Learn about left and right hand and eye dominance, and how they’re related; why running might actually be good for your knees; why Buzz Aldrin claimed 33 dollars in travel expenses for his trip to the moon; and two traits that determine how whether you’re more likely to cheat on your partner. 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: Running May Actually Be Good for Your Knees Buzz Aldrin Claimed $33.31 in Travel Expenses for His Moon Trip Two Traits Determine How Likely You Are to Cheat on Your Partner Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey Plus, we discuss hand/eye dominance using the following research: More than 500,000 years of right-handedness in Europe | Taylor & Francis Left-handedness: Genes and matter of chance | Genetic Literacy Project Footedness of left- and right-handers | American Journal of Psychology Sighting dominance, handedness, and visual acuity preference: three mutually exclusive modalities? | Opthalmic & Physiological Optics What being right or left-handed says about your brain | Quartz 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! Learn about these topics and more onCuriosity.com, and download our5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable ourAlexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about left and right hand and eye dominance, and how they’re related; why running might actually be good for your knees; why Buzz Aldrin claimed 33 dollars in travel expenses for his trip to the moon; and two traits that determine how whether you’re more likely to cheat on your partner.
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
Plus, we discuss hand/eye dominance using the following research:
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!
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/infidelity-predictors-buzz-aldrins-moon-mementos-running-may-be-good-for-your-knees-and-hand-eye-dominance
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Happy Sunday. We've got three stories from curiositydotcom plus the answer to a question from a curious listener like you 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 why running might actually be good for your knees, why Buzz Aldrin claimed $33 in travel expenses for his trip to the moon, and two traits that determine how likely you are to cheat on your partner. We'll also get into left and right hand and eye dominance and explain how they're related.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: You've probably heard that running is bad for your knees. But a growing body of research suggests that running might not only be fine for your knees, it might actually improve your knee health.
CODY GOUGH: Do you think you have healthy knees then?
ASHLEY HAMER: I have super healthy knees. This is my biggest pet peeve. My response to this is always to change the subject so people never know how I actually feel. But whenever someone tells me, oh, I used to run but then it was just terrible for my knees so I stopped. I want to--
CODY GOUGH: You just can't--
ASHLEY HAMER: I can't.
CODY GOUGH: --handle it.
ASHLEY HAMER: I can't handle it.
CODY GOUGH: Why don't you educate them?
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm a very well, actually, kind in person, and I try to stop from doing that in social situations because people don't really appreciate it.
CODY GOUGH: That's tricky. To be a science educator but then also want to have friends.
[LAUGHTER]
ASHLEY HAMER: That's the trick.
CODY GOUGH: OK. That's fair. That's fair. Thank goodness, we've got this podcast for an outlet.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, really. It helps a lot. Well, for a study published in 2016 in The European Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers had male and female runners either run on a treadmill for 30 minutes or spend the same amount of time sitting quietly. Each participant then did the opposite activity the next day.
Before and after each session, the researchers drew blood from an arm and synovial fluid from a knee. That's the substance that lubricates your joints. Then they analyzed it from a bunch of angles like looking at cells associated with knee inflammation and a substance called cartilage oligomeric matrix protein or COMP which is often used as a marker of arthritis.
And the results were pretty dramatic. After running, the participants' knees had lower levels of cells linked to inflammation. And the COMP levels in their knees had also dropped. The study's author concluded that moderate runs are, quote, "Not likely to harm healthy knees and probably offer protection." Unquote. And this is just recent research.
As far back as the 1980s, studies were showing that running wasn't associated with knee arthritis or other types of degenerative joint disease. But hang on. Your knees hurt when you run, right? Especially if you're a new runner. Well, that pain rarely comes from a breakdown of your joints. A lot of the time, it's because you're running too much mileage too soon or even just the fact that you're using old shoes.
Of course, if you've got a nagging pain that doesn't go away, then please see a doctor. This podcast is not intended to be medical advice. But at the same time, don't let the fear of knee damage scare you away from running. It might actually keep your knees healthy. There are links to supplementary exercises you can do to help stop knee pain in our write up today on curiositydotcom and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS.
CODY GOUGH: Here's the fun story. Buzz Aldrin claimed about $33 in travel expenses for his trip to the moon. Today we're going to tell you what they were. Ashley, have you got on a lot of business trips?
ASHLEY HAMER: I've been going on a few lately. Yeah. It's kind of fun.
CODY GOUGH: I love business trips.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Any time you get to spend money that's not your money, it's the best thing in the universe.
ASHLEY HAMER: That is true.
CODY GOUGH: When the policy is, each meal gets a $50 budget, it's like what steakhouse am I going to? No one listening to this is ever going to hire me. All right. Well, back to the moon. In July 2015, Buzz Aldrin tweeted a photo of his travel voucher from his trip to the moon. He said it was his mission director's favorite piece of Aldrin's memorabilia.
And it's pretty funny because the voucher outlines his points of travel. Houston, Texas, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to moon, to Pacific Ocean with the USS Hornet in parentheses, to Hawaii, to Houston, Texas. The grand total for reimbursement was $33.31 for a rental car. In August 2015, Aldrin tweeted another photo of a customs form. All three of the Apollo 11 astronauts actually had to sign a customs form when they returned to Earth in Honolulu, Hawaii on July 24, 1969.
The document declared that the cargo they had brought back included moon rock and moon dust samples. Also included on the form is a portion for any other condition on board that may lead to the spread of disease. And the answer, to be determined. The Apollo 11 astronauts were quarantined for 21 days before they were able to head home because back in the day, we didn't know there were no microorganisms on the moon. Better safe than sorry, right?
The last thing we need is those aliens popping out of somebody's stomach.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: That's violent.
ASHLEY HAMER: A recent study has identified two traits that could determine how likely you are to cheat on your partner. Cody, do you have tricks from exes?
CODY GOUGH: I can't wait to see where this question is going.
[LAUGHTER]
ASHLEY HAMER: Do you have little hints in exes, of course?
CODY GOUGH: No.
ASHLEY HAMER: To know if they were like looking around.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, if they're on Tinder next to you in bed, that's typically bad.
ASHLEY HAMER: That is. Yeah. That would be a sign.
CODY GOUGH: But I guess what we're talking about today is a little more research-based.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is. In a new study led by Dr. Jim McNulty and his team at Florida State University, researchers kept tabs on 233 couples for three and a half years, beginning when they were newlyweds. They gave each a behavioral test or two then kept in touch with them for the remainder of the experiment.
Occasionally, the couples filled out a survey about any infidelity, how committed they felt to their partner, their relationship happiness, and whether or not they were still married. The researchers focused on two traits. The first was something called attentional disengagement. That's, basically, the amount of time between when you start paying attention to something and when you stop. Often down to a matter of milliseconds.
And the study found that the faster people looked away from the faces of very attractive people, the less likely they were to cheat. Even shaving a couple hundred milliseconds off their gaze was enough to reduce the chances of infidelity by half. The second trait was a thing called devaluation of alternatives. For this, the researchers didn't just measure how fast the participants looked away. They also explicitly asked them to evaluate the attractiveness of a set of portraits.
And the people who rated the attractive portraits as less attractive were much more likely to stay faithful to their partners. So basically, if you linger when you're looking at attractive people longer than the average person and you rate those attractive people higher, then you've got to traits that might make you more likely to cheat.
The researchers point out that neither devaluation nor disengagement are conscious behaviors. So you might not even be aware that you're doing one of them. But knowing about how they work might give you a foundation to start cultivating more partner-friendly habits.
CODY GOUGH: And this is why I've never looked at a single female since getting married.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. That's right. You are-- currently have a bag over your head. That explains It.
CODY GOUGH: We've gotten a couple of questions about hand and eye dominance. Our Patreon supporter Michael, thanks Michael, writes, quote, "What causes us to have a dominant eye? Is there any connection between handedness and ocular dominance or are they completely separate? Is there anything that influences ocular dominance or is it purely rooted in chance?" Unquote.
And Kristen in Connecticut wanted to know, "Is right-left dominance mainly nature or nurture? And what is the difference between hand and foot dominance, say, about the way your brain processes information?" Great questions Michael and Kristen.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK. Let's work our way down. Is right-left dominance mainly nature or nurture? That is, are we taught to be right or left-handed or is it a genetic trait? This one's easy. It's genetic. Family and twin studies support the idea that handedness is encoded in your genes. And even fossil records show that humans have been mostly right-handed for at least half a million years.
For most people, handedness matches footedness. Although that's more common for righties than lefties. The same isn't true of eye dominance. Your dominant eye has about a 50/50 chance of being on the same side as your dominant writing hand. What's interesting though is if you compare a person's dominant eye to a person's dominant throwing hand, they're slightly more likely to match.
Also, eye dominance has nothing to do with which eye has better vision. It's just which eye your body tends to rely on most. What this all says about your brain comes down to a concept known as lateralization. Basically, which hemisphere of your brain is dominant and how dominant it is.
Most people have a dominant brain hemisphere, probably, because it would be counterproductive for both sides to compete for processing power. This bears out in the statistics. Children who are strongly right or left-handed tend to have strong lateralization and therefore have well developed language skills. Ambidextrous children-- kids who use their right and left hands about equally, don't seem to have strong lateralization and that's been linked to atypical development of motor and language abilities.
Now, what this doesn't say is whether you're right or left-brained and therefore creative or analytical. That is a big old myth. Thanks for the questions. If you have a question, go ahead and tweet at us or email it to podcast@curiositydotcom.
CODY GOUGH: And if you've got a few minutes this weekend, we'd really appreciate it if you would take our listener survey. You can enter to win a free Curiosity T-shirt if you take it. We're trying to learn more about you and what you like hearing on our show, so we've posted the survey in today's show notes and on our Patreon page and on our podcast page on our website and on a 1 square kilometer billboard in low Earth orbit. OK. So maybe not the last one but still.
It's going to take a few minutes to fill out, but like I said, you can enter to win a T-shirt and we're going to use your feedback to figure out how to do our show better. What are your favorite subjects? What have you had enough of? Now, is your chance to tell us. One more time, find the link in today's show notes or at Patreon.com/curiositydotcom all spelled out. We really appreciate it. Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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