Learn about how social connection may be as basic of a human need as hunger; the ongoing scientific debate around how ice skating actually works; and the Uberman sleep cycle, a polyphasic sleep schedule that was allegedly used by Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla.
Learn about how social connection may be as basic of a human need as hunger; the ongoing scientific debate around how ice skating actually works; and the Uberman sleep cycle, a polyphasic sleep schedule that was allegedly used by Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla.
Social connection may be a "basic human need" like hunger by Kelsey Donk
There Is Still Hot Debate Around How Ice Skating Actually Works by Joanie Faletto
Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla Allegedly Followed the Uberman Sleep Cycle originally aired August 9, 2018: https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/antimatter-101-w-everyday-einstein-how-to-avoid-be
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/we-still-dont-know-how-ice-skating-works
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 social connection may be as basic of a human need as hunger; the ongoing scientific debate around how ice skating actually works; and a unique sleep cycle allegedly used by Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We’re more than eight months into this pandemic, and science is here to explain why we’re still craving social interaction. And I mean craving. After all, loneliness can sometimes feel like a pit in your stomach. As it turns out, there’s some evidence that social connection is a basic human need just like hunger. We crave social contact in almost the same way we crave food.
Here’s how scientists figured it out. For a study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers asked 40 adults to each come to the lab for two separate 10-hour sessions. The first session was like quarantine, but worse! The participants couldn’t use their phones, or view social media, or have face-to-face contact with other people. Yikes.
During the second trip to the lab, the participants fasted. They could drink water, but they couldn’t have anything to eat for 10 hours.
After each of the sessions, the participants looked at pictures of whatever they’d been deprived of: either other people having social interactions, plates of delicious food, or unrelated pictures of flowers. While they looked at the pictures, researchers scanned their brains with an fMRI machine.
When the team looked at the brain scans, they noticed that the same part of the brain responded to both images of food and images of people. The part of the brain is called the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area, but what’s important is that it’s responsible for reward processing.
What the researchers saw was evidence that just like hunger, loneliness is a signal that we’re missing something important and we need to take action.
Now, that said, being alone doesn’t necessarily mean a person is lonely. When you choose solitude for a while, you can walk away feeling rested and restored. Most people had negative reactions to the forced isolation of the experiment, but not everyone feels lonely after the same period of isolation. Loneliness is subjective — it’s your brain’s response to not having enough human connection.
The amount of necessary human connection probably varies from person to person, and that’s what this team wants to research next. What kind of social connection do we need? And how much is necessary for the body to turn off that craving feeling?
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people who felt lonely was on the rise. This new research could help people meet their needs for social connection — both during the pandemic and beyond.
Figure skating is the oldest sport in the Winter Olympics. But the debate behind how ice skating actually works dates back even further than its 1908 Olympic debut. You'd think we know by now why ice is slippery, right? Well, this matter of physics has proven difficult to get a grip on.
You see, ice itself isn’t slippery. It’s that tiny bit of water that makes it slick enough to skate on. But how that thin layer of water gets there has baffled scientists for years.
One theory is pressure. In 1850, Michael Faraday showed an audience at London's Royal Institution how pressing two ice cubes together could make them form into a single block. He believed the pressure between the two cubes created a thin layer of water that quickly refreezes. But pressure doesn't pass muster in terms of ice skating. Even an overweight ice skater wouldn't be able to create enough pressure between skate and ice to get it melting.
Maybe instead, the friction of the moving skate heats up the ice enough to create a bit of water to glide on. But that doesn’t explain why ice is slippery even when you’re not skating.
Then in 2015, a scientist in Germany named Bo Persson came up with a breakthrough idea. He figured that if sliding on the ice at a certain speed actually created a film of melted water, you'd expect the ice to get way more slippery at that magical sliding speed. But his experiments said that wasn't the case. Instead, the ice gets gradually more slippery as you slide faster and faster.
So instead, he says two different things are happening thanks to the interaction of friction and ice temperature. If you’re sliding fast enough, you produce enough heat from friction to form that film of water. When you're not sliding fast enough, the frozen ice puts up resistance which leads to friction, and that helps your skates create enough heat to form the film anyway.
Still, the exact reason as to why ice skates can glide so smoothly and easily is a mystery. The problem lies in the inability to get in between the skate and the ice, a plane called the buried interface, while the skate is contacting the ice in motion. So even if you're not completely wowed by an Olympic figure skater's triple Salchow [SOW-cow?], just the fact that they’re skating on ice at all is itself an impressive feat of physics.
CODY: Not all sleep is created equal. And with a lot of schedules and routines being thrown off these days, now might be a good time to try a new way of getting rest.
ASHLEY: Right. And that’s why we remastered THIS classic clip from 2018.
[CLIP 2:27]
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Joanie Faletto, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. 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!