Today you’ll learn about how fruit flies are inspiring new forms of gameplay in basketball, how IQ levels are falling around the country, and a potential solution to difficult-to-recycle plastics!
Today you’ll learn about how fruit flies are inspiring new forms of gameplay in basketball, how IQ levels are falling around the country, and a potential solution to difficult-to-recycle plastics!
Basketball Positions
Self-Healing Plastic
IQ Decline
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/basketball-positions-self-healing-plastic-iq-decline
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about how fruit flies are inspiring new forms of gameplay in basketball,
how IQ levels are falling around the country, and a potential solution to difficult-to-recycle hard plastics!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: All right, Nate, I know you're a big sports guy, but actually, if you want to figure out how to play the best moves in basketball, then you should probably pay attention to those renowned little titans of sport. The fruit flies.
NATE: Am I missing? Is that a new NBA team? That I don't know. That's a terrible name, frankly, for a team does not inspire fear.
CALLI: Nope. I am actually talking about Drosophila Melanogaster. That is the common fruit fly. A new study dropped that says it's figured out the best way to place every player on a basketball court. And incidentally, it comes from an older physics theory about how fruit flies and molecules are going to move around at any given time.
NATE: Okay, Hold on a sec. What does this have to do with basketball? Like, we're not telling fruit flies where to go or telling molecules how to move, right?
CALLI: No, but the mathematical models used in the study come from methods created by a man named Professor Tomás Arias from the Department of Physics at Cornell University. The way Arias’ research works is it combines a number of mathematical models together for something called density, functional fluctuation theory, or DFFT for short. The original DFS study used fruit flies to measure how a crowd's mood evolves in any given environment. Using the theory, you can study everything from how segregation or migration works amongst any given population to the social behavior of any group of people like those on a basketball court. Do you do you see where I'm going with this?
NATE: Yeah. Okay. That does make a lot more sense. Now, this is actually pretty interesting and it kind of reminds me of that movie Moneyball, which was based on a real story about a baseball manager who used his own math models to put a team together. But how does this work in the specific context of basketball, though?
CALLI: Well, a doctoral student named Boris Barron that worked on this with Professor Arias was having a conversation with a man named Nathan Sitaraman in one day. Nathan is a consultant for the NBA that analyzes data from games and basketball seasons to figure out more efficient play methods, whether it's a starting lineup or a certain formation on the basketball court. Nathan figures out what's best for his team through math alone. So Boris had this lightbulb moment too, after the talk. What if we combine Nathan's method with Professor Arias ideas? So he got to work, adapted the DFF theory into one that would be friendly for team sports and created a very effective model for how to put a team together.
NATE: What does very effective mean? Like, how effective is this model?
CALLI: It is 3% more effective than anything else we know about.
NATE: It's a bit smaller of a number than I was expecting. Doesn't sound like that much.
CALLI: Okay. But here's the thing. Think. Don't think about it in 3%. Think about it instead. Like three shots out of 100. If you get three additional shots or three point shots or anything like that in any game, that can be the difference between victory and defeat. Plus, Barron's model does a lot more than just improve somebody's offensive abilities. It can predict where someone from the opposing team might go next. It can figure out which positions are optimal or not. It can even calculate how probable a team's victory is based on player position alone and create simulations for how your opponents might respond after a certain move. Like, say, if your star player wants to run in for a dunk. That model will tell you what the other team will do defensively.
NATE: Okay. I got to say, it's pretty cool that this is even just a little bit more successful than anything else. Why do you think that DFFT works so well in the context of basketball?
CALLI: All right. It's a little cliche, but it's because there's no I in team. Put another way. Basketball is a team sport. DFFT doesn't look at just one player's behavior. It looks at everyone's behavior. So even if you're getting very impressive results with one player, that's not for the player, it's for the team. What's even better is that this could work for other team sports. You can have, say, a baseball coach putting data from the opposing team into a computer, and soon he'll have a strategy printed out on how to more efficiently take down that team. Or he can run his own team's data through the model to find out which players are leading the way to victory more often than anyone else. For example, which players are the best at blocking shots? Barron says the model is quite general, which means it could actually change the game completely. That no pun intended, and maybe one day a model like this could be used to predict any number of things.
NATE: Like what?
CALLI: Think about any time any crowds get together or break apart when the environment changes. You have a group of people gathering for a bus. The bus arrives and everyone leaves. Well, how does everyone act? How do they line up or not? How do they choose their seats? On the other end of things, what about. Situations where a certain population is moving in unison from one location to another like we see in heard migration. This experiment being applied to basketball is a remarkable use of this model, but it's also a sign to me that we're not even close to done seeing the potential of something like DFFT.
NATE: And they took a fascinating premise and really dragged it out a lot.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: On a global scale. We only recycle a few percent of all plastic annually and we toss the rest out into dumps. Or, as we've talked before, the ocean, especially rigid plastics, which are super difficult to recycle. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about these plastics now, but a team of chemists from the Netherlands have a solution we call vitrimers.
CALLI: When you're talking about rigid plastics, what do you mean exactly?
NATE: So rigid plastic has been a problem for us since plastics were invented over 100 years ago. Plastics that we can easily recycle like water bottles are soft plastics. Rigid plastic is used for things like building materials, plastic window frames, tires, dashboards, laptops, anything intentionally un bendable. These kinds of plastics are cheap to produce but hard to dispose of.
CALLI: And researchers think vitrimers are the answer. Och, well, what are they.
NATE: To explain the vitamins? I need to tell you a bit more about hard plastic. Currently they're made up of molecules that have these long strands that are interlinked by connections that stay in place even during high temperatures, meaning you can't melt them. Basically, once hard plastic is formed, it can't be transformed. Vitrimers are polymer, meaning a large molecule that combines the advantages of hard and soft plastics. They were invented a while ago, but we're finding new uses for them now. And think of a vitrimer as being a lot like the links that bind a soccer net. If you kick a ball at the goal, the debt will stop it. But you can untie the net if you want. That's the fundamentals of the vitrimers to recycling them. We'll untie the plastic knots, making hard plastic easier to recycle.
CALLI: So it's a new type of hard plastic.
NATE: Exactly. Scientists have been able to make small changes in how plastic is made that could change its properties forever. And they've done so on a molecular level using these vitrimers.
CALLI: Oh, wow. Okay. So you're saying it's hard, like the hardest of plastics, but it can be broken down?
NATE: Yeah. Their process makes it so the plastic stays hard at room temperature, but it starts breaking down once it gets hotter than 302 degrees Fahrenheit or 150 degrees Celsius.
CALLI: Okay. So I can still, like have my coffee in my mug and it's not going to just melt in front of me, right?
NATE: No, you can get on that. There's a lot of hope that any products people make out of this plastic can end up recycled and therefore not end up in the environment.
CALLI: Incredible. Okay, I am super excited about this. Why don't we start to see the stuff roll out on a wider scale?
NATE: Right now it's in the prototype stage. The basic vitrimer prototype works to a certain extent, but it still needs to be tweaked to become more fully functioning.
CALLI: All right. Well, now my recycling efforts aren't going to go to waste.
NATE: The team are trying a number of different combinations for their Vitamin A recipe right now, while also trying to modify existing hard plastics to make them recyclable. Now, even if the Netherlands team isn't able to make any headway on this particular vitamin project, they say that other researchers could use their research to do things like create safe, sustainable and strong food packaging. But long story short, even if the vitrimer is just a prototype for now, it's a promising idea that could lead to even more promising ideas down the road.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: You might think that as technology and communication continues to grow, so would our IQs. But apparently that's not the case. This year is the first year that we saw the first recorded drop in IQ scores.
NATE: We've talked before about how IQ tests don't really matter because of its flawed methodology and how it can actually do more harm than good to society. But even with that, this does still seem surprising.
CALLI: Oh, totally. Especially when we consider that IQ levels have been steadily growing for a long time now. This defies a new concept I learned recently called the Flynn Effect. See, the Flynn Effect was named after an intelligence researcher in 1984 named James R Flynn and suggests that the human race is actually getting smarter with each passing generation. Or, in other words, their average IQ increases. There's a lot of research that supports this theory, too. Between 1932 and 2000, average IQ scores increased anywhere between three and five points. But over the past several years, it turns out that IQ scores have been dropping all over Europe. And now it seems to be the case in the U.S., too.
NATE: It's contagious. It's spreading.
CALLI: You figured it out.
NATE: That's pretty weird. Why now? Like, what is what's changed?
CALLI: That's the thing. It's not clear. A group of psychologists from Northwestern University and the University of Oregon wondered the same thing. So they studied the result of online IQ tests taken by adults. Specifically, the test they took was called the International Cognitive Ability Resource, or ICAR, for short. Between the years 2006 and 2018, they noticed that IQ scores dropped for everybody between the ages of 18 and 60, regardless of gender, with the biggest drop off happening for young people between 18 and 22.
NATE: All right. So this is kind of like the reverse Flynn effect. And we don't know why it's happening.
CALLI: We don't know for sure yet. But the researchers strongly believe it's a lower quality of education. Basically, whenever they judged the IQ decline on a curve, taking into account who had received a four year degree, the decline disappeared, except for the younger generation whose scores still dropped. The researchers have a few theories about this. First, they believe that a change of quality or content of education and test taking skills might explain this.
NATE: Okay, but why would they think that there's been a change in the quality?
CALLI: It could be a number of things. Younger people have seen huge changes happen in the education system over the course of their lives, including students having to learn from a constantly changing curriculum like the transition to Common Core Math, which is a guideline for learning math in 42 states. The Common Core Standards Initiative was started to establish a standard for what each grade should know in each subject at the end of the year. Something else to consider was kids having to learn how to adapt to an at home curriculum in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. No matter the reason, the study claims that spatial reasoning, which is the ability to visualize and change objects in your mind, is actually up across the board. So it's not a total wash for younger people. It's the problem solving numerical series assessments and verbal reasoning that have all gotten worse.
NATE: Okay, well, how did the researchers explain that?
CALLI: That's just it. They don't. I think the study is meant to be more of an objective presentation of the data with its conclusion, even suggesting that more research needs to be done to explain the drop. But no matter the outcome, I think it's important to remember a few things. Number one, this isn't just happening to the U.S. I mentioned earlier, it's happening across Europe with Finland seeing a two point drop off between 1997 and 2009 and France seeing a nearly four point drop between 1999 and 2009.
NATE: Yikes. That's pretty rough.
CALLI: Yeah, but number two, it's really important to remember that IQ tests are not perfect measures of intelligence due to how narrow the focus of an IQ test is. Back in 2012, a huge study of over 100,000 people came to the conclusion that most intelligence tests are fundamentally flawed because they don't take into account how complex the human intellect can be. Basically, no one human trait like IQ can explain all the variations in intelligence revealed by any tests. So is it interesting that we're seeing an IQ drop? Yeah, kind of. Is it concerning? No, probably not.
NATE: But the IQ test I took was real, right? It said I got a 300. It was just asked for.
CALLI: Did it. Did it ask for your.
NATE: Email and credit card?
CALLI: Yeah, I'm.
NATE: Just to get the results.
CALLI: Sure. It was legit.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: Wanna learn how to shoot a three-pointer, kid? Then it’s time to watch the fruit flies! A mathematical model has been developed that can accurately predict crowd behavior in many settings, and a few years after its creation, it’s been implemented in an unusual place: basketball. This model has proved successful in everything from creating a team's roster to even predicting the opposing team’s behavior - meaning this theory is a real slam dunk!
NATE: Annoyed by all that plastic you can’t recycle? A new plastic that gives us the best of both worlds is here! A team out of The Netherlands has developed a malleable plastic that’s recyclable like soft plastic and durable like hard plastic. The best part: it can be broken down in saltwater! It’s still a prototype, but the science behind this new plastic could eventually lead to new innovations in everything from cars to snack foods!
CALLI: For the first time in nearly a hundred years, IQ tests are averaging lower than ever after decades of a steady increase! Researchers aren’t sure why, but it might have to do with the worsening quality of a college education. Or, it might have to do with shifting priorities. Or: it might not matter at all, since IQ tests are widely controversial due to their flawed methodology. We can probably rest assured that people AREN’T getting dumber - even if it feels that way sometimes!