Learn about several states of matter beyond the three or four you probably already know about; the military-tested Argonne diet designed to prevent jet lag; and the Near-Death Experience Scale. 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: SKILLSHARE: Two months of unlimited access to more than 20 thousand classes for just 99 cents — http://skillshare.com/curious There Are Way More Than Three States of Matter — https://curiosity.im/2CJs0nf This Military-Tested Diet Prevents Jet Lag — https://curiosity.im/2CIwBWP The Greyson Scale Quantifies Near-Death Experiences — https://curiosity.im/2CJkAAx 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! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom 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 several states of matter beyond the three or four you probably already know about; the military-tested Argonne diet designed to prevent jet lag; and the Near-Death Experience Scale.
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! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
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/greyson-near-death-experience-scale-a-diet-to-prevent-jet-lag-and-several-states-of-matter
[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 several states of matter other than solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, a military-tested diet to prevent jet lag, and a skill designed to measure near-death experiences.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: There are way more than three states of matter-- solid, liquid, and gas, that's just for beginners. You're a curious listener and we think you can handle a lot more.
CODY GOUGH: Is one of them love?
ASHLEY HAMER: No. One of them is not love, Cody. Science doesn't care about your love.
CODY GOUGH: No. Science, what are you good for?
ASHLEY HAMER: As a reminder, all matter is made of small particles like protons and neutrons or even smaller particles like electrons and quarks. And states of matter come down to how those particles are arranged. In a solid state like an ice cube, molecules are bound to one another by intermolecular forces, which makes the ice cube hold its shape and keep its volume fixed.
In a liquid state like water, the intermolecular forces are weaker. So the molecules can move around a bit but still stay close to each other. Solids and liquids can't be compressed. Then, you have gas. Gas particles move around and spread out much more than liquid particles. Gas has no defined volume or shape.
Now, take plasma. That's a hot ionized gas made up of highly charged particles. But plasma is not a gas because its electrical charge puts the stuff under the influence of any electric or magnetic fields nearby. Oh, and plasma makes up 99% of all observable matter. We're talking stars the jets that blast out of black holes and even parts of Earth's atmosphere. Not to mention neon signs, which means plasma also makes up about 80% of Las Vegas. That was a joke.
Anyway, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma are considered the four fundamental states of matter since we can spot them in nature easily. Now, the non-classical fun starts. Take glass. Glass is an amorphous solid. Molecules in glass are less organized than they'd be in a solid but more organized than they'd be in a liquid.
Other states of matter only exist in really extreme conditions. When you cool atoms to near absolute zero, you can get what's known as a Bose-Einstein condensate where all of those individual atoms coalesce into one object. Cooling things to very low temperatures also gives rise to a lot of super stuff.
Superconductors conduct electricity that resistance, super fluids flow without friction, and super solids flow without friction but keep their shape. On the high end of the temperature and pressure spectrum, you've got the kind of matter that made up the very early universe. Quark-gluon plasma. That's a state of matter thousands of times hotter than the sun that's made up of elementary particles and has been described as a nearly perfect fluid.
Or you've got the stuff inside of a dying star. Electron degenerate matter. That happens when atoms become so compressed that their electrons escape and begin to overlap, climbing into higher and higher energy states the way they do in white dwarf stars. There are many more states of matter than that, but I hope you feel like we've given you a solid starting point.
CODY GOUGH: Just more evidence that science matters.
ASHLEY HAMER: Aha.
CODY GOUGH: Here's something I never knew. There's a military-approved solution to prevent jet lag. It's called the Argonne diet, and if you're traveling anywhere soon, you might want to listen up.
ASHLEY HAMER: This was so weird to me. How could a diet prevent jet lag?
CODY GOUGH: Your body does want certain things at certain times of the day. Sleep is certainly one of them and that's what comes to mind during jet lag because we get tired. But when you think about it, our body also wants food at certain times.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, you could really give your body everything it needs at certain times-- Netflix. Maybe watch Netflix in the morning instead of at night. Get ready for that overseas trip.
CODY GOUGH: Well, that is a rare Ashley comment that is not scientifically validated.
ASHLEY HAMER: It will be.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: However, this diet has a bit more backing to it. It was created back in the 1980s by Charles Everett. He was a scientist at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory hence the Argonne diet. And he initially pitched the diet as a life hack for vacationers in his book called Overcoming Jet Lag. Since it's kind of important for soldiers to minimize their jet lag when they're traveling around the world, researchers took this idea and ran a controlled study in 2002.
They put 186 soldiers on the Argonne diet and found that those who didn't follow the diet were between 7 and 1/2 and 16.2 times more likely to experience lag symptoms than those who did follow the diet. It's no wonder the Argonne diet has been used by the Army, the Navy, and the CIA.
For this diet, you alternate feasting and fasting for the four days leading up to your flight. Here's how to plan it. Before you even start your diet, figure out when it's breakfast o'clock at your destination. That's when each of the diet's quote unquote, "days" will start and end. Then eat like this.
Day 1, feast. This means high protein meals like bacon and eggs for breakfast and lunch to keep your motor revved and a high carb, low protein meal like pasta with red sauce for dinner to make you a little drowsy. Day 2, fast. This means eating only light foods like broths, salads, toasts, things like that for every meal.
Day 3, feast a second time and day 4, fast a second time. And this is the day of your flight. So you'll fast at least partially on the plane, then when the clock strikes breakfast time in your destination, eat a high protein breakfast. Then stretch. Surround yourself with as much natural light as possible or unnatural, if you have to. And above all, stay awake. When you land, you should be feeling fresh as a Daisy that just took a transatlantic flight.
ASHLEY HAMER: Today's episode is sponsored by Skillshare.
CODY GOUGH: Skillshare is an online learning platform with more than 20,000 classes in business, marketing, design, technology, and more. All the courses are taught by real experts in the field or public motivational speakers.
ASHLEY HAMER: Skillshare has classes for everything you're curious about. Like mobile and website programming, photography, social media strategy, Google Analytics, cooking.
CODY GOUGH: Skillshare has been a huge help for me personally with courses on how to work from home effectively and successfully. When I take days off from my job, I have to work ahead to make sure we don't leave you hanging without a podcast to listen to. And that means putting in some extra hours. But I want to do that efficiently. So I took a productivity course from the product marketing manager at Trello, which is a really popular workflow tool. We even use it here at Curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Does this mean you're going to start replying to my emails?
CODY GOUGH: Anyway, you can join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare with a special offer just for Curiosity Daily listeners. Get two months of Skillshare for just $0.99. To sign up, visit Skillshare.com/curious.
ASHLEY HAMER: Again, that's Skillshare.com/curious for two months of unlimited access to more than 20,000 classes for just $0.99.
CODY GOUGH: Lifelong learning is important. That's why you like Curiosity and that's why we think you'll love Skillshare. So get to it. Start your two-month trial today. For every listener that signs up, I'll reply to one of Ashley's emails.
ASHLEY HAMER: Hey, that's on record. You heard him. One more time, that's Skillshare.com/curious. Near-death experiences have been prevalent across time, culture, and condition. So researchers did what they had to do. They came up with a way to quantify and categorize the stories recounted by people who've experienced them.
Written records of near-death experiences or NDEs date all the way back to the times of ancient Greece. But it wasn't until 1983 that Dr. Bruce Greyson published a 16-point questionnaire. He called it the Near-Death Experience Scale also known as the Greyson scale. And the survey is in regular use today. It's divided into four components with four questions each.
The categories are; cognitive, affective, paranormal, and transcendental. Survey takers can give each question a zero-- meaning they did not experience a particular event through a two-- which means they had a vivid experience. For the event to be considered a real near-death experience, the total score on the questionnaire has to add up to seven or higher.
We've included the full test in our write up about this on curiositydotcom and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But here's an idea of some of the questions. One cognitive question is, did time seem to speed up or slow down? An effective question is, did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe?
One paranormal question asks, did scenes from the future come to you? And transcendental questions include, did you see deceased religious spirits? And did you seem to enter some other unearthly world? This is one questionnaire we hope you never have to take.
CODY GOUGH: Read about today's stories and more on curiositydotcom.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow with 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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