Learn about when to use bandages; online shopping’s hidden health benefits; and why tardigrades were shot out of a gun. LISTENER Q: Should you let a wound breathe or keep it covered? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Brian) Bishop, S.M.; Walker, M.; Rogers, A.A.; Chen, W.Y.J. (2003). Importance of moisture balance at the wound-dressing interface. Journal of Wound Care, 12(4), 125–128. https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/jowc.2003.12.4.26484 The Claim: Wounds Heal Better When Exposed to Air (Published 2006). (2021). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/health/01real.html?_r=0 Brouhard, R. (2021). Should I Use Neosporin on a Cut? Verywell Health. https://www.verywellhealth.com/should-i-use-neosporin-on-my-cut-1298910 Smack, D. P. (1996). Infection and Allergy Incidence in Ambulatory Surgery Patients Using White Petrolatum vs Bacitracin Ointment. JAMA, 276(12), 972. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1996.03540120050033 Shopping online steers us away from sweets by Cameron Duke Consumers spent less on candy and desserts when shopping online. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-06/e-csl060221.php Shah, K. (2021). US consumers spend less on sweets and dessert when shopping online. New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2279892-us-consumers-spend-less-on-sweets-and-dessert-when-shopping-online/ Zatz, L. Y., Moran, A. J., Franckle, R. L., Block, J. P., Tao Hou, Blue, D., Greene, J. C., Gortmaker, S., Bleich, S. N., Polacsek, M., Thorndike, A. N., & Rimm, E. B. (2021). Comparing Online and In-Store Grocery Purchases. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 53(6), 471–479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneb.2021.03.001 Scientists further abuse tardigrades by firing them out of a gun to see if they can survive space impacts by Grant Currin Starr, M. (2021). Scientists Fired Tardigrades Out of a Gun to See if They Can Survive Space Impacts. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/tardigrades-can-survive-high-velocity-impacts-after-being-fired-from-a-gun Tardigrade Survival Limits in High-Speed Impacts—Implications for Panspermia and Collection of Samples from Plumes Emitted by Ice Worlds. (2014). Astrobiology. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2020.2405 Even hard-to-kill tardigrades can’t always survive being shot out of a gun. (2021, June 2). Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/tardigrade-survival-shot-gun-crash-landing-planet Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about when to use bandages; online shopping’s hidden health benefits; and why tardigrades were shot out of a gun.
LISTENER Q: Should you let a wound breathe or keep it covered? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Brian)
Shopping online steers us away from sweets by Cameron Duke
Scientists further abuse tardigrades by firing them out of a gun to see if they can survive space impacts by Grant Currin
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/letting-wounds-breathe-grocery-app-benefits-tardigrade-guns
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, we’ll answer a listener question about whether you should let a wound breathe or keep it covered. You’ll also learn about how online shopping can keep you healthier; and why scientists shot tardigrades out of a gun.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We got a listener question from Brian, who asks, “For an injury, such as a cut or scrape, does letting it ‘breathe’ really help with recovery? Or is it better to keep a bandaid on until it's fully healed?” Thanks for this question Brian, because the answer made me realize I’ve been doing it wrong all these years!
The answer, for most wounds, is no: letting your wound breathe will not help with recovery. In fact, it will probably slow healing and make the wound more likely to scar. Here’s why: healthy skin keeps a precise balance of moisture, bringing water in through blood circulation and draining it through the lymphatic system. Skin cells grow best in that moist environment. So when you let a wound “breathe” by leaving it uncovered and allowing it to scab over, your skin has a harder time growing those new cells it needs to heal the wound. And even when it does grow them, the scab itself forms a barrier that new cells have a hard time moving through to get where they’re needed.
So for everyday cuts and scrapes, your best bet is to clean it up, cover it with a bandage, and replace the bandage every day until the wound is healed.
But that brings me to another question: what’s the best way to clean a wound? Should you use hydrogen peroxide? Rubbing alcohol? A triple-antibiotic ointment like Neosporin? The answer to all of those questions is no, no, and ehhhh maybe but probably not.
Hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol are incredibly harsh chemicals that are great at killing bacteria — but they’re also great at killing your own cells. Not the thing you want when your main goal is growing new skin cells. Triple-antibiotic ointments have the potential to help wounds heal faster and with less pain, at least at first, but they also have some downsides. For one thing, overuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic resistance, and topical antibiotics are no different. Triple-antibiotic ointments can also cause allergic reactions in some people — reactions that can sometimes be mistaken for infection, which can lead allergic people to slather even more of it on. And finally? It’s just not that effective. A study that compared using antibiotic ointment on wounds to using plain petroleum jelly — which is the main inactive ingredient in those ointments — found no difference in infection rates.
So if you want your wound to heal quickly with minimal scarring, clean it with soap and water, put a bandage on it, and replace that bandage every day until you’re good as new. Thanks for your question, Brian! If you have a question, send a voice recording or an email to curiosity at discovery dot com, or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
Over the last year, many of us who had the option turned to online grocery shopping to stay safe. While grocery shopping from our sofas predictably changed what we bought, not all of those changes were bad ones. According to research, for many of us, shopping online meant staying away from sweets.
That’s right: somehow, never setting foot inside a grocery store actually made our buying habits healthier on average. This came out in a new study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior that tracked the buying habits of 137 people. The people all did their grocery shopping at a particular grocery chain in Maine and had previous experience shopping online.
Each shopper was tracked for 44 non-consecutive weeks from 2015 to 2017. You might notice that those years were long before the pandemic hit. That didn’t matter — it gave the researchers a way to compare people’s shopping habits online versus in-store.
The study found that even though people who shopped online spent 44 percent more than they would have in the store, they bought far fewer candies, desserts, and other tasty but admittedly unhealthy items.
This pre-pandemic data suggests that our buying habits might have slightly improved in 2020 without us being aware of it.
But before you go celebrating, the decline didn’t apply to all junk foods. Salty snacks and sugary drinks seemed immune to the health benefits of online shopping.
The researchers think that the difference here is that candies and other sweets are typically impulse purchases. You know, the types of things you never walk into the store intending to buy, but always seem to walk out with. In-store shoppers spent an average of $2.50 on sweets, roughly the price of a bag of M&M’s in the checkout lane. Shopping online requires you to actively seek those things out, and this study suggests that, on average, we don’t.
It’s important to mention that there is nothing wrong with buying sweets in moderation. But if you never meant to buy them when you started shopping, you won’t miss them when you check out. Whether that’s in person or online.
If you’ve never heard of tardigrades, well let me tell you about these amazing little things. Also known as water bears or moss piglets, these are microscopic animals that are famous for being tough. Years of drought and famine? No problem. Boil ‘em, freeze ‘em, expose ‘em to radiation — they’ll be fine.
But could they survive a crash-landing on a new world? Scientists weren’t sure, so they got a few dozen tardigrades and shot them out of a gun.
That might sound bizarre, but there are actually good reasons to learn what kind of impacts a tardigrade can survive. For instance, in 2019, an Israeli spacecraft carrying tardigrades crashed into the Moon. No one knows for sure whether they survived. The experiment also has implications for the origin of life. Could tiny organisms have spread through the Universe aboard asteroids and comets that crashed into planets? Some astrobiologists think life could have made its way to the Martian moon Phobos aboard space rocks from Earth and Mars.
To see whether tardigrades could be living it up on distant moons, researchers tried packing them into nylon bullets and firing them from what’s called a two-stage light gas gun. That’s a device that uses gunpowder and certain types of gas to make things go very, very fast. Up to 5 miles or 8 kilometers per second. Per SECOND. They shot the tardigrades into a target made of sand before fishing them out and waiting to see if they survived.
As it turned out, the researchers didn’t have to turn the device all the way up to eleven before they found the tardigrades’ limits. They started off easy, at a little over 500 meters per second (that’s about 1100 miles per hour). That was no problem. The scientists slowly increased the speed over the next several rounds of the experiment, and the tardigrades were just fine.
It was at 900 meters per second, or about 2,000 miles per hour, when disaster struck. Tardigrades seem to have mastered biology, but even the mighty water bear isn’t above physics. When the researchers went to recover those tardigrades from the target, all they found were fragments of the test subjects’ bodies. None survived.
900 meters per second is fast. It’s faster than a rifle bullet! But it’s slower than that Israeli spacecraft was going when it crashed into the Moon. And it’s a lot slower than the rock and dust that could have carried life to Phobos. For tardigrades to live on distant worlds, they’d have to find another way to get there.
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CODY: We’re gonna recap what we learned today, but first, I want to remind you that you can do us a HUGE favor by voting for Curiosity Daily in the 2021 Podcast Awards! Visit podcast-awards-dot-com, register your email address, and find us in the drop-down menus for the categories of Education and Science & Medicine. That’s all you have to do! Voting in all other categories is optional!
CODY: And when you vote, you can also volunteer to be a judge to help select winners once finalists are announced in August, and that’ll give you an extra chance to vote for our show. So take a minute this weekend to visit podcast-awards-dot-com; we’ll also include this info — and a link — in today’s show notes. For now, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily. Next week, you’ll learn about how animals sniff out viral infections;
An ultrafast engine that scientists say uses information as fuel;
Why researchers performed magic tricks for birds;
What the “dog days of summer” means;
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Cameron Duke and Grant Currin.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also a writer on today’s episode.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend! [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Then, join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!