Learn about how your body type affects the way you should exercise; the New England Vampire Panic; what our constellations would look like if we saw them from Mars; and the benefits of writing a better, non-vertical list to organize your thoughts. 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: Should You Exercise According to Your Body Type? — https://curiosity.im/2D5EnKu After the Salem Witch Trials, There Was the New England Vampire Panic — https://curiosity.im/2D5Nv1V To Write a Better List, Don't Write It Vertically — https://curiosity.im/2D6lzep Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey 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!
Learn about how your body type affects the way you should exercise; the New England Vampire Panic; what our constellations would look like if we saw them from Mars; and the benefits of writing a better, non-vertical list to organize your thoughts.
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:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
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/exercising-for-different-body-types-new-england-vampire-panic-non-vertical-list-benefits-and-constellations-on-mars
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got the latest and greatest 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 learn about whether your body type affects the way you should exercise, the New England vampire panic, and how to write a better list to organize your thoughts. We'll also answer a listener question about what our constellations would look like if we saw them from Mars.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you've ever fallen down the internet rabbit hole of fitness tips, you've probably heard of the three body types or somatotypes. You might have read that one routine might work for an ectomorph but you should try a different routine if you're an endomorph. But science says, when it comes to exercise, your body type might not really matter.
CODY GOUGH: This story is my fault.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is. And I love that because we were talking about fitness, we weren't talking about work at all, and you were just like, oh, yeah. You know. Because I'm an ectomorph, so I'm doing this workout for ectomorphs. And I was like, really.
CODY GOUGH: And then you yelled at me.
ASHLEY HAMER: I didn't yell at you.
CODY GOUGH: You chastised me, you threw things. Cody, that's not science.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, actually, I didn't know. I wasn't sure but it sounded like personality types to me. It sounded like-- it sounded too good to be true.
CODY GOUGH: And was it?
ASHLEY HAMER: I think it was.
CODY GOUGH: You should find out. I'm glad you did this. This satisfied my curiosity and, hopefully, it will satisfy many other people's curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: The three human body types we're talking about came from a psychologist and doctor named William Herbert Sheldon in the 1940s. This is a wild story. He analyzed a bunch of nude photos of male college students to come up with three body types. Guess where he got 4,000 nude photos of college students. It turns out that back in the day, incoming freshmen to Ivy League schools had to pose for posture photos because the images were believed to divine something about their health and intellect.
CODY GOUGH: So academic institutions had incoming students give them nude photos because that would tell them something about how smart they were.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: That's insane.
ASHLEY HAMER: History is weird, man. Anyway, Sheldon took this data and came up with the three body types you've, probably, heard of. Endomorphs are rounded and soft and predisposed to storing fat. Mesomorphs are square and muscular and predisposed to building muscle but not storing fat. And ectomorphs are thin and fine-boned and are not predisposed to storing fat or building muscle.
CODY GOUGH: That's me, supposedly.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, Sheldon also came up with psychological traits for these body types. But they've all been discredited so we won't even get into that. There's a big problem with the three body types though. Even from a physical standpoint, they're just a description of a person's body at one point in time. And bodies change.
An ectomorph can start lifting weights and become a mesomorph. An endomorph can kick their exercise regimen into high gear and become an ectomorph. And studies bear this out. When researchers put untrained men on a weightlifting program, the people who started with the least muscle at the beginning had the biggest gains at the end of 12 weeks.
Another study we talked about last month showed that after enough training, even identical twins end up with different bodies and even different muscle fibers. Now, you should still tailor your workouts. If you're trying to lose a lot of fat, then you should cut your calories and do high-intensity interval training instead of a high-calorie, low-cardio program. But the moral of the story is that good fitness advice is good fitness advice regardless of your so-called somatotype.
CODY GOUGH: Around Halloween, a lot of people think about the Salem witch trials. Now, what about the New England vampire panic? That's a thing that happened in the 1800s and it involved a whole lot of grave digging. We will tell a tragic story of one family to illustrate how this all came about. And it centers around the Brown family and the late 1800s.
They all fell prey to tuberculosis, which was often called consumption in those days. It's a wasting disease that could take years to kill its victims. George Brown's wife and granddaughter both died of the disease in the early 1880s and his daughter, Mercy Lena Brown died from it a decade later in 1892.
At that time, George's son Edwin had been trying to recover from the disease for years. After all that bad luck, George was desperate for a way to cure his family's misfortune. He'd already lost a bunch of family members and he wanted to save Edwin. His neighbors convinced him that there might be something supernatural leaching their strength. This was centuries after the Salem witch trials, but that didn't stop a group of New Englanders from searching for monsters in the area.
So on March 17, 1892, a group of local men dug up three deceased members of the Brown family. They were searching for signs that one of them was rising from their graves. And Mercy Lena Brown who had been buried only a few months ago in the cold New England weather, was almost perfectly preserved.
And the village doctor explained that the body was preserved thanks to weather conditions and she clearly had symptoms of tuberculosis. But the people of Exeter, Rhode Island did not care. They removed her heart and liver, burnt her hearts to ashes, and fed those ashes to her brother Edwin. Tragically, Edwin died less than two months later.
This family's sad story all took place after Dr. Robert Koch figured out the causes of tuberculosis in 1882. And before that, supernatural explanations for the disease were even more common. The silver lining of this ghost story is that most of the victims of this persecution had probably already passed away before the crowds rose up against them. A bit less violent than the Salem witch trials, but haunting nonetheless.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Jane from Charlotte, North Carolina who asks, "What would our night sky constellations look like from Mars? Will new constellation names get to be chosen from Mars's night sky view? If so, who would get to pick those names? Great question, Jane.
Jane asks, because the constellations aren't actual structures in the night sky, they're illusions that come from the way stars look from our vantage point. The stars in any given constellation vary in their distance from us. Just like how a painting wouldn't look the same if the artist viewed their subject from a different angle, constellations like Orion and the Big Dipper would look totally different if you viewed them from a star system light years away.
Now, is Mars far enough away to change what the constellations look like? Unfortunately, for would be constellation namers, the answer is no. What is different about the night sky on Mars is the paths that the constellations take. Polaris is known as the North Star on Earth because it's closest to our planet's North celestial pole.
In contrast, Mars's North celestial pole points to an empty patch of sky between the constellations Cygnus and Cepheus. Same goes for the South Star. There's no such thing on Earth but there isn't on Mars either. Anyway, the real question is, what's your Martian star sign? Thanks for your question, Jane. If you have a question, send it in to podcast@curiositydotcom and we might answer it on a future show.
CODY GOUGH: I'm already an Aries which I think is associated with Mars. So what would happen to me on the red planet?
ASHLEY HAMER: Exactly the same thing that would happen to you on Earth. Nothing. Because it's all made up.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: It's always a good idea to write stuff down but are you doing it the right way or the wrong way? You might want to rethink the way you write down your notes, lists, and reminders and this is definitely an idea worth writing down.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm so bad at writing a to-do list.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: I need to do it more.
CODY GOUGH: I feel you. Well, writing things down by hand can do a lot of good outside of even lists. According to Psychiatrist Victoria L Dunckley, writing stuff down by hand not only improves your memory, but it can also improve reading comprehension, language skills, information retention, hand-eye coordination, and critical thinking skills, especially if you're young. But how you write things down is probably not something you've thought about very much, especially when it comes to lists.
Now, when you write a list, you probably just write down the first thing then go to the next line and then keep doing that until you have a vertical list. But that's a neat, tidy ordered sequence, and that's not really how your brain naturally works. Not to mention that when you write a vertical list, you're automatically making the top items seem most important when that may not be the case. And that brings us to the round-robin petition. That's a document that's signed in a circle so there's no hierarchy.
The idea was first documented in 17th century France and it let government officials sign a petition without giving away the ringleader of the document. You can use this idea for your own to-do lists. Don't start at the upper left corner on a piece of paper like you do with the vertical lists. Instead, start at the center of the page and jot down your tasks in spatial relation to each other.
That way, all of your chores will sit within one-themed cloud of to-dos and they won't bleed over into your errand running items. Try experimenting with other formats too. If you're working on a list of party invitations, try a Venn diagram, for example. You can use that to anticipate how people interact with each other and then you can adjust your list accordingly.
That would have been very good to when I was working on the seating chart for my wedding reception, by the way. Microsoft Excel is a great program but yeah, probably not quite as efficient. Anyway, go sharpen your pencils and get to listing. Before we wrap up, we want to give a special shout out to one of our patrons for supporting our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Dr. Mary Yancey who gets an executive producer credit today for her generous support on Patreon. Thank you so much.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you're listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily, then visit Patreon.com/curiositydotcom all spelled out. Our patrons get to hang out with Cody and me on our Discord server all day and talk about science and fitness.
CODY GOUGH: And video games.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. And share cool pictures of what everyone's up to. And lots of other cool stuff. We're also producing extra episodes exclusively for our patrons.
CODY GOUGH: And rest assured, we do not plan to scale back on the free podcasts we give you almost every day. We're just doing some extra stuff to show our appreciation for our patrons. One more time, you can join our awesome patrons at Patreon.com/curiositydotcom.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning 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.
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