Today, you’ll learn about a way we might, one day, be able to sleep our way to the stars, why some of the world’s cities are sinking, and how babies’ brain structures could be influenced by how much we speak to them.
Today, you’ll learn about a way we might, one day, be able to sleep our way to the stars, why some of the world’s cities are sinking, and how babies’ brain structures could be influenced by how much we speak to them.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/space-hibernation-new-york-is-sinking-baby-talk
Space Hibernation
New York is Sinking
Baby Talk
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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 a way we might one day be able to sleep our way to the stars, why some of the world’s cities are sinking, and how babies’ brain structure could be influenced by how much we speak to them.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: How would you like to travel to the stars?
CALLI: Yeah! I mean…What curious person wouldn’t want to go see a strange interstellar star system?
NATE: I’m right there with ya! I think it would be pretty fantastic. Of course, once we got there we would be pretty old.
CALLI: Yeah… so there’s the kicker! How old, Nate?
NATE: Well let’s say we wanted to hit the beach on Alpha Centauri - which is the closest star system to us. If we traveled at the speed of the fastest spacecraft we’ve ever sent into space…we’d be about 70,000 years old by the time we got there. To put that in context, some of the oldest cave paintings on Earth are only about 45,000 years old.
CALLI: So we're gonna need a LOT of snacks.
NATE: Right? This is one of the things that wannabe space explorers have been struggling with for ages - not the snacks things in particular but even if we could figure out how to propel a spacecraft full of humans through interstellar space, well…it takes decades to even leave our own solar system. Who wants to spend their whole lifetime in a tiny capsule?
CALLI: Please tell me they’ve invented a wormhole machine.
NATE: Not quite. But a new study by a team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and published in Nature Metabolism claims that mice have been induced into a hibernation-like state by ultrasound waves.
CALLI: Oh okay. Hibernation! Like in that movie Interstellar!
NATE: Totally. Hibernation is straight out of sci-fi…until now. In the past, researchers have been able to put mice into a state called torpor by…well…actually by operating on their brains and doing gene modification. Not exactly something most humans would be up for.
CALLI: Yeah, Not exactly.
NATE: The thing is, mice don’t actually hibernate, which is the key point here. But they do enter torpor if it’s too cold outside or if there’s a lack of food.
CALLI: So explain torpor to me. What…what exactly is it?
NATE: Sure. Think of it like a deep, deep sleep. They barely move and their body temps plummet. In nature, it lasts for a couple of hours. But using this new technique, they were able to put the mice in a state of torpor for up to 24 hours with absolutely no adverse side effects. The little guys’ body temps dropped, they used less oxygen, their metabolism slowed down, and even their heart rates were cut in half.
CALLI: How did they do it?
NATE: Basically, they put a sort of head band on the mice that allowed them to move around, and blasted ultrasound waves at their heads. They could control the waves and monitor the condition of the mouse, which meant they could keep them in that state - theoretically - as long as they needed. And the thing is, about an hour after the ultrasound waves stopped, the mice sprang out of their torpor, ready for anything.
CALLI: Ready to build a new civilization in a new star system?
NATE: Yeah. Something like that.
CALLI: So I guess the next obvious question…
NATE: …will it work on humans?
CALLI: Exactly.
NATE: That remains to be seen. But they actually found it did work on rats, which, like humans, don’t naturally enter a state of torpor. And while the rats didn’t show any huge drop in body temp, it’s still potentially good news for our future star fleet. Researchers say this is a giant leap forward in humankind’s eventual journey to the stars.
CALLI: Torpor sounds lovely, but you know what else would be good?
NATE: A wormhole?
CALLI: All they need to do is fold the fabric of space and time. What is so hard about that?
NATE: Well…if they do that, you’ll hear about it here first…
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: What’s full of pizza and weighs around 1.7 trillion pounds?
NATE: Me after a trip to the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet?
CALLI: I mean close. I know you have a hollow leg but I am talking about New York City.
NATE: 1.7 trillion pounds? That is definitely a Big Apple.
CALLI: That’s just the million or so buildings. That doesn’t take into account the streets, bridges, subway cars, or Times Square Spiderman impersonators. So all that weight, well new research shows that it’s causing the city to sink.
NATE: No.
CALLI: Yeah! This type of sinking is called subsidence, and it happens when the ground slowly compresses. And even though the subsidence rates in The Big Apple only average between 1 and 2 millimeters per year, this is a huge, huge problem.
NATE: I guess that adds up over time, right?
CALLI: Absolutely. But here’s another twist: due to climate change, sea level is going up around 1 or 2 millimeters every year.
NATE: Oh boy. So that means it’ll be underwater twice as fast as we thought.
CALLI: Exactly. Water goes up 2 millimeters, city sinks 2 millimeters. That’s 4 millimeters a year, which becomes significant really quickly.
NATE: So I guess New Yorkers might wanna think about moving to a different big city?
CALLI: Bad news…
NATE: …I was afraid you’d say that…
CALLI: Yeah…most other cities are also experiencing some level of subsidence. Researchers have found high levels all up and down the East coast. Some spots in Delaware are dropping as much as 10 millimeters a year. Parts of Jakarta, Indonesia? A foot a year. Take sea-level rise and subsidence together and up to 165 miles of coastline could disappear from the San Francisco Bay area.
NATE: So what are we supposed to do? Like, can we build lighter buildings?
CALLI: That is a great question. It seems like lighter buildings would help, right? But unfortunately, not so fast. It turns out that the biggest buildings out there don’t cause all that much subsidence because they are anchored to bedrock, which isn’t all that squishy.
NATE: Squishy being a technical term, right? I believe it’s somewhere between mushy and spongy on the scale.
CALLI: Yeah, yeah. That sounds about right. But that’s the thing - one of the biggest causes of subsidence is depleting groundwater. When those underground aquifers dry up, it’s like a water balloon with a leak. The ground starts to collapse on itself. And when it’s already carrying a bunch of weight…
NATE: The squishy is just off the charts!
CALLI: I mean that’s one way to put it but yeah! Development and urbanization is the real culprit here. We’re building on ground that is easily compressed, and then we’re using up all the water underground that’s holding the place together. And to make matters worse, as the shape of the land changes, the way water moves also changes, creating bowls where water can pool and cause increased flooding.
NATE: It’s not a very pretty picture. Like is there a solution, other than moving to Nebraska? Nothing against Nebraska, of course.
CALLI: Well…there’s no silver bullet here. The fix is to restore the natural wetlands to their original healthy state. They act as a buffer and can absorb storm surge and rising seas. But coastal development is booming, and if the trend continues, cities like New York and San Francisco are only going to get bigger, more crowded, and less able to cope with this subsidence problem.
NATE: So that means more flooding?
CALLI: We knew there would be flooding, but this new research shows that the problem could be much, much worse and come much faster than we thought. And that makes data like this critical for our ability to find other solutions for problems like this. We need to know what we’re up against so we can face it.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: New research suggests that a baby’s brain structure is shaped to some degree by the amount of adult speech they hear.
CALLI: Like…in a good way?
NATE: Ha. Yes. You don’t have to give babies the cold-shoulder.
CALLI: Okay, hasn’t there been a lot of research already that suggests talking to babies is good for them?
NATE: Absolutely. Studies have shown that talking or reading to babies from birth has huge effects on their language development and their vocabulary. But this new study actually looks at how talking to tots actually forms their brain structures.
CALLI: Whoa. Okay so the words that we speak to babies actually turns into brain structure?
NATE: It’s food for thought isn’t it? That’s one way to put it. The research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Professor John Spencer from the University of East Anglia led a team that studied 87 six-month-olds and 76 30-month-olds. They used a recorder inside a vest to measure how much speech they were exposed to at home.
CALLI: Okay but that’s really cute! They were like little spies with all their little hidden recording devices.
NATE: Totally. And the very secret data that they smuggled out of their nurseries was pretty remarkable. Spencer and his team were able to record over sixty-two-hundred hours of language and found that kids with more highly educated moms were exposed to more speech - and they also produced more vocalizations themselves.
CALLI: K… That’s not totally surprising.
NATE: No - and it matches the findings of the previous studies. But here’s where it gets super interesting - and also sneaky. They invited 84 of those babies into the lab, where they fell asleep in a snuggly quiet room.
CALLI: Okay that’s too much! That’s really cute! Sleeping babies in a snuggly room! Yes, please! Thank you.
NATE: Once they were asleep, they snuck them into the MRI room and scanned their brains.
CALLI: Less cute, a little creepy but go on…
NATE: …they found that the 30 month olds who had heard more language had more of a substance in their brains called myelin, which is this stuff that surrounds the nerves and helps signals happen more smoothly.
CALLI: Okay. Lemme get this straight. The ones that were spoken to more often had more myelin in their brains?
NATE: Yes. Especially in area of their brains associated with language.
CALLI: Amazing. But you said this happened in the 30 month olds?
NATE: Yes. Which for the math, that’s two and a half year old child.
CALLI: What about the six month olds in the study?
NATE: Well it gets more interesting here because the six-month-olds who heard more language…they actually had LESS myelin.
CALLI: Okay… so was hearing language bad for them?
NATE: Well no, of course not! But it shows that while this study is intriguing - those 30 month olds who heard more speech did, indeed, have more myelin in their brains, researchers can’t say for sure that the speech, itself, caused the growth of the extra myelin. It’s also worth mentioning that a six month old is a totally different creature than a 30 month old.
CALLI: I mean yeah, it’s the same age ratio between a 6 year old and a 30 year old.
NATE: Right. And also consider the possibility that moms who are more highly educated might just be genetically predisposed to being more linguistically capable. So their 30 month olds might develop more myelin anyway.
CALLI: So should we talk to babies? Is this a yes or a no?
NATE: Here are the two big takeaways: one - babies are affected by speech in all sorts of positive ways. We can say that for sure no matter what this study says. And two: most of the time, a study’s findings just lead researchers to do more research. That’s the beauty of science, and exactly why we can do so many episodes of Curiosity Daily!
CALLI: [baby talk] Do most studies lead to more research? Yes they do! Yes they do lead to more research! Who’s my little scientist? You are!
NATE: What are you doing?
CALLI: More research! Is it working?
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Researchers were able to induce a form of hibernation in mice and rats using ultrasound beams aimed at their brains, in a finding that could one day lead humans to physically be able to travel to the stars.
CALLI: New York City is sinking at a rate of between 1 and 2 millimeters per year, as are most coastal urban areas. This is due to something called subsidence, and it could double the threat of sea-level rise over the coming decades. The fix? Restoring natural coastal wetlands.
NATE: Researchers found that 30 month-old babies who heard lots of speech had a correspondingly large amount of a substance called myelin in the parts of their brain associated with language.