Learn why scientists think Saturn’s moon Dione might be habitable; why new research shows that giving advice is better than receiving it; and how to get a deeper sleep and boost your memory by listening to “pink noise.” 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: Bright Streaks on This Underdog Moon of Saturn May Mean It's Habitable — https://curiosity.im/2EUJSxI When It Comes to Self-Improvement, Giving Advice Is Better Than Getting It — https://curiosity.im/2D5F8TQ For Deeper Sleep and a Stronger Memory, Listen to "Pink Noise" — https://curiosity.im/2D3qsol 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 why scientists think Saturn’s moon Dione might be habitable; why new research shows that giving advice is better than receiving it; and how to get a deeper sleep and boost your memory by listening to “pink noise.”
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/pink-noise-sleep-hack-saturns-moon-dione-habitability-and-giving-versus-receiving-advice
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiositydotcom 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 scientists think one of Saturn's moons might be habitable, why giving advice is better than receiving it, and how to get a deeper sleep and boost your memory by listening to pink noise.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scientists have discovered new signs of habitability on a moon in our solar system. Dione is a moon of Saturn and we've spotted straight bright stripes whose origins give us hope that it might be a habitable world. Cody, we were talking about this earlier. How many moons of Saturn can you name?
CODY GOUGH: Well, Dione.
ASHLEY HAMER: Dione.
CODY GOUGH: That's about it. Do you know how many moons Saturn has?
ASHLEY HAMER: 53.
CODY GOUGH: That is so many moons.
ASHLEY HAMER: So many moons.
CODY GOUGH: In our solar system total there's nearly 200 moons.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. And if we-- well, we talked about this with Pluto. If we make Pluto a planet, a lot of those moons are going to become planets too.
CODY GOUGH: Too much to remember.
ASHLEY HAMER: Too much.
CODY GOUGH: Well, if Dione can support life, maybe we'll upgraded.
ASHLEY HAMER: Maybe you will. So for some background, Dione is a tiny moon. Just 700 miles in diameter. That's about a quarter of the width of the United States. Its surface is also covered with craters just like our own moon. Nothing too extraordinary there. But in 2016, a study in geophysical research letters suggested that Dione may have a large underground ocean, just like two other Saturn moons-- Titan and Enceladus.
The Cassini spacecraft picked up gravity data that's best explained by water some 60 miles below the surface. It's not a slam dunk for life. But as we know, water is pretty important. And this is where the new stripes come in. These bright features we spotted are linear virgae. A virga is a singular form of virgae and that's classified as a stripe or streak of color.
Scientists say the bright lines likely come from the draping of surface materials, which could come from sources such as the rings of Saturn, comets passing by, or the nearby moons-- Helene [INAUDIBLE]. Emily Martin is a research fellow at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington and one of the study's authors. And she said, quote, "We think that the material forming Dione's linear virgae is not native to Dione. So this could mean that whatever the source of the material is, it could be contributing some important chemistry to the Dione system that might make it more habitable." Unquote.
Martin said, her team plans to continue doing modeling work on the virgae and will also explore if other worlds in the solar system have these weird features. At the very least, the virgae do show that some neat activities going on at Saturn. One more reason to keep looking for life in our solar system.
CODY GOUGH: Do you love giving advice? Well, here's something weird. You might actually benefit more from that advice than the person you're giving it. According to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, giving advice is actually a lot more effective than receiving it. Are you an advice giver, Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: I am. I give a lot of advice, actually. I feel like there's a time in the last few years where I've shifted from an advice taker to an advice giver. And it kind of feels good.
CODY GOUGH: I've heard a theory that no one in a relationship has ever listened to advice about that relationship.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. Oh, you mean people outside the relationship giving advice on the relationship?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: That's just one context, but it's like really, no matter how bad it is, no matter how good it is, you're never going to listen to anybody else.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's true.
CODY GOUGH: But maybe, people can use this information and change what they do with advice.
ASHLEY HAMER: We're going to give people advice about giving advice. I wonder if they'll take our advice or if they'll give advice about giving advice themselves. Woo. Meta.
CODY GOUGH: Dude, it's Monday. You can't do this to me. For this study, researchers made a series of experiments and they looked at how adolescents interacted with each other and with their teachers. In the first experiment, teens and pre-teens were randomly assigned roles of advice giver and advice receiver.
Advice givers or advisors got the chance to reply to a letter that was written by a fourth grader having a hard time with a vocabulary lesson. Each advisor was responding to the same letter by the way. Now, those in the advice receiver group or advisees were each given a letter written by a teacher on the same subject. Again, each student was shown the same letter with the same generically positive advice.
Here's an excerpt. Don't settle. Always try to make things better and better. You need to put in your full effort, not just cost by. Something that means putting a lot of time after the school day and like studying vocabulary online. Stuff like that. In the following four weeks, the students were given access to an online vocabulary program and the researchers secretly tracked the amount of time they spent working on their vocab in their own time.
But sure enough, the advisor groups spent more than seven minutes more per session on their vocab while the advisees only improved their study time by three minutes in change. Less than half as much. Other experiments showed similar results for people from a wider range of ages and in fields other than academic achievement.
Financial, interpersonal, health, and work. In these cases, participants self-reported their feelings of motivation rather than being secretly tracked but the difference was still clear. People think that getting advice is more motivating but in reality, giving advice is what leads to fire. So the next time you're not super sure about what you should do, try imagining another person in the same situation as you and what advice you would give them to make it through. You might just find that your confidence improves accordingly.
ASHLEY HAMER: Here's a tip for taking your sleep routine to the next level. Pink noise. Ready for a bedtime life hack?
CODY GOUGH: Am I?
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, you've probably heard of white noise. It kind of sounds like this [VOCALIZING].
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Sure, does, Ashley.
[LAUGHTER]
ASHLEY HAMER: So pink noise is a lot like that, except with a special blend of high and low frequencies that sounds a bit more pleasant and balanced. According to Berkeley Wellness, pink noise is a little deeper than white noise and it mimics natural sounds like rustling leaves and rushing waterfalls. White noise is more like a hissing teapot and that familiar buzz of TV static. Here's a quick sample of pink noise.
CODY GOUGH: I'm going to fade in and then fade out of this so it's not just jarringly loud.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: Here it goes.
[WHOOSHING SOUND]
ASHLEY HAMER: Studies have shown that both pink and white noise can help people fall asleep and stay asleep. And a few studies have shown big time benefits of pink noise. A 2012 study analyzing brain waves showed that participants slept and napped much better when pink noise is playing. In a 2013 study, German researchers found that the morning after a night of pink noise, participants were able to recall pairs of words they read before going to sleep much better than they were after a night of no noise.
And a 2017 study of participants aged 60 and older found that after a night of pink noise sleep, they had slept more deeply and they perform much better on a memory recall test than they did after a night of sleeping in silence. I should mention that although multiple studies support the idea that some noise can improve your sleep and your memory, no study has pitted the different colors of noise against each other to see which one might reign supreme.
For now, at least, it's all up to your preference. If you prefer the higher pitched frequencies and want to have a go at better sleep, try white noise. If rushing water is more your jam, try pink noise. Happy snoozing.
CODY GOUGH: Read about today's stories and more on curiositydotcom.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.