Today we discuss how the lost temple of Poseidon may have been discovered, how our circadian rhythms show what time of day is best to exercise, and how researchers decoded a stack of letters written by Mary Queen of Scots during her imprisonment. WATCH SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS ONLY IN THEATERS MARCH 17. (Rated PG-13)
Today we discuss how the lost temple of Poseidon may have been discovered, how our circadian rhythms show what time of day is best to exercise, and how researchers decoded a stack of letters written by Mary Queen of Scots during her imprisonment.
WATCH SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS ONLY IN THEATERS MARCH 17. (Rated PG-13)
Poseidon Temple
Time to Exercise
Queen of Scots Letters
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/poseidon-temple-time-to-exercise-queen-of-scots-letters
[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 how the lost temple of Poseidon may have been discovered, how our circadian rhythms show what time of day is best to exercise, and how researchers decoded a stack of letters written by Mary Queen of Scots during her imprisonment.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, have you heard this super common phrase: learn something new everyday and you’ll never work a day in your life.
CALLI: Um, yeah, duh, obviously. That’s why I’ve dedicated my life to the quest of knowledge!
NATE: So has Gary Arnt, host of the podcast Everything Everywhere Daily.
CALLI: Omg I love that show, I listen most days… some days… a few days a week. Listen, there’s just so much good information that Gary almost always sends me down a curiosity rabbit hole and before I know it the entire day is gone.
NATE: Well if you, dear listener, don’t have time to go with Calli down the rabbit holes of learning, Everything Everywhere Daily is a great place to start. In just ten minutes each weekday you can learn something new.
CALLI: About history, geography, mathematics - even science. It’s a great companion to Curiosity Daily.
NATE: The Curiosity team has been listening to episodes about Why Are There No Flying Cars and The Most Important Supermarket Trip in Human History around here, and we think you’ll love them too!
CALLI: Check the show out and spend a little time - or a few hours - learning something new today.
NATE: Learn something new every single day with Everything Everywhere Daily—find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Guys, I really liked the first Shazam movie and the sequel Shazam: Fury of the Gods is coming out March 17th, so I've been counting down the days till that comes out in theaters. I love superheroes. I also love Greek mythology. Took a Greek mythology class in high school. Shazam blends both of those. We got him. It's a good combination. So big fan, but it's not out yet. So you know fill my time. I've been reading up on a little bit of Greek mythology stuff and I learned that they recently discovered a temple dedicated to one of those gods, and it's been missing for like 2000 years.
CALLI: Okay, so first off, love, Shazam! I'm really excited about that. I also really love Greek mythology. So which God was this temple for? Was it Hesperides, Calypso? And tell us, who are we talking?
NATE: So the temple might have been dedicated to Poseidon, God of the sea and of earthquakes, the God of storms, and also horses. As far as gods go, he's kind of a jack of all trades, but he was also famous for being bad tempered, moody, greedy and spiteful. And if you know about the God of the sea being as angry as he was, it probably comes as no surprise to you that his temple was found near Samikon, an ancient village on the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece and the home of some of the wildest tsunamis on Earth.
CALLI: Okay, but you did say that it only might have been. Why do they think it was Poseidon?
NATE: Good catch. Yes, for starters. Other than its tsunami activity, Samikon is famous for being the location of Poseidon's missing sanctuary, a sanctuary that has been considered lost for over 2000 years, but was once described in great detail by the ancient Greek historian Strabo. Now, Strabo wrote about the sanctuary, saying that it had existed since the sixth century B.C.E. and was 30 feet wide and 90 feet long with two foot thick walls. In his writings, Strabo spoke about the temple having an ordinary vestibule or meeting hall, as well as a back room chamber and a special room dedicated to Poseidon. And based on context, historians suspected that the temple existed in the plains below Samikon, which is on a hilltop. Unfortunately, since troubles writings, nobody knew where this temple once stood exactly until recently, when a team of researchers from Mainz University in Germany uncovered an early temple like structure near the shoreline not too far from where they predicted it might be found.
CALLI: Okay, well, wait, back up 30 feet by 90 feet isn't a small temple. So why did it take so long to find?
NATE: So the structure was buried deep and showed signs of being decimated by tsunamis. The researchers found rock and sediments that had high energy traces of tsunamigenic origin, which is rock that shows signs of being damaged by heavy earthquake activity. Tsunamis are already very common in the Mediterranean Sea, the result of heavy seismic activity in the area triggering earthquakes that lead to tsunamis. And due to how common earthquakes are in the region, it could create something called a mega tsunami. The most recent Mediterranean megatsunami happened back in 1908 in southern Italy, killing more than 100,000 people. But researchers believe that thousands of years ago there may have been as many as a dozen or more megatsunamis that hit the shores along the Mediterranean.
CALLI: Okay. So do you think there's a chance that they chose this place because of the tsunamis. Because if Poseidon is the God of the sea and he had a temper, it would make sense to be located somewhere that the sea seems so aggressive.
NATE: Yes, that is what the researchers currently believe. Exactly. Yeah. Poseidon had another nickname, Earth Shaker. Well, and since tsunamis are the result of earthquakes, creating erratic weather, Mainz University believes it's quite likely this temple was built somewhere that ancient Greeks knew would attract this kind of weather. But this wasn't necessarily a case of poor planning. The structure is actually surrounded by three large hills, which are further surrounded by a series of lagoons. That being said, we don't actually know for sure what happened to the temple to leave it in such a state of disarray. We can't even be sure that this is actually Poseidon's temple.
CALLI: I mean, if it matches the description, it's got to be Poseidon's temple, right?
NATE: The kicker, as the researchers described it, is something in the temple called a marble perirrhanterion, or a water basin used for ritual washing in sanctuaries from that era. But beyond that, confirming the shrine is going to take a lot of time. Mainz University predicts that a study will take multiple years. But no matter what they find, one thing is for sure. It will expand our knowledge on what life was like for a specific type of people from over 2000 years ago and teach us more about the partly unknown history of the worship of Greek gods.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, Do you remember how recently you were telling me that the time of day doesn't matter for when you eat? Well, it actually turns out that the time of day does matter for when you exercise.
NATE: Huh? All right. Why? For one and not the other.
CALLI: So this was actually discovered during a collaborative study between the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The study hypothesized that the time of day a person worked out would matter due to the way our circadian rhythms work, which are human’s internal clocks see, the different biological processes work differently at different times of day. Because of your circadian rhythm, you can kind of think of it as like this master clock that controls a number of other little clocks, like when you get hungry, when you get tired and when you're most alert. The theory was that the same master clock might also hold the secret to the time our bodies process fat the most efficiently.
NATE: Okay, so how did they do this study?
CALLI: As always, it comes back to mice. They studied the adipose tissue of mice. And in case you didn't know that word, like I didn't have to look it up. Adipose tissue is actually the kind of body fat that connects everything in your body. So muscle to bones, to veins and so on. It's all connected in some way by adipose tissue. Specifically, they put the mice on an exercise cycle at different times of day and then scanned their adipose tissue.
NATE: How? What? Right. What's the mouse exercise cycle? We talk and we got like little lab mouse sitting there bench pressing, “Bro, spot me.”
CALLI: Okay, well, actually, that's a lot cuter, but not exactly. It was more like mice running on one of those little hamster wheels at a high level at two different times of day, late morning and late evening during and after the exercise. The researchers studied different genetic markers in the adipose tissue and figured out which genes were active after the exercise.
NATE: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. What did they find?
CALLI: Well, whenever they had the mice working out during the late morning hours, it increased the activity of genes that are associated with the breakdown of body fat. So like thermogenesis, a.k.a. heat production and the presence of mitochondria in the body fat, which means that the mouse's metabolism was working harder. So to put it simply, during the morning hours, the mice were really burning off a lot of fat.
NATE: All right. That sounds pretty impressive. How about our Jimmy Fallon mice? The the late night variety?
CALLI: So much like the real Jimmy, these mice, his muscles were not on fire. The. Yeah, the metabolism effects were only seen in the mice who did a high intensity workout in the early morning. All of these results were completely independent of the mice. Food intake. Of course, mice that ate more in the morning didn't see these results, but none of the mice working out at night saw any substantial changes to their metabolism.
NATE: All right. So does that mean we, the non mice in this situation should only be working out in the morning?
CALLI: I mean, not everybody has the luxury to choose the time to exercise. But what the study is suggesting is that if you can work out in the morning, it might be more effective for weight loss. Mice and humans have really similar body functions, which is why we talk about so many animal studies on the show centered around them. And because of that, the researchers believe that this cycle would probably apply to humans as well.
NATE: Okay. Let me just play devil's advocate here for a second. Even though there are a lot of similarities between humans and mice. There's the problem I'm seeing with this study. Mice are nocturnal and humans are not, at least not naturally.
CALLI:That's actually true. And that is something the researchers want people to caution before coming to the conclusion that the morning will work better for everyone trying to get fit. It's their opinion that the study is evidence that timing matters when it comes to the body's energy balance. They also believe that the health benefits that come from exercise will increase if you work out at the right time of day. But because of the difference in circadian rhythms between mice and humans, more studies still need to be carried out. That being said, if those studies turn out promising for humans, then we'll know that the time you eat doesn't matter, but the time you exercise does.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Mary, Queen of Scots, who was famously imprisoned, wrote a stack of secret letters before she died that have recently been decoded.
CALLI: Okay. I love the beginning of this already secret letter. Sound really cool, but what kind of letters are these?
NATE: Well, that's the craziest part. When they found the letters, at first they were written in a cipher, which is basically writing in a secret code where you swap one letter in a word for another. Sometimes it's more simple, like pig Latin, where you take the first letter of a word and you make it the last letter. And sometimes it's more complicated, like the famous Zodiac killer messages that have never been solved more than 50 years later. Thankfully, in Queen Mary's case, the cipher she used didn't turn out to be that complicated a way.
CALLI: Ut-way id-day uh-they etters-lay ay-say?
NATE: Huh?
CALLI: Sorry. You're talking about pig Latin, so I assumed you were fluent. What did the letter say?
NATE: Okay, so first, I think you need some context to understand the importance of what the letters say. Each of the letters were addressed to a number of other notable political figures between 1578 and 1584, but they weren't marked as being written by Mary. During this time, Mary was imprisoned because Queen Elizabeth, the first of England, was afraid that Mary and her supporters were trying to overthrow her to become the Queen of England. Most of these letters were addressed to Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador to England, but the scientists weren't sure at first if it was Mary who wrote them.
CALLI: Wait. So they found these letters and they think they were from Mary, but they're not sure.
NATE: They had their suspicions. It was Mary because Mary sent an infamous letter in 1586 that was intercepted and given to Queen Elizabeth. That particular letter wasn't in the stash discovered, but it was also in a cipher. And it was also addressed to Michel de Castelnau and it called for Elizabeth's assassination. And that letter would lead to Mary being tried for treason and beheaded a year later. So with all of that in mind, the team that found these letters fully expected that when they cracked the code, the letters were written in, they would be able to paint a clearer picture of Mary's mindset. The only problem is they were written in a cipher that they had never seen.
CALLI: Makes it a little bit more complicated. So how do they solve the cipher?
NATE: So there's a cryptographer or someone who solves ciphers named George Lasry, and he's part of something called the Decrypt Project, which is a multi-university collaboration that attempts to find and decode historical ciphers. He and a team of scientists found the letters stashed away with a bunch of documents from Italy in the National Library of France. The scientists assumed the letters cipher would be in Italian, but they didn't have any luck cracking the cipher until they realized that the substitution of letters only made sense if the original language was French.
CALLI: Gotcha. Okay, so first off, this sounds like the coolest job ever, but how did the cipher work?
NATE: The letters were written in a homophobic cipher where each letter is replaced with multiple symbols in a normal substitution cipher. Exchanging E, for instance, with A is easier to crack because once you get the rhyme in reason of the cipher, you can solve it in minutes if you're a cryptographer. But in a homophobic cipher, multiple symbols are used interchangeably for letters being used at a higher frequency. So before with the E for A example, I used it would actually be more like E for a X, Y, and Z.
CALLI: I take it back. That sounds really complicated.
NATE: So what made it even worse is that Mary’s cipher used certain symbols to replace entire words. And George Lasry said that working on the decryption was like peeling an onion by hand without hands. But the picture in front of George did become more and more clear with every deciphered passage. First, he learned that the letters were in French. Then it was the discovery that certain French phrases like ma liberté. If I'm saying that right, which suggested that Mary was talking about freedom, and then the smoking gun, the name Walsingham, who is the spymaster that had turned Mary in to Queen Elizabeth. So that's when George knew these letters were written by Mary, Queen of Scots. So he reached out to the UK's National Archives to see if any of these letters had ever been intercepted by Walsingham and discovered that seven of them were in the archive.
CALLI: Holy cow. Were the seven letters written in the same cipher?
NATE: Yes. And they had already been deciphered too. This, of course, helped them work out some more of the symbols in the letters, because even though the National Archives had seven of these, George had an additional 50 letters that weren't fully deciphered yet.
CALLI: All right. So last question then. What did the other 50 letters tell us about Mary?
NATE: They tell us quite a lot. So Mary worries about her health. She tried to get the French ambassador to make requests for her freedom to Queen Elizabeth. She expressed concern that her imprisonment isn't actually being done in good faith or even legally. Most of the letters are diplomatic in nature and less focused on her personal feelings. So we're still a bit further away from understanding her mindset during her sentence. But now we have a clear picture that while Mary was in prison, she was still performing her duties as the Queen of Scots. For example. Some of the letters have her negotiating peace treaties with the Spanish, the French, and even Elizabeth. Together, the letters make up around 50,000 words of new material. A book's worth of context that can be added to the file of Mary's life. As George Lasry said, we have only scratched the surface.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Poseidon might not just be a Greek myth, he was once real! Well… maybe. Recently, a 2,000 year missing structure was found on a Grecian peninsula that quite possibly could be the missing temple of Poseidon, god of the sea! More work needs to be done to figure out exactly what the structure is, but soon, it may unlock some of the many secrets of ancient Greek culture! If you’re interested in learning more about Greek gods: WATCH SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS ONLY IN THEATERS MARCH 17.
CALLI: You trying to get SWOLL, bro? New evidence suggests that the time of day you exercise matters a lot more than we previously knew. After a study where mice did high intensity exercises at different times throughout the day, scientists have concluded that if you want to see ample fat loss and quicker muscle gain, work out in the morning. This study hasn’t been tested on humans yet, but when it is, there’s a very real chance that everything we know about exercise will change forever!
NATE: What’s the most important thing you’ve ever lost? For a certain breed of historian, it’s most of the history of Mary, Queen of Scots’ final years. But in a stunning discovery, 57 ciphered letters were found AND deciphered, cluing us into what Mary’s life was like in the final decade of her life, where she was famously imprisoned and then tragically executed. We know now that Mary wasn’t a victim of circumstance or a cunningly traitorous prisoner - she was conducting her political duties from BEHIND BARS, with a care for her duties we didn’t previously know about.