitlin Spaulding
So, as Scott mentioned, these organisms – bacteria in general – carry pili and they’re these hair-like fibres that allow the organisms to stick to different ligands and when we look at UPEC – or uropathogenic E. coli – which is the bacterium that causes most urinary tract infections, UPEC bacteria express these pili and it allows then to bind to different sugars or glycans that are present throughout the intestinal tract, so depending on where they are in the gut, they can express different types of pili and allow them to bind to different ligands.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
We’ve got these bacteria floating around that are kind of – we’ve got the little hands sticking out and on the end of the hand is like a piece of Velcro and that’s essentially what’s enabling them to – with a compatible receptacle for the Velcro on the gut wall – that’s what’s allowing them to stick?
Interviewee: Scott Hultgren
That’s exactly right.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
So, I suppose the tantalising thought is, well, if you could somehow take the Velcro off and stop them from sticking, would they just float harmlessly through the gut and the bladder?
Interviewee: Caitlin Spaulding
Yeah, that’s exactly what we were thinking. Our lab, in collaboration with some chemists have developed small molecules that essentially stick in the binding pocket of that adhesin so you could put another piece of Velcro, if you will, into the hand of that pilus and it prevents the interaction of the pilus with the surface of the intestine and so what we did was we took mice and we orally gave them these compounds and what we found is that you can indeed reduce the number of these bacteria in the gut by giving this compound orally.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And it’s also not an antibiotic, and that’s pretty useful isn’t it?
Interviewee: Scott Hultgren
That’s really useful because – for a number of different reasons. If this therapeutic, translates over to the potential for human use, and if it has – if it’s efficacious – it would allow us to reduce the dependence on antibiotics for the treatment of UTI which is very important, also these compounds, since they don’t kill the bacteria, we believe that there would be less resistance, less selection for resistance to develop, and finally since these compounds don’t have to cross a membrane to get into the bacteria to work, they evade all of these resistance mechanisms bacteria have like pumping antibiotics out of the cell, or degrading them. They just need to bind to the tips of these hair-like fibres to prevent them from being able to colonise.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Caitlin, when you watch this compound have its effect in the mice that you use for the experiment, did you also watch what happened to the gut bacteria they have living in them and not causing them any problems – the good guys, as it were.
Interviewee: Caitlin Spaulding
Yes, absolutely, so that’s one of the major things we wanted to look at because when you give a compound orally you’re exposing not just to the organism you want to get rid of but all of the bacteria present in the gut. And so, what was exciting is we found that if you give this compound and look at the microbiota, or all of those bacteria microbes that are present in the gut, the compound itself is really not having much of an effect on the overall structure of the microbiota. It’s leaving these innocent bystander organisms, if you will, alone, which is exciting. And that is in stark contrast to what we see with antibiotic treatment.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
That was Scott Hultgren and PhD student Caitlin Spaulding. They’re both at Washington University in St. Louis. And if you’re wondering what happens next, Hultgren told me that he’s formed a company to try and get their compound to the clinic, in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline. There’s a paper and a News & Views at nature.com/nature.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
The Research Highlights are next, read by Shamini Bundell.
[Jingle]
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Data from the Rosetta Spacecraft which crash landed on a comet last year is still helping scientists solve mysteries and this week it’s a puzzle about the noble gas, Xenon. Xenon comes in a few different flavours, or isotopes, and the mix of these isotopes in earth’s atmosphere is different from the mixture in the rest of the solar system. Scientists used Rosetta to look at the Xenon emanating from Comet 67P, and found a match for some of earth’s Xenon. Based on the data, they reckon that almost a quarter of Earth’s Xenon came from comets, and if that’s true for Xenon, then why not water and other life supporting substances? Find the paper in Science.
[Jingle]
Interviewer: Shamini Bundell
Mice whose hearing is damaged by loud noises could be treated with more noise. Researchers played 45 minutes of siren level noise to mice and looked at how parts of their brains reorganised in response to the noise. This gave the mice the equivalent of tinnitus and they couldn’t distinguish little silent gaps in a passage of noise. But, if they piped white noise into their cages afterwards, the mice didn’t have the same hearing deficit. They did have to play the white noise for seven days, but this suggests that it stopped the circuits from reorganising in response to the loud noise. More in the Journal of Neuroscience.
[Jingle]
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
I have a quick announcement before we carry on with the show. In a couple of weeks’ time, I’m giving up my podcast hot-seat after almost a decade of hosting the Natureshow. I’m not going far; I’m moving to Nature’s Features team, and if the podcast gang let me, I’ll be back in the studio now and again with stories from my new desk. Before I go I’ll be hosting another episode of Backchat at the very least, so look out for that. But for now, on with the show.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
Time now, for a musical interlude. Geoff Marsh has been to meet an extraordinary musician by the name of Derek Paravicini.
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
Hello Geoff, I’m Derek.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Hi, nice to meet you Derek.
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
I play the piano, Geoff.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
It’s a nice piano.
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
It is Geoff, yeah.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
And you’re going to play us something now, are you?
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
I am, Geoff. I’m going to play you Ave Maria, Geoff.
[Piano playing]
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
This is Derek Paravicini playing one of the thousands of songs he’s committed to memory. It’s possible that you’ve seen Derek on the television, or playing in some of London’s esteemed musical venues like the Barbican, but his current celebrity comes after a bumpy start. He was born very premature at just 25 weeks, blind and on the autism spectrum. [Piano playing] I’m meeting Derek because he’s a major character in a new book by psychologist and music therapist, Adam Ockelford. Adam thinks we can learn a lot about music by working with people like Derek, who perceive the world in a different way. The two have known each other since Derek was just five. We all meet at Derek’s house in South London and sit in his spacious front room with a wind chime sparkling above our heads. Well, the room would be spacious if it didn’t have two pianos in it.
[Piano playing]
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Has Derek always been an easy student?
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
An easy student?
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
Derek, have you always been an easy student?
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
Yes I have, Adam.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
No you haven’t.
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
I haven’t been an easy student, no.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
Derek, you’ve always been a lovely person but, I think Derek, like lots of children on the autism spectrum, when you were little the world was just such a confusing place. It was really only when your music started to take off from the age of about 8 really, that the world became less of a threatening place and more of a place to be relished. Suddenly you had this way of making friends and that’s what changed everything.
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Derek, like all child musical prodigies apparently has a precious ability called absolute pitch.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
It’s an unusual memory for pitch. And for most people if I just play a note. Derek, I’m just going to play on my own.
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
Okay.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
So for most people if I just play a note, say, down the bottom.
[Adam plays a piano note.]
[Derek plays a piano note.]
[Laughter.]
Interviewee:Adam Ockelford
Hold on Derek. So, I’m going to explain absolute pitch.
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
Okay.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
So you don’t have to copy it, okay? So for most people if I just play a note down the bottom end of the keyboard, say down here somewhere…
[Adam plays a piano note.]
[Derek plays a piano note.]
[Adam and Geoff laugh.]
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
F sharp.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
You can’t resist can you?
[Piano playing]
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
Derek, sit on your hands for a minute. Put your hands under your bottom – right – stay still. So for most people…
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
It became clear pretty quickly that for Derek, hearing a note on the piano and not responding was tantamount to torture. It’s clearly his favourite mode of communication with Adam.
[Derek plays a piano note. Laughter.]
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
Derek, you are so funny… [laughs]
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
Eventually Adam explained that absolute pitch is a memory of the exact tone of a sound. It might be a musical note, but it could equally be the pitch of a whirring microwave. In a typical western population, only one in a thousand people have absolute pitch, but when you look at a population of people bind from birth, that number shoots up.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
In fact, it’s four thousand times more likely amongst children born blind or who lose their sight shortly after birth. I’ve worked a lot with hundreds of blind babies and if you watch the way they interact with the world, they sit or they lie and they take in sound. What they don’t do that sighted babies do is to ascribe meaning to the sounds. Now, most blind babies then do go on to associate sounds with meaning, either as words or as everyday sounds like a door slamming or a car engine. But by then, by 24 months, the absolute memories of pitches have been laid down and they never go if you have them at 24 months.
[Music]
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
And why do you think that we see a similar pattern with children born on the autistic spectrum?
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
I think in some ways, autism in the early years can have a similar effect to not being able to see because the brain takes in stimuli in an absolute way. It doesn’t ascribe meaning to them in the same way. So in classic autism, which is the autism where language doesn’t tend to develop, there’s all these blobs of sounds coming out of people’s mouths and they don’t mean anything. They don’t associate themselves with anything in the brain and so for autistic children, as for blind children, sound tends to stay at that absolute level.
[Piano playing]
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
You know, when I started in music psychology about 35 years ago, there were various models of musical development and I used to stand up in conferences and say, well that’s not a good model of musical development because it doesn’t include the children I work with. I then, over the years, thought actually if I can crack how extreme people do things, it’s then easier to look back, as it were, down the middle of the spectrum that we’re all on and to understand that and I suppose people say, Derek are you creative and I think yeah, Derek’s very creative…
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
I am creative. Yes Adam.
Interviewee: Adam Ockelford
Because if I just play four – any notes, just randomly… [Plays notes on the piano.]And I say, Derek, make me a blues on that…
Interviewee: Derek Paravicini
Can make you a blues on that, Adam. [Plays piano.]
Interviewer: Geoff Marsh
So what can exceptional people like Derek tell us about the neurotypical brain? One example that Adam gave surrounded the nature-nurture debate… that old chestnut. [Piano playing.]Music theorists, too, wonder if our musical abilities are a product of our genes or our environment. Blindness in childhood often doesn’t have a genetic cause and yet 40% of children born blind go on to develop absolute pitch. So, Adam suggests that it’s our environment that contributes most to our musical abilities. Give young ears the right amount of musical stimulation and you might just release their inner prodigy.
[Piano playing.]
Interviewer: Adam Levy
That was Derek Paravicini on the piano with tutor and music theorist, Adam Ockelford. Adam’s new book is called Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music, and there’s a review of it this week at nature.com/booksandarts.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Time for this week’s news chat and on the line from Washington DC is one of our reporters Sara Reardon. Hi Sara.
Interviewee: Sara Reardon
Hi Kerri.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Now, a little while ago you covered quite a big shift in how one of the US National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Mental Health, is funding mental health research and this week you’ve analysed how that has all been going. Now what happened before?
Interviewee: Sara Reardon
This, I’ve actually been covering this for several years. This is kind of a long running saga of psychiatry trying to figure itself out. There’s been very little progress made in mental health research in terms or drug development and therapy development over the past couple of decades. There’s lots of stuff we’ve learnt about the brain, but not a lot that’s actually made it into the clinic and the theory that the former NIMH director had and the one before him and many other people – a growing number of scientists – is that this is because we’re looking at mental illness in the wrong way, that we’re trying to categorise people by saying you have depression so we’re going to give you a depression drug as opposed to looking at more specific things about them, like why do they have depression? Maybe they have a certain gene causing them to have these depressed feelings. Maybe there’s a certain pattern of brain activity that’s causing then to have suicidal thoughts and the problem with doing that is that you’d be lumping all these people together in one diagnosis of depression, whereas there might be a whole lot of differences actually between them.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
So for a few years it sounds like people at the institute who were in charge of the funding have been thinking about going back to basics.
Interviewee: Sara Reardon
Yeah, and so what they want you do is strip down mental illness into these components. If we can identify the biological roots maybe we can actually develop a drug that will target this particular brain connection, or this particular molecule and so they developed this thing called RDoC which stands for Research Domain Criteria and it is sort of like this chart, this matrix, that they want people to fill out over time, looking at these characteristics like genetics or a very specific symptom that someone might have, like suicidal feelings. And this is controversial because at the same time they were rolling this out, they made a lot of statements about how clinical trial’s Ads are being done are kind of useless and there’s been not a lot of progress made. And they also said they weren’t going to fund any clinical trials that were only looking at these categories that have existed before like anxiety, depression, et cetera. So this upset a lot of people who had been spending their entire careers working in this corporate framework. Why do we now have to shift over into this new one? And so now that we’re a few years out, in 2017, we can kind of start to look at these trends of has this had any impact on the way that mental health research is conducted, and how are people feeling about it?
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And that’s what you look into this week in this kind of deep dive into RDoC. What have been the repercussions in terms of the kinds of projects they’ve been funding? Have they done what they said they were going to do?
Interviewee: Sara Reardon
They are definitely funding a lot more projects that have to do with RDoC. One of the things I looked at was how many projects had mentioned RDoC or one of the words that would be associated with circuitry, or bio-marker which could be a biological marker of a specific illness, or ‘transdiagnostic’ which is this word that they’ve coined for a study that would include people who have multiple different psychiatric diagnoses, so maybe they’d have ADHD and, I don’t know, autism together and looking at any of the common characteristics that those kids would share. And so words like that – invented with RDoC – have just completely spiked in the past couple of years. At the same time, the funding for clinical trials – especially clinical trials as have been traditionally done – has gone down a lot. They’ve been funding a lot more basic research and a lot less clinical research and there are probably various reasons for that: scientists who have been working in clinical research want to claim that this is because NIMH doesn’t care about it. They want to just do basic research and see how the brain works and not see what can be done for patients right now, whereas the NIMH says, yes we’ve shifted away from this particular framework people have been using but we still do want to do clinical trials. They say that nobody’s been applying for – not nobody but fewer people have been applying – for clinical trial money.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Did you get the sense from psychiatrists you spoke to or mental health researchers that traditional psychiatry – if we can call it that – is kind of being side-lined? How do people who do this research feel about the new framework?
Interviewee: Sara Reardon
They do think that they’re being side-lined. There’s a new NIMH director that came in last summer, I guess, and he might be more open to shifting these parameters around, maybe not by forcing this – in their eyes – forcing this thing down their throats. People are maybe feeling a little less upset about it than they were a few years ago when they felt like they had no choice but to use this.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And would you say this is still an experiment on the part of the National Institute for Mental Health? Or, I mean, how long are they going to give it before they decide, yes this is the only way we’re going to fund research or, okay, maybe we’ll soften our approach slightly.
Interviewee: Sara Reardon
They wouldn’t give me a deadline but they are – the new director actually, just last week, had a blog post talking about how he saw this as an experiment just like you said. He wants to continue doing it but at the same time, as we learn more, he’s open to revising them and making it a more evidence based framework in the future.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Did you get the sense – this might be difficult for you to answer – that scientists, researchers, are kind of gaming the system in some way – just doing the same science with a slightly different slant, putting in another condition name and sending the same grant application off?
Interviewee: Sara Reardon
I have heard that. I’ve heard the same thing about publications in journals, that people will be just kind of name checking RDoC or just, ‘oh look this is actually transdiagnostic because we included a few ADHD kids in with our autism kids’ and hoping that the will get them NIMH money. I have heard that from a lot of people who didn’t want their names used. There certainly seems to be a feeling in the field that even if people aren’t admitting that they’re doing it, they’ve heard of many cases where that is happening.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
Sara Reardon in DC, thank you. There’s more on both of those stories on nature.com/news.
Interviewer: Adam Levy
That’s it for this week. Over the next 2 weeks we’re taking a little break as we recover from the emotional trauma of losing Kerri Smith. But never fear, in the meantime there will be an episode of Backchat and more than likely some other goodies to keep you entertained. I’m Adam Levy.
Interviewer: Kerri Smith
And I’m Kerri Smith.
[Jingle]
[Champagne popping, and cheers and laughter.]
