Learn about how saturated fat can make it harder for you to focus; why it matters that animals have regional accents; and why Mars used to have rings.
Learn about how saturated fat can make it harder for you to focus; why it matters that animals have regional accents; and why Mars used to have rings.
A single meal high in saturated fat could make it harder to focus by Kelsey Donk
Many Animals Have Regional Accents by Samantha Suarez
Four of the eight planets have rings. Mars used to be the fifth. by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/saturated-fat-could-kill-your-focus-animals-have-regional-accents-and-rings-around-mars
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how saturated fat can make it harder for you to focus; why it matters that animals have regional accents; and why Mars used to have rings.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We’ve all heard that saturated fat is unhealthy. That’s the kind of fat most often found in fried food, processed meat, and baked goods. It’s bad for your heart and it’s bad for your waistline. But what you may not know is that it’s also bad for your brain. A new study found that just a single meal high in saturated fat could make it harder to focus for the rest of the day.
Let’s pause to acknowledge how wild that is. Past research has focused on how saturated fats affect a person’s ability to focus over time. But this study was about immediate results. Five hours after the study participants ate a fatty meal meant to mimic a Big Mac and medium fries, they still performed worse on an attention test. That means one fast-food lunch could make your attention lag for the rest of the day.
Here’s how the researchers figured it out. The study involved 51 women who took a morning trip to the lab to complete a 10-minute attention test. Then, they ate a decadent, high-fat breakfast of eggs, turkey sausage, and biscuits and gravy. Half of the women ate a version of the meal that was cooked with an oil high in saturated fat, and the other half ate one that was cooked with sunflower oil, which is lower in saturated fat. Then, five hours later, the women took the same attention test.
After eating the meal high in saturated fat, the women performed significantly worse on the attention test than they did after the low-saturated fat meal. Something worth noting here is that neither of the breakfasts were ‘healthy.’ Both of them were high in fat and carbohydrates and contained around 930 calories. The only difference was in the cooking oil. But the difference in performance was dramatic. The researchers think that if they compared the saturated-fat meal to a meal low in fat, the difference would be even larger.
The researchers weren’t able to determine exactly why the women performed worse on the test after eating saturated fats, but they have a theory. Past studies have shown that foods high in saturated fats can increase inflammation, both in the brain and in the rest of the body. That could be what caused this lapse in focus.
The worst part, for those of us who’ve been stressed out during quarantine? Stress can make you crave food that’s high in saturated fat, and stress and anxiety alone can interfere with concentration. So if you’re stressed and eating fatty food, that’s a bad cognitive combo. So if you’re having trouble concentrating, you might want to go for broccoli instead of bacon.
Animals with distinctive accents are the bread-and-butter of children's movies. I mean, just think about Sebastian from the Little Mermaid or that surfer turtle in Finding Nemo. Well, it turns out that those depictions may not be that far from the truth. Just like humans, animals have regional accents.
Like, take whales for example. Whales use specific click patterns to communicate. These are known as "codas." Danish researchers observed sperm whale communication in the Caribbean for six years and found that many of the codas they used were unique to their particular regional groups. A whale from one region could tell another whale came from a different region, just from the sound of their clicking pattern.
In another study, researchers used computer algorithms to analyze 2,000 different howls of dogs, coyotes, and various species of wolves. They found that each species has its own distinctive howl. Researchers have also found unique dialects in monkeys, cows, bats, and birds. There are even species of songbirds that learn different songs based on where they were raised!
Animal speech is a pretty amazing thing. Humpback whales can sing for up to 30 minutes at a time. Dolphins can call each other by name and cooperate to solve problems. At least one study even suggests that orcas can learn to speak dolphin! No joke, when they were socialized with dolphins at a water facility, they actually changed the sounds they made to resemble those of their new dolphin friends. It’s like when you went to a new school and everybody said everything was “the bomb,” so you started calling things “the bomb” too.
But why does it matter if some birds tweet and some cows moo in different accents? Well for one, studying these dialects could show us the way our own language has evolved. And by comparing the similarities and differences of these animals' accents, scientists may be able to better manage the populations of endangered species. We may not be able to talk with the animals, but we can listen — and learn a lot.
When you think of the planets in the solar system with rings, what comes to mind? Saturn? Uranus? Neptune? Even Jupiter has a ring. Mars doesn’t make the list, sadly. But once upon a time, Mars did have a ring — and it will again! Pretty cool, right?
You can blame this on the fact that Mars seems to have kind of a “love-hate relationship” with moons and rings. Martian moons tend to migrate inward toward the Red Planet and get broken apart by its gravity, which creates a ring. Some of that ring coalesces into a new moon, and the cycle continues. Throughout the last 4.3 billion years, Mars may have gone through this strange ring-moon cycle as many as seven times.
Right now, Mars has two moons, Phobos [FOH-bowss] and Deimos [DEE-mowss]. If you’re picturing the big, round image of Earth’s moon, think again: these moons are about 100 times smaller than our moon and look a lot more like misshapen potatoes. In fact, they look a lot like asteroids captured by Mars’s gravity, which is what researchers thought they were for a long time. But captured asteroids tend to orbit in whatever direction they were traveling when they were captured, and both of these moons orbit really close to Mars’ equator. That means they probably formed in orbit around the planet. What’s most likely is that they’re made up of debris from former moons that condensed over time into the moons that we see today.
Researchers recently figured this out from the slight differences in orbit between the two moons. Phobos, the larger, younger, inner moon, is slowly falling toward Mars. Deimos, the smaller, older, outer moon, has a 2-degree orbital tilt from the equator. That tilt implies that sometime in Deimos’s past, it interacted with a much larger object orbiting further in. That object must have been moving outward, which means it was probably being pushed by an inner ring of debris.
The researchers think this moon was 20 times larger than Phobos and was probably the younger moon’s quote-unquote “grandparent.” Billions of years ago, it probably broke up into a ring, which formed a moon which formed a ring, rinse, repeat, until eventually Phobos was born.
In about 70 million years, Phobos itself will be ripped apart to continue the cycle. If the simulations are true, it means Mars has spent more time with a ring than without one. So sure, Mars isn’t one of the ringed planets. But that’s only temporary.
CODY: Well that was fun. Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Samantha Suarez, and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!