Cymatics Could Help Surgeons Identify Cancer Cells for Tumor Removal
The study of cymatics has fascinated researchers for years. Now, one scientist has found a practical way to use the phenomenon to enhance targeted cancer treatments.
The study of cymatics, or the spontaneous, geometric patterns produced by sound when it encounters water or particulate matter on a surface, was coined by Swiss researcher Hans Jenny in 1967. Jenny documented the patterns that appeared when putting sand or fluid on a metal plate that was connected to a sonic frequency oscillator.
Today, acoustic-physics scientist John Stuart Reid has partnered with Dr. Sungchul Ji at Rutgers University, to apply cymatic imaging to identify cancer cells compared to healthy cells. The two hope to develop this technology to allow surgeons the ability to more precisely target cancerous cells when removing tumors.
“So, what we do with the Cymascope instrument is to literally imprint sound onto the surface and indeed the sub-surface of pure, medical-grade water and thereby make it visible with specific lighting techniques. It’s actually quite difficult for a surgeon to remove a tumor in its entirety,” Reid said.
While this type of technology would aid any procedure requiring the surgical removal of a tumor, it would be particularly groundbreaking for brain surgery and other highly sensitive areas in which healthy cells must be carefully navigated.
So, what do cancer cells look like compared to healthy cells?
“What we found was that the sounds of cancer cells are generally fairly skewed and, well, I would call them subjectively ugly,” Reid said. “Whereas the sounds from healthy cells, generally the sounds are harmonic and therefore the patterns that are created, these cymatic patterns, are very symmetrical by comparison. As the cell has a kind of respiration, it’s literally making sound all of the time, so all of our cells are singing all of the time. Actually, it’s really interesting to know that they’re singing in the audible spectrum.”
“So, in other words, if we could hear those sounds, well it would actually drive us nuts, wouldn’t it? So, it’s probably just as well that we can’t hear them, however, they are literally in the audible spectrum. It’s just a question of having specific tools that allow us to listen in to those sounds and then amplify those sounds so that we can then hear them.”
As Reid and his colleagues continue to develop the Cymascope for targeted cancer surgery, they are also looking into a number of other applications for the technology across multiple scientific disciplines.
“We are at the very beginning, you could say, of this new revolution in science in terms of making sound visible,” Reid said. “It’s extremely important because sound actually underpins virtually every science. If you think of biology even, all the biochemical reactions that are occurring in our body all of the time, they’re all based on sound if you think of it from the atomic viewpoint. So, being able to make sound visible is a really wonderful way of gaining new insights into almost every science.”
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Artificial Intelligence Finds Missing Ghost Ancestor of Humans
Our ancestry as a species is intricate and convoluted. We know that Denisovans, Neanderthals, and the other iterations of our hominin ancestors interbred and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. But while anthropologists have done their best to map out this complicated lineage, we’ve now reached a point in our evolution that machines can map our genealogy better than we can. Such was the case when a machine learning algorithm applied to our DNA roadmap found a new ancestor we didn’t even know existed.
According to a study published in Nature Communications, scientists fed DNA data from fossilized bones and modern humans into an A.I. algorithm that computed thousands of timelines to map out the possible evolutionary pathways based on what we know – or what we think we know – about our ancestors migrations, diasporas, and interbreeding to tell us if we were missing anything.
It turns out we were…
The new study found that a missing, archaic “ghost” ancestor played a significant role in the development of the human species, helping to propel us from primitive hominins to the highly intelligent beings we are today.
This ancestor was likely a hybrid of Neanderthals and the Denisovans – the hominin ancestor discovered in 2010, that five percent of modern humans can still directly trace their genealogy through.
And though the study’s authors are referring to this hominin hybrid as a “ghost” population, they also believe there might be fossil evidence of it found in the bones of a 90,000-year-old specimen of a teenage girl discovered in Siberia’s Denisova cave – the location where the original Denisovan fossils were found.
The discovery of the Denisovans has presented itself as one of the most profound and baffling finds for archeologists within the past decade as their fossil remains showed they existed for millennia alongside our other ancestors. Not to mention they appear to have been massive in comparison to other hominin species.
And by massive, they mean that a Denisovan wisdom tooth found in the cave was originally mistaken for that of a bear’s. And though wisdom teeth can vary in size, the anthropologist studying the specimen, Bence Viola, told National Geographic, “large teeth with massive roots would probably require massive jaws.”
Who were these gigantic Denisovans whom we know so little about, and even more baffling, what did their hybrid progeny with Neanderthal’s look like? These paradigm-shifting discoveries only add to the fact that we still have so much more to learn about our species’ history.
For more on the strange discovery of the gigantic Denisovans check out this episode of Ancient Civilizations :
