Learn how the wrong lighting can make you less productive, and why “nuclear pasta” might be the strongest material in the universe. We’ll also dispel some myths about the worst diet fads in history, and answer a listener question about why there are “innie” and “outie” belly buttons. 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: You Should Never Work in a Dimly Lit Room "Nuclear Pasta" May Be the Universe's Strongest Material You Should Never, Ever Try These 11 Diet Fads From the Past (and Present) Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey 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!
Learn how the wrong lighting can make you less productive, and why “nuclear pasta” might be the strongest material in the universe. We’ll also dispel some myths about the worst diet fads in history, and answer a listener question about why there are “innie” and “outie” belly buttons.
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
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/nuclear-pasta-belly-button-science-how-lighting-affects-learning-and-memory-and-the-worst-diet-fads-ever
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got the latest and greatest from curiosity.com plus the answer to a question from an awesome 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 how the wrong lighting can make you less productive, and why nuclear pasta might be the strongest material in the universe. We'll also dispel some myths about the worst diet fads from history, and we'll answer a listener question about belly buttons. I did some serious navel-gazing for this one. Stay tuned for the answer.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily. Here's a quick and easy productivity hack. Do the opposite of what Nelly Furtado might have you do and turn on the lights.
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know any song that Nelly Furtado did except for that one about flying.
CODY GOUGH: You don't remember, [SINGING] turn out the lights, turn out the lights?
ASHLEY HAMER: No.
CODY GOUGH: Are you serious?
ASHLEY HAMER: What year was that from?
CODY GOUGH: It is not possible for you to have not heard Turn Out the Lights.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm going to say year, was it before or after? I was in the same album as the fly one.
CODY GOUGH: What's the fly one you're talking about?
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know. Nelly Furtado, like fly like a-- not fly like an eagle. I'm like a bird, that's the only one I've heard.
CODY GOUGH: You have absolutely heard [SINGING] they say the girl, you know she act to tough, tough, tough. Let's go and to turn out the lights. That one?
ASHLEY HAMER: No.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: I was in jazz school, man. I don't know.
CODY GOUGH: We are going to have a little concert after this in the office. But that notwithstanding, Nelly Furtado is fantastic but turning off the lights is not a really great way to be productive, it turns out. According to a study by Michigan State University researchers earlier this year, spending too much time at dimly lit rooms may hurt your ability to remember and learn. Pretty relevant news since Americans spend about 90% of their time indoors according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
For this study, researchers looked at Nile grass rats who sleep at night and are active during the day. Sounds like humans. The rats were exposed to bright or dim light for four weeks. After the four weeks, the dim light group lost about 30% capacity in the hippocampus. That's a critical part of your brain for learning and memory.
The rats also performed poorly on a spatial task they had previously been trained on. And the bright light group showed significant improvements on the task. More than that, the brain capacity and task performance of the dim light group completely bounced back after they were exposed to bright light for four weeks.
The researchers found that a lot of exposure to dim light led to huge reductions in something called "brain derived neurotrophic factor." That's a peptide that helps keep neurons in the memory-centric hippocampus healthy. In other words, dim lights are producing dim wits. Ashley, maybe you just heard the Nelly Furtado song when it was really dark out.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Maybe I just didn't remember because it was so dark.
The universe's strongest material might be a thing called nuclear pasta. Do you prefer your neutron star science overdone or al dente?
CODY GOUGH: I'm an al dente kind of guy.
ASHLEY HAMER: Me too. First, here's a quick recap on neutron stars. They are ultra dense objects that come from the death of a massive star. We're talking several times bigger than our own sun. The star collapses into a space the size of a city, creating a neutron star that's one of the densest objects in the universe. But its density isn't the same all the way through.
Neutron stars are made up of several layers, and like the Earth, the outermost zone is known as the crust. It's made up of the outer crust and the inner crust, and the whole thing stretches about a kilometer down from the surface. Physicists think that atoms at the surface aren't very dense at all but the further down you go in the outer crust, the tighter the squeeze, until the atoms are so close together that their electrons escape and their nuclei form a tightly-bound lattice structure.
Go even deeper into the inner crust and those nuclei are so tightly-packed that they start to arrange themselves into bizarre shapes. Shapes that look a lot like pasta. In a new paper published in the Journal Physical Review Letters, this is what physicists Charles Horowitz, Andre da Silva Schneider, and Matt Kaplan call the "pasta layer." Some of these nuclear structures are flattened into lasagna-like sheets, others are stretched into strands like spaghetti.
You've got your dumpling like gnocchi and your tube-shaped bucatini. You've even got anti-pasta. Anti-spaghetti is nuclear matter punched through with tunnels and anti-gnocchi is full of holes like Swiss cheese. Also, there are nuclear waffles, because who doesn't like waffles?
This pasta layer is only 100 to 250 meters thick, but it's so dense that it may contain more than half of the crust's total mass. This means that it's important to understand it since if you know how a neutron stars density is laid out, you can predict the ways it might behave. To that end, the researchers created computer simulations of the stuff and figured out how much force it took to break.
It turns out that breaking nuclear pasta takes a lot of force, as in 10 billion times the force you need to crack steel. And the reason it's good we know this is because we think that magnetar outbursts, star quakes, and importantly, neutron star mergers all involve the crust-breaking. According to these simulations, the nuclear pasta is stiff enough to produce the gravitational waves that LIGO is looking for. Anyway, who's hungry for spaghetti?
CODY GOUGH: You know what I'm not hungry for? A ridiculous diet fad from history. Let's have a Sunday funday and learn about some of the worst diets ever conceived and dispel some myths you might even still believe.
ASHLEY HAMER: These are fun and also gross.
CODY GOUGH: We are going to start with cleansing, because simply put-- and this might be hard for you to hear-- the idea of a cleanse or detox is actually a myth. That's what your kidneys are for. In 1941, alternative health enthusiast Stanley Burrows created the lemonade diet which supposedly kills off your cravings for junk food and drugs. It's simple-- just down a mixture of lemon or lime juice, maple syrup, water, and cayenne pepper six times a day for at least 10 days.
But very unfortunately, this diet got some positive modern press in 2006 from none other than Beyonce. Yes, this diet helps you lose weight but that's because it makes your body survive on a shockingly low number of calories. And you'll gain it right back as soon as you go back to eating normally.
Juice cleanses are not much better. Dr. Elizabeth Applegate is a senior lecturer in the Nutrition Department at UC Davis and she said, quote, "we do a good job of recouping our losses but that doesn't make juice cleanses at all healthy. On a cleanse diet, you shed water weight as your body breaks down its glycemic stores. But it comes back once you start eating adequately again," unquote.
Here's another myth-- the tapeworm diet. Legend has it that people in Victorian times would eat a tapeworm to gobble up the food they put in their stomachs. But this is actually debated among historians. There's no hard evidence that the tapeworm diet was ever an actual fad, so it may be an urban legend.
We get into more fad diets in our fill write-up today on curiosity.com and the Curiosity app for Android and iOS, including the cotton ball diet and the werewolf diet. But here's one more-- liquid diets. It turns out those have a long history, as in William the Conqueror long. He was born in 1028 and switched to a liquid diet when he became overweight later in life.
The thing was that liquid was mostly just alcohol. Technically, he lost weight but if he hadn't been killed in a horseback riding accident, we have a feeling his liver would have given out pretty fast. Some diet fads have echoed that eat healthy but you can drink whatever you want IDF, and that is not a good thing. Always drink responsibly. And no matter what you put in your body, remember, everything in moderation.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Nico who writes, "I'm familiar that there are two types of belly buttons-- innies and outies. But how does one become an innie or an outie? Is it genetic? The way that the umbilical cord is cut? I've also heard that it possibly depends on how it's cleaned after birth. What's the science behind it?" I had a blast looking into this one.
CODY GOUGH: You really did.
ASHLEY HAMER: I did.
CODY GOUGH: You were giddy all morning. You're tweeting about it, you're laughing out loud.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's-- I looked at so many belly buttons.
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: There is a surprising amount of research out there into belly buttons, mostly thanks to plastic surgeons. So here's the short answer. About 90% of people have an innie and only 10% have an outie. The reasons why are disputed. But you're right, Nico, many of the theories come down to the way the umbilical cord is cut at birth. In fact, the technical term for belly button is umbilicus.
As far as I can see, it doesn't seem to be genetic. And while Cody and I thought it might come down to body fat percentage, that doesn't seem to have anything to do with it either. So there's that answer. But I have to share some really quick belly button facts before I move on.
First, your belly button hasn't always been the same. Most babies start with a literal button where the skin protrudes from their belly. Then grows into a more mature belly button later. Your belly button is also made up of four parts-- the mamelon which is the central hump, the cicatrix which is the scar from where the doctor cut the cord, the cushion which is the little border around the indentation, and the furrows which is the depression that rings the central hump.
A 2017 study found that the average male belly button is a circle with a radius of 2.1 centimeters, and the average female belly button is a little wider at 2.4 centimeters across and 2.1 centimeters up and down. There are also way more belly buttons than just innies and outies. A study called-- no joke-- In Search of the Ideal Female Umbilicus, found that 37% of women have a t-shaped belly button. That is, in any with a prominent hood at the top. Next most common is the oval-shaped belly button, followed by vertically-shaped and horizontally-shaped. What kind do you have?
CODY GOUGH: Wow. I don't even know what shape mine is.
ASHLEY HAMER: I had to go look in the mirror.
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: I think it's an oval. I can't really tell.
CODY GOUGH: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: We invite you to join us again tomorrow on the award-winning Curiosity Daily to learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
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