In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes: These "Sea Nomads" Have Supersized Spleens for Diving Project Blue Book Was the US Government's Official UFO Investigation Project J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies 10 Ways To Hack Your Cooking with Chemistry Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. 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.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. 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.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/project-blue-book-cooking-hacks-using-chemistry-and-sea-nomads
CODY GOUGH: Hi, we've got three stories from curiosity.com 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 about sea nomads who have super-sized spleens for diving, the US government's official UFO investigation project, and some delicious ways to hack your cooking with chemistry.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, researchers have found a group of people that basically have super powers because of their spleens.
CODY GOUGH: What?
ASHLEY HAMER: Do you even know what the spleen does?
CODY GOUGH: I have literally no idea what the spleen does.
ASHLEY HAMER: I didn't, either, before this. But it's an organ in the upper far left part of your abdomen, to the left of your stomach, and it does lots of stuff. It acts like a filter for blood as part of the immune system. It helps fight certain kinds of bacteria that can cause pneumonia and meningitis. It recycles old red blood cells, and it stores platelets and white blood cells.
And a new discovery shows off one other superpower. It can help you go for longer without breathing.
CODY GOUGH: What?
ASHLEY HAMER: It's basically like a built-in scuba tank. Curiosity has written before about the Bajau, a group of nomadic people indigenous to Indonesia that can stay underwater for up to 13 minutes at a time. Well, there's more news. A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen heard about the awesome diving ability of the Bajau and wondered if there were any evolutionary reasons for their amazing skills.
They took ultrasound scans and saliva samples from the Bajau and from their land-dwelling neighbors, the Saluan, and found that the Bajau have spleens that are 50% larger than the Saluan, even the spleens of Bajau who never dive, and that points to a genetic origin. The researchers sequenced the DNA samples and found that the Bajau have a gene that the Saluan don't. It's called PDE10A, which is thought to control the levels of a thyroid hormone that's been shown to influence spleen size in mice.
This is the first time genetic adaptations to diving have been seen in humans, and this could give researchers a chance to study acute hypoxia, which is the rapid depletion of oxygen in the body, caused by complications of lung disease, heart problems, and lots of other issues. Holding your breath underwater is a type of hypoxia after all. The lead researcher said, quote, "It's a hypoxia experiment that nature has made for us and allows us to study humans in a way that we can't in a laboratory," end quote.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Your spleen. Who knew?
CODY GOUGH: Had no idea.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm sorry for doubting you, spleen.
CODY GOUGH: Also, everything we said about the spleen was kind of a general overview. The spleen does lots of other stuff that you can learn about if you want to really research into it. So this is just a very high-level overview. So please do not email us if we missed something. This is not meant to be a comprehensive medical definition of the spleen.
All right, Ashley, were you ever a fan of The X-Files?
ASHLEY HAMER: I was.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Well, for a while, the US government did actually have resources committed to looking into UFO sightings.
ASHLEY HAMER: Huh.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. It wasn't called The X-files, sadly, but they did call it Project Blue Book. It was originally an investigation by the Air Force, but the CIA got involved in 1953. They put together a panel of experts to dig into UFO sightings to ease some of the public's concerns, and this panel included physicist HP Robertson from the California Institute of Technology. There was a Robertson Panel that lasted for three days and included military experts, Blue Book advisors, and scientists who were interviewed and reviewed photo and video, quote unquote, "evidence."
Of course, the panel concluded that there was no basis for the so-called "extraterrestrial hypothesis," UFOs did not pose a threat to us, And 90% of so-called "UFO sightings" can be explained. In 1968, researchers from the University of Colorado looked into Project Blue Book's unidentified sighting cases and basically concluded that everyone was wasting their time. They released a report called the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, better known as the Condon Report, headed by Dr. Edward Condon.
And the following year, in 1969, the secretary of the Air Force announced the end of Project Blue Book. But in its time, Project Blue Book investigated around 12,000 sightings or related events. However, since the panel's information wasn't completely declassified until 1979, 10 years later, there are a lot of conspiracy theories from people who don't buy the whole story.
And also, astronomer J. Allen Hynek was a Project Blue Book advisor who published The UFO Experience-- A Scientific Inquiry in 1972. That included the Hynek scale, a six-item list system for categorizing reports of UFO sightings and alien encounters. His legacy also includes the Center for UFO Studies, which he founded the following year, in 1973. That is still around today, and you can check it out at CUFOS.org. It's like "see UFOs," but it's the letter C.
ASHLEY HAMER: The letter C.
CODY GOUGH: Be sure to check it out, especially if you've been abducted by aliens. Maybe they can help you out.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, do you have a secret cooking tip that you use?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. When I make chocolate milk, I use the powder, and I dump a ton of it in there. You've got to put four spoonfuls in.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, yeah. The serving sizes on chocolate milk and hot cocoa are all wrong.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Definitely four times as much that you need. Definitely. Well, cooking is chemistry, right? Straight up. Boiling water, adding salt, mixing salad dressing-- all of these are chemical reactions. We like science and Curiosity, so we found some ways to use chemistry for better cooking. What's not to like, right?
CODY GOUGH: Right.
ASHLEY HAMER: My favorite one that we wrote about is knowing when to salt. I don't know about you, but when I'm cooking on the stove, I will salt the food as I'm cooking. Right? You want it to blend in with all of the extra stuff. But temperature affects how we perceive flavor. So the hotter your food is, the less salty it tastes.
So if you're tasting your food while you cook, like I do, and it doesn't taste salty enough, well, maybe it is salty enough, but you can't tell because it's hot. So if your food tastes too salty whenever you eat it, try waiting until the dish is finished cooking and has cooled down a bit before salting it.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. And this is especially good for people who are trying to cut down on their salt.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Well, my favorite cooking tip that we wrote about was about carb calories. You probably know that rice and pasta have a ton of carbs, but there is a way to reduce their calorie count. One word-- leftovers. In a recent study, researchers found that reheated pasta caused a much smaller glucose spike in their volunteers than freshly cooked pasta. And a couple of years ago, a Sri Lankan chemistry student realized he could cut the calories in rice by up to 60% by cooking it with a little bit of coconut oil, then refrigerating it overnight.
ASHLEY HAMER: A couple other quick tips? If you're boiling water to cook pasta, don't add oil. The oil will not keep the pasta from sticking because oil and water don't mix, right? So the oil will just sit on top of the water until you drain all the pasta, and then it coats the noodles, which will keep the sauce from sticking.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, gross.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. If you don't want your pasta to stick, then just use a huge pot of water, because if the pasta has room to keep moving, it's less likely to settle for long enough to stick to itself.
CODY GOUGH: Awesome. We've also got tips for chilling your beverages faster, using geometry to make the perfect roasted potato, and some fun lemon juice tricks, all today on curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: You can read about all of these stories and so much more on our website or on the Curiosity app for Android or iOS.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
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