Today you’ll learn about how getting a good night’s sleep is especially important for men when it comes to vaccine efficacy, how grizzly bears have taken to eating a specific kind of moth, and how technology is working to make physical touch a part of the AI experience.
Today you’ll learn about how getting a good night’s sleep is especially important for men when it comes to vaccine efficacy, how grizzly bears have taken to eating a specific kind of moth, and how technology is working to make physical touch a part of the AI experience.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/sleep-and-vaccines-moth-eating-bears-feeling-the-metaverse
Sleep and Vaccines
Moth-Eating Bears
Feeling the Metaverse
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[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 getting a good night’s sleep is especially important for men when it comes to vaccine efficacy, how grizzly bears have taken to eating a specific kind of moth, and how technology is working to make physical touch a part of the AI experience.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Fun fact: if you don't get enough sleep, you’re going to suffer in more ways than one… especially if you’re a man!
NATE: Wow! Gotta bring that into it right away. The matriarchy once again. We’ve talked a little bit about why a good night’s sleep is good for you. A lack of sleep could lead to things like heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure, and depression. But I read a study a while ago that said women are more likely than men to have bad sleep habits. They’re also more likely to get severe depression symptoms than men if they’re sleep deficient, as well as a better likelihood of things like memory loss.
CALLI: You’re missing something important on that list: sleep deficiency can also lead to a weaker immune system. A lot of the body’s most important defenses are created while we’re asleep, like white blood cells, so if we’re lacking sleep, we’re basically letting our guard down to infectious diseases. This fact got a few researchers wondering about something that helps stop us from getting sick: vaccines. Because of the relationship we have between sleep and our immune systems, it’s long been believed that vaccines would be less effective on people with bad sleep habits, because vaccines aren’t effective on people with weak immune systems. Seems like a straight line, right? Bad sleep equals bad immune system equals vaccine not working. And the study DID find that… but only in men.
NATE: Okay, that’s strange. How did they figure this out?
CALLI: Karine Spiegel from the French National Institute of Health and a team of researchers began the study with a hypothesis: bad sleep patterns could damage the effectiveness of our immune systems’ reactions to vaccines, which would lead to fewer antibodies to fight viruses. You see, vaccines give the immune system a pathogen from the disease, and our systems react by creating temporary antibodies that travel through the body for a short time; just short enough for our bodies to get stronger fighting that virus. With that in mind, they got seven studies worth of research together surveying 603 people aged 18 to 60, whose antibody responses to vaccines were monitored. On top of that, each subject was asked how much sleep they got nightly.
NATE: So how do men factor into this study?
CALLI: Well, men showed a troubling relationship between bad sleep, which was seen as being less than six hours per night, and how their bodies’ antibodies responded. Each man’s antibody response was measured as being weaker than people who slept well, and each of their response rates also lasted a far shorter amount of time, too. So, like I said earlier, they don’t react as well to vaccines if they don’t sleep well. Dr. Spiegel ended the study by saying that men need to get more sleep both before and after getting a vaccine, to make sure their body can utilize the vaccine efficiently.
Spiegel and her associates don’t actually know for sure why this happened, but they have a theory: hormones. The women were also somewhere between 18 and 60 years old, which means they were all at various stages of their menstrual cycles. Some may have been pregnant or ovulating, or even undergoing hormone-replacement therapy. They believe that these hormones could be throwing off how the body responds to a vaccine. Now, this is just me talking, but you also cited evidence earlier that women on average get worse sleep than men. There’s a good chance that if the sampled women were more used to getting less sleep, their bodies might have prepared accordingly.
NATE: It’s an interesting theory, but to be fair, you don’t know for sure, right?
CALLI: Nope, and neither do the researchers. They say it’s something we “urgently” need to study further - especially since vaccines are one of the most important weapons humanity has against the spread of infectious diseases, and we need to make sure they’re as effective as possible. For now, the best solution is for us to make sure we’re getting as good a night’s sleep as possible - especially if you’re a man!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Deep in the hills of Montana’s Glacier National Park in the Rocky Mountains, there’s a sleuth, a collective noun I just learned about, or rather a group of grizzly bears prowling everywhere you look, searching for food. But they’re not looking for fish or anything else you might expect a bear to eat. No, their diet is a bit more interesting than the average bear’s - and these bears traveled hundreds of miles to get this meal.
CALLI: This is starting to sound really sinister. Do I even wanna ask what the bears are eating?
NATE: These bears are here to eat silver-colored, fluttery, one and a half inch long… moths.
CALLI: Oh. The bears are traveling hundreds of miles to eat moths? That’s… not what I was expecting.
NATE: Specifically, the army cutworm moth. Billions of these things pass through the North Rocky Mountains during the summer to get out of the heat and get some sustenance of their own in the form of alpine plants. By day, they rest about at the top of peaks as tall as 13,000 feet. By night, they slurp down alpine nectar, which fattens them up by as much as 75 percent of their body mass. And it’s this exact phenomenon that makes grizzly bears so very, very hungry that they climb those massive peaks just to get a nice little moth snack.
CALLI: But why moths? And why would a bear even want to climb that high… for a MOTH?
NATE: So it’s important to know that grizzly bears are an endangered species, and have been since 1975. A lot of this has to do with being common hunting targets, which decimated their population during the 20th century. Thankfully, they made a bit of a comeback; as we’ve said on the show before, there are an estimated 2,000 grizzlies now roaming in the lower 48 states of the US. One of the most concentrated grizzly populations is in Glacier National Park. The Glacier bears have a pretty diverse diet, too, with one study saying they eat about 175 plant species and over 80 mammal varieties. That said, those plants and animals aren’t quite as nutritious, or rich with calories, as a plump army cutworm moth. And believe me: if you want a huge meal, these cutworm moths are the way to go.
CALLI: But how could a moth be more nutritious for the grizzly than say, I don’t know, a rodent?
NATE: You have to think about it in terms of physical exertion. Most of the bears’ diet is plant-based so if they are going to chase down a rodent or some other mammal, they’re exerting a ton of energy for a meal that isn’t necessarily a sure thing. Whereas the moths provide a ton of calories and they are very easy to catch.
CALLI: Gotcha. So, how long has this been going on for?
NATE: No clue. The first time somebody documented this, it was in the 1950s in Yellowstone Park, but there weren’t any studies on the phenomenon till the 1980s or so. Since then, the moth feasting has only become more prevalent - and for good reason. One source says that a plumpened army cutworm moth only contains about half a calorie a piece. But each of these moths travel in staggering group sizes of tens of thousands or more; a bear can waltz right into what has been called a “moth blizzard” and feast on 40,000 of these things EASILY.
CALLI: 40,000 times .5 is… 20,000 calories?! Geez, and I thought my diet was bad. That’s a nice little buffet the bears have, but didn’t you say they have to climb a huge mountain to do this?
NATE: They do, and it’s probably because some of the other foods they eat have slowly disappeared over time. Grizzly bears usually feast upon nuts that come from whitebark pine trees, for example, but those trees have been ravaged by a fungus that has destroyed 90 percent or so. You might expect a bear to go hunting for fish, but the kind of fish a grizzly eats in this area, the cutthroat trout, has also started to dwindle. Which leads us to the moths. But for a long time, researchers had no idea why. So they decided to figure it out.
CALLI: How did they do that?
NATE: They set up a mobile tracking radar that kept track of how many army cutworms were coming to the area, and discovered that FIVE MILLION of these suckers came to ONE pass in the Rockies called the Absarokas during the summer… in just five days. Since then, they’ve figured out over 30 places in the Rockies and surrounding areas where moths and bears both go, and it’s pretty likely that over 33 percent of these bears are eating the moths. This didn’t get the researchers any closer to the answer, unfortunately, so our best idea on why the bears are doing this is the simplest one: desperation. Less food equals a need for more options. And high up in the Rockies, well, there’s a TON of options. Like say, five million or more options.
CALLI: Let’s just say I wanted to go somewhere to see this - for “science.” Where should I go?
NATE: Like I said, this is happening all over the Rockies, but you probably shouldn’t go. This moth feast has created a bit of a headache for land managers in the area, because the number of people coming to the Rockies to witness bears eating moths gets bigger every day. A biologist named Erika Nunlist did her thesis in the area and found that at one of the moths’ favorite spots, people would approach bears to either get a better look or get a picture, and the bears would run away nearly eighty percent of the time. The headache comes in when you realize the bears weren’t done eating, and if a bear’s about to hibernate, their calorie storage is important to their survival. So long story short: as cool as it might sound to watch a bear swatting around for moths, don’t. Just let the bears eat!
CALLI: Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Hey Nate, how would you react if I told you today I wanted to talk about “feelies”?
NATE: I’d say this is a science podcast, not a confessional, but there’s no need for us to avoid being vulnerable about our feelings here.
CALLI: Not feelINGS… feelIES. Like talkies, which is slang for movies that have spoken dialogue. I wanna talk about the concept of FEELIES, the type of media where you FEEL what the characters feel. They’ve been a product of science fiction for decades now, but there have been a lot of developments in the gaming world that have made feelies less science fiction and more scientific reality.
NATE: Fine, I didn’t wanna talk about my feelings anyway! Tell me more about “feelies.”
CALLI: The term originated in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, where he writes about a movie that has a romantic sequence set on top of a bearskin rug. The characters watching the movie FEEL every part of the bear from its hair to its snout… and they maybe even feel the romance, too. And researchers are working on bringing that technology to life in video games. In fact, there are a number of innovations in sensory-based entertainment popping up, mainly in the world of VR, or virtual reality. One of the first innovations is “haptic clothing,” which is based on the same sort of equipment they make polygraph tests out of: bubbled underneath the surface, while measuring your body temperature and heartbeat, so think of those blood pressure machines that you stick your arm into at the pharmacy.
NATE: How would this tech work for gaming?
CALLI: First of all, despite the polygraph’s inability to actually detect a lie, it is still pretty good at detecting changes in how your body is feeling. And importantly, the tech can be reversed so that it can CREATE feelings by being sent a sort of pulse effect. In gaming, you don’t need to have a futuristic sci-fi look going on where you’re covered head to toe in haptic gear. All you need is a vest and a glove. If you move your hand around in the glove while wearing a VR headset, you can see your hand in the virtual reality. What happens when you’re part of a “feelie” experiment, though, is you start to feel all of the things you touch in the game.
NATE: How does that work?
CALLI: Through something called a haptic actuator, which is built into the glove. These things are built in many shapes and sizes, but the most common are known as eccentric rotating masses, or ERMS, and linear resonant actuators, or LRA. The ERM model makes the glove vibrate, kinda like a cell phone, by using a small motor connected to a weight. But the LRA model simply uses an electromagnetic coil to make the glove oscillate, or shake around. Subtle difference, I know. And I mentioned cell phones, too; honestly, these devices are used in phones, laptops, and more, usually when you get an alert of some kind. It turns out that availability is why they’re so easy to adapt to VR.
NATE: So hear me out for a second. I’m playing a VR game, and the fake phone in my real hand buzzes with a text message… and I feel that buzz?
CALLI: Yep! And that’s the gist of how ERMs and LRAs work, but the field of haptic clothing gets a little crazier the further we look into it. There’s a company called owo Game that’s gearing up to launch a haptic -
NATE: No way that’s how you’re supposed to say that company’s name.
CALLI: Owo game I have no idea what you’re talking about. Anyway they’re gearing up to make a haptic vest that makes direct contact with your skin… and then stimulates it with a little BZZT.
NATE: Sounds painful.
CALLI: It might be. One article I read said that you can even emulate the feeling of getting shot by a gun. Or stabbed. Or even blown up!
NATE: Wow. Fun for the whole family.
CALLI: But the motherlode comes from what a company called HaptX is making: an entire set of head-to-toe haptic clothing that relies on pneumatics, an outdated technology that uses pressurized gas or air to make its parts move. How outdated am I talking? It was first mentioned in the FIRST CENTURY. But we live in a nostalgic time, and what once was old is new again: the company says that compressed air is the best way for haptic clothing to accurately recreate a sense of touch.
NATE: So… it just pumps air all over your body? How is that realistic feedback?
CALLI: Right now, the company is gearing up to launch their gloves, which are called g1 gloves. These things pump air through a series of tubes that expand and contract over 100 little balloons in each glove. Each balloon is a different size - for different sensations. So for example, the finger tips are less than a millimeter in diameter. They also have “exotendons” that stop the fingers from moving at specific times, emulating what it would feel like to, say, touch a wall in the game. And to control these gloves, you wear a backpack that contains the equipment pumping the air, thus allowing you to move around at your own pace. All while feeling as close to real life as humanly possible.
NATE: But those are just gloves… you said this was for the whole body.
CALLI: That comes later. They’re currently designing a full-body suit using the pneumatic actuators, because they’ll be way easier to make bigger than anything that uses electricity. No details yet on when that will arrive, or even how it will work, but one can assume it’ll be similar to the gloves. They DID share one detail about the suit, though: the full-body suit will be able to emulate forces that weigh you down, like gravitational differences, or somebody pushing your hand away.
NATE: This sounds awesome, honestly. BRB - gonna hit the store for a pair of these gloves in preparation for the suit.
CALLI: I mean you could try but not so fast. First, these things aren’t even out yet, and second, one pair of these puppies is a cool $4,500 - minimum. Now, I know science podcasters are notoriously the most well paid profession on Earth, but even if you could afford it, the other thing is - they’re not for sale for YOU. They’re expected to be sold at a corporate level first, like for organizations that do VR training exercises or medical schools that want their surgeons to have a “hands-on” practice without damaging a cadaver.
NATE: That’s really interesting. So THOSE aren’t for gaming, then. I bet there would be a huge market for haptic suits even outside of video games.
CALLI: Exactly. Even beyond VR, companies specializing in haptic tech are trying to innovate better haptic systems for everything from smartphones to laptops. Take the company Aito, for instance. Their actuators use piezoelectricity, which we’ve talked about before, where something gets bigger or smaller when they get zapped, inspiring the material to create a movement. What we didn’t talk about before is how you can reverse engineer this. So, let me spell that out a little bit: piezoelectricity can work as both an actuator AND a sensor, because if you squeeze a piezoelectric crystal, then BAM - you create a current of electric energy.
NATE: Most commonly found in bbq lighters, those little clicking triggers.
CALLI: Yep. Yeah, exactly. These actu-sensors, as they’re called, can detect a finger when touched. Think about how when you touch a modern iPhone to type, the phone does a very subtle buzz or click. But with this kind of tech, you can do all sorts of other things too. One of the ideas being floated around, for instance, is a way to turn the top layer of your phone or tablet’s screen into a sort of scratchy surface. You could take a stylus and just scratch away at a note or photo app, and it would FEEL and SOUND like you’re writing on paper.
NATE: So it’s not just the act of adding “touch” to your body… it’s about changing the way technology even feels altogether.
CALLI: Exactly. Some version of haptic tech is already in our phones, our laptops, even our cars, but as time goes on, it’s just going to get even better. Even though I’m pretty sure Aldous Huxley was talking about “feelies” to make fun of the recent “talkie” innovation in movies, he might have actually predicted the future in a way - and in my opinion, it’s less scary and much more exciting than he imagined.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: If you’re a man who gets bad sleep, there’s a good chance you’re gonna have a worse time than women when an infectious disease starts going around: new research suggests that men with bad sleep routines are less likely to see a vaccine be effective than women. There’s no word on why women aren’t seeing the same correlation, but no matter what, the suggestion here is for everybody to get a good night’s sleep!
NATE: Fish, berries, and… moths? That’s the diet of a certain type of grizzly bear who prowls around in the Rocky Mountains, likely due to a lack of sustenance available closer to home. But in case you think this sounds cool, don’t seek these bears out: 80% of them run away when approached, and they need as many calories as possible for their long winter nap!
CALLI: Ready to blur the line even further between virtual and actual reality? Get a load of the future of haptic gear, an innovation that can make you actually experience everything from a gunshot in a video game to a full emulation of an autopsy in a surgeon training exercise. These technologies are changing the game for good, and they’re only going to get better the more we learn about them!