If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — and learn about antimatter from Everyday Einstein of Quick and Dirty Tips — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla Allegedly Followed the Uberman Sleep Cycle What's the Best Way to Avoid Bed Bugs? Plus, learn more about antimatter from Quick and Dirty Tips. Then check out their other podcasts: Everyday Einstein Grammar Girl Nutrition Diva Get-It-Done Guy Get-Fit Guy Money Girl Mighty Mommy Clever Cookstr Unknown History Perhaps the most famous mention of polyphasic sleep is in "The 4-Hour Body" by Tim Ferriss, who talks about it and a wide variety of other body hacks that can help you make the most of your 24 hours. For the best way to get rid of bed bugs, check out "Breaking Bed Bugs: How to Get Rid of Bed Bugs without Losing Your Mind, Money & Dignity" by Chipp Marshal. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase, then Curiosity will get a share of the sale. Learn about these topics and more onCuriosity.com, and download our5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable ourAlexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — and learn about antimatter from Everyday Einstein of Quick and Dirty Tips — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Plus, learn more about antimatter from Quick and Dirty Tips. Then check out their other podcasts:
Perhaps the most famous mention of polyphasic sleep is in "The 4-Hour Body" by Tim Ferriss, who talks about it and a wide variety of other body hacks that can help you make the most of your 24 hours. For the best way to get rid of bed bugs, check out "Breaking Bed Bugs: How to Get Rid of Bed Bugs without Losing Your Mind, Money & Dignity" by Chipp Marshal. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase, then Curiosity will get a share of the sale.
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/antimatter-101-w-everyday-einstein-how-to-avoid-bed-bugs-and-uberman-sleep-cycle
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about a four-hour sleep cycle allegedly used by Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla, the best way to avoid bedbugs, and everything you ever wanted to know about antimatter with some help from a special guest. That's Everyday Einstein, who you might know from the website, Quick and Dirty Tips.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. What's the least amount of sleep you can run on?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, gosh. No sleep I guess. I can run on it. Doesn't mean it's going to be pleasant.
CODY GOUGH: Have you noticed it get exponentially more difficult in the last five or six years because I have?
ASHLEY HAMER: To get less sleep?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. To survive the next day.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes. I definitely have. And I've made a bigger effort to really try to get that sleep in.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: I remember, yeah, in college, it was like four hours a night. And I was just fine.
CODY GOUGH: College was awesome. If you're listening to this, and you're in college, and you can survive off no sleep, enjoy it while you can.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: It's the best.
ASHLEY HAMER: But also life gets better after college, so.
CODY GOUGH: So you know, no life stage is perfect. But if you are listening, and you think you need more than 4 hours of sleep, then you might want to think again. Because allegedly, Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla stuck to an almost impossible-sounding sleep cycle. Today, we present to you the Uberman sleep cycle.
It's a polyphasic sleep cycle, which means you sleep several times in a 24-hour period. Most of us probably just sleep once, which is a monophasic sleep cycle. In the Uberman sleep cycle, you take six 20-minute naps, evenly distributed throughout your day, forever. That's your life. And according to the Polyphasic Society, you can adjust the system in a non-equidistant way to fit your needs. So a little variety might still work.
It's an intense sleep schedule, but science suggests it can work. A 1989 study published in work and stress found that polyphasic sleep strategies improved prolonged sustained performance. So not only do you have more time to do what you have to do, you'll maybe even get better results when you do it.
And the Uberman sleep cycle can radically change how much time you have. Leonardo da Vinci supposedly slept 15 minutes out of every 4 hours. So it was slight variation on this. That's a daily total of an hour and a half of sleep. That could have given him an extra six productive hours a day. Da Vinci lived for 67, years so he would have gained an extra 20 years of productivity over his lifetime.
But Tesla allegedly never slept more than two hours in a given 24-hour period. And well, he had a mental breakdown when he was 25. So it's not for everyone. Tim Ferriss talks about polyphasic sleep in his book, The 4-Hour Body. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes in case you want to take your body hacking to the next level. Just be aware of the risks involved. And let us know how it goes for you.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, have you ever had bedbugs?
CODY GOUGH: One of my roommates used to insist that we did, and we had to do the whole extermination thing, where you move all your furniture away from the walls.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, gosh.
CODY GOUGH: It was really annoying. They are bad news.
ASHLEY HAMER: But you weren't sure if you did?
CODY GOUGH: No. My friend and I just gave him an endless amount of hard time because we insisted we don't have them, and we thought he was being paranoid. But to this day, he swears we had bedbugs.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, gosh. That's so hard.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is. But that's an extreme measure, you know? You really have to do a lot.
CODY GOUGH: It's not fun.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I mean, bedbugs are bad news. And there's always a chance you could carry them home from a hotel or a friend's house. So today, we've got some tips from entomologists for keeping bedbugs out of your home. This especially applies the next time you stay at a hotel or even an Airbnb by the way.
First off, don't put your suitcase on the floor. Put it on a desk, or a stand, or even in the bathtub. Basically, any hard surface where bedbugs can't hide. Then look for bedbugs. Pull back the covers in the sheets. Look at the mattress. Even look around the box springs if you can. The headboard is also a popular bedbug hiding spot.
An adult bedbug is about the size of an apple seed. So you might need a flashlight, since they're tiny. And keep your dirty laundry sealed. A 2017 study showed that bedbugs prefer dirty laundry. So seal it away, and never, ever toss it on the floor. One more reason to toss those thrift store clothes in a dryer as soon as you get home too, in case they're in there. You can find more tips in our full write-up on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But if you suspect an infestation, call a trained professional. There are some DIY bedbug solutions out there, but bedbugs are not easy to get rid of. Best to let an expert handle it.
CODY GOUGH: And so we did. And it was worth it because then, we didn't have bedbugs.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: But did we ever?
ASHLEY HAMER: Who knows?
CODY GOUGH: Blake, did we really? We've written about anti-matter on Curiosity in the past, but we've never really done a deep dive on this podcast into what anti-matter is, or where it comes from. So today, we decided to give you a little background with some help from Everyday Einstein, a podcast from Quick and Dirty Tips. Enjoy.
SABRINA STIERWALT: Hi. I'm Sabrina Stierwalt. And I'm Everyday Einstein, bringing new quick and dirty tips to help you make sense of science. Anti-matter may sound like science fiction, but it actually surrounds us every day. Anti-matter even gets produced by the bananas sitting in your kitchen. More on that in a minute.
Anti-matter also poses one of the biggest mysteries in physics. When an antimatter particle and its opposite, regular matter particle, encounter one another, they annihilate and produce a burst of energy. During the Big Bang, regular matter, the stuff you and I are made of, and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. Thus, we would have expected all of those matter and antimatter pairs to have crashed into one another, leaving behind a universe full of energy in the wake of their destruction. And yet, we are here. In a universe full of regular matter stuff.
Matter is made up of atoms, which we have mapped out as a nucleus of subatomic particles called protons and neutrons with electrons swirling around it. So subatomic particles, those proton, neutron, and electron pieces that build together to make an atom, can have charge. And they can also have spin, a quantity that represents the particle's angular momentum.
Every matter particle is believed to have an associated anti-matter particle, which is identical, except for having the opposite charge and spin. For electrons, that antimatter particle is a positron, which has the same mass, but positive charge and a counter-rotating spin. Anti-matter electrons are used in medical imaging to get high resolution views of our bodies. If you've ever had a PET scan, that P stands for positron.
The bananas sitting in your kitchen also produce positrons. Bananas are rich in potassium, an element that always has 19 protons in its nucleus. Different forms of potassium called isotopes have different numbers of neutrons and differing levels of stability. Bananas tend to have a lot of the isotope potassium-40, which has 21 neutrons and will occasionally decay into argon, a process that spits out a positron roughly every 75 minutes. That may sound like a lot, but those anti-matter positrons are quickly annihilated.
As for why we exist at all and haven't been annihilated in a burst of light thanks to matter, anti-matter collisions, the best theory so far is that there was one measly extra matter particle for every billion matter, anti-matter pairs created. And that was enough to leave behind the matter-filled universe as we know it today. The reason for that initial asymmetry, however, remains a mystery. This is Sabrina Stierwalt with Everyday Einstein's quick and dirty tips for helping you make sense of science.
ASHLEY HAMER: Thanks to Everyday Einstein for the info. You can find a link to Everyday Einstein in today's show notes, or visit quickanddirtytips.com to find lots of great podcasts, including Everyday Einstein, Grammar Girl, Get Fit Guy, and more.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Lots of good stuff. You can read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com. And if you love this podcast, you can now support us on Patreon.
ASHLEY HAMER: Patreon.
CODY GOUGH: Patreon is a way for you to give back to your favorite shows, so that we can produce more awesome stuff for you.
ASHLEY HAMER: And you can get all sorts of cool perks too.
CODY GOUGH: We'll put a link in our show notes to our Patreon page or, visit patreon.com/curiosity.com. We'll talk about a lot more in tomorrow's episode, but we wanted to let you know that it's there. And we'd love if you would like to support us.
ASHLEY HAMER: Thank you.
CODY GOUGH: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily, and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.