Learn about how socializing too much can be bad for your health; rogue planets without a home star; and ancient bâdgirs. Socializing too much can be bad for your health by Steffie Drucker Research Shows Too Much Socializing Can Harm You. (2021). Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/202110/research-shows-too-much-socializing-can-harm-you Stavrova, O., & Ren, D. (2020). Is More Always Better? Examining the Nonlinear Association of Social Contact Frequency With Physical Health and Longevity. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 194855062096158. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620961589 Rogue Planets Wander The Galaxy Without A Star To Call Home by Ashley Hamer Drake, N. (2014, March 13). A Guide to Lonely Planets in the Galaxy. Science; National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/a-guide-to-lonely-planets-in-the-galaxy?loggedin=true Gough, E. (2021, October). Rogue Planets Could be Habitable - Universe Today. Universe Today. https://www.universetoday.com/152785/rogue-planets-could-be-habitable/ Schulze-Makuch, D. (2021, August 24). The Astrobiological Potential of Rogue Planets. Air & Space Magazine; Air & Space Magazine. https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/astrobiological-potential-rogue-planets-180978507/ Ancient Persian "wind catchers" could help us beat the heat better than air conditioning by Grant Currin Kimiya Shokoohi. (2021). The ancient Persian way to keep cool. Bbc.com. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210810-the-ancient-persian-way-to-keep-cool Carey, T. (2021, September 22). Is ancient technology better than modern air conditioning? Freethink; Freethink Media. https://www.freethink.com/environment/wind-catchers Cooling Stadiums at the 2022 FIFA World Cup - Free Running Buildings. (2021, July). Free Running Buildings. https://freerunningbuildings.com/cooling-stadiums-at-the-2022-fifa-world-cup/ 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.
Learn about how socializing too much can be bad for your health; rogue planets without a home star; and ancient bâdgirs.
Socializing too much can be bad for your health by Steffie Drucker
Rogue Planets Wander The Galaxy Without A Star To Call Home by Ashley Hamer
Ancient Persian "wind catchers" could help us beat the heat better than air conditioning by Grant Currin
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.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/socializing-too-much-rogue-planets-ancient-persian-ac
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how socializing too much can be bad for your health; rogue planets that wander the galaxy without a home star; and how ancient Persian technology could help us fight climate change.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Human beings are social animals. As a result, socializing tends to make us healthier and happier, while isolation can cause harm. But a new study suggests that you can have too much of a good thing. As in, socializing too much can be bad for your health.
To find this out, social psychologists from Tilburg University in the Netherlands reviewed 16 years of data from the European Social Survey. That’s a biennial survey that measures different aspects of people’s beliefs and behaviors. Roughly 393,000 people in their 30s to 60s took the survey between 2002 and 2018. When they crunched the data, the researchers were most interested in how often participants socialized with friends, relatives, and colleagues. They compared that frequency to their rating of their physical health. When researchers plotted it out on a graph, it looked a bit like a squashed bell curve: At first, physical health seemed to improve with more frequent social contact. But after a certain point, the line plateaued, which suggests that the benefits wore off once people were socializing several times per week.
So, socializing more than several times a week doesn’t help your health — which makes you wonder if it could actually hurt it. And researchers looked into this, too. They analyzed data from a German survey that measured the long-term well-being of around 50,000 people, along with when they died. That gave researchers a measure of their lifespan. The team looked at how often respondents visited with neighbors, friends, acquaintances, family members and relatives, and they found that socializing daily didn’t lead to better health or a longer life. Even worse, going beyond daily social visits was associated with a greater risk of death.
The team thinks it could come down to the fact that a greater quantity of social interactions means more of those interactions are of a lower quality. Not every interaction can be deep and meaningful, and when you’re seeing friends and family because of social pressure or FOMO, it’s just added stress. Like, get this: never seeing family was just as bad as seeing them daily. Because like I said, you can always have too much of a good thing: just think about the harms of exercising or brushing your teeth too much.
According to this study, it seems like the sweet spot for social time is some point between “never” and “monthly.” So make sure your calendar isn’t too full, and make sure to build in some alone time. Canceling plans has never felt so good.
Billions of stars orbit the center of our galaxy, and many of these stars have at least one planet orbiting them. But not all stars belong to a galaxy, and not all planets orbit a star. Rogue planets are worlds that drift through the universe unattached to any star. And they’re not rare, either. Experts estimate that there are billions of them in our galaxy alone.
So if all the planets we’re familiar with form and live around a star, where do rogue planets come from? It could be from a couple of different places. Most likely, they started out in a solar system, only to be ejected by the gravity of a more massive planet or colliding with another planetary body. But they might also form on their own out of a random cloud of gas and dust way out there in the boondocks of space. Since they often form like any other planet, they can even have moons. Recent research even suggests they could be habitable.
Usually, astronomers detect exoplanets — that is, planets outside of our solar system — in relation to their home stars. Since rogue planets don't have a home star, they present a unique challenge. Astronomers overcome this challenge in one of two ways. If the planet is young enough, researchers can use infrared technology to detect the heat it gives off, kind of like a SWAT team would use night-vision goggles to catch a suspect. If the rogue planet is large enough, its mass can actually bend the light of the stars we see behind it. Its gravity basically acts as a massive lens, which is why astronomers call this method gravitational microlensing.
Neither of these methods is perfect, since they can't detect anything smaller than Jupiter. But so far the discoveries they've enabled have led researchers to estimate that in the Milky Way, at least, rogue planets outnumber stars 60 to one. A 2019 simulation of star behavior suggested that our galaxy could contain 50 billion rogue planets. As they say, not all who wander are lost.
How do you cool off a building... in the summer... in the desert... without using any energy? If it sounds like an impossible engineering challenge, then I’ve got some news for you: workers living in ancient desert cities figured it out more than 3,000 years ago. Modern engineers are still learning from their brilliant insights today.
The ancient Egyptians were some of the earliest people to harness the wind to cool down buildings, at least as far as archaeologists have discovered. The technology became its most sophisticated in the dry, hot city of Yazd [YEAHZ-d], which is located in modern-day Iran. Their greatest achievement may have been the bâdgir [boh-ahd-GEER or bod-GEER], or “wind catcher,” in Persian.
The basic idea is pretty simple. A tower with several openings sits on top of a building and catches wind as it blows by. Those openings funnel the wind into the building. The cool air displaces warm air, which escapes through a vent or a different tower. And there you go! An indoor oasis without any AC.
But don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the idea: it was the details that made the bâdgirs of Yazd so effective. To cool as effectively as possible, a tower had to be the right shape with the right pattern of openings. The tower and house both needed to face the right direction. Inside the tower, the blades, air canals, and empty spaces were designed to maximize cooling capacity. Some bâdgirs used underground pools of water to cool down the air even more before it made it into the living space.
The technology spread across the Middle East and North Africa. But eventually, bâdgirs fell out of favor as modern air conditioning displaced the ancient technique.
But that isn’t the end of the story. Some of the most advanced buildings constructed in the last 50 years have used similar technology to cut back on energy used for cooling. One study in the UK found that more than 7,000 structures built in the ‘80s and early ‘90s use wind catchers to cool things down. The visitors center at Zion National Park in Utah uses passive cooling techniques so effectively that rangers there hardly ever have to use regular old AC. Passive cooling will even keep fans comfortable at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
When modern technology fails you, it’s a good idea to look to the past. Our ancestors did some pretty cool things.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Steffie Drucker and Grant Currin.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also a writer on today’s episode.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!