Learn about whether there’s such a thing as “single A” batteries; 5 surprising ways volunteering improves your physical health; and how duckbill dinosaurs may have crossed an ocean to reach Africa.
Learn about whether there’s such a thing as “single A” batteries; 5 surprising ways volunteering improves your physical health; and how duckbill dinosaurs may have crossed an ocean to reach Africa.
Single-A batteries? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Julien and his son Phelix)
5 Surprising Ways Volunteering Improves Your Physical Health by Joanie Faletto
These duckbill dinos may have crossed an ocean to reach Africa by author Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/do-single-a-batteries-exist
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about five surprising ways volunteering improves your physical health and how duck-billed dinosaurs may have crossed an ocean to reach Africa. But first, we'll answer a listener question about A batteries.
CODY GOUGH: What satisfies some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Julian and his son Felix. Julian writes, "My son just asked me if there's such a thing as a single A battery. For that matter, where did we get all these battery names and how many are there? The short answer Julian and Felix, we got them from everywhere. And there are so, so many. The long answer may break your brain.
So in the early 20th century, battery technology was changing fast. New materials, new sizes, new voltages, new uses. People soon realized that it would be a good idea to start standardizing things. In 1928, the organization that would become the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI formed a committee of industry and government representatives to lay out battery standards that included a simple, easy-to-remember naming convention based on the letters of the alphabet.
So A was the smallest battery, B was a little bigger, C was a little bigger than that, and on and on up through J. Seems simple enough, right? Except that battery technology isn't simple. It kept on changing and people kept on revising those standards. Not only in the United States, but in governments and companies all over the world. Mostly, without consulting one another.
And electronics kept getting smaller. So batteries kept getting smaller too. In 1947, the AA battery was introduced. In 1959, we got the AAA battery. In the 1990s, we even got a AAAA battery. This couldn't last. So by 1999, ANSI had completely revised their naming system. ANSI now calls the AA battery the ANSI 15. But that's just ANSI. In the meantime, other organizations had come up with their own completely different names.
So today, the AA battery has several dozen different names. The MN1500, EN91, PC1501, and on, and on, and on. In the United States, customers know it as the AA, so manufacturers label it that way. But they don't have to. In fact, manufacturers can totally use their own proprietary names for batteries. That means that if a camera says it requires EL123A, it's technically suggesting a brand name. And you could swap it out with a CR123A instead if you knew enough about batteries, which I definitely do not.
So what happened to the A battery, well, it's still hanging on and being combined in those big portable batteries you put in lanterns. But you can't buy it on its own anymore. And someday in the future, I'm sure the trustee AA will face the same fate. Thanks for your question, Julian and Felix. If you have a question, send it in to curiosity@discovery.com or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
CODY GOUGH: When you volunteer for a worthy course, you probably don't do it for personal gain. But it turns out that you may gain from it anyway. And that's because volunteering doesn't just give others a boost, it can give your health a boost too. I'm going to give you five surprising facts to prove it and it's just in time for the giving season. Number 1, volunteering can lower the health effects of stress. Two, national studies published in 2013 found that helping others can ease the impact that everyday stress has on your physical health.
Number two, it can reduce the risk of drug abuse. In 2015, the Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior published a literature review showing that young people who volunteer tend to steer clear of alcohol and drugs along with other quote unquote, "problem behaviors" like delinquency and dropping out of school.
Number three, it can lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. Volunteering is a great way to get out of the house and step away from the screens for a bit. As a result, it could aid in weight loss and lower your cholesterol. A 2013 study showed that 10th graders who volunteered in an after-school program lost more weight and had improved cholesterol profiles compared to their non-volunteering peers. I know there aren't as many chances to be around people these days, but volunteering like picking up litter on a trail. That's away from people.
Anyway, number 4, volunteering can lower your risk of death. All those health boosts add up as you get older. In 2013, a study in the Journal psychology and aging showed that volunteering reduced mortality risk in older adults by a quarter, even when researchers accounted for how healthy they were before the study began.
And number 5, it can release happy hormones. Never heard of a helpers high? Many studies show that volunteers have lower rates of depression, higher levels of self esteem, and greater functional ability than those who don't volunteer. In fact, one 2005 study showed that volunteers who gave social support experienced greater benefits than the people receiving their support.
So what's going on? Well, in the simplest form, when we give to others without expecting anything in return, our brains release dopamine and serotonin and other hormones that make us feel warm and tingly inside. As long as your volunteering efforts align with a cause that's personally important to you, there don't seem to be any cons to lending a hand. And considering the year we've had, there are a whole lot of causes that can use all the help they can get.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you remember back in May, we told you about prehistoric monkeys that crossed an entire ocean to get from one continent to the other. Well, a new discovery suggests that at least one dinosaur did something similar. This dino belonged to the hadrosaurus family who are known for their distinctive duck like bells. Think ducky in the land before time.
These were plant-eating dinosaurs that lived in the Cretaceous period, between 145 million and 66 million years ago. The continents have drifted a lot in our planet's history. North America, Europe, and Asia used to be a single continent called Laurasia. And the rest of the continents were joined in a supercontinent called Gondwana.
But by the Late Cretaceous, the map was starting to look the way it does now. Australia and Antarctica had already drifted toward the bottom of the globe and the Americas were just about in their place. The biggest difference was that there were shallow seas covering a lot of places that are now land.
Oceans split North America down the middle, Southern Europe and parts of the Middle East were under water, and Africa was one giant island. Duck-billed dinosaurs first evolved in North America and eventually spread to South America and Eurasia. So scientists were stunned to find a fossil from this family in Africa, Morocco, specifically.
Remember, Africa was an island at the time. One researcher said it was like finding a kangaroo in Scotland. So how did it get there? Well, the researchers say there's no way the dino simply walked. Africa was completely surrounded by deep ocean and there's no evidence that there were land bridges.
The alternative seems improbable but not impossible. This dino had to have made the several kilometer journey by sea. The new dinosaur's name honors this conclusion. Ajnabia odysseus, from the Arabic word for foreigner and the name of the seafaring Greek hero. This may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. Hadrosaurus were known to live around aquatic environments. And this one had a large tail and powerful legs, so it could have been a good swimmer.
But another possibility is that it drifted across the ocean on debris. Modern iguanas and tortoises have been known to do that and scientists believe that theory explains the migration of other species like lemurs to Madagascar and, like I mentioned, monkeys to South America. But whatever it was, this dinosaur's journey serves as a reminder from Mother Nature. Always expect the unexpected.
CODY GOUGH: Before we recap what we learned today, we have a quick programming note.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. We're going on vacation. So we're going to enjoy the holidays.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Just as I took several months off, look, I need a little bit to get back in the swing of things. So Ashley and I are working on production of our 2021 episodes. So we will hit the ground running. All brand new episodes starting January 1. Just like you've always expected, five days a week. But yeah. Between this Monday and December 31, we're bringing you back by popular demand, your favorite stories from 2020.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's right. And just as a personal note, I feel like I need two weeks of vacation after helming the ship for three months while Cody raised a tiny human. So Cody might be getting extra vacation but I am getting all the vacation I absolutely need.
CODY GOUGH: You deserve it. And since this is our last new episode of the year, I have to make it abundantly clear to everyone. That Ashley is the best coworker ever. You did such an incredible, extraordinary job of making sure I wasn't buried with work when I got back. It was such a smooth transition. I am so thankful and grateful for that. So it's been awesome and I'm pumped to be back and doing episodes and it's really fun. And we're going to do some awesome stuff in 2021.
ASHLEY HAMER: We are. I am so happy you're back. For more reasons than one. But you are a great co-worker and it's wonderful to have you back.
CODY GOUGH: I very much appreciate that. So do we want a sneak peek of what people will hear next week?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, yeah. So I will give you a sneak peek of what you'll hear in your favorite episodes from 2020, including the history of last names, why so many outbreaks like the coronavirus come from bats, how speed listening affects your emotions, and how pi was almost legally changed to 3.2.
CODY GOUGH: Can't wait. Now, let's recap what we learned today, starting with the fact that the only thing more frustrating than getting a toy as a gift that says batteries not included is trying to understand how the heck batteries have evolved and how they got their names. It turns out that batteries have a tumultuous history of being standardized and then not being standardized then now some are being phased out.
So yes, there is a single A battery but it's going the way of the dodo or the duck-billed dinosaur. And to be clear I mean, extinct, not swimming to Africa.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you think that USB cables changing is frustrating and confusing, I mean, batteries are on a whole other level. They've been doing this for decades longer. And they know how to frustrate.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. It's brutal. The worst is the tiny disk shaped ones.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: Because at least with a AA or AAA or C or D battery, if you eyeball it and you're at the store, you're like, oh, I need one of those batteries. I roughly know the size. But if you're talking about one of those disk ones, there are like way so many of those. Like I've looked and I know I need some, but unless I look at, specifically, which one it is, there is a close to 0% chance I'm going to get the right one.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, fun fact, I did learn that the numbers of those like CR2032 or whatever, the 32 is 3.2 millimeters, I believe. So it all corresponds to how big the battery is. But of course, it's a tiny difference between the different batteries. And yes, I learned that the hard way recently. I had to get those little disk batteries for my meat thermometer, my thermal pen. Ding. Thermal pens are the best.
CODY GOUGH: Well, what was the ding?
ASHLEY HAMER: It was a product placement.
CODY GOUGH: Oh.
ASHLEY HAMER: I did a product placement. Nobody's paying me for this but I just think if you want to get someone a Christmas gift, that's like-- and they're a cook, that's an amazing Christmas gift. I got it as a Christmas gift. Thermal pen. TM. But no. I went to the store and I was like, I just need those disk batteries. Oh, here are some. And it turned out to be the wrong ones because there are more than one type.
CODY GOUGH: Womp, womp.
ASHLEY HAMER: Anyway, we also learned that volunteering does more than just help the folks receiving help. It helps you too. Those who volunteer experience health benefits like reduced health effects of stress, greater weight loss, lower chances of chemical dependency, and ultimately, a lower chance of death. So volunteering really is a win-win situation.
CODY GOUGH: And we also learned that duck billed dinos somehow got to Africa during the Late Cretaceous by crossing a large body of water. That's because at the time, Africa was one giant island surrounded by a deep ocean. As for how they did it, well, they could have potentially swam or drifted on rafts of debris like scientists think some monkeys did to get to the Americas from Africa thousands of years ago.
ASHLEY HAMER: Maybe it was a prehistoric boogie board. Just get down on their bellies and paddle with their little arms. I like that idea.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. You would. Today's this story were written by Ashley Hamer, Steffi Drucker, and [INAUDIBLE] and edited by Ashley Hamer who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan, Sonia [? Hodgson ?] and Cody Gough. Today's episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY GOUGH: Charge your phone's battery. Have a great weekend and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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