The collapse of America’s health data system; How sleep affects your focus; Life on Mars in liquid veins?

0:00Sweeping cuts across US agencies are putting vital, long-running surveys and data sets in danger. These are the kinds of statistics that enable monitoring of things like veteran health, maternal mortality, even the long-term health of the entire nation. Officials are saying that without this data, the country would effectively be flying blind. And our US health reporter will be revealing some of the startling impacts of the Trump administration's cuts to health monitoring on the show today. We'll also be learning about how our brains clean themselves and how this disrupts your day if you don't get enough sleep the night before.

0:30A rinse cycle, so like a washing machine. Is that what we're talking about here? Yes, exactly. Brainwashing. Yes. I'm here for it. And also how veins of water may be hiding in the permafrost on Mars and potentially could be home to Martian life. They're saying that these veins aren't even that deep under the surface, but these veins could support life.

0:56This episode is sponsored by Wellcome's podcast, When Science Finds A Way. Welcome to the world, the universe and us. I'm Dr Timothy Revel. And I'm Dr Penny Sarche. The US government has dealt blow after blow to the country's public health system this year. The Trump administration has laid off hundreds of employees at the country's top public health agency. And with such sweeping cuts, it can be hard to get a picture of what the impact is when you wait for the dust to settle, and also what that means for scientific research and healthcare itself. So today we've got health reporter Grace Wade here to shed light on just how devastating some of the effects of this are likely to be.

1:33Grace, hi. Hi. So, Grace, could you give us some of the backstory of this first? Because it's really felt like the US government has just been bleeding public health experts recently. That's because it is. The US Department of Health and Human Services has experienced multiple rounds of layoffs this year. So in March, it lost about 20 ,000 employees. And most recently, it terminated an additional 1 ,100 positions. And this is concerning for a variety of reasons, including that some of those let go are in charge of running really crucial public health surveys and databases. These data sets really form the foundation of public health policy in the US, helping us identify and monitor and respond to health threats across the country.

2:16It can be quite hard to get across the picture of just how important data sets like these can be. Can you explain to us the kind of data that the US is losing or missing out on and why that's such a bad thing? Well, it's been difficult to know how many surveys have been affected, but so far my reporting shows that at least five have been impacted. The first of these is the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which has been monitoring drug use, addiction, and mental health in the U.S. for more than a half a century. In April, all 17 people in charge of this survey were laid off. It isn't clear who will run this survey moving forward, which plays a crucial role in helping policymakers allocate funding for substance use and mental health services.

2:57Then the government announced in September that it would end the Household Food Security Reports, which tracks food insecurity throughout the country. It said in a statement that these reports were redundant, costly, politicized, and did nothing except fearmonger. But that isn't the case. This survey has received bipartisan support for decades and can actually help the government save money by ensuring food assistance programs are targeted to those who would benefit the most. Right. And like this is just so often the case with data. You can't address a problem unless you can measure it. And then that's just why good data is so important for running effective government.

3:32And also why just the loss of these data sets is such a big problem. So I guess the thing is, it doesn't even stop there, right? There's more that you've identified that have been cut. Yeah. Most recently, the government cut the majority of the staff behind and the National Vital Statistics System, which tracks births and deaths across the US. It also reports on the country's leading causes of death and maternal mortality rates. It's astonishing to me to think that that kind of data collection and reporting could become compromised. Yeah, and there's more. The entire team running the National Death Index was also terminated.

4:06This is a very little known database, but it contains identifying information about every death in the US, including the person's name, place of residence, cause of death, and in many cases, their social security number. And so this index is integral to numerous long-term studies and analyses, from understanding how the health of veterans compares with non-veterans, to assisting with data integrity and long-term studies of older adults. The government also laid off the team in charge of planning the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. This survey is probably the most comprehensive assessment of health, diet, and illness in the U.S.

4:41It informs dietary guidelines, monitors exposures to toxins, and even helps update food labeling. So it's a lot of layoffs, and there's going to be a lot of gaps and just missing roles and responsibilities there. Do we know if they're planning to replace any of these people, to bring any of them back, to pass on their responsibilities to someone else? The HHS does seem to have reverse terminations of those working on the nutrition survey. It also told new scientists that it wasn't enforcing the most recent layoffs due to a core order that has temporarily blocked them, but it declined to comment on whether it would go through with them if the core order lifts or how it plans to maintain these databases moving forward.

5:19So obviously we're a new scientist podcast. We love science. Science depends on data. But for people who are hearing this and thinking some of this sounds very niche, very detailed, a lot of unnecessary busy work, what would you say, Grace? I cannot emphasize enough how concerning this is. Former officials tell me it would be like flying blind. The country would have no way of knowing where to prioritize public health work or identify if a new threat has emerged. It could be really catastrophic. Speaking of which, Grace, you've been our resident bird flu expert, and I feel like it's getting to that time of year again in the northern hemisphere.

5:54We know that last year the virus became widespread at some U.S. farms. Do we know what's happened since? What's happening with the monitoring of that in the States? So there's actually some good news there. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an end to the bird flu emergency in July after no new human cases have been reported since February. Infections in farm animals have also been steadily declining. And that's thanks to the Trump administration continuing and expanding upon the nationwide testing of dairy milk. So this program has allowed them to identify infected herds and quickly contain the virus.

6:29And from my understanding, that is all still ongoing. So that's quite a good example then of where monitoring and data genuinely pays off, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's great to have some good news on that front. On the US government shutdown, which is ongoing, is that affecting science and health at the moment? Yeah, so all government activities deemed non-essential are paused right now. And And what that means is processes for reviewing grant proposals have stopped. So a bunch of research is getting delayed. Researchers in institutions with active grants can usually continue to withdraw funds during a government shutdown, but they can't get administrative or technical support from government agencies.

7:08The National Institutes of Health also pauses recruitment for clinical trials and basic research during a shutdown. So in short, the government shutdown is putting a pin on research, but it shouldn't derail it completely. Now time for a word from our sponsor. The Best Science isn't just a laboratory endeavour, it changes lives. But that link between researchers and the impact they have on people is often forgotten. That's the gap filled by Wellcome's podcast, When Science Finds a Way. Host Alicia Wainwright is a botanist turned Hollywood actor who invites researchers at the cutting edge to tell their inspiring stories alongside the people in communities around the world who are working with science to improve lives and shape their own futures.

7:49Episodes cover topics ranging from cholera prevention in Kenya to wildfire management approaches rooted in indigenous practices. When Science Finds a Way is available now wherever you're listening. Now, Tim, imagine you've had a terrible night's sleep. What's the next day like for you? How are you feeling? Yeah, normally not the best. I'm not very good with not much sleep. Especially like concentration wise, my procrastination levels go up. I'm getting distracted easily. My list is not getting shorter. It's getting longer. you know those kind of days exactly and that is a thing it can be really hard to focus your mind when you haven't slept well the night before and a new discovery actually explains why health reporter carissa wong is here to tell us about it hi carissa hi penny yeah this story is way too relatable to me right now um i've just moved house and there's bright white lights outside my bedroom window i have no curtains classic i have no bedroom door my house is an absolute mess um But yeah, I am literally losing focus right now.

8:49Back on the story. So this thing obviously affects all of us. But actually, it's really poorly understood, like how your lack of sleep might actually lead your mind to lose focus. Yeah, because it's such a familiar feeling. It kind of seems self-evident. But I guess we don't actually know why the two things are linked. Exactly. We don't know those exact pathways involved. Yeah. And one idea that scientists have had is that basically when you're sleeping, your brain does some really crucial functions. And perhaps when you're sleep deprived the next day, it's desperately trying to catch up on some of these tasks.

9:25And that's interfering with your focus. So some of these things that we know are fundamental for brain health that happen when we sleep, it's things like laying down memories and clearing out any mess or junk. Is that the kind of thing we're talking about here? Yeah, exactly. So this finding that we're going to talk about is about the brain's rinse cycle. And it's something that happens normally only when you're in deep sleep. And it happens very little when you're awake is what we understand. Isn't this a great name? Yeah, rinse cycle. So like a washing machine. Is that what we're talking about here?

9:55Yes, exactly. Brainwashing. Yes. I'm here for it. So during a phase of really deep restorative sleep called non-REM sleep, our brain changes its activity a little bit and that essentially leads to this clear fluid that bathes the brain called cerebral spinal fluid being kind of flushed around your brain and as it moves around it sweeps up this metabolic waste so proteins and molecules that are produced during the day and they build up and they can clog up the brain kind of interfering with its function so it's really important that this happens while we sleep yeah because some of these things are things like tau proteins, proteins that are implicated in things like Parkinson's, right?

10:36So it's really important to remove this stuff. Yeah, I guess it really is kind of like a rinse cycle, right? You've got all this sloshing about and it's clearing up all the waste material. But why is that linked to a lack of concentration? Yeah, so when you sleep poorly, your brain doesn't get that chance to kind of do this great rinse cycle and clearing out all of this waste. So researchers had this idea that maybe the brain is trying to catch up on these cleaning cycles the next day when you're sleep deprived and so that's maybe what's interfering with your attention. To explore this a team of researchers have now recruited about 26 people aged between 19 and 40 and they were asked to get a good night's sleep and then two weeks later they were also asked to have a terrible night's sleep where they basically slept not at all because researchers were keeping them awake in a lab do we know how they did that i do not know how they did that but hopefully they had some interesting conversation and it wasn't just the weather reading about these studies always makes me tense because i think if someone told me i had to get a good night's sleep that would be enough to ruin the night's sleep for me i feel for these people so yeah they had this really weird um bad night's sleep yeah researchers staring at them in a lab and so what the researchers did is they got the participants to carry out these attention tasks the morning after both of those nights and these tasks basically involved the participants looking at a screen and every time a cross turned into a square or they heard a tone a very specific tone they had to hit a button and so what the researchers found is that of course when you're sleep deprived you're really bad at doing this so about 17 % of the time they just missed the cue whereas when they had a good night's sleep they were much better only 5 % of the time did they miss the cue.

12:28Quite a difference there then yeah. So what was really cool about all of this though is that when the participants had a lapse in their attention that coincided with the brain seeming to do this mini rinse cycle so it's the sort of cleaning that we said before is like normally happening during sleep but it looked like the brain were just fitting it in during these attention lapses and to be specific about it the participants lost focus about two seconds before a bit of cerebral spinal fluid was flushed out of the brain at the base of the brain and then this fluid was drawn back into the brain about one second after the attention recovered.

13:07That's mad isn't it? I love it! So a fluid is sort of sloshed in and out of the brain during these lapses of attention and this kind of rapid let's catch up on the cleaning and so when your mind drifts and you're really struggling to sort of stay focused it's actually because your brain is doing this mini cleanse sort of makes me feel better you know you feel guilty when you can't focus on the task at hand but actually your brain is doing necessary maintenance yeah exactly i'm not zoning out i'm just brain cleaning it's very cool but um what's the link like why do we necessarily lose our attentional focus when there's this quick surge of cleaning?

13:43Yeah it's not totally clear why but that's such an interesting thing to find out and the researchers hope that if they can pinpoint maybe a shared core brain circuit that is coupling these two processes together then maybe they could even come up with a way for us to you know let that mini cleaning happen because let's face it we're all going to still be sleep deprived all the time so yeah maybe they can find a way for that to carry on but then to stop you having the attention problems which of course are they're not just about phasing out in a meeting it's also to do with like driving you might have a lapse in attention that's really dangerous yeah i think it can make you feel a bit better about those distractions that like whilst it's ongoing there's quite a serious thing going on when you get distracted it's not it's not just you it's like a bit of sloshing going on in your head which sounds pretty distracting to me um but it does make me think about like what's the other side of this Is there anything we could do to boost our brain rinsing?

14:36You know, if we don't get enough sleep or we just want a super clean brain. Deep clean. Yeah, put it on the ultra high sanitizing setting. How do we do that? Yeah, I would really love a way to just make my brain do a cleaning cycle whenever I felt a bit dozy. But yeah, researchers haven't quite got a way to do that quite yet. But we do know that this cerebral spinal fluid, when it flushes out of the brain, It basically enters this cool like invisible network of tubes, which we call the lymphatic system. And so once that gets out into this lymphatic system, it can reenter the blood and eventually the waste products are kind of got rid of from the body.

15:12So what I do know is that some researchers are looking at ways we can boost the clearance of fluid from the brain by massaging the lymphatic vessels around your face and neck. so this is very hot on social media jade rolling or guashua um that kind of thing so it's not quite the the beauty fads that you see on social media unfortunately it's actually a very specific way of massaging the face and neck and that was in mice i must add as well but researchers are finding that if you massage those vessels in a certain way on the the face and the neck then you can actually boost the clearance of fluid from the brain and we don't know if there's cognitive effects of this yet I'm I must be very clear about that but I do know researchers that I spoke to said they're working on this right now sounds potentially promising and a hand wash add to the natural washing machine our brain we're going deep onto all the programs on your machine I will just say Carissa has written a lot more about the lymphatic system for us recently.

16:19Do you know we've known about it for millennia, but we're still only really just uncovering what it does. Amazing. And you did write in a recent cover feature for us, didn't you, Carissa, about how the way that it works can actually help prevent cognitive conditions like dementia. It's a really interesting piece, so we're going to link to that in our show notes. And finally, we've got another development in the story of life on Mars. You might remember that last month there was a lot of excitement about some rocks in Jezero Crater that had these unusual markings called leopard spots and poppy seeds.

16:54Yes, I remember it well. Really exciting. Those markings hinted pretty strongly that there may have been ancient microbial activity. It's very difficult to explain these patterns in any other way, which is so exciting. And we're hoping that a future sample return mission might be able to confirm that. That's right. And then in the meantime, the search for Martian life, this time living, not ancient life, continues. And our space reporter Leia Crane is here to tell us all about a new line of inquiry. So Leia, hello, welcome. Can you tell us a bit about this story? And it begins with a potential discovery of a network of actual liquid water on Mars, right?

17:33Yeah, hi. So the first thing you have to understand is that all permafrost on Earth and elsewhere is expected to have these tiny, tiny veins of liquid water running through it. Just these little channels, not ones that you could see. They're microns thick. But we were sort of not sure if they would be big enough on Mars to keep liquid water because temperatures there get way into the negatives and pure water freezes at zero Celsius. But thankfully, there's lots of salts on Mars and they dissolve into the water and they can lower its freezing point significantly. So this team, which was led by a researcher named Hannah Sizemore at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, calculated how much of the soil on Mars could be liquid actually running through these tiny veins and how wide the veins could be to try to figure out if there could be life in these veins on Mars as there could be where they are on Earth, which is all over the place.

18:35So what did the team find out then? So they find out that it was surprisingly easy, as they said, to get soil with more than 5 % liquid, which was sort of their benchmark for it being potentially habitable. And channels that are at least five microns in diameter, which remember I said is still very small. It's thinner than really fine human hair, but it's big enough that you could submerge a microbe in it. And that's big enough for life. Yeah, I'm trying to remember my microbiology here. I think a bacterial cell is about one micron. So, you know, at five microns, that's kind of roomy. They can do their thing in that.

19:13Yeah, the idea is that you would have enough space not just to submerge the microbes, but also to bring nutrients and waste in and out. So there's a size requirement, an interconnectedness requirement, and of course, an amount of liquid that you need. So they are saying then that Mars could support veins of liquid water in this way that are spread out and joined together in a way that would provide for all of that. Yeah, they are saying that. And they're saying that these veins aren't even that deep under the surface. A lot of the places where we see ice and water on Mars are buried super, super deep under the surface.

19:51We can't get to it. But these veins could support life. Of course, the difference between plausibly could and actually does is pretty wide. There are difficulties. We don't know if the temperatures are just too low enough, but it is plausible. I love one of the quotes that you have in the story you wrote on this from Bruce Joukowsky at the University of Colorado Boulder. The bottom line is that based on this and related work in particular, it's not impossible that life could exist in the Martian near surface. Which feels like one of those statements that a scientist makes where it's like, yeah, I'm sort of a bit excited about this, maybe.

20:32But let's not overstate it. We'll take that. Not impossible. That's a start. So if life does exist in networks like this on Mars, can we go find it, Leia? Like how easy would it be to look for it? It would actually be surprisingly easy. A lot of the time when I report on stories like this, you know, I say, hey, there might be life here, but we'll never find it. In this case, thankfully, if it is there, we could probably find it. There's a lander that landed on Mars in 2008 called Phoenix. And these researchers, Dr. Sizemore and her colleagues, took into account the soil measurements from the Phoenix lander.

21:10And they found that these networks of channels of vanes could be really abundant at latitudes higher than 50 degrees. Of course, lower than that, it's too warm, basically. But higher than that, you could have these liquid vanes. And if there's life on Mars, they would be the easiest place to look for it by far. It could be 30 centimeters under the surface. We really wouldn't have to dig very far. That sounds eminently doable for a rover, right? 30 centimeters must not be that difficult. Yeah, we don't have any there right now that could do it, I don't think. But it is plausible that we could send something there that could dig down 30 centimetres and sample these veins.

21:53That sounds absolutely amazing. It feels like we just need to put the call out there. Anyone got a robot on Mars who could dig down just a little bit and claim the discovery of life? I mean, why not? Are there plans underway that could make that happen? The big problem with that is that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. So we're not going to confirm life on Mars with rover measurements. Our rovers are great. They're fabulous. But there are limits to what they can do. In order to confirm life on Mars, as long as it's not a wildebeest or whatever, we're going to have to bring those samples back.

22:30Yeah. If we see something running across the surface, that seems confirmed. That's not going to happen. It's going to be microbes. So we have to bring back samples to Earth so that we can look at them in laboratories here, because the laboratories here are where we have the equipment that can actually find them. The problem with that is that while Mars sample return has been a big priority for the research community for a long time, the missions are now in pretty serious danger. There was a mission planned and the Trump administration's budget request for NASA completely scuppered that mission.

23:03Regardless of what ends up happening with that budget, it's feeling pretty unlikely that sample return is going to happen anytime soon. So that's a fairly major blow to the hunt for life on Mars, regardless of what form it takes, even if it's those leopard spots or the poppy seeds or microbes in these veins. we're not going to be able to confirm anything without sample return. So we're just going to have to be content with hints of life on Mars for a little while longer yet. Yeah. That's all for this week. Thanks to our guests and to you for listening. Do give us a review or rating wherever you watch or listen.

23:38We'll be back next week. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. This episode was sponsored by Wellcome's podcast, When Science Finds A Way, available on all podcast platforms.