Fallout from Hurricane Helene, Stem Cell Treatments for Diabetes and Spread of Marburg Virus

Stem Cell Treatments for Diabetes and a Dolphin’s Smile

By Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi & Anaissa Ruiz Tejada

Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! Let’s kick off the week by catching up on some of the latest science news. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

The death toll for Hurricane Helene was still rising at the time of this recording on Friday, with hundreds of people missing across hundreds of miles and at least a million people without power. Buncombe County, North Carolina, home to Asheville, experienced what an official called “biblical devastation.” While any loss of human life is of course inherently devastating, experts are saying what happened in Asheville should concern all of us on another level, too. Asheville sits more than 2,000 feet above sea level and hundreds of miles from the nearest coastline, which, along with its temperate weather, has previously seen it dubbed a “climate haven” by the media. Asheville isn’t the only place that’s gotten this kind of designation before seeing unprecedented extreme weather, and it’s a somber reminder that we all need to prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted by Helene. We’ll be talking more about the shifting risks of hurricane season this Wednesday. 

On a more hopeful note, researchers say they’ve effectively reversed a 25-year-old woman’s type 1 diabetes using stem cell therapy. Her case was outlined in a study published late last month in Cell. Scientists in Beijing extracted cells from people with type 1 diabetes and used a modified version of an existing technique to send them back into a pluripotent state, which means that they could be coaxed into turning into many types of cells. The researchers then used those cells to make islets. Those are the pancreatic cells that produce hormones such as insulin and glucagon and that are attacked by the immune system in type 1 diabetes patients. In June 2023 the team injected the equivalent of more than a million of those islets into the woman’s abdominal muscles. The procedure reportedly took less than half an hour, and less than three months later the woman was producing enough insulin on her own that she didn’t need to inject any. These days she’s reportedly able to eat sugar without dangerous glucose spikes or dips. We’ll, of course, need to see this replicated in many more patients before it’s ready for widespread use, but the results are still pretty exciting. Plus, several other research groups are also already working on using stem cells to treat diabetes.  

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In public health news, Rwanda is in the midst of its first known outbreak of Marburg virus, and it’s already one of the biggest on record. Most of the 36 cases confirmed as of last Thursday were in healthcare workers from two facilities in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Marburg, which is transmitted by fruit bats and can spread from person to person, has an average fatality rate of 50 percent, though that can be much higher if cases aren’t managed early with symptom treatment and rehydration. There currently is no approved vaccine for this virus, which causes hemorrhagic fever, and the fact that it’s spreading in an urban area—and travel hub—is cause for some concern. Contact tracing has already turned up hundreds of people who’ve potentially come into contact with the virus, and one of those people recently traveled to Belgium, though they reportedly completed their monitoring period without presenting symptoms. The World Health Organization has said that while it believes the risk of a regional outbreak is high, it considers the global risk to be low at this time. So protecting any broken skin and keeping your mucus membranes away from other people’s spit remains, as ever, solid advice especially if you’re getting on a plane. 

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Here’s something pretty exciting: scientists say they’ve mapped out every single neuron and synapse in an adult brain. There’s just one tiny caveat which is that that brain belonged to a fruit fly. But hey, we’ve gotta start somewhere! In a set of papers published last Wednesday in Nature, an international team of scientists called the FlyWire Consortium presented a diagram of all 139,255 neurons. This isn’t the first full-brain diagram of this kind, but previous efforts have tackled smaller noggins—like that of a fruit fly larva, which has just over 3,000 neurons, and a nematode, which only has just over 300. This marks the first time scientists have mapped the entire brain of an organism that can see and walk, so the study authors say it’s a major step toward scoping out big, complicated brains like ours—even though the brain they mapped is less than 1 millimeter across. The scientists have made their findings freely available online so other neuroscientists can use it in their research. 

Speaking of little brains doing big things, a study published last Thursday dives into the history of agriculture—not in humans, but in ants. Hundreds of ant species cultivate fungi for food, and the new study suggests that this practice dates back millions and millions of years. Researchers analyzed ant and fungi DNA to trace back their respective evolutionary trees and concluded that they’ve had a good thing going for about 66 million years. If that number sounds kind of  familiar, that’s probably because it’s around the same time an asteroid took out the dinosaurs. The study authors point out that the same conditions that helped fuel a mass extinction—dust and debris blocking out the sun and choking much of the planet’s plant life—would have left fungi with lots of dead organic matter to munch on. In other words, it was a pretty sweet time to be a fungus and if you were an ant that wanted to survive eating shrooms probably sounded pretty good. After around 40 million years, the study authors say, ants developed what scientists call higher agriculture—practices like protecting their fungal crops and finding fresh vegetation to feed them. This probably coincided with environmental changes that increased dry conditions in some areas. Basically, ants took their fungi out of lush, wet, tropical forests—where the crops really didn’t need much help to grow—and into arid habitats, where the fungi fully relied on the farming insects for survival. 

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Here’s one more animal story that’s pretty much guaranteed to make you smile. And if it doesn’t, I’m so sorry, I don’t know how to help you. A new study claims that bottlenose dolphins use an “open mouth” facial expression to communicate with one another while they’re playing. So, in plain English, that means scientists think dolphins smile when they’re having fun with one another. The scientists observed captive bottlenose dolphins during solo play, play with humans and play with other dolphins. They caught just one so-called open-mouth event during solitary play but tallied more than 1,200 when dolphins were being social. Plus, almost all of those occurred when dolphins were playing with other dolphins as opposed to with humans, and they were most likely to say cheese when their faces were visible to their playmates. Dolphins returned the gesture about a third of the time. Are they just mimicking each other? Maybe. But the thing is, we don’t actually know why humans smile either. It’s a gesture that seems to transcend cultures to show enjoyment, but it’s physiologically quite similar to facial expressions that signify fear or submission in other primates. So whatever these marine mammals are up to, it will definitely be interesting to see what scientists can find out about their goofy grins. 

That’s all for this week’s news roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday with a deeper dive on hurricanes and climate change. And on Friday we’ve got a brand-new Fascination all about the science of folk music. Will you hear me, Rachel Feltman, sing a folk tune? Maybe. That depends on whether the production team decides to save me from myself. 

Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Today’s episode was edited by Anaissa Ruiz Tejada. 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!