Scientific breakthroughs are redefining what’s possible with asteroids, cancer research, and neurotech

Technological advancements in various fields of science are shattering what some scientists once deemed impossible.

In recent years, researchers have mitigated the existential threat of asteroids, unlocked the power of immunotherapy to treat cancer tumors, and achieved unprecedented control over the human vestibular system.

These scientific innovations have been fostered by new types of cross-disciplinary collaboration and the use of artificial intelligence tools.

And though they’re approaching it from vastly different perspectives, planetary science, pathology, and neuroscience researchers shared at the World Changing Ideas Summit in November how they’re really working toward a common goal: to improve the human experience in some way.

The DART mission of 2022 saw a team led by NASA intentionally crash a spacecraft into an asteroid and successfully change the asteroid’s path through space, marking “a waterline for humanity,” said Terik Daly, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, at the summit cohosted by Fast Company and Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

Researchers are better prepared, he added, for the “real threat” of asteroids—which is a medium-size asteroid, roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool or half a football field, that could easily destroy an area like the D.C. metro area or even larger.

“Currently, we cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot stop volcanoes, we cannot stop hurricanes,” Daly said. “But with appropriate investments, we can be ready to stop an asteroid if we find one coming our way.”

New mapping tools for cancer research

And finding new ways to treat cancer is getting an assist from a perhaps unlikely discipline: astronomy.

That’s the idea behind AstroPath, which uses decades-old learnings about organizing spatial data to help researchers figure out how the immune system interfaces with cancer, said Janis Taube, a pathologist and a professor of dermatology and pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

Cancer researchers are making advancements about how to treat tumors, including identifying which patients are a good candidate for immunotherapy, none of which would be possible were it not for learning how to map the breadth of tumors using tools from astronomy, Taube said. “We never would’ve been able to separate the signal from noise.”

New uses for neurotechnology

Finally, the founders of the neurotechnology startup Orbit set out to find a solution to a supposedly anatomically unsolvable problem—generating a motion hallucination.

They not only did that, but they are now looking for ways to use the technology to optimize and heal humans, said Steven Pang, cofounder and CEO.

“If you get really fine, great control over the vestibular system, you can use it to build a generation of general bodily or mental regulators that no one’s ever been able to build before,” Pang said.

Orbit is now in clinical trials for its first few devices focused on enhancing human cognition and optimizing both the onset of and effectiveness of sleep, Pang said.

There are projections of “some incredibly powerful neurotechnology” coming in the next 30 to 40 years that could help people be smarter, faster, sleep a lot better, and solve various health conditions that have eluded pharmaceutical interventions for decades, but Pang is optimistic that such innovations could happen even sooner. 

“Our take is just, if you’re clever about it, you start solving some of these problems with some distinct ways of thinking, that it might just be two or three years away,” he said. “So hopefully we’ll prove that out.”