Curiosity Daily

PPE Concrete, Steroid Use and ADHD, Butterfly Chastity

Episode Summary

Today we discuss how recycling used personal protective equipment can make stronger concrete, a rise in ADHD symptoms among male weightlifters who take steroids, and the battle of the sexes among male and female butterflies!

Episode Notes

Today we discuss how recycling used personal protective equipment can make stronger concrete, a rise in ADHD symptoms among male weightlifters who take steroids, and the battle of the sexes among male and female butterflies!

PPE Concrete

Steroid Use and ADHD 

Butterfly Chastity

Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Calli and Nate — for free! 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 transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/ppe-concrete-steroid-use-and-adhd-butterfly-chastity

Episode Transcription

[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, we are gonna learn about how recycling used personal protective equipment can make stronger concrete, a rise in ADHD symptoms among male weightlifters who take steroids, and the battle of the sexes among male and female butterflies!


 

CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!


 

[SFX: WHOOSH]


 

NATE: Calli, do you ever think about how much personal protective equipment we’ve used in our fight against COVID-19?


 

CALLI: Oh boy, I mean it’s been a few years now, so it has to be just an unbelievable amount. right?


 

NATE: Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have created more than 54,000 tons of personal protective equipment, or PPE, around the world. Even now, we use 129 billion disposable face masks a MONTH world wide. And that has some researchers pretty worried about waste.


 

CALLI: Well what are we supposed to do with it all? Most of this stuff is disposable by design, right? For doctors and surgeons to always have clean equipment?


 

NATE: It sure is, but that doesn’t mean it just disappears after we use it! That's why researchers at RMIT University in Australia started looking for other things to do with disposed PPE. What they found was that disposable PPE can be added to concrete and it actually makes the concrete stronger and more durable.


 

CALLI: Two benefits for the price of one? That’s awesome. What kind of PPE did they look at? Was it just masks?


 

NATE: They looked at isolation gowns, face masks, and rubber gloves. They used these as reinforcement materials in structural concrete and found that the addition of PPE could increase concrete’s resistance to cracking by up to 22%!


 

CALLI: Does that mean they are just throwing whole gowns into the slop of wet concrete?


 

NATE: Ha, thankfully not. Researchers shredded the PPE and then explored adding the three different types of PPE to concrete in various volumes ranging between .1% and .25% of the concrete.


 

CALLI: Oh they separated the PPE? Did the different kinds of materials have different results?


 

NATE: They sure did! Rubber gloves could increase compressive strength by up to an impressive 22%. Isolation gowns made concrete up to 21% more resistant to bending stress, 15% more compressively strong, and 12% more elastic, and face masks increased compressive strength by up to 17%!


 

CALLI: Those aren’t small numbers! That’s a big difference, and it sounds like you could use the right PPE for whatever kind of strength or attribute you needed in your concrete. But could you mix the various types of PPE?


 

NATE: As always Calli, such a good question. And that's exactly what researchers are hoping to do next. They want to mix different streams of PPE and see what difference it makes in the final concrete, for all we know we might be able to make something even stronger!


 

CALLI: Right on, so when will I be seeing this concrete make its way into homes and buildings?


 

NATE: Well, along with mixing streams, researchers are currently working on strategies to get this concrete mixture out into the field for various trials.


 

CALLI: Well I hope they go well, I love when we can find benefits in old waste products!


 

NATE: Right? How cool would it be if we could decrease waste, AND make stronger building materials? Thankfully, the research is looking like this might soon be a reality!


 

[SFX: WHOOSH]


 

CALLI: Nate, what do you know about performance-enhancing drugs?


 

NATE: Why does this feel like an accusation?! I don’t know much, enlighten me.


 

CALLI: Well, I’m talking specifically about steroids, which are more accurately known as anabolic androgenic steroids or AAS. Researchers recently found that male weightlifters who use or have used AAS in the past are more likely to have ADHD symptoms than non-users. While we don’t have the full picture of this relationship yet, knowing it exists could help us fight drug use in the future. 


 

NATE: Steroids? I haven’t heard much about those since the Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa home run race so many years ago. I wonder if they’ve shown any symptoms of ADHD.


 

CALLI: They honestly might. Researchers found that symptoms of Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder are more prevalent among athletes than in the general population. We already knew that steroids can have a positive effect on athletic performance and muscle growth, but they can also have really serious side effects. In addition to this new discovery, they’ve been shown to cause mood syndromes, cardiovascular disease, disruptions to one's cognitive or behavioral processes, and they’ve been linked to hostility and mood swings.


 

NATE: That’s a long list of side effects, people can’t really still be using them then, right?


 

CALLI: Unfortunately, some athletes still use them at all levels of sports, from the very casual athletes to professionals. And researchers still aren’t sure what predisposes people to using AAS.


 

NATE: So they started looking for ADHD because it occurs more among athletes, but could it be the other way around? That people with ADHD are more likely to use steroids?


 

CALLI: Funny you should ask, researchers already knew that those with ADHD had an increased risk for substance abuse, so they started to look for a potential connection between ADHD and AAS use in general.


 

NATE: So how did they study this? Were people willing to admit they were taking steroids?


 

CALLI: Researchers took a group of 134 male weightlifters, all over the age of 18. They separated them into two groups: those who had, or were currently, taken AAS, and those who had never used it. They then put them through a series of tests.


 

NATE: What kinds of tests?


 

CALLI: They put them through a series of cognitive tests, to see how they scored on things like memory, learning, processing speed, and executive functioning, and they had them do a self-report on any ADHD symptoms and any emotional or behavioral problems. Across the weightlifters, AAS users had more ADHD symptoms than non-users.


 

NATE: What does that tell us? That AAS use gives us ADHD?


 

CALLI: No, researchers were quick to point out that this test didn’t prove any causal link, only that there IS a connection. Knowing this could prove effective in creating strategies to fight or discourage steroid use, especially in groups that seem most susceptible.


 

NATE: So is that true for all weightlifters? All athletes?


 

CALLI: There are still a lot of limitations to the study, it was only weightlifting, not other sports, and the study only included male weightlifters, so researchers need to expand the study across all genders. But the results are still pretty illuminating.


 

NATE: Wow. Well, whether you have symptoms of ADHD or not, if you’re listening, know the risks of using AAS aren’t worth it.


 

[SFX: WHOOSH]

NATE: So Calli, I don’t know if you’ve ever had an insanely jealous ex but I just learned about a species that is SO controlling of their mates that they go to the most extreme lengths to make sure that their partners basically stay monogamous.

CALLI: What can animals possibly do to get rid of other mating options? Is it like with lions where the males fight over who gets the lioness?

NATE: No, not like that. It’s a little bit more evolutionary, actually. I found a study that shows that, apparently, male butterflies, not lions, are the ones that display this toxic behavior.

CALLI: Uh oh. How do they do that?

NATE: They follow up any sexual release with an additional fluid that… well, it seals their partner up with what’s described as a “waxy chastity belt.” This is called a “sphragis” and resembles a scab or a blob of petroleum jelly in some species. These sphragis all serve the same purpose of enforcing female monogamy on an evolutionary scale, because female butterflies will always fertilize most of her eggs with sperm from her last partner. That’s why male butterflies have evolved this kind of “protection,” as it’s called.

CALLI: Somehow that’s both super cool and also kinda sad? How did I find myself feeling sorry for the female butterflies?

NATE: Don’t feel too bad just yet. What this study discovered is that female butterflies are actually counter attacking this through evolution, and have evolved larger, more complex organs that are, and this is the study’s words not mine… “tougher to plug.” This has led male butterflies to ALSO evolve. Some of these “waxy belts” now include pointed hook formations that dig into the female.

#CALLI: Talk about a battle of the sexes. This is like one of those old timey sex comedies, but with way more violence. Like Bringing Up Baby meets Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

NATE: Well, there’s a catch here, and it’s part of why this is so fraught. Female butterflies actually benefit from mating with more than one male, because multiple mating events are known to increase the genetic diversity of her offspring. Interestingly, female butterflies get a health boost from the nutrients included in males’ sperm.

CALLI: NATE. You have to be making that last part up, right?

NATE: I’m really not! It’s a huge factor in why this evolutionary battle is so interesting, because female butterflies need male butterflies to stay healthy and procreate, but male butterflies need female butterflies to keep their lineage alive. On top of all that, there have been hypotheses that the “mating plug” might actually lead to the evolution of new species of butterfly.

CALLI: Wow. Okay. How does that work?

NATE: So Ana Paula dos Santos de Carvalho, a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History, ran a study on the mating plugs of brush-footed butterflies. First, she traced back the evolution of the plug and analyzed how quickly new species appeared. She was shocked to find that lineages with AND without mating plugs evolved at the same rate.

CALLI: What does that mean?

NATE: Well, she thinks that other factors, like where a butterfly lives, might actually be responsible for their diversity. She expected to find a link between the mating plugs and evolution, especially since other studies cited a connection, but she now believes it’s more complex than that.

CALLI: Well, that’s a bust. Did she discover anything else?

NATE: Yes, and it’s good news for female butterflies. In the evolutionary family tree she constructed for her butterflies, she found evidence that mating plugs would originate across the tribe, but disappear in some species. This actually suggests a successful evolutionary counterattack.

CALLI: And just like in the human battle of the sexes, women come out on top, Nate.

[SFX: WHOOSH]


 

NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Waste from personal protective equipment used in the fight against covid-19 has some environmentalists worried. Thankfully, new research has found that we might be able to divert this PPE waste from the landfill to create stronger, more durable concrete.


 

CALLI: Side effects of Anabolic steroid use were recently discovered to increase symptoms of ADHD among male weightlifters.


 

NATE: Male butterflies have been observed creating a waxy chastity belt in an effort to control female butterflies’ mating habits.