If you love learning super cool stuff, this is the place to do it and it won't take more than just a few minutes.

This is Curiosity Daily from Discovery.

I'm Nate.

How the heck are you guys? I'm Callie and this is Curiosity.

Today you'll learn about the amazing regenerative effects of thistle extract on damaged nerves,

the first synthetic lab-made cells and new insights into the development of

language in people with autism. Yeah yeah yeah it's story time.

Anyone who plays a contact sport or virtually anyone involved in the contact sport called life

is at risk of an injury that could result in nerve damage.

The thing is, nerves aren't all that great at regenerating, but a new study has found a compound that encourages those nerves to regrow and could really actually level up treatment, and that compound comes from thistles.

I feel like I keep hearing about thistle extract as

this kind of cure-all and the claims are pretty wild. It's used to treat everything from

stomach aches to COVID, but usually if something seems too good to be true, it is. Yeah I know. So

before we dig into the study, let's talk about nerves. Good idea. We all kind of know

what nerves are and what they do, but I would bet if you asked anyone on the street, the details might get a little fuzzy.

Agreed. So nerves are these specialized cable-like structures built from these fibers called accents. Those accents are wrapped in

layers of fat and connective tissue. To oversimplify a little bit, nerves are like the electric

cables of our whole nervous system. Sure, they transmit impulses to the brain, right?

Yep, throughout the whole nervous system, basically between the brain and the spinal cord

and the rest of the body.

If you step on a lego, for example, your nerve send a signal through those little accents to your spinal cord and brain so that your brain can be like, hey, get off that lego.

Stepping on a lego is the worst.

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