(upbeat music) - Coming up next on this special science edition of "Arizona Horizon."

Researchers share new information that suggests how stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang.

Also tonight, a new non-invasive form of biopsy that requires only a blood test.

And how solar farms are being used to regenerate biocrusts in the desert.

Those stories and more, next on this special edition of "Arizona Horizon."

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- Good evening and welcome to the special science edition of "Arizona Horizon."

I'm Ted Simons.

Images from the James Webb Space Telescope are helping astronomers at the University of Arizona learn more about how first stars and galaxies were formed after the Big Bang.

For more on that research, we recently spoke to the U of A Regents' Professor of Astronomy, Dr. Marica Rieke.

(title swooshes) - Well, thanks for havin' me again.

I like to talk about this stuff.

- I'll bet you do.

The JADES- What are we talkin' about here with this particular program, looking way back, I mean, way back at these baby galaxies.

- Yeah.

JADES is the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey.

Astronomers like to name their projects, and we had an allocation of nearly 900 hours of observing time on the telescope from my team.

And half of that time is going into this project.

And so we've been trying to find the most distant galaxies, the first ones to form after the Big Bang.

- How far back did you go?

- Well, right now we've made it to a time of 330 million years after the Big Bang, and the universe is 13.7 billion years old.

So we're almost all the way there.

Not quite, - Almost all the way there.

And again, lots of- How many galaxies did you find out there?

- In our first data release, we have a catalog of 45,000 in an area 1/40th the area of the full moon.

- That is incomprehensible.

I mean, was this a surprise to you, to find that many of these infant galaxies out there?

- Well, you know, some of the ones in our image are sort of middle age, so they're not the most distant ones.

We didn't find 45,000.

We found a a few thousand, but yes, we're finding more than people had originally predicted we would.

- We've got some images here that mean absolutely nothing to me.

But you are the expert and you brought the images.

Let's look at the first one here, and it's got a bunch of numbers on 'em.

This basically is, I guess that's the little thing of the moon right there on the left.

And this is what that little spot is showing, correct?

- Yeah, the tilted rectangle, it takes 40 of those to cover the full moon.

And then I magnified one little section to show what's, so you could see the detail, the numbers are how much the wavelengths get shifted by redshift.

So it's a measure of how far away the objects are.

And in this particular little snip, you can see one near the top yellow arrow that says 7.56.

So that's not quite the furthest one we we found, but it just happened to be the one in this little snip.

- Yeah, that is again, for such a small sample, you have that many thing.

And these are galaxies.

We're not talking about stars here, doctor.

These are galaxies.

- These are, each one of these has as many stars as the Milky Way, more or less.

- [Ted] Okay, the next chart, I know this has some wavelengths at the bottom here.

What exactly are we looking at?

- So this is a data sample from one galaxy and the wavelengths correspond to the different colored filters that we use in NIRCam to, you know, they're infrared filters, but they're just like, you know, red, green, blue, except they're different wavelengths.

And the top row of the grayscales show what we saw on this.

This is the second most distant galaxy we found.

And you can just see a little smudge in the middle of those.

We made a model of the shape and then we subtract, which is the middle row, and we subtracted the model to make certain that we had done it right.

And the bottom is what we call the residual that shows the model was pretty darn good.

- Yeah, from top to bottom you just go gradual from one to the other.

Fascinating.

There's one more image here, discernible shapes of distant galaxies.

And I want you to explain this one as well because this is at the core of what we're talking about here, I guess.

- It is.

And you know the previous picture, that grayscales, the object was just a tiny little smudge.

These are not quite as far back in time, but this is a almost, and this is showing that, instead of just being a tiny smudge without structure, we're actually seeing some of these blobs come together.

And presumably by the modern times, they will have merged and formed a bigger galaxy.

And so we're starting to trace out that process.

- This is absolutely fascinating.

But what do we take, what do you as a researcher and what do we as the public, what do we take from all this?

- Well, we take, one thing we take from it is that our basic theory of how things work seems okay, but there are a bunch of details we need to tune up and we still have hopes of really coming to grips with how did our very own Milky Way form?

And we're getting a lot more of the pieces to that puzzle put together here.

So we'll have a better understanding of our place in the universe is basically where we're gonna end up here.

- Yeah.

Well it's, again, great research.

Congratulations on this James Webb space telescope.

It just keeps on giving.

Dr. Marica Rieke, U of A, again, Regents' Professor of Astronomy.

Congratulations on the research and best of luck moving forward.

- Thank you very much.

We're still working to find the most distant ones still.

- Yeah, very good.

Good luck on that.

We're rooting for you.

Thank you so much, Doctor.

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- A new form of biopsy is being developed that is non-invasive.

It requires only a blood test instead of the physical examination of a piece of tissue.

We learn more about this new technology from David Spetzler, president and Chief Scientific Officer for Caris Life Sciences.

(title swooshes) David, thank you for joining us.

Before we get too- Caris Life Sciences, what is that?

- So we are primarily a molecular profiling company.

So serving late stage cancer patients, interrogating the tumor for DNA and RNA to figure out which drugs will work and which drugs won't work.

- Alright.

And with that in mind, liquid biopsies.

What are we talking about here?

- So when you have cancer, it's a series of cells that are growing out of control.

And when you have cells that are growing quickly, it also means they're dying quickly.

And so that material is shed into our blood to get cleaned up.

And so what we do is we take some blood and we look for the fragments that are coming from these cancer cells to identify whether a cancer exists within somebody or not.

And in that way we can identify the type of cancer and that somebody has cancer far earlier than existing technology today.

- So it's basically a blood-based diagnostic tool.

- It is a blood-based diagnostic tool.

- Okay, with that in mind, you've got molecular profiling involved here.

I mean, are you sequencing codes and all this kind of business?

How are you getting this done?

- Yeah, so we're sequencing 23,000 genes.

Both at the DNA level and the RNA level to look as broadly as we possibly can to find these signals.

- Basically tumor profiling.

- It is tumor profiling.

- Okay.

So let's say you take the liquid biopsy, the blood test, and you find something that tells you what, that there is a cancer or a specific type of cancer?

- So it tells you first that you have a potential of having a cancer.

And then the type, but there's a second component to this.

You also want to interrogate the immune system to understand is this a cancer that's going to grow out of control?

Because we all get cancer every single day, but our immune systems kill it.

So we need to differentiate between material shed from our immune system functioning well and material shed from something that's out of control.

- How precise is something like this?

Because I think people know biopsies, you take it, you examine it, you got it right there, you're looking right at it.

How precise is something like this?

- So it's still early days.

So we have to improve the performance of these tests because the actual incidence rate of cancer is quite low.

So about four out of a thousand people will have it.

We don't want to have false positives.

False positives are gonna lead to, you know, overtreatment, overdiagnostics, and that's a really bad thing.

And so that is one of the key components of improving this technology is making it more precise.

- Are there cancers that are more easily recognized by this kind of biopsy?

- Yeah, so the higher the degree of vascularization, so the more blood vessels there are moving through the cancer, the easier it is to find.

However, those are the cancers that we typically have an easier time finding anyway.

So this is a technology that we really need to deploy looking for things like pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer, those cancers that we don't have good screening modalities that are highly lethal.

- Interesting.

So is it something that could be coordinated along with a regular biopsy?

- Absolutely.

In the beginning of this journey, it's going to be in conjunction with existing technologies, but eventually it's gonna take over everything.

And at the end of the day, when you start to think about it, every disease are cells going wrong.

And so this approach, this technology that has been created will have far reaching consequences outside of cancer as well.

I mean eventually I think every person will get a blood test every year that's telling them about the molecular configuration in their body and it'll identify things like Alzheimer's or rheumatoid arthritis or cancer.

- So it's basically what to watch out for.

- Absolutely.

What's happening in the body right now, and then how to treat it and how to start to fight it early on.

- Or something is happening right now and you need to go get further treatment.

- Yeah, it's not predisposition, it's not a risk factor, it's actually what is happening in the body right now.

- I would imagine this would also work in terms of tracking.

I mean you don't wanna do a physical biopsy every, you know, week or something like that.

But you can do this every week, can't you?

- That's right.

And so you can see if the therapy that you're taking is working or not, is it actually having the desired effect?

Is there a evolution of the cancer?

And so it's coming back now, and you wanna switch therapies to something else.

It gives us a window into what's happening within the human body.

- How long has this kind of thing been around, this kind of information, this kind of scientific inquiry?

- It's still very new.

It has to do with evolutions in the technology.

So really, revolutions in the technology.

And so when we start to think about the human genome, it's about 3 billion bases.

Well, we need to measure that about 25,000 times in order to have the depth of information in the blood.

And so that type of sequencing technology is really brand new, plus the computing technology.

So what we're seeing is that with the computing evolution with AI- and ML-type interrogation techniques and the technology to measure the genome at such high depths, that is creating a new opportunity.

The way to think about it is like a microscope, we've discovered germs, so now we can start to fight and develop antibiotics.

- Interesting.

I was gonna ask about AI.

It sounded like something AI would be involved in.

- Have to use AI for this.

- Yeah, yeah.

Last question.

This sounds promising, it sounds interesting, and it sounds like something that I think a lot of people would be interested in, but it's still in development.

When is it gonna be ready?

- It is.

So we're finalizing our clinical trials right now to be able to prove it.

There are other companies that are doing this now where it is available to them, and it really just comes down to when is it going to be beneficial to the mainstream population And so we can start to divide up, is it a high risk patient population?

So, you know, they get early access to this type of technology 'cause it's more important to be screening more thoroughly.

But for a global screening test, we're still a ways away, - But a year or what?

- Yeah, months to few years.

- Last question, real quickly here.

Do you still need to convince doctors that this is a way to, this is an option.

- It depends on the doctor.

Certainly there are some that pay more attention and are really focused on this.

But the technology being so new, there's also a lot of skepticism out there, and that's not unhealthy.

I mean anytime there's a scientific breakthrough, we need to make sure we're doing a good job of validating it completely and thoroughly.

- Alright, David Spetzler, Caris Life Sciences.

Fascinating stuff.

Thanks for sharing.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you for having me.

- You bet.

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(lively music) (music continues) - ASU researchers have figured out a way to use solar farms to regenerate desert biocrust.

It looks to be a low cost, low impact method for expanding soil restoration efforts.

To learn more, we spoke to Dr. Ferran Garcia-Pichel, director of ASU Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics.

(title swooshes) Let's talk about solar farms being used to, what?

Regenerate the soil?

- Yeah, so we've been working on this for about a decade now.

We are into the good microbes as opposed to the bad microbes.

And so there's microbes that can grow naturally in desert surfaces and they actually help stabilize the soils naturally.

Unfortunately, many of those microbial assemblages are gone because of agriculture, because of other human activities.

And the consequences of that is that the soils are unstable and then we get haboobs and high dust in the air and so on.

And so one potential approach to take care of that problem is to regenerate those microbial assemblages.

And we've been in that business for a while.

- I think that that would be almost counterintuitive in the sense that you are kind of growing dirt.

- Not quite.

- But close enough for me.

- Close enough, maybe for you, we're growing microbes that then we can add to the dirt.

So they sort of glue the dust particles together into the ground.

- Gotcha.

- So we've been doing this for a long time, but the truth is it's sort of, so far, a boutique enterprise.

You know, for example, my whole team maybe could treat a few acres a year working full time.

Now this approach of using existing solar farms allows us to increase this capacity by 10,000 fold.

- [Ted] Okay, we're seeing solar panels here and we're seeing the farm.

How exactly does this work?

Is it, are you just growing it in shade or how does it work?

- Well it's just simply the realization that under the solar panels, the desert habitat is a lot less harsh than without them because the, when it rains, the soil remains wet longer, the insulation is less, it's just a less harsh environment.

So the microbes naturally grow faster, better, and can be harvested to treat other areas.

- [Ted] And when you say naturally grows faster, I mean it really grows faster, doesn't it?

- It does grow faster compared to not having the panels.

They will grow under both conditions, but it's just a probably a factor of five or sixfold faster.

- On your research when you transplant something that has been developed and grown under the solar panels and you put it out into the wild, into the real world there, do they hang on?

Do they attach, do they work?

- We don't know that.

That's our next step.

So our recent studies that have us so excited about this is about the capacity and we show that it can be used.

Now we need to bring all the stakeholders together to do it in a large scale.

And we haven't done that yet.

That's gonna be a little bit more of a work beyond science, bringing, you know, the owners and operators of solar farms, the farmers that have their fallowed agricultural lands in need of treatment, ourselves, the scientists, so many parts of society.

- And when you talk about the fact that the bio crust can be damaged and is damaged by human activity, once it's damaged, is it gone forever?

How long does it take to regenerate on its own without your help?

- It just depends, but it's quite slow.

It can take up to a hundred years to fully recover.

- [Ted] Oh my goodness.

- Simply because these microbes only grow when it's wet.

When the soil is wet.

And you know, in Arizona, the soil is not wet often.

So the actual active times are very short.

And so if we can accelerate that process by any factor, then we're much better off.

And that's exactly what we're doing.

- When you're growing this and we're running outta time, but I'm just fascinated by this, when you're growing it, can you see it?

Is it a different color?

Does it look, smell different?

Feel different when you touch it?

- Yes.

It feels crusty.

So when you touch it, it feels like a cookie if it's dry.

And that's exactly what's happening.

The soil particles are being held together by these microbes and essentially when the wind blows over it, it doesn't take any sand grains along.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And you say this could be a game changer as far as soil restoration?

- We think so.

We think it can make a big, big difference in Arizona.

- Alright.

What's next in the research?

Real quickly before you go.

- Just try to get to the next step.

Try to apply this in a large scale.

- And see if it works out in the real world.

- Yes.

- Well, congratulations on your research.

It sounds fascinating.

It sounds like the kind of thing people don't think too much about, but when you're out there, you certainly think about it.

Hiking.

- Yep, we're really excited.

- Yeah.

Dr. Ferran Garcia-Pichel from ASU's, one more time, Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics.

Thank you for joining.

- [Ferran] Thank you much.

(title swooshes) - And that is it for now.

I'm Ted Simons.

Thank you so much for joining us on this special edition of Arizona Horizon.

You have a great evening.

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