Smart Toilet, Soft Robotics, Naked Mole Rats. March 17, 2023, Part 2

Published: March 17, 2023, 4:38 p.m.

b'Stop Flushing Your Health Data Down The Toilet\\nYou could be flushing important information about your health right down the toilet\\u2014quite literally. Pee and poop can tell you a lot about your health, so what if your waste\\u2026didn\\u2019t go to waste? What if, instead, it could tell you more about your health? Like number one, it can catch a condition like diabetes early. Or number two, check out what\\u2019s going on in your gut microbiome.\\nThat\\u2019s the goal of the smart toilet\\u2014a device that gets all up in your business to tell you more about your health. Ira talks with the inventor of the PH Smart Toilet, Dr. Seung-min Park, instructor of urology at Stanford\\u2019s School of Medicine in California, about how the toilet works, how it can be used to catch diseases early on, and the ethical implications of such a device.\\n\\n\\xa0\\n50 Years Later, Reflecting On The Treaty That Controls Wildlife Trade\\n50 years ago this month, a collection of nations met in Washington and reached agreement on a way to regulate international trade in certain wildlife species\\u2014from orchids to gorillas. That agreement came to be known as CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The treaty has come to cover over 30,000 different plants and animals. Some, listed in Appendix 1 of the treaty, are under a complete ban on commercial use, while other species have their trade tightly regulated via a system of permits.\\nDr. Susan Lieberman, the vice president for international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, has attended the last 13 meetings of the CITES signatories. She joins Ira to talk about the convention, and what it has meant for conservation over the last 50 years.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nThis Skin-like Robot Can Heal Itself\\nThink of a robot, and the image that may come to mind is a big, hulking body building cars or working in factories. They battle each other in the movies. But a growing field called softbotics focuses on thin, flexible materials\\u2014closer to human skin than to a Transformer. There\\u2019s been a breakthrough in this field out of Pittsburgh: softbotics that can not only conduct electricity, but can heal itself from damage. This replicates the healing abilities of organic materials, like skin, but can happen in seconds. Dr. Carmel Majidi, mechanical engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, joins Ira to break down possible futures for this material, including a new generation of prosthetics.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nNaked Mole-Rats Are Eternally Fertile\\nThere may be no stranger\\u2014or more impressive\\u2014critter than the naked mole-rat. They may look unassuming, but they can defy aging, have an astonishingly high pain tolerance, and are resistant to cancer. And their list of superpowers doesn\\u2019t stop there. Scientists recently discovered yet another way these rodents reject the mammalian status quo: by producing egg cells, and staying fertile, until the day they die. This makes them unlike humans, whose ovaries eventually stop producing eggs. So what can we learn about fertility from these strange critters?\\xa0Ira talks with the lead researcher of this study, Dr. Miguel Brie\\xf1o-Enriquez, assistant professor at the Magee-Womens Research Institute and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine\\u2019s Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nTranscripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on\\xa0sciencefriday.com.'