Learn about how drugs like Ritalin and Adderall actually make you “focus,” how tech companies are using lava lamps to make computers more secure, and why new life discovered at the bottom of the ocean opens up new possibilities for finding life on Mars.
Learn about how drugs like Ritalin and Adderall actually make you “focus,” how tech companies are using lava lamps to make computers more secure, and why new life discovered at the bottom of the ocean opens up new possibilities for finding life on Mars.
Scientists figured out how Ritalin actually makes you focus by Grant Currin
Additional resources from Matt Parker, stand-up mathematician:
Researchers discover bacteria living in rock beneath the sea floor (which is good news for life on Mars) by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/using-lava-lamps-to-generate-randomness-w-matt-parker-how-ritalin-makes-you-focus-and-what-bacteria-beneath-the-sea-floor-means-for-life-on-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 drugs like Ritalin actually make you “focus”; how tech companies are using lava lamps to make computers more secure; and why new life discovered at the bottom of the ocean opens up new possibilities for finding life on Mars.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall definitely help people focus on difficult projects and during long study sessions, but how exactly? That’s something that scientists are only starting to understand. And now, new research solves a piece of the puzzle: they may work by making the brain care more about the benefits than the costs of completing a difficult task.
A group of Dutch researchers started with a simple question: Do these drugs improve performance by boosting the brain’s ability to think or by boosting people’s motivation to keep going? They knew the drugs led to higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. They also knew dopamine motivates people to complete physical tasks. What they didn’t know was whether dopamine could motivate cognitive tasks, like writing a term paper.
So they brought 50 young, healthy volunteers into the lab to figure it out. The researchers first measured each participant’s dopamine levels, then had them take some memory tests that varied in difficulty. Next, participants took either: a generic version of Ritalin; an antipsychotic that increases dopamine levels (but in a different way from Ritalin); or a placebo. The researchers then let the participants choose which tests to repeat — for money, this time. The harder the test, the more money they could earn.
The results? Participants who started out with lower dopamine levels naturally were more likely to choose the easier tests, suggesting they were focused on avoiding situations that required hard thinking. In other words, they cared a lot about the potential costs of the harder tests. The opposite was true of participants with higher levels of dopamine. They were more focused on the amount of money they could earn. That focus on earnings was the same in people with naturally higher levels of dopamine and in people who’d taken drugs to elevate it.
The results show that drugs like Ritalin encourage focus by influencing the brain’s system for making cost-benefit analyses. Dopamine helps regulate this system, and the natural variations in dopamine levels between people explains some of their differences in everyday behavior. People with lower natural levels of dopamine tend to be more risk-averse because they focus on the potential costs of a decision, while people with higher levels of dopamine might be more interested in high-risk opportunities because they’re focused on the potential rewards.
But that’s also why using these drugs without a prescription can be dangerous: It can throw off the brain’s decision-making system. According to one of the researchers, quote, “when you raise dopamine in someone who already has a high dopamine level, every decision seems like it has benefit,” end quote. So avoid bad decisions by deciding not to abuse these drugs in the first place.
What do decorative lamps from the 1960s have to do with cryptography? Well you’re about to find out on this week’s Monday Math Mishaps with Matt Parker. He’s a stand-up comedian, YouTube personality, and best-selling author, with a new book called “Humble Pi (Pi as in P-I): When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World.” Here’s what Matt told us when we asked: why does a tech company in San Francisco have a wall full of lava lamps?
[CLIP 2:12]
This techy use of lava lamps is called LavaRand, and it’s actually been around for a while. It’s covered under a U.S. patent from 1996 that’s titled "Method for seeding a pseudo-random number generator with a cryptographic hash of a digitization of a chaotic system." You can find links to learn more about LavaRand and how Cloudflare, specifically, uses it, in today’s show notes — along with links to pick up Matt Parker’s book “Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World.” Although, to be fair, I guess this story was more about math going right. Maybe today, it’s the segment itself that was the mishap?
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is sponsored by KiwiCo.
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Scientists have discovered life in a very unlikely place: inside rocks buried deep beneath the ocean floor. And that could mean new and exciting possibilities for finding life on Mars.
The ocean floor has a lot in common with Mars, when you think about it. Humans have mapped both of them with some level of accuracy, but they’re both still mostly unexplored. And that means that the possibility of making new discoveries on either one is downright tantalizing. In 2010, a team of researchers tried their hand at making some of these discoveries. They piloted a ship through the South Pacific Ocean and dropped anchor in several locations. At each location, they extended a six-kilometer, or four-mile tube fitted with a drill all the way to the ocean floor. They drilled through 75 meters of mud, or about 250 feet, before hitting rock. Then they drilled another 40 meters, or 130 feet, through that. The whole time, the tube was sucking up the mud and rock like a straw.
Once they had their samples, the researchers examined tiny cracks in the rock. These cracks are no more than a millimeter wide in most cases, and they’re packed with clay — a lot like the clay you’d use for pottery. The researchers made thin slices of this clay and washed them with a dye that stains DNA. When they looked at their samples through a microscope, they saw all these orange clay tunnels that were absolutely packed with little green microbial specks.
In other words, they found life. Inside the rocks! And not a little bit of life, but TONS of it. In fact, they estimate the density of the microbes living in the clay to be somewhere around the same density as the microbes in the human gut. That’s about 10 billion cells per cubic centimeter. Not only is it a surprise to find life at all in rocks buried so deep, but the fact that it’s flourishing this much is super exciting. Basically, these microbes are living their best lives isolated in these little oases much farther down than we thought life could be.
But how are these little microbes doing so well down there? Well, the researchers think that it’s thanks to the fact that the clay is rich in nutrients and it’s not being diluted by seawater. Even cooler, when it comes to water and nutrient availability, these undersea rocks may not be all that different from rocks under the surface of Mars. If life can thrive deep beneath the ocean floor, where else can it exist?
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Grant Currin and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was 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!