Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes: Is It Safe to Eat Food That Has Freezer Burn? Quetzalcoatlus Was a Flying Reptile the Size of a Giraffe Scientists Found a Technique That Can Help You Learn Skills Twice as Fast Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/freezer-burn-science-a-giant-flying-reptile-and-how-to-learn-twice-as-fast
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi, I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.
CODY GOUGH: Today, you'll learn about whether it's safe to eat food with freezer burn. You'll learn about a flying reptile the size of a giraffe. And a technique that can help you learn skills twice as fast.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity. So, have you ever opened your freezer and reached for some ice cream, and just seen it surrounded by ice?
CODY GOUGH: Yes. It is gross, and I don't want to eat it.
ASHLEY HAMER: And it's depressing. You wanted ice cream. What is this mess? Well, Curiosity researched how freezer burn works. And we found out that it's actually safe to eat freezer burn food even if it's maybe not that appetizing. So what happens is the water inside your frozen food actually comes out. Like when you're boiling water and water escapes in the form of steam, water inside frozen food sublimates. The water escapes and it dehydrates the food that's been staying in your freezer.
So what's happened in your freezer is the water inside the meat, or the ice cream, or the veggies, or whatever, has actually been drawn out into the air, and then turned back into solid ice crystals on its surface, which is why if you've ever-- I don't know, Cody-- if you've ever put a tray of ice cubes in the freezer and then haven't looked at them for months, and you go back and they're smaller, that's because they're sublimating. That ice is actually coming out into the air and sticking to other things in your freezer.
CODY GOUGH: Weird.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. That's what's happening to the food too. But instead of it just getting smaller, it gets all dried out and gross.
CODY GOUGH: So with a steak let's say some of the water inside comes out. But it doesn't evaporate. It turns into a crystal form?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, it just turns into ice on the outside instead of nice moisture on the inside.
CODY GOUGH: It's like an opposite evaporation?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: It's really weird.
ASHLEY HAMER: So this causes it to get discolored because it's oxidized by the surrounding air. So it changes color, like an apple browns when you cut it. That doesn't mean it's spoiled. It's just not really that tasty. And we all know that it has a certain flavor to it that's not that appetizing.
If you want to prevent that from happening, keep your food wrapped up really, really tight. This is where vacuum sealers really come in handy, or even mason jars because if the water and the food doesn't contact the dryer around it, it can't sublimate, and your food will stay fresher for longer.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: All right, well, I have something completely different. Have you ever heard of Quetzalcoatlus?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, I have. It's amazing.
CODY GOUGH: All right, well, curiosity has the pulse on the dinosaur world. And we just had to tell you about this underrated pterosaur. Its name comes from the Mesoamerican feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, which you've probably heard of. It's also the Aztec god of wind, air, and learning.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait. Oh, wow. Wind, air, and learning.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's great.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Also, the name of a guardian forest in the Final Fantasy VIII. But we won't go there. But Quetzalcoatlus late during the Cretaceous era, in the waning years of the dinosaurs reign over the planet, a giant reptile soared through the sky with a wingspan as long as a city bus.
This was Quetzalcoatlus, which was as tall as a giraffe and could walk on its four legs standing about 10 feet at the shoulder with a long, stiff neck with a 10-foot skull. It might have weighed as much as 550 pounds. And it was a giant lizard that could fly.
ASHLEY HAMER: It has a huge beak. It's so weird-looking. You have to see this thing.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I would strongly recommend visiting curiosity.com to see it. But some paleontologists think Quetzalcoatlus was just too heavy to get off the ground. That's not a very fun theory. So I subscribe to other estimates that put the creature as low as 154 pounds, which means that maybe it could have flown. They survived for more than 130 million years. So they must have done something right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Check out curiosity.com and you can see what scientists think this thing might've looked like.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's really worth it. It looks wild.
CODY GOUGH: What else are we talking about today?
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, what's your best method at learning something super quickly?
CODY GOUGH: Practice makes perfect?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, that's generally the rule. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University did that rule one better, especially for motor skills. Here's the secret. Practice different versions of the motor skill you're trying to master instead of just doing the same thing over and over again, like practice makes perfect.
The lead researcher said, quote, "If you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row." You and I are both musicians, right? We both did the music school thing--
CODY GOUGH: Sure.
ASHLEY HAMER: --where you just spend lots of time in a practice room--
CODY GOUGH: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: --trying to play the same thing over and over.
CODY GOUGH: So many hours.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, we both probably know what this is like. You can't just practice a scale over, and over, and over and expect for it to be perfect because there are always one or two notes that your fingers can't really hit.
And so instead, you practice different orders of the scale. You start at different notes and go from there, and practice it in a bunch of different ways, attack it from a bunch of different angles. And then your fingers figure it out. And that's really the key.
CODY GOUGH: Athletes will do it by, maybe, if you're a swimmer, you'll practice stroking with just your arms or practice stroking with just your legs. And then when you put it all together, your brain is synthesizing it differently.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right, exactly. And the same thing with team sports. This is why people do drills and stuff like that instead of just playing a game every time they meet. The researchers call this reconsolidation. So consolidation is a sort of enhancement that happens after your brain has encoded a memory, but before that memory is recalled. You've already remembered it. But you haven't actually called it back up into your memory.
Reconsolidation happens when that consolidated memory is retrieved and goes through the same steps again. So it's consolidated again. But this time, it's modified with new information. So that's what happens when you modify that motor skill. When you do it a different way, when you start the scale from a different note, when you do a dribbling drill instead of a full-on game, you're reconsolidating the things you've learned in different ways.
The researchers think that is what strengthens motor skills. The important thing is make the alterations subtle. So don't do something wildly different. Just make a small tweak to the action you're trying to learn. Then make another small tweak and another small tweak until you've improved.
CODY GOUGH: That's cool. And it introduces variety. So it's less boring.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: And you can read more about all of the stories we talked about and so much more today on curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for The Curiosity Digest and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
On the Westwood One Podcast Network.