Even though modern medicine has come a long
way, there are still a number of things we’re not very good at. Chief among them: fixing brain injuries. But a case study published this week in the
journal Current Biology might start to change that. Because a group of French researchers took
a patient suffering from unresponsive wakefulness syndrome — what’s sometimes called a vegetative
state — and figured out how to make him responsive again. Unresponsive wakefulness isn’t quite the
same as a coma. Instead of being asleep and unresponsive,
the patient is awake and unresponsive. So their body is working fine, but they’re
not showing signs that they’re aware of anything. The neurons in their brain just aren’t communicating
with each other the way they should be. Sometimes awareness can come back, because
the brain is pretty good at fixing itself. But sometimes it doesn’t. Scientists still aren’t sure exactly how
and why that works for some people and not for others. But most will agree that after about a year
of unresponsive wakefulness, the chances of recovery are very, very slim. So these researchers were trying to find a
way to bring people back. Earlier research has shown that patients with
minimal levels of consciousness improved a bit when a certain nerve was stimulated, so
the team wondered if the same thing could work for someone with even less awareness. The patient in the study was a 35-year-old
man who’d been unresponsive for 15 years because of a car accident. The researchers decided to try stimulating
his vagus nerve, one of the most important nerves in the body. It sends signals from your brain to pretty
much every other organ, and is responsible for things like maintaining blood pressure,
regulating mood, and even making you feel drowsy after you eat too much. It’s also very involved in keeping you alert
and awake, so the team wanted to see if stimulating it electrically could help get the patient
responsive again. And … it worked. After about a month of treatment, the man
actually started reacting to things. He turned his head when someone asked him
to. He could follow movements with his eyes. He even reacted with a sort of fear when one
of the researchers moved suddenly. The results of this treatment are nothing
short of incredible. This guy was unresponsive for 15 years. That said, this was only one case. And most scientific conclusions need to be
made with a few more than that. The researchers say that they want to test
this on more patients in a similar state and see if it helps them recover faster. And if it does, doctors might someday have
more options when it comes to treating people stuck in unresponsive wakefulness. In the meantime, other researchers have been
looking for new solutions to a totally different problem: how to power our excessive electrical
needs in a way that won’t make climate change ten thousand million times worse. Researchers from Columbia University have
been working on a new way to harness energy from a process that’s happening somewhere
around you right now. And in a paper published this week in the
journal Nature Communications, they’ve shown that it might be way more powerful than they
thought. Every year, more than 500,000 cubic kilometers
of water evaporates from the oceans, lakes, rivers, and creeks all over the world. And when that much water changes from a liquid
to a gas, it uses an enormous amount of energy. A few years ago, the researchers wondered
if that energy could be turned into a renewable source of power — what they called an evaporation
engine. And in 2015, they developed some working prototypes. Strangely, it’s all powered by a property
of bacterial spores — a kind of tough outer shell that bacteria form when conditions get
rough. The bacteria will sort of go to sleep and
just chill there, waiting for their environment to get better. The researchers discovered that these spores
will expand when you hydrate them but then contract again when the water goes away. When they put drops of the bacterial spores
onto tape and dried them out, the tape curled itself up, and when they exposed the spores
to humidity or moisture, the tape expanded again. In other words: the spores were using the
energy from evaporation to power movement. There are a few versions of the evaporation
engine. One sits on top of a pool of water and uses
natural evaporation to move shutters back and forth. Another uses differences in humidity to spin
a turbine and power a tiny lego car. They’re super cute! But the technology is seriously new and hasn’t
really had enough time to develop into something that can actually be used. So in this week’s paper, the team demonstrated
the engine’s potential using math. By developing new computer models that looked
at how much water is available, along with surface area information and meteorological
data, the researchers calculated that the technology could generate up to 325 gigawatts
of power. That’s 69% of the total power used in the
United States in 2015, which is huge. They also calculated that from one reservoir
in Texas, they could get 178 megawatts of electricity a year. That would be enough to power more than 130,000
homes. That’s the best case scenario, though. Covering an entire reservoir or lake with
an evaporation engine has its drawbacks, because covering water sources can dramatically change
the chemistry of an ecosystem. Plus, lots of bodies of water are really important
for communities. Who doesn’t want to picnic by the water
and go out on the boat and then you’re just in the shade of your weird evaporation engine. But the evaporation engine could be useful
because it has an advantage over other forms of renewable energy. Both wind and solar power rely on some sort
of weather, but the water cycle is always going on in the background. So, give it some time and your lights could
be powered by bacterial spores getting a little moist. Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow
News, and thank you especially to all of our patrons on Patreon who make this show possible. If you want to help us keep making videos
like this, please check out patreon.com/scishow. It is the whole reason that this channel exists. Thank you guys!
