In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: NEAT Is How Your Body Burns Calories Without Exercise A 15-Year-Old Girl Heard Amelia Earhart's Last Transmission This Is The Odd Writing Technique Used by David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and Bob Dylan If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please considersupporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! 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!
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
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!
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/burning-calories-without-exercise-amelia-earharts-last-words-and-bob-dylan-and-david-bowies-writing-technique
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiositydotcom 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 writing technique used by David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and Bob Dylan, how you can burn calories while you're not exercising, and how dozens of people around the world heard Amelia Earhart's last transmission.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: You know what's fun? Burning calories. You know what's even more fun? Burning calories when you're not even exercising. Your body already does this. And today, we'll teach you how to do it more effectively. Cody, have you heard about this?
CODY GOUGH: My brother is a bodybuilder and I feel like he's said before, the cool thing about lifting is that if you do enough work, then later when you're just sitting on the couch, you're still burning calories.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It's called the after-burn effect. We have an article about it.
CODY GOUGH: But that's different than this.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's similar. It's related.
CODY GOUGH: OK. Got it. Well, I'm glad you're about to explain it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes. We're going to help you understand how to burn calories without exercise using what's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT. It's pretty neat.
CODY GOUGH: I see what you did there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yup. First, you have to understand how calories work. Your body runs on calories, which are just units of energy you get from food. At the most basic level, your weight depends on the balance between how many calories you take in and how many calories you use up. Take in more than you burn and you gain weight, but take in fewer than you burn and you lose weight. Take in the same amount as you burn, and your weight stays the same.
But your body burns calories in a few different ways. Your basal metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate is how many calories your body uses up just to keep you alive. That's about 60% of your total energy expenditure. Though it varies based on your size and muscle mass. Then, there's the thermic effect of food, which is how much energy you use to digest the food you eat. You actually burn about 10% to 15% of your daily calories by consuming calories.
There's also exercise related-activity thermogenesis, which is the energy you use for exercise like lifting or running or playing sports.
CODY GOUGH: Isn't that also known as exercise?
ASHLEY HAMER: It's also known as exercise.
CODY GOUGH: That's a little simpler.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's actually a pretty small part of your daily energy use, though, which is why diet is way more important than exercise for losing weight. And finally, there's non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT. That's the energy you use on day-to-day activities like bringing in groceries or talking on the phone or even fidgeting in your chair. This uses up 15% to 50% of your total calories depending on how active you are.
It makes up the largest portion of your activity-related energy expenditure by far. So if you want to burn more calories, then NEAT has the biggest potential impact. You can read up on every method for burning more calories in our full write up today on curiositydotcom and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS.
But a great place to start is just by moving more. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Take walk breaks during the day. Move around by cleaning your place. Even chewing gum, fidgeting, and typing can boost your energy expenditure. Even minor changes could double or even triple the calories you would have burned otherwise. Don't underestimate the power of movement.
CODY GOUGH: All right, Ashley. Have you seen the Star Trek-- Voyager episode where they explain what happened to Amelia Earhart?
ASHLEY HAMER: No, Cody. I haven't seen the Star Trek-- Voyager episode that did that.
CODY GOUGH: It's so good. I won't spoil it for you, because I know you're going to go look at it, right? And we going to watch it right after this, yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely. Right away. Can we pause so I can go do that?
CODY GOUGH: I won't spoil it for you, but it is on Netflix right now. But Voyager finds Earhart and her Navigator Fred Noonan safe and sound in the Delta Quadrant in the year 2371. I bring this up for an actual reason, because the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart has captivated historians, airplane enthusiasts, and science fiction writers imaginations' for decades.
But we tend to overlook some interesting facts about what did happen when she disappeared in 1937. So today we've got a story straight out of the history books. The setting is Saint Petersburg, Florida in the summer of 1937, 15-year-old Betty Klink was sitting in front of her family's radio. Her dad had set up a 60-foot long wire antenna that ran across the backyard to a pole outside the house.
It was strong enough to capture transmissions from a much farther than a radio normally could. Well, young Betty described herself as crazy about airplanes and on that afternoon in July, she heard a voice come over the radio saying, "This is Amelia Earhart, this is Amelia Earhart." Betty transcribed everything she could make out from the message for about three hours. She heard that the plane was angling for Howland Island that Earhart had sustained a mild injury and that her navigator was more badly hurt and that the plane was quickly taking on water.
Betty also caught snippets like, waters high, waters knee deep, let me out. And are you here? But even after her dad got home and contacted the Coast guard, nobody was interested in Betty's notes. She wasn't taken seriously until 1970 when her next door neighbor contacted The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or TIGER.
To date, TIGER has collected about 57 accounts of the final the words of Earhart and Noonan. That's 57 people who heard their last words. Kind of chilling but then, again, so is the plane's mysterious disappearance, isn't it?
ASHLEY HAMER: What do David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and Bob Dylan have in common? At some point in time, they actually use the same method for writing some of their best loved lyrics. It's pretty simple and you can do it too. Cody, do you use the same approach for writing every time you do it?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Whether I'm writing just creatively for fun or writing articles for curiositydotcom, either way, I pretty much sit in front of a laptop or a computer and start writing. So--
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I need to add some variety of things to maybe spice things up. How about you?
ASHLEY HAMER: When I write things that are purely creative, I actually do like to write with a pen and paper. It's--
CODY GOUGH: Whoa.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Like in a notebook. Sometimes, I do morning pages, which we have an article about where you just write a stream of consciousness for three pages every morning, I don't keep up with it very well. But that's really good to do on paper. And I think because of that, I keep using that method when I write creatively.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Old school.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: For those younger listeners, a notebook is when pages are bound together-- just kidding. I mean, I'm not kidding about what a notebook is but--
ASHLEY HAMER: Sure. Well, if you're looking to switch up your writing game, then try the cut up technique. First, you put words on a page. You can do it as if you're writing lyrics or a poem or you could just go for prose instead. Then you get out the scissors, and you literally cut up everything you've just written. Be merciless. Maybe you'll pull it apart line by line or maybe you zero in on a few choice words and phrases.
But either way, the final step is to start putting it back together again. When Radiohead was working on the song Kid A, Thom Yorke wrote his lyrics by pulling them line by line out of a hat. And you can actually watch David Bowie do it in the 1975 documentary, Cracked Actor. You can find a link to a clip from that documentary in our full writeup. But none of the people we've mentioned actually invented the cut up technique.
Its roots come from the Dadaist art movement which championed absurdity. The method is often attributed to Romanian-French Poet Tristan Tzara who described it almost to a T in his piece, How to Make a Dadaist Poem. Writer William S. Burroughs eventually started using it, his friend Bob Dylan gave it a shot, and the rest is history.
CODY GOUGH: Makes you wonder who didn't make the cut. That's all for today, but Curiosity has big plans for this weekend. What can you learn about this weekend, Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: This weekend, you'll learn about why extreme temperatures mess with your batteries, extremely weird animals that lived before dinosaurs were around, a trick for how to negotiate better, the science behind whether we all see the same colors, why you should stop using hydrogen peroxide, and more.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again Sunday for the Curiosity Daily to get smarter in just a few minutes and to hear from some special guests.
ASHLEY HAMER: If there's something you're curious about, then email us your question at podcast@curiositydotcom. And we might answer it on a future episode.
CODY GOUGH: Thanks for listening. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Have a great weekend and stay curious.
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