Learn about why it’s a big deal that researchers found animal life underneath the Antarctic ice shelf; how scientists measured blinks to figure out why exercise gives your brain a boost; and why having a bad boss can make you a good boss.
Learn about why it’s a big deal that researchers found animal life underneath the Antarctic ice shelf; how scientists measured blinks to figure out why exercise gives your brain a boost; and why having a bad boss can make you a good boss.
Scientists accidentally found animal life 3,000 feet beneath the Antarctic ice shelf by Steffie Drucker
By measuring blinks, scientists may have determined why exercise boosts cognitive function by Grant Currin
Having a Bad Boss Can Make You a Great Boss by Mae Rice
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CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why it’s a big deal that researchers found life way beneath the Antarctic ice; why scientists measured people’s blinks while they exercised; and why having a bad boss can make you a great boss.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Everybody knows that a sponge can live in a pineapple under the sea. But it turns out they can also survive in much harsher conditions: beneath thousands of feet of Antarctic ice.
That was a huge surprise to researchers with the British Antarctic Survey, who made the shocking discovery totally by mistake. They’d spent weeks planning and preparing to collect a sample of the ocean floor from beneath a giant ice shelf. They drilled half a mile or nearly one kilometer into the ice, lowered a coring device with a GoPro attached, and waited an hour for it to return to the surface — and when it did, it was empty. Turns out that they drilled directly above a bolder.
While the geologists were disappointed, it was a happy accident for the biologists on the team. The GoPro footage revealed colonies of organisms that had never been seen before, including two types of sponge and a few other tube-shaped creatures. One scientist from the team called the discovery “slightly bonkers” and said they wouldn’t have thought to look for life down there “in a million years.”
What makes these animals’ survival so remarkable is that they’re stationary. Mobile creatures like shrimp, worms and krill that have been found that deep are able to swim to find food. Filter feeders like these suspected sponges eat whatever happens to float by or fall onto them. These creatures were found beneath a skyscraper-sized layer of ice in water that’s below freezing and devoid of sunlight, where no plants can grow. That means there’s probably not a lot of food just drifting past! The scientists think they probably feed on dead plankton that floated thousands of miles to get there.
This discovery could be key to finding out if there’s life out there in the universe. Scientists think there are three ingredients for sustaining life: Liquid water, a source of energy, and the right mix of chemicals like carbon and oxygen. One place that has that mix of ingredients is Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon encrusted in thick ice, with a liquid saltwater ocean beneath its surface. Sounds similar to where those sponges were found, right?
If life can survive that far under Antarctic ice, there’s a good chance it can survive elsewhere in our solar system. Whether that life is absorbent and yellow and porous, well — only time will tell.
The eyes are the window to the soul. It turns out they’re also the window to the brain. That came in handy for a team of researchers who recently watched people blink to better understand the connections between exercise and brain function.
There’s plenty of research showing that people who exercise a lot tend to do a touch better on average at tests that measure cognitive function. Researchers know of a few different ways that physical activity benefits the brain, but they’re still working to fully understand the relationship.
That’s why researchers recently invited 25 healthy young men into the lab for an experiment that took place over three days. On the first day, the participants rode exercise bikes until they were exhausted. That was to measure their levels of aerobic fitness.
On the next day, the researchers measured how frequently each participant blinked. Why? Well, because it’s recently become clear that measuring blink rate is an easy, non-invasive way to track the activity of the dopaminergic system [dow·puh·muh·NUR·juhk]. That’s the brain’s so-called “reward system” — but despite the name, it plays an important role in all kinds of brain activity.
On day three, the participants performed a cognitive test. They were shown a computer screen with a row of colored X’s at the top and a list of colors below. Their task was to quickly determine whether the color names matched the order of the colored X’s above.
While each participant worked on the task, researchers used a brain scanner to watch what was happening in a region of the prefrontal cortex that’s responsible for things like working memory and selective attention.
Once the researchers crunched all those numbers, they found a strong correlation between blinking, fitness, and cognitive performance: higher levels of one was correlated with higher levels of the others. When they analyzed the data with fancier statistics, the researchers found that blink rate was the key to this relationship — and remember, blink rate is a sign of dopamine activity. Greater aerobic fitness was correlated with a higher blink rate, and a higher blink rate was correlated with greater cognitive performance.
Does that mean that exercise turbocharges the dopaminergic system to make people blink faster and be smarter? It’s not that simple. When the researchers added the brain scans into the mix, they saw that smart blinkers actually had average or below-average activity in the brain region they looked at. It looks like exercise makes the dopaminergic system more efficient, which apparently leads to better cognitive performance.
One more reason to keep up that exercise routine!
There may be some silver lining to having a bad boss. And make no mistake: bad bosses are bad news, both for their employees and for the company itself. Employees with bad managers are more likely to skip work, quit their jobs, and sue their companies, which costs companies billions of dollars every year. Even worse, research suggests that abuse by a boss can "trickle-down" to other managers. So, does that mean if you have a bad boss, you’re doomed to be a bad boss too? A study from the University of Central Florida says not necessarily. In fact, it could make you a great boss.
In the first part of the study, they had 288 online participants imagine that they were a supervisor at a café — they were a boss, but they also had a boss. The researchers tweaked the description of the boss to make the participants either identify with the boss or feel like they were nothing like them. The imaginary café had a program to reward employee suggestions, and the participants imagined that they brought up an idea to their boss. For some participants, the boss ridiculed their idea in front of their peers. For others, the boss just passed the idea on to management.
Next, participants got an idea from one of their employees — and the idea was bad. You can probably see where this is going. Here’s the surprising part: participants who didn’t identify with their boss and were also mistreated by them demonstrated more ethical leadership behaviors with their own employees, compared to participants who weren’t mistreated at all!
But what would make someone not identify with their boss in the first place? In the next part of the study, the researchers found out. They looked at survey data from real workplaces in Indian cities. They found that if an employee had a strong moral identity, they were less likely to identify with an abusive boss and, therefore, more likely to demonstrate ethical leadership.
Basically, the takeaway here is that abusive bosses don't always spread their abusive style through an organization. In fact, abuse can prompt some people with strong moral compasses to behave more ethically. That’s not to say that you want a bad boss — but if you’ve already got one, it sure is a nice silver lining.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Steffie Drucker, Grant Currin, and Mae Rice, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new — and, perhaps, slightly bonkers — in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!