Learn 4 tips for managing WFH paranoia; flat-pack pasta; and how eye contact is affected by the shape of a dog’s face. 4 tips for managing your WFH paranoia by Kelsey Donk Managing Your WFH Paranoia. (2021, April 28). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2021/04/managing-your-wfh-paranoia Is Remote Work Making Us Paranoid? (2021). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/style/is-remote-work-making-us-paranoid.html Jacobs, E. (2020, June 18). Paranoia creeps into homeworking. @FinancialTimes; Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/e50ce245-09fd-4831-a90b-953ef51a2281 Scientists have created flat-pack pasta that curls into shape in water by Steffie Drucker Executive Summary: Environmental Footprint Literature Review — Food Transportation. (2016). State of Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. https://www.oregon.gov/deq/FilterDocs/PEF-FoodTransportation-ExecutiveSummary.pdf Tao, Y., Lee, Y.-C., Liu, H., Zhang, X., Cui, J., Mondoa, C., Babaei, M., Santillan, J., Wang, G., Luo, D., Liu, D., Yang, H., Do, Y., Sun, L., Wang, W., Zhang, T., & Yao, L. (2021). Morphing pasta and beyond. Science Advances, 7(19), eabf4098. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf4098 CMU lab leads development of pasta that morphs into shape when cooked. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/cmu-cll043021.php Gael Fashingbauer Cooper. (2021, May 6). This strange, flat pasta transforms into 3D shapes as you cook. CNET; CNET. https://www.cnet.com/news/this-strange-flat-pasta-transforms-into-3d-shapes-as-you-cook/ Flat Pasta That Turns Into 3-D Shapes — Just Add Boiling Water. (2021). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/pasta-3d-flat.html Video: https://vimeo.com/543657466 Your dog’s face shape determines how easily it makes eye contact with you by Cameron Duke Bognár, Z., Iotchev, I. B., & Kubinyi, E. (2018). Sex, skull length, breed, and age predict how dogs look at faces of humans and conspecifics. Animal Cognition, 21(4), 447–456. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-018-1180-4 Bognár, Z., Szabó, D., Deés, A., & Kubinyi, E. (2021). Shorter headed dogs, visually cooperative breeds, younger and playful dogs form eye contact faster with an unfamiliar human. Scientific Reports, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88702-w Eötvös Loránd University. (2021, April 29). Researchers determine which dogs more often establish eye contact with humans. Phys.org; Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-dogs-eye-contact-humans.html Gácsi, M., McGreevy, P., Kara, E., & Miklósi, Á. (2009). Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 5(1), 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-9081-5-31 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free!
Learn 4 tips for managing WFH paranoia; flat-pack pasta; and how eye contact is affected by the shape of a dog’s face.
4 tips for managing your WFH paranoia by Kelsey Donk
Scientists have created flat-pack pasta that curls into shape in water by Steffie Drucker
Your dog’s face shape determines how easily it makes eye contact with you by Cameron Duke
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-to-manage-your-work-from-home-paranoia
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 4 tips for managing your work from home paranoia; shape-shifting pasta that could help save the planet; and how your dog’s face affects the way it can make eye contact with you.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you’ve ever felt yourself getting paranoid about whether your boss is mad at you or whether your coworkers are talking behind your back, you’re not alone. As an office worker, there’s plenty to be paranoid about. And when you work remotely without the ability to judge body language and facial expressions, that paranoia can get even worse. Luckily, research shows that there are things you can do to cut down on that feeling that everyone else on Zoom is thinking bad things about you. And some of this could help you get through the work week even if you ARE going into the office. So let’s go through four recommendations from Harvard Business Review.
First up, make your expectations clear with your colleagues. It’s important to go over your preferred communication style, how you like to make decisions, and what you’ll do if there’s a conflict before starting on a project. Some people even write out a manual for their working preferences to help people understand their working hours and how they learn best. If that becomes part of your office’s culture, reading other people’s user manuals could help you cut down on anxiety.
Next, don’t let FOMO make you attend more meetings than you need to. A lot of remote workers accept every meeting invite they get, just so they can observe and appear totally in control. But make a habit of that, and you’re sure to burn out before too long. Instead, think about delegating meeting attendance or sharing notes with colleagues. It’ll feel uncomfortable at first, but over time, stepping away will help reduce your fear of ambiguity.
You can also work on depersonalizing the actions of others. People high in empathy tend to feel more paranoid than most. But the next time you take someone’s behavior personally, stop before getting too paranoid. Ask yourself what the other person could be going through, and try to interpret their behavior as generously as possible. It’s most likely not about you.
Finally, work on compartmentalization. “Turning off” after work can be tough when you’re working remotely, but without strong boundaries, it’s easy to let work worries take over your personal time. One strategy to try: imagine leaving your stressful work experiences in the corner of your work space at night to pick back up in the morning.
According to psychologists, paranoia is simply a state of fear that happens when you misinterpret an unclear situation. You’re hypervigilant when you’re paranoid, just waiting for your boss to give you some unexpected feedback or tell you you’ve done something wrong. But if you clear up those unclear situations and try to react more calmly when they arise, you can beat workplace paranoia! I believe in you.
When it comes to getting food on the table, packaging and transportation account for about 15% of your meal’s carbon footprint. Furniture companies have addressed their own packing problems by selling “flat-pack furniture” that you assemble at home. Now, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have done the same for pasta. They’ve created a flat noodle that morphs into 3D shapes when boiled in water.
Like furniture, pasta comes in all sorts of 3D designs, from spirally fusilli [foo-ZEE-lee] to hollow penne to bendy macaroni. The variety of forms serves different functions: different shapes provide a different mouthfeel and lend themselves to different sauces. All those shapes also require different packaging, and a lot of it is filled with air to prevent the pasta from breaking in transit.
To arrive at their breakthrough, scientists in Carnegie Mellon’s Morphing Matter Lab didn’t start out with noodles on their minds. Flat-pack furniture originally inspired the team to explore how two-dimensional structures could transform into 3D shapes.
The prototypical pasta is made from standard ingredients, a combination of water and semolina [seh-muh-lee-nuh] flour. The team found that by stamping grooves into the dough at specific spots, they could give flat pieces of pasta shape-shifting capabilities. Researchers predicted how heat and water would affect the pasta’s form after cooking, and tweaked the groove pattern to make dents wider, deeper or more spaced out to change how the dough bent while boiling. The final product morphed into unusual spirals, knots, tubes, and even saddle shapes. There’s a video where you can watch it happen in today’s show notes.
This isn’t the first time scientists have created shape-shifting pasta, but it is the easiest method so far: previous attempts have required 3D printing, while this just uses simple stamping and molding of the dough.
Unlike the flat-pack furniture that inspired it, the novel noodles assemble in a snap: Just boil in water for seven minutes! Researchers demonstrated how easy their creation is to cook on the go by packing it on a hiking trip and boiling it in stream water over a portable flame. Its minimal storage requirements and easy prep could make it useful in other settings where space is a premium and conventional appliances aren’t available, like at a disaster site or on the International Space Station.
There’s no word yet on when this groovy grocery item could hit store shelves, but the team’s technique seems cheap and easy to replicate. The pasta-bilities are endless!
Making eye contact is important for human communication. And as dogs became domesticated, they picked up on that and learned to do it too. That’s been useful: not only does eye contact help us bond with our canine friends, but it also makes it easier to give them commands. But new research suggests that not all dogs make eye contact so effortlessly. In a recent experiment, a research team in Hungary found out that how easily a dog makes eye contact may come down to the shape of its face.
The team’s trials went a bit like this: An experimenter stood in the center of a room with a dog, while the dog’s owner sat at a distance. Each dog participated in several trials, some of which involved the experimenter giving the dog a treat every time they established eye contact. The treats kept coming until the dog made eye contact 15 times, or 300 seconds passed, whichever came first.
They found that, no matter how adorable, dogs in the experiment did not make eye contact equally. Dogs with shorter faces like pugs and boxers had a much easier time looking the experimenter in the eye than medium-faced dogs like golden retrievers or long-faced dogs like greyhounds.
You might think this would come down to genetics — after all, certain dogs were bred to work with humans, and eye contact is an important part of that. And yeah, previous research has found that visually cooperative breeds, like shepherds, do make eye contact really quickly.
This study found that too, but the effect of breed wasn’t as large as the effect of face shape. Long-faced cooperative breeds didn’t make eye contact as well as short-faced dogs that weren’t bred to help humans.
The reason for this, scientists think, might have to do with the way light-sensing nerves are arranged on the dog’s retina. Dogs with shorter snouts tend to have high concentrations of these neurons toward the center of the retina, while dogs with longer faces have them distributed more evenly. Dogs with shorter snouts have eyes that can focus on objects like a human face much easier than dogs with longer faces. It’s like natural tunnel vision.
In the end, all dogs, regardless of face shape or breed, generally got better at making eye contact throughout the trials. In the end, dogs all have one thing in common: an undying love for treats.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Kelsey Donk, Steffie Drucker, and Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Why the long face? We won’t be gone for long. You can join us again tomorrow! to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!