Learn about how your lover’s clothing could improve your sleep; how astronauts grew vegetables in space for the first time; and ancient animals that were connected by a crude version of the internet.
Learn about how your lover’s clothing could improve your sleep; how astronauts grew vegetables in space for the first time; and ancient animals that were connected by a crude version of the internet.
Smelling your lover’s shirt could improve your sleep by Kelsey Donk
We grew lettuce in space! by Grant Currin
Half-billion-year-old fern-like animals acted like an ancient internet by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/astronauts-grew-lettuce-in-space-why-smelling-a-dirty-shirt-can-help-you-sleep-and-early-animals-that-acted-like-an-ancient-internet
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how your lover’s clothing could improve your sleep; how astronauts grew vegetables in space for the first time; and ancient animals that were connected by a crude version of the internet.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Here’s some weird advice for the happy couples out there: the next time you spend a night apart, toss out your pillowcase and replace it with your partner’s unwashed shirt. New research from the University of British Columbia suggests that you’ll probably sleep better if you have the scent of your bae hanging around.
For this study, the researchers analyzed sleep data from 155 participants who were given two identical-looking T-shirts to use as pillowcases. One of the T-shirts had been worn by the participant’s romantic partner for a full 24 hours, with no deodorant or scented body products to interfere. The other had either been worn by a stranger or never worn at all. The shirts were frozen to preserve their scent.
The participants went to sleep with activity-monitoring watches on and completed surveys about their sleep when they woke up. On average, participants said they felt more well-rested on nights when they thought the T-shirt belonged to their partners. But more impressive was that data from the sleep watches also showed that the participants’ sleep objectively improved when they were exposed to their partner’s scent.
Their average sleep efficiency improved more than 2 percent on nights when they had their partners’ shirts in bed with them. Sleep efficiency is the ratio of time spent asleep to time spent in bed, and that improvement in sleep efficiency is similar to what researchers have seen when people use melatonin to help them sleep.
As the researchers point out, many people wear their partner’s shirt when their partner is away. A survey of U.S. college students found that 70 percent of women and 25 percent of men reported sleeping with a partner’s previously worn clothing while they were away. Clearly, people get some feeling of comfort and security from the scent of their beloved — and the science bears that out.
The takeaway here is pretty simple. The next time you or your partner go out of town, keep one of their dirty shirts on hand. It’s not silly, it’s science. You’ll probably sleep better.
How excited do you think you could get about a few leaves of romaine lettuce?
What if it were your first vegetable in a while? Because you’d been eating a lot of freeze-dried food. Because you’re an astronaut. On the International Space Station?
You’d probably be pretty excited.
Well, that’s not a hypothetical question. Astronauts on the ISS and researchers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida recently announced that they’d grown the first crops of space lettuce aboard the International Space Station.
Growing food in space is a big deal for a lot of reasons. Traditional space food isn’t known for being delicious. It’s mostly processed, pre-packaged stuff like freeze-dried fruit, chocolate, nuts, and microwaveable, just-add-water meals. (This might sound familiar if you’re living on quarantine rations right now!) That’s a pretty monotonous diet, so fresh veggies are a boost to morale. But space station-to-table fare does more than jazz up astronauts’ meals. Fresh produce is also rich in important nutrients that aren’t common in typical space food. It’s important for astronauts to get plenty of potassium and vitamins K, B1, and C to stay healthy, especially on the longer missions NASA has planned.
The astronauts-turned-farmers grew several crops of red romaine lettuce under LED lights in specially designed chambers called Vegetable Production Systems, or "Veggies" for short. Back on Earth, scientists used Veggies to grow their own crops of the same lettuce variety, which the researchers used as a control to determine how the differences in gravity and radiation levels affected the lettuce grown in space.
It turned out that the space-grown greens were safe to eat — and maybe even a little more nutritious. Some of the lettuce samples from space had higher levels of potassium, sodium, phosphorus, sulphur, and zinc. They also had higher levels of phenolics [fen-ALL-icks], which are molecules with proven antiviral, anticancer, and anti-inflammatory activity. The researchers also identified the microbes that grew on the plants’ leaves and roots. To their surprise, the same species of bacteria and fungi thrived on both the Earth lettuce and the space lettuce.
After taking all the data into account, the researchers gave the all-clear for eating lettuce grown in Veggie units aboard the ISS. In the future, researchers want to try growing other leafy crops, and maybe even peppers and tomatoes. Here’s to even more delicious experiments!
CODY: Today’s episode is sponsored by KiwiCo.
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This next story is about a species that dominated their ecosystem. This species formed tight-knit communities connected by “wires” they used for chatting, dating, and ordering food. Sound familiar? Well I’m not talking about humans connected by the internet. I’m talking about rangeomorphs [RANGE-oh-morfs] — fern-shaped animals that colonized the sea floor half a billion years ago. These early organisms were connected by a network of filaments that was surprisingly similar to the internet.
This was near the end of the Ediacaran [EE-dee-ACK-uh-rin] period, when the microscopic, single-celled organisms that once dominated the planet began to give way to larger, more complex animals. “Complex” is a relative term, though. Rangeomorphs were some of the earliest animals on the planet, but they didn’t have mouths or internal organs. Their fern-shaped bodies grew to around two meters long — so, just a little taller than I am. They grew up on shallow sea beds and stayed there. After all, they had no way to move, because they had no muscles or bones.
That’s puzzling to paleontologists, since despite all these disadvantages, rangeomorphs were pretty successful as a species. They’re super common in the fossil record, and seemed to have colonized huge areas of the sea floor. It seemed unlikely that they’d dominate the landscape by just absorbing nutrients from seawater. That’s why it was such a breakthrough to discover that whole populations of them were interconnected by fibrous filaments, some up to four meters (or 13 feet) long. Researchers found these connections in seven different species of rangeomorphs, and they probably served a range of purposes.
Researchers think that they were mostly used for reproduction by cloning, in the same way many modern fungi reproduce. But since the filaments seem to connect many individuals of similar sizes, researchers think they also had other purposes, like distributing nutrients and communicating with one another.
This fundamentally changes how paleontologists have to think about these early animals. The fact that they may have had a relatively complex communications network will force researchers to re-examine what they know these animals — especially how they competed for space and food. Discoveries like this teach us that even the simplest animals can still be full of surprises, even after 500 million years.
CODY: Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Grant Currin, and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!