Bruce Robeson
Appearances
Short Wave
The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Hey Short Wavers, Emily Kwong here. And Regina Barber. With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. Today we have Ari Shapiro.
Short Wave
The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Picture a jellyfish crossed with a slug, adorned with this cape-like hood. And the whole thing is transparent, so you can see right through it. And it can glow in the dark, this creature, because it's bioluminescent.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
But now they do. Through much observation and also DNA sequencing, they were able to confirm that this is a nudibranch.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
This is the only nudibranch we know of so far that swims in the deep water of the midnight zone. That's the middle zone of the ocean between the sunlit shallow waters and the sea floor. This creature goes deep.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Yeah, I know. Bruce told us it's a testament to how much we don't know about the deep sea, despite it being the largest ecosystem on the planet and why it's so important to do this kind of work.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
So it has been an exciting week in science news. First, we're going to tell you about a newly identified deep sea creature. And then the benefits of exercise for healing our nervous system.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
It's so good for us. That's the end of the story. That's the end of the story. We can wrap this up right here. But it's good for us in ways we're uncovering even yet. Like, it's good for our brain, our immune system, our bones and muscles, but also our nervous system.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
They created a mini muscle factory. They took a petri dish and they popped in some muscle fibers from mice, grew them, and generated this small sheet of tissue about the size of a quarter.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
The team, led by Ratu Raman, then collected these delicious myokines and fed them...
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Yes. In this experiment, that chemical soup created by those muscles helped with these motor neurons. In a separate experiment, Ritu jiggled the motor neurons like using magnets, kind of simulating exercise and just the physical forces helped the neurons grow just as well. No chemicals required.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
I totally remember those commercials. Yeah. They kind of did that to these neurons, proving that exercise really is medicine, helping to promote nerve growth, which ultimately could improve mobility.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
So Ratu hopes that this study, published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials this week, adds to a growing body of knowledge on how these cells interact and how mobility can be recovered.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Ari like scooted forward to the table. Let's do it. All right. Come up to our science-backed holiday eating buffet table. Tip number one, don't skip meals before the big holiday feast.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Well, Ari, one in four people surveyed thought that was a good idea.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Tip two, ditch those detoxes you see online. You know the ones I'm talking about because you can be thankful for your kidneys and liver, those organs for detoxing and filtering out stuff your body doesn't want. Shauna and the dieticians at Orlando Health made it clear you don't need any sort of over-the-counter or home remedy.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
They don't live up to the true detox promise and they're a waste of money and can sometimes even be harmful.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Because in reality, one rich meal is not going to affect your health significantly. Just like one healthy meal isn't going to suddenly make you a Greek god.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
So much stuff you don't want to know. No, we're going to talk about this mysterious creature. Yeah, discovered in 2000 and now for the first time described in detail in the journal Deep Sea Research Part 1 by scientists at MBARI. That's the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
Agreed. Yes, and they call this creature off their shores Bathodevious cadactylus.
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The Mystery Mollusk Roaming The Midnight Zone
We're going to get into that because for a long time they called it the mystery mollusk.