This week, finding a use for carbon dioxide.

Right now it's considered a waste. We just release it into the atmosphere and do nothing with it.

And stem cells offer a test bed for therapies aimed at bipolar disorder.

We would be able to take cells from patients that have had an episode, and we could screen these

cells to assist the physician in the prescription of drugs they'd be most effective.

Plus tracking cancers to stop their spread. This is the Nature Podcast for October the 29th,

2015. I'm Kerry Smith. And I'm Adam Levy.

Our cells get rid of waste proteins in little packages called exosomes that float around in our blood before being flushed from the body.

Cancer cells are no exception. They shed exosomes too. That means they can be detected in the blood

and potentially used to diagnose cancers early. This might ring a bell because on the show

back in June we had researcher Raghu Kuluri and he had been working on using exosomes to

catch cancer. And our interest was to ask the question, since every cell type releases these particles called exosomes,

is there a way to identify them that are released by the cancer cells?

And that would then give us an idea of the cancer load that the patient may have

and what type of things that you can identify in the

exosome that could potentially be being derived from the cancer cells.

Raghu Kuluri from the University of Texas back in June. Now, a group of researchers has moved

the story on. They say that not only can they diagnose cancer, they can predict its next move.

You see, exosomes have been shown to play an important role in metastasis,

the process by which a tumor spreads to other organs.

Exosomes act a bit like scouts seeking out new locations

and preparing the sites for tumor cells to grow in.

...