Today you’ll learn about how a groundbreaking new study explores the nature of singlehood across the globe, how a new drug might be able to treat alcohol addiction, and how scientists have created a new type of ice that has never been seen on Earth before!
Today you’ll learn about how a groundbreaking new study explores the nature of singlehood across the globe, how a new drug might be able to treat alcohol addiction, and how scientists have created a new type of ice that has never been seen on Earth before!
Global Singlehood
Anti-Drinking Pill
Moon Ice
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/global-singlehood-anti-drinking-pill-moon-ice
[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 a ground-breaking new study explores the nature of singlehood across the globe, how a new drug might be able to treat alcohol addiction, and how scientists have created a new type of ice that has never been seen on earth before!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Romance is a tough topic for those trying to find the right one to settle down with. But maybe it shouldn't be so hard to talk about because it turns out a massive amount of the population feels like they have trouble finding love.
CALLI: Okay, so are we turning into like a dating advice podcast now? All right. You have piqued my interest. I am curious, what are we talking about here?
NATE: So a team of researchers talked to over 7000 people from 14 countries in a study on poor mating performance. Now, that's a term that here is not strictly referring to sex. The researchers were more concerned about the social side of sex, so attracting and retaining intimate partners. And it turns out that poor mating performance is a very common problem.
CALLI: Ooh, that is not something you want to have as a common problem. But how common?
NATE: So nearly 25% of the participants were found to have issues holding on to a romantic partner. And that's if they can even find a romantic partner. Across most of the countries surveyed, an astonishing 40% of the participants admitted to not being able to find a romantic partner at all.
CALLI: That is actually really sad. But also those numbers are kind of astounding.
NATE: So some of this might be due to the lack of empirical data on the topic of mating performance. Until recently, most research available on mating performance was limited to Chinese and Greek points of view. So that's why a team of researchers decided to focus on the topic of singlehood across 14 nations. So we're going from Austria, Brazil, China, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the U.K. and Ukraine.
CALLI: That is quite a list. Dare I ask, how is mating performance measured?
NATE: So they talked to, like I said, over 7000, it was 7181 people over the age of 18, and they gave them a self survey form to measure mating performance on a scale from one which meant strongly disagree to five which meant strongly agree. So, for instance, they'd be given a statement like, I am very good at flirting or I am emotionally intelligent before segueing into more sexually charged questions like I am a very considerate lover, or I care mostly about self-gratification. And at the end, each participant was asked to define their relationship status as either between relationships, single, voluntarily single, involuntarily single, in a relationship, married, or other. And what the researchers found was that one third of the participants had trouble with the idea of an intimate relationship. One half said they had trouble starting relationships and 38% had trouble maintaining a relationship.
CALLI: Okay. And all of those I'm actually really interested in the the the fact that the idea of an intimate relationship was the one that so many people had trouble even imagining. Was there any more data on that?
NATE: That wasn't actually one of the study's focuses. But it's a blindspot that the researchers hope to address in future studies on the different factors associated with poor mating performance. Interestingly, they did mention that in another study they found that the amount of effort put into mating is a huge predictor of somebody being single. So, for instance, if you put a lot of effort into finding mates, you're much less likely to be single, which means that at least some of these answers can be explained culturally.
CALLI: Okay. I do feel like that makes sense, but also how?
NATE: All of the results broke down differently for each country. In Japan, nearly 60% of the participants expressed difficulty with starting an intimate relationship. But in China, only 19% of the participants had that problem. Even though 22% of the people from Brazil reported being involuntarily single, only 5% of the Polish subjects reported the same way. So you got to think anthropologically, which cultures are still taking part in arranged marriages? Which countries are more patriarchal and structure with a focus on men choosing women to be their partners? Unfortunately, the study didn't directly address these questions, but its data hints at some pretty sprawling differences between cultures that are worth considering.
CALLI: That is fascinating. So what about other factors? Like like what about age? I can't imagine that this problem persists for the elderly.
NATE: You would be correct in assuming that, at least mostly. So singlehood was far more common across each culture to be something that affects younger people. Interestingly, age didn't make a difference when it came to sex. Anybody who scored poorly on the more sexually charged questions, regardless of age, were far more likely to be single.
CALLI: So why do we think that finding love is such a global problem right now?
NATE: A lot of these results can be explained by evolution. Actually, the way our brains evolved happened in a setting where free mate choice was pretty limited. Humans came to exist during times when arranged marriages were the norm in most societies, where when your only romantic partners were the children of people your family knew. So now we have unlimited global access through social media and dating apps with ease of travel and even just the existence of more people. So our brains just aren't equipped to handle this kind of mating overload.
CALLI: Mating overload is quite the statement. All right. What are some solutions?
NATE: Start living in communities of 80 people. No more, no less.
CALLI: Done. Solved.
NATE: No, that's. That's a question the researchers hope to address in future studies. But the final suggestion they have is to just never give up. The rewards of being in a good, intimate relationship or a high for sure. But if the methods you're trying aren't working, look inward. So whatever is stopping you from meeting somebody, consider what you can do to fix that on your own and adjust your methods, which I know is easier said than done. But since the study found that mating gets easier with age, it can be assumed that if you stay patient, eventually you'll always find what you're looking for.
CALLI: And if you do, make sure that you never give them up. Make sure you never let them down.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Alcoholism is a terrifying disease, and there is a slogan out there about progress, not perfection. Now, there's actually some really good news because there's a recent discovery on a drug that can eliminate alcohol consumption urge.
NATE: That does sound like good news. Alcoholism, also known as alcohol use disorder or AUD for short, isn't like many other addictions. It's actually somewhat of a complex psychiatric disease. And AUD leads to 95,000 deaths per year in the United States. Treatment total costs about $249 billion per year, which averages out to $807 per U.S. citizen.
CALLI: And those are some pretty intense numbers. And despite the scientific community learning more and more every day about the genetic or molecular mechanisms of AUD, there haven't been too many consistent treatment methods until now. So have you ever heard of Phosphodiesterase type four inhibitors or PDE4 inhibitors for short.
NATE: PDE4 inhibitors… those are anti-inflammatory drugs. Yes. Yeah. Some of them can be used for treatment for Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. What do they have to do with AUD?
CALLI: Well, PDE4 inhibitors are also known to help treat nicotine dependance. Now, nicotine addiction is one of the closest comparisons one could make to AUD, since both are psychiatric addictions with horrible physical side effects. A team of researchers decided to see if PDE4 inhibitors could be used to treat some of the more psychological effects of an addiction to alcohol.
NATE: Can you just use any PDE4 inhibitor? You have to use a specific one?
CALLI: There's actually one specific PDE4 inhibitor they tested. Yeah, it's called aprimelast. Now aprimelast is actually meant to be used to treat psoriasis, but it has a very low risk of nasty side effects and excellent safety record and is already FDA approved. What they found was that aprimelast could almost completely eliminate binge level alcohol consumption and reduce the scale of drinking related to stress.
NATE: Interesting. All right. So why aprimelast specifically?
CALLI: It's pretty complex. So bear with me here for a second. The researchers used electrophysiology on their subjects, which is a test performed to assess how a heart's electrical system is working in coordination with the brain. They found that aprimelast might actually be increasing neural activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is the brain region most associated with alcohol consumption. So too long didn't read: to put it in the simplest terms, aprimelast makes the brain feel a rush comparable to the rush it gets from drinking alcohol without actually feeling or being drunk.
NATE: K It's a bit weird to wrap my head around. So your brain thinks it's drunk without being drunk? Yeah.
CALLI: In a way, yeah. I guess it's all right. It's a little bit complicated because there's no sensation for being drunk associated with aprimelast. The example I would have for you is think about how when you watch a horror movie on an empty stomach and then you see a really grisly murder scene, you lose your appetite. That's what aprimelast is doing. It's eliminating your craving for alcohol.
NATE: Okay. How how did they figure this out? How are they testing this?
CALLI: You’re gonna love this. They gave aprimelast to “high drinking in the dark mice” or HD ID mice for short, which are mice that are selectively bred to be tested in alcohol-related sciences.
NATE: There are mice that just exist for getting drunk? Yeah, that's their whole purpose in being. Yeah. What a life.
CALLI: These mice can reach high blood alcohol content levels in short amounts of time, which makes them perfect subjects for tests like this. HDID mice can reach blood alcohol levels well over what's considered pharmacological intoxication in the quickest time possible. And for every mouse it was found that aprimelast drastically decreased their cravings for alcohol. So they followed the mouse study with a phase two placebo-controlled study on humans. This 11 day study had the hypothesis that individuals with AUD who were treated with aprimelast would consume significantly fewer drinks per day than those treated with a placebo.
NATE: Okay. Did it work out the way they thought?
CALLI: Aprimelast reduced each person's consumption by an average of three drinks per day. In comparison, the participants taking the placebo only saw a difference of a half a drink of alcohol over the 11 day period. There were no negative side effects and aprimelast was actually more than double effective at suppressing alcohol than any other proposed treatment method. So this means that aprimelast has the potential to change everything we know about AUD treatment. But there is a catch.
NATE: What I'm so surprised, not actually surprising. What's the catch?
CALLI: Well, many of the mice, after finishing their aprimelast treatment, began drinking even more than they did before. It's not entirely clear why, but it seems like upon termination of the aprimelast treatment, the mice actually developed more of an urge to drink. As of right now, there isn't any evidence that this has happened with humans or even will happen with humans. But it's the only hiccup in a project that has developed what otherwise seems to be a miracle treatment.
NATE: Those poor little boozy rodents.
CALLI: Yeah.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: In the current age of film and television, the remake is king. Everything old is brand new again. So it was only a matter of time before science started thinking, Hey, what can we remake too? And that's why scientists have announced a brand new version of Ice.
CALLI: There are so many things that we could have remade that need a rework like taxes or climate or the DMV. And we went with ICE?!
NATE: I'm not sure all of those are up to science to remake. But to be fair, this was more of an accidental remake, and it's one where the team created ice that you can normally only find on other moons and planets. But even better is the discovery of this new ice actually changes everything we know about not only ice, but water in general as well.
CALLI: Moon ice. All right. First off, that is the coolest name. I feel like that would be an amazing makeup palette.
NATE: Or a desert.
CALLI: Oh, yes. Okay. But back to the subject. And how how did they do this?
NATE: Honestly, the researchers just did this for fun. So a team at the University of Cambridge, they knew about this process called cryo-chilled ball milling to grind ice down into tiny crystals. You start by adding some steel balls, which are frozen at temperatures of under -320 degrees Fahrenheit into a container. And then you have a robot shake it 20 times per second and the metal balls create a level of force that turn the crystals into a fine powder. And this process has been used before for other substances like cheese and rubber, just to see what they look like as powders on a molecular level. But apparently it had never been done with ice before.
CALLI: Okay, so it's like a robot using a shake weight to make parmesan cheese. Except instead of cheese, it's ice. And specifically it's moon ice. What? Isn’t that snow?!
NATE: It's it is distinctly different from snow for some important reasons. But other than that, you get the gist of it. Yeah. So the molecular makeup of this ice is similar to ice scientists have seen on other planets. Specifically, it's called medium density amorphous ice. All right. And normally when water freezes, it crystallizes. Except ice is less dense as ice than it is as liquid water, which is pretty unusual for a crystal. Depending on how fast or slow water freezes. Water can turn into ice in a few dozen shapes, and it's pretty predictable. But that's not how amorphous ice works.
CALLI: Okay. How does amorphous ice work?
NATE: So it's a little hard to say because it doesn't have any rhyme or reason to its structure.
CALLI: So is this the first time scientists have ever made amorphous ice?
NATE: No. There have been two kinds of amorphous ice discovered before this. There's low density amorphous ice, which is the result of water vapor freezing onto a very cold surface at a temperature of lower than -240 degrees Fahrenheit. And then there's high density amorphous ice, which is created by compressing ordinary ice at similar temperatures, but under higher pressure. And neither kind is common on earth, but both can actually be found all over the place in space. For example, comets are just really huge chunks of low density, amorphous ice, liquid water, completely frozen in time that can teach us more than we already know about water. But here's the thing. There was a third kind of amorphous ice.
CALLI: So now there's a third player on the field. All right. What is the third kind of amorphous ice?
NATE: The researchers fired X-rays at the powder and they measured the length of the rays as they bounced off, which is a process known as X-ray diffraction. And it helped them figure out the molecular structure of the new ice, which had a molecular density similar to liquid water, but with no obvious structure to the molecules, meaning that its status of crystallinity was destroyed.
CALLI: So the density was higher again because it was closer to liquid water. That's awesome. But it was still frozen.
NATE: Exactly. It was still frozen. And I can't stress what a big deal this is because it could lead the way for more studies of water that we could never do before, despite water's existence. Pre-dating, you know, everything. We don't know nearly as much about it as we'd like. For example, it's commonly believed that water is composed of two forms: low density and high density water, similar to the variance of amorphous ice. But this discovery was of a medium density, amorphous ice, and the discovery of a medium density, amorphous ice could challenge the idea that there are only two kinds of water.
CALLI: Which technically means that this changes everything we know about water.
NATE: In more ways than one. So there's now a way we could better understand other planets, too. Some of the moons in our solar system, like Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus, have icy surfaces. And it's now theorized that if two icy areas and one of these moons were to rub together due to tidal forces. They could produce medium density amorphous ice between them through the same process that the researchers used. That increase in density could create gaps on the surface, creating disruptions on the moons completely due to the collapse of the ice. And if that happened, the moons could potentially die as a result.
CALLI: Holy crap. We went from just a joke about scientists playing around and remaking ice to changing science entirely to moons blowing up.
NATE: The good news is that last bit is really just a theory. But with the discovery of medium density amorphous ice, it's one we're now much closer to understanding.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.Unlucky in love - unlucky in life? Not quite! A new study has found that despite nearly 25 percent of the population expressing trouble in maintaining sexual relationships, that concern diminishes with age. So if you’re lonely now and want to fix that, you can rest easy, because with a little bit of patience, you’ll find that lucky somebody that will make you happy in due time!
CALLI: Alcoholism is one of the United States’ biggest addictions and potential killers, with few treatments available for the main reason it’s so addictive: the craving we have for alcohol. Thankfully, a drug called apremilast has hit the scene, showcasing a level of effectiveness in killing alcohol craving never seen before. There are some signs that ending treatment may have us revert to our previous level of craving, so the treatment isn’t perfect yet… but once that’s worked out, we may find a way to kill the craving for alcohol once and for all!
NATE: In an era of reboots and remakes, the last thing any of us ever expected was for scientists to remake ice - but that’s exactly what they did, with the creation of a medium-density amorphous ice that resembles the kind of ice that exists on moons within our solar system. This creation is revolutionary and challenges everything we know about everything from the ice on other moons to even the very science of water. Sometimes, the remake CAN be better!