Today you’ll learn about whether or not melatonin can be used to treat anxiety, the development of a laser that can change the path of lightning, and how a recent study shows that children are hard-wired to empathize with dogs!
Today you’ll learn about whether or not melatonin can be used to treat anxiety, the development of a laser that can change the path of lightning, and how a recent study shows that children are hard-wired to empathize with dogs!
Melatonin Anxiety
Lightning Laser
Toddler’s Best Friend
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/melatonin-anxiety-lightning-laser-toddlers-best-friend
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about whether or not melatonin can be used to treat anxiety, the development of a laser that can change the path of lightning, and how a recent study shows that children are hard-wired to empathize with dogs!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: I take melatonin almost every night to go to sleep, and it's also pretty common knowledge that it is used sometimes as an anxiety cure. So I decided to look into that.
NATE: All right. Well, you said it's common knowledge, but I feel like a lot of things that are common knowledge facts are not, in fact, factual.
CALLI: Okay. That's that's fair. And there's some things that you want to take into account when it comes to something like melatonin, because it's largely unregulated. But that's an entirely different story. I think the reason that the claim seems suspicious is because melatonin is technically natural. It's created in the body inside our pineal glands, then released into our bloodstreams at night to help regulate our inner clocks, also known as our circadian rhythms. But anxiety also comes from inside the body, which means that it could overcome any natural production of melatonin. So it always felt like the two could possibly be related.
NATE: Okay. I think I see what you're getting at here because melatonin is also available over the counter as a dietary supplement that can be used to help with sleep problems or sleep cycle disruptions like jetlag. So if you want to use melatonin to fight anxiety, you control when it deposits into your bloodstream. But I still don't see how a sleep aid could help with anxiety. Is melatonin actually good for anxiety?
CALLI: Okay. The short answer is maybe! Almost every source you'll find on this question says that if you struggle from anxiety and struggle to get a good night's sleep, melatonin might eliminate anxiety in addition to helping you sleep. The problem is, most people seem to skip the disclaimer on that fact and say that anxiety can be reduced by taking melatonin period. It doesn't help that most research relating to anxiety reduction for melatonin is related specifically to being put under before surgery. So I decided to dig a little deeper and found a very recent study about how melatonin affects anxiety on a deeper physiological level.
NATE: All right. And the verdict is.
CALLI: There's a number of verdicts, actually.
NATE: Right.
CALLI: First, the study found that melatonin is one of the most effective ways to limit the harm of stress caused by free radicals.
NATE: You know, free radicals sounds like swingers in the sixties, but I assume that's not what we're talking about at this particular instance.
CALLI: No, no, no. When the body becomes overly stressed out during an anxiety episode, a sort of unstable molecule develops in the body during an otherwise normal cell metabolism. Think of the cell creation process like resetting a game of Jenga, but in the middle of putting up your tower, a small earthquake hits and makes the structure a little unstable. Instead of starting over, you just keep building on top of it. Free radicals are the cells that are slightly off center from the other cells and could build up over time to damage other molecules such as DNA or proteins. So what I'm saying is that melatonin, without a doubt can prevent harm from coming to the surrounding cells. It's sort of like the hand that's carefully pushing those Jenga blocks back into order.
NATE: Okay, Got it. So how does melatonin do this for us?
CALLI: By deactivating the free radicals. When melatonin hits the bloodstream, it releases a few electrons that become sort of magnetically attached to the free radicals, which then tell the free radicals to stop multiplying. Afterwards, melatonin increases production in the bloodstream of antioxidant enzymes, as well as enzymes required for tissue building. And finally, it also synergizes with other common antioxidants like vitamin C or vitamin E to increase the restorative effects of each vitamin.
NATE: Wow. So if melatonin can help reduce the effects of anxiety and it boosts the effects of vitamin C, it can also boost your immune system in the process?
CALLI: Exactly. Although melatonin is not directly responsible for boosting your immune system. It can focus on mediating tissue damage by exaggerating your immune system's response to a threat. Believe it or not, this is directly tied to its anti-anxiety bona fides too, because of its antioxidant relationship with mitochondria, which as we know, is.
NATE: The powerhouse of the cell. Okay. So what does the mitochondria, which as we know, is the powerhouse of the cell. So what is the mitochondria have to do with all of this?
CALLI: Kind of that? So mitochondria are the tiny organelles in most cells responsible for energy production. Melatonin stimulates the effect of this energy production. This helps cells metabolize, but it also helps transport mitochondria from healthy cells to damaged cells, including any of the cells previously damaged by the free radicals. Basically, it repairs a body broken by anxiety.
NATE: Okay, so that's bringing us back to the beginning of the story, what we were talking about before. Does that mean that melatonin can treat anxiety?
CALLI: Okay, please forgive me. This is my favorite part of the story because my answer is still maybe.
NATE: How?!
CALLI: Anxiety development is an incredibly complex thing unto itself, that we could spend an entire episode walking each other through. The bullet points version is that anxiety is manifested through alterations in the production of stress hormones, neuro signaling pathways, and the level of free radicals being produced. Melatonin is very promising as a means to treat anxiety. But the study concludes by saying that some of the studied anxiety may still be coming from an inability to sleep. The only real way to research this would involve performing a hyper-specific study on participants who suffer from varying levels of anxiety but are still able to get a good night's rest.
NATE: I guess that does narrow down your candidates a bit. Finding enough people who have a lot of anxiety but sleep really well to do the tests. Yeah.
CALLI: I don't think they exist. Anyways, even if melatonin isn't a cure-all for anxiety, the study confirms once and for all that it's not bad for you to take it as an attempted treatment. Like I said before, just be careful about where you're getting your supply from. It's all over the counter and it's not highly regulated. But even better, since melatonin is produced naturally. All you need to do is reduce light pollution at night and keep up a regular sleep routine, which we've discussed before about how… listen, I'm not saying that the glow of your cell phone is making you more anxious, but I'm also not… not saying that.
NATE: Fair enough.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Jumping into this next story, it is about a powerful laser that can grab a lightning bolt and throw it through the sky.
CALLI: Okay, hold on. I talked about melatonin, and you get to talk about a lightning bolt that you throw through the sky from a laser.
NATE: We both talk about all the things. It's fine.
CALLI: Okay. Okay. Go on. Please explain.
NATE: I know this sounds like a DC supervillain plot to take over the world, but I promise this is a real thing. On top of a mountain in Switzerland, a team of scientists pointed a high energy laser at a storm and redirected the trajectory of a lightning bolt.
CALLI: And that sounded like a game of Mad Libs. But I'm terribly curious. Why? Why did they do this?
NATE: All right, Think about it like this. It's not a secret that lightning bolts are deadly. A person getting struck by lightning, they can get burned. They can get cardiac arrest or worse. If a tree gets hit, it could start a raging forest fire. Not to mention buildings getting hit by lightning. They can lose all their energy. Or worse, they could have an electrical fire start. By redirecting lightning with this giant laser, the scientists could help prevent deadly lightning strikes forever.
CALLI: A laser seems a little bit silly to me. Like we already have something in place for this. Why not just improve lightning rods?
NATE: So lightning rods are the industry standard for anti-lightning tech. And for decades they've lured lightning away from nearby buildings or people and fed that electricity back down into the planet. The only problem is they lose stability the larger you make them. For example, if you wanted to protect an airport, your lightning rod would have to be over 3000 feet long. With lasers, you wouldn't need to worry about that in practicality.
CALLI: Holy cow. I had no idea that was what you would need. Okay, How does this work?
NATE: So the scientists set up shop at a telecommunications tower on top of a tall mountain in Switzerland. You're up high, closer to lightning. Good spot. At the top of this tower is a lightning rod. Old tech. Yes. That gets struck over a hundred times a year by lightning. So this seemed like the perfect location to test out the laser. They fired up their cannon and shot out multiple short, intense bursts of infrared light at the clouds in quick succession and around a thousand times per second during a thunderstorm season, over the span of three months. So the laser continuously ripped electrons off of air molecules, knocked other air molecules out of the way and created a low density charged plasma.
CALLI: Whoa. Okay. Why did that happen?
NATE: Well, because it cleared a path for electrical current to head down a specific trail and then kept that path clear. Think of it as raising a forest and laying down the pavement for a road. You attract travelers only instead of concrete and travelers, you're laying plasma to attract electricity. So they're making a new ideal path of least resistance.
CALLI: All right. Did this also take three months to work?
NATE: No. Within the first week, a high speed camera captured the moment that their laser rerouted a lightning bolt away from the lightning rod. And it wasn't just a slight deviation, either. The laser knocked the bolts off course by nearly 165 feet, and that was before they'd fully worked out the new path for the lightning bolt too. As they tuned the laser, they managed to create a fairly consistent pathway just above the tip of the tower that always led it to the lightning rod.
CALLI: Okay, this is awesome. How many times did they see lightning hit the tower?
NATE: They had a hit four times, and one of those strikes happened on a fairly clear sky day and two high speed cameras captured the moment. When you look at those images, you see lightning zigzagging down from the clouds following the laser for around 164 feet, all the way toward the tower's lightning rod for the other three, which happened on stormy, cloudy nights. The researchers looked at radio waves created by the lightning. Those radio waves showed that all three strikes followed the path of the laser even more closely than lightning strikes that happened whenever the laser was off. So basically, the laser guided these three strikes to the lightning rod.
CALLI: Mm hmm. Okay. All right. I think I'm going to be a convert to this dark side supervillain plan. What's next for the laser?
NATE: So the main goal with this project is to increase safety for people all over the world. But researchers believe that the sky's the limit with this technology. If harnessed correctly, you could actually use Lightning's electric discharge as an energy source for charging or for a time traveling DeLorean. That being said, this was a test performed on at most a 164 foot curve. Most lightning channels are miles long, and scaling this system up to the appropriate size could prove to be a real challenge. And that is something that the researchers are proposing for their next step. They want to create a higher frequency, higher energy laser that can harness around a mile's worth of lightning.
CALLI: I mean, I feel like controlling lightning is still kind of like playing God. God? Zeus, Zeus. I don't know.
NATE: In theory, yeah. In practice, though, it's just supposed to be a way to keep people safe.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, I've got some bad news. Today we are going to be talking about climate change. And unfortunately, scientists have figured out when the world is going to end. I'm just kidding. This is a story about why children love puppies.
NATE: Oh, good. I like that a lot better. We did the thing recently with Dan talking about the Puppy Bowl, so he's good and we need more puppy stories in our lives, I think.
CALLI: Absolutely. So first of all, it is really important to know some background on this study, despite it being just absolutely adorable. Of course, it's pretty established in the scientific community that children who grow up with pets are given multiple advantages. Pets can help kids learn, for instance. An older study actually showed that children are way more relaxed when they practice reading to a dog than they are to their parents. They can also help children become more nurturing, kind and careful when learning how to care for a pet. But, until recently, it wasn't clear why most toddlers are naturally drawn to caring for pets.
NATE: I have a theory in this one. It is because dogs are cute.
CALLI: You figured it out. End of story.
NATE: I'm such a good scientist.
CALLI: Okay. That that might be part of the reason. But researchers actually wanted to know more specifically. There is a phenomenon that occurs when a dog expresses discomfort like their paw stuck somewhere, or if they can't reach a treat and toddlers are driven to help the dog out. So a team of researchers gathered three helpful dogs named, and I love this, Fiona, Henry and Seymour and decided to get to the bottom of this pressing mystery.
NATE: I think this is probably the most important field of science that anyone could choose to look into.
CALLI: Oh, for sure. Absolutely. Well, these scientists gathered up 97 toddlers between two and three years old and observed them in various situations with Fiona, Henry and Seymour. These situations were varied, but usually the toddlers were watching the dogs struggle as they tried to get a treat or a toy that was just out of reach.
NATE: I would feel so bad as the scientists setting this experiment up, like, “Here's a cute little puppy, here's a treat it wants where it can't get it. Just sit there and don't help them.”
CALLI: Well, here's the thing. The scientists didn't have to because in half of all the events, the toddlers reached out to grab the treat or toy and gave it to the dog themselves. And if the dog showed interest in the toddler, like, say, if they were sniffing them or licking them, the children were twice as likely to help the dog. The same applied for more energetic, lively dogs, too, especially if the object was food and not just a toy.
NATE: All right. Do they know why the toddlers did this?
CALLI: It's not 100% clear, but the researchers believe these findings support their belief that children's early development reads on things like identifying goals or being social extends to animals, especially if the social aspect is reciprocated by the animal. Some of the children helping can be explained by their own experiences. For example, if a child had a dog at home, they were far more likely to help Fiona, Henry or Seymour.
NATE: Okay. So what you're saying some of this might just be learned behavior from home for the toddlers?
CALLI: In some cases, maybe. But consider this. Some of the objects were ignored by the dogs. Whenever that happened, the children only offered the dogs those items 26% of the time. So basically, they saw that if the dog didn't want this particular treat or this particular toy, they didn't try to give it to them. It's a very interesting social cue for a toddler to pick up on. Long story short, children naturally wanted to pet the dogs just like the rest of us.
NATE: Okay. I know we've talked in the past about how, you know, dogs are selectively bred and how they've evolved with our help to become more favorable to humans. Do you think that we as humans have actually evolved to care for dogs more instinctively as we did that?
CALLI: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The researchers believe that the care a human has for a dog is closely tied to our capacities for compassion and empathy. The fact that some of these children were as young as two years old and we're still able to recognize a dog in need is pretty remarkable.
NATE: Very cool. Right. So what's the bigger picture here? Like, what can we take away from what I admit is a very cute study.
CALLI: Even though we spend the last few minutes joking about how this is a lighter subject than normal for us. It has pretty huge implications on psychological development and future studies. Might answer some of the bigger questions like which emotions are tied to this motivation or how much culture shapes our empathy for dogs. But one thing is for sure, right now, dogs are just as important to us as we are to them.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: If you’ve ever heard that melatonin can treat anxiety and asked “is that true,” the answer is a bit complicated. Melatonin can regulate many of our physiological functions when our bodies are damaged by our own anxiety, but there is no definitive answer on whether it can technically TREAT anxiety. Still: research confirms it can’t hurt to try, so if you want an easy and potentially free method to treat your anxiety - just aim for a good night’s sleep!
NATE: Quick - look! A laser is redirecting that lightning bolt away from the orphanage! Amazingly, that’s not the plot to the newest DC superhero movie - that’s something scientists are doing NOW. A laser has been developed by French scientists that is capable of redirecting lightning by hundreds of feet, which could potentially help mitigate future damage created during storms. Unfortunately, the laser can’t handle more extreme weather, which generally moves around for miles, but with time and funding, lightning strikes could become a thing of the past!
CALLI: Have you ever wondered why children love puppies so much? It turns out it’s because the way humans have evolved over the course of millennia has allowed us to empathize with dogs in need! More research needs to be conducted to figure out some of the deeper psychological implications of this, but one thing’s for sure - we love dogs on an EVOLUTIONARY level!