Learn about whether you should avoid fever reducing drugs; why some dinosaurs replaced their teeth as much as sharks do; and how the smelling disorder “phantosmia” can make you hallucinate with smell. 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: If Fever Helps Fight Infection, Should I Avoid Fever-Reducing Drugs? | The New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/well/live/fever-infection-drugs-tylenol-acetaminophen-ibuprofen-advil-aspirin.html The Case for Letting Fevers Run Their Course | The Daily Beast — https://www.thedailybeast.com/let-it-burn-why-you-should-let-fevers-run-their-course Commonly found fossils | Journal of Thoriacic Disease — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/ Commonly found fossils | National Trust — https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/commonly-found-fossils 10 Rough Facts About Majungasaurus | Mental Floss — https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66566/10-rough-facts-about-majungasaurus Researchers determine dinosaur replaced teeth as fast as sharks } Phys.org — https://phys.org/news/2019-11-dinosaur-teeth-fast-sharks.html Plant-eating dinosaurs replaced teeth often, carried spares | Phys.org — https://phys.org/news/2013-07-plant-eating-dinosaurs-teeth.html Evolution of high tooth replacement rates in theropod dinosaurs | PLOS — https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224734 Phantom smells may be a sign of trouble } NBC News — https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/phantom-smells-may-be-sign-trouble-n890271 What to know about phantom smells (phantosmia) | Medical News Today — https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322698.php What is phantosmia? | Healthline — https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia#common-causes Phantosmia: What causes olfactory hallucinations? | Mayo Clinic — https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/temporal-lobe-seizure/expert-answers/phantosmia/faq-20058131 Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about whether you should avoid fever reducing drugs; why some dinosaurs replaced their teeth as much as sharks do; and how the smelling disorder “phantosmia” can make you hallucinate with smell.
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:
Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/should-you-avoid-fever-reducing-drugs-plus-teeth-replacing-dinosaurs-and-phantosmia-smell-hallucinations
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about whether you should avoid fever reducing drugs; why some dinosaurs replaced their teeth as much as sharks do; and a condition that can make you hallucinate with smells.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
(3 AUDIO SCRIPTS): If fever fights infection, should you avoid fever reducing drugs? (Cody)
Your nose is running, your throat hurts, and your temperature is off the charts. Should you use medicine to lower the fever? Or are you better off letting it ride while your body fights the infection?
Fever is no accident — it’s actually something your body does on purpose to fight infections. When viruses or bacteria get into your body, your immune system starts attacking the intruders, one cell at a time. Sometimes that initial response is enough to get rid of the infection. If it’s too big of a job for the immune system to handle on its own, your body produces chemicals called pyrogens that tell the brain to crank up the temperature.
Of course, a very high fever comes with a risk of brain damage, which is one reason people reach for fever-reducing drugs. But the good news is that brain damage from fever is rare, and it doesn’t happen until your temperature gets really high: that is, above 108 degrees Fahrenheit, or 42.2 degrees Celsius. If you’re that sick, a doctor should be deciding what medicine you take — not a podcast.
But if most people with fevers don’t need to take fever-reducing drugs, the question is: does a fever actually help you get better faster? Well, scientists can’t say for sure. Doctors used to treat certain diseases by deliberately giving their patients fevers. They don’t anymore, but some recent studies do suggest that the fever your body naturally produces can kill bacteria and help your immune system work better. But the evidence for that isn’t very good.
The best evidence comes from a study published in 2015 where researchers went to an ICU and gave fever-reducing drugs to some patients and placebos to others. The researchers found that the patients who got the real drugs weren’t any more or less likely to return to the ICU in the next thirty days than those who got fake drugs. It didn’t seem to make a difference at all.
So, if taking fever-reducing drugs doesn’t help you or hurt you, should you take them? Doctors and scientists still don’t agree, but there’s one more thing to consider: having a fever isn’t fun. And since there isn’t solid evidence that fever-reducing drugs keep you from getting better, why not take them and feel a little better?
--
**Summary:** Spoiler: there's no hard-and-fast rule about this, and it continues to be controversial. Some say fever is helpful and you should "let it ride," some say fever is harmful and you should reduce it however possible (the study below has a great summary of this controversy). But I like what the MD who wrote the NY Times article below said at the end: even if fever-reducing drugs don't help you get better faster, they also don't seem to hurt, so if they make you comfortable, why not take them?
Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/well/live/fever-infection-drugs-tylenol-acetaminophen-ibuprofen-advil-aspirin.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/let-it-burn-why-you-should-let-fevers-run-their-course
Study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/
Some dinosaurs replaced their teeth as fast as sharks do (Ashley)
Paleontologists have it rough. Studying animals that existed millions of years ago doesn’t exactly make it easy to know how they behaved, what they ate, or how fast their teeth grew. But they do their best, and now, one team has used a cool way to discover one of these day-to-day details. It turns out that at least one species of dinosaur had the dental habits of a shark: it grew replacement teeth once every 56 days.
This dinosaur, Majungasaurus, lived on Madagascar from 72 million years ago to 66 million years ago, making it among the last dinosaur species that existed before the legendary dino-killing asteroid hit. It was a stocky, meat-eating creature, and scientists believe that once it had eaten all the flesh of its prey, it gnawed on the bones. That’s because they’ve found grooves on the bones of smaller animals from its era that are spaced out at the same intervals as the Majungasaurus’s teeth. Speaking of which: This dinosaur grew a lot of teeth. It replaced its teeth about as often as sharks replace their teeth, and sharks replace theirs so much that shark teeth are some of the most common fossils on Earth. Even among its peers, Majungasaurus was weird. It grew new teeth almost twice as fast as two other meat-eating dinosaurs, at a rate closer to that of herbivorous dinosaurs like the sauropod Camarasaurus, which replaced its teeth every 62 days.
Scientists sorted this out by looking at the dentin in the dinosaur’s teeth. That’s the layer below the enamel, and it grows steadily over time. The growth lines in a dinosaur tooth’s dentin are sort of like the rings of a tree; they give you a sense of how old it was — and how quickly it grew. It’s not totally clear why the Majungasaurus grew teeth so prolifically, but it probably wasn’t just a flex. What’s more likely is that it helped the dinosaur survive.
One theory goes that it helped with that bone-gnawing I mentioned earlier. Gnawing on bones subjects teeth to a lot of wear and tear. When modern animals gnaw on bones, they tend to solve the wear and tear problem with ultra-durable teeth. The Majungasaurus, meanwhile, had flimsy teeth — but tons of them. They probably thought of their teeth the way humans think of our toenails — as an infinite, disposable resource. Pretty wild, huh?
SOURCES
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/commonly-found-fossils
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66566/10-rough-facts-about-majungasaurus
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-dinosaur-teeth-fast-sharks.html
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-plant-eating-dinosaurs-teeth.html
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224734
--
Summary: A meat-eating dinosaur species (Majungasaurus) that lived in Madagascar some 70 million years ago replaced all its teeth every couple of months or so, putting it in the leagues of modern-day sharks. In fact, Majungasaurus grew new teeth roughly two to thirteen times faster than those of other carnivorous dinosaurs, forming a new tooth in each socket approximately every two months. They think this was because it wore down its teeth by gnawing on bones. This is unusual for carnivorous dinos, but not plant eaters -- past research suggests that some of the largest herbivorous dinosaurs replaced one tooth every 1-2 months.
Sources: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-dinosaur-teeth-fast-sharks.html
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-plant-eating-dinosaurs-teeth.html
Study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224734
[NHTSA]
CODY: Today’s episode is sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. ASHLEY: Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a crash. People could get hurt or killed. But let’s take a moment to look at some surprising statistics.
CODY: Almost 29 people in the United States die every day in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes. That’s one person every 50 minutes. Even though drunk-driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year.
ASHLEY: Many people are unaware that driving while high can be just as dangerous. In 2015, 42% of drivers killed in crashes tested positive for drugs. Not so harmless after all, is it? And get this, from 2007 to 2015, marijuana use among drivers killed in crashes doubled.
CODY: The truth is driving while high is deadly. So, stop kidding yourself. If you’re impaired from alcohol or drugs, don’t get behind the wheel. If you feel different you drive different. Drive high get a DUI.
ASHLEY: Drive sober or get pulled over.
You can hallucinate with smell (Cody)
If you’ve ever smelled burning rubber in a quiet forest, or rotten eggs in a vegan restaurant, you may have been hallucinating with your nose. It’s uncommon, but far from impossible — about 2.7 million people have some sort of smelling disorder, and up to 20 percent of them experience phantom smells — or, technically speaking, “phantosmia.”
This kind of sounds like a superpower at first. You can stop and smell the roses, no roses required! But phantosmia is rarely fun. People often hallucinate unpleasant odors. Experts think our brains devote more space to cataloging bad smells, so when our brains hallucinate a random smell, it’s more likely to be a bad one. And because our senses of smell and taste are interconnected, when every food smells like bleach, it tastes a little like bleach, too. That makes it hard to enjoy eating. Persistent phantosmia can last for decades, and it’s understandable that sufferers often experience weight loss, depression, and other problems.
Phantosmia can also be a symptom of serious health problems. Often, that’s a simple nose or mouth issue, like a sinus infection, but sometimes, phantosmia signifies a neurological problem. We process smells with our brains, after all, and phantom smells are sometimes signs of things like a brain tumor, epilepsy-related temporal lobe seizures, or Alzheimer’s Disease. So it’s usually worth mentioning to a doctor, just to be safe.
Treating phantosmia usually starts with figuring out the underlying cause, which might start with a nose endoscopy, where doctors probe your nasal cavities with a tiny camera, and a saline wash for the nasal passages. When there’s no obvious root condition, doctors may resort to performing surgery on the olfactory bulb, the smelling sector of the brain. That’s only for extreme cases, though — usually, phantosmia disappears on its own. And honestly, good riddance.
SOURCES
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/phantom-smells-may-be-sign-trouble-n890271
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322698.php
https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia#common-causes
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/temporal-lobe-seizure/expert-answers/phantosmia/faq-20058131
--
Summary: Phantosmia (phantom smell), also called an olfactory hallucination, is smelling an odor that is not actually there. It can occur in one nostril or both. Unpleasant phantosmia, cacosmia, is more common and is often described as smelling something that is burned, foul, spoiled, or rotten. It can be triggered by temporal lobe seizures, epilepsy, or head trauma, but most often due more to a problem in your mouth or nose rather than your brain.
Sources: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/phantom-smells-may-be-sign-trouble-n890271
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/phantosmia
https://www.healthline.com/health/phantosmia#common-causes
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/temporal-lobe-seizure/expert-answers/phantosmia/faq-20058131
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Grant Currin and Mae Rice, with editing and scriptwriting by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity.com.
ASHLEY: 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!