Learn about why you don’t weigh the same everywhere on Earth; the personality traits shared by people who live past 90; and how researchers figured out how shoelaces come untied. Please support our sponsors! Visit skillshare.com/curiosity for two months of unlimited access to over 25,000 classes for free. Start your two months now! In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: You Don't Weigh the Same Everywhere on Earth — https://curiosity.im/2Gumy8K These Are the Personality Traits Shared by People Who Live Past 90 — https://curiosity.im/2GuzFH2 Scientists Just Discovered How Shoelaces Come Untied, and It's Weirder Than You'd Think — https://curiosity.im/2Gr3t7g If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about why you don’t weigh the same everywhere on Earth; the personality traits shared by people who live past 90; and how researchers figured out how shoelaces come untied.
Please support our sponsors! Visit skillshare.com/curiosity for two months of unlimited access to over 25,000 classes for free. Start your two months now!
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/weight-changes-in-different-places-how-shoelaces-come-untied-and-longer-life-mentality
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why you don’t weigh the same everywhere on Earth; the personality traits shared by people who live past 90; and how researchers figured out how shoelaces come untied.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
You Don't Weigh the Same Everywhere on Earth — https://curiosity.im/2Gumy8K (Ashley)
Here’s something fun: you don’t weigh the same everywhere on earth. Your MASS stays consistent no matter where you are, but you’d actually weigh less standing at the equator than you would at a pole. Today you’re going to learn about centrifugal and centripetal forces, so I can help you understand the GRAVITY of this situtation. Picture this: imagine you're carrying a plastic bag filled with a few oranges. If you swing that bag over your head at the right speed in the shape of a circle, the oranges will stay in the bag. If you swing it too fast, the oranges might bust out through the bottom of the bag and get flung halfway across the room. Congrats, you just learned about centrifugal and centripetal forces! Centrifugal force is what would cause the oranges to bust out of the bottom of the plastic bag. It’s defined as the apparent force, equal and opposite to the centripetal force, that draws a rotating body away from the center of rotation, caused by the inertia of the body. Centripetal force, on the other hand, is defined as the component of force acting on a body in curvilinear motion that’s directed toward the center of curvature or axis of rotation. That centripetal force is what makes the oranges want to keep looping around in a circle. And these forces are why you weigh less standing at the equator than at a pole. At the equator, centripetal forces are acting on you as you spin around the center of the Earth. This spinning keeps you from flying off into space. At a pole, that force isn't acting on you because you're not rotating at such an intense speed. Also, at a pole, you're closer to the center of Earth, since our planet isn’t a perfect sphere, and that means that gravity is pulling you down with just a tad more strength. But the effect it has on your weight isn't too extreme — you'd weigh about half a percent more at a pole. So if you weighed 200 pounds at a pole, you'd weigh 199 pounds at the equator. Which means that shedding that extra pound is just 10-thousand kilometers away. How’s that for a weight loss hack? [ad lib]
These Are the Personality Traits Shared by People Who Live Past 90 — https://curiosity.im/2GuzFH2 (from Saturday) (Cody)
Researchers have come up with a list of personality traits shared by people who live past 90. And they did this by looking at the habits and health conditions of a place where a lot of people live very long lives. I’m talking about Cilento, Italy, where one out of every TEN residents is over 100 years old. That’s more than 5 times more centenarians per capita than we have here in the United States. There's clearly something special about Cilento, and that’s why researchers paid it a visit. The team selected 29 people between the ages of 90 and 101, along with 51 of their relatives between the ages of 51 and 75. The researchers evaluated each of those participants on their physical and mental health using self-assessment, doctors' opinions, and the views of their friends and family. 90-plus participants scored better than their younger relatives on self-confidence, decisionmaking, and mental well-being. And their mental strengths boiled down to a few positive thought patterns. For Cilento residents, longer life was strongly correlated with life-affirming mental states. The top trait was resilience, or the belief that you can handle the obstacles that get in your way. That was followed by optimism, so it was good to believe that things will go generally well. Also important: good relationships, which have been strongly correlated with overall happiness in other studies. In Cilento, this trait was generally shown in connections with family, community, and religion. One factor that seemed unique to this particular region was a love of the land, which could be seen as an offshoot of the positive community relationships. But the factor that stood out the most has also been observed among long-lived people around the world: willingness to work. That rings true even here: staying in the workforce has been linked with a longer life. In the United States, just waiting until age 66 to retire instead of 65 can be enough to decrease your likelihood of death by as much as 11 percent. There you go: If you want to live longer, maybe you should plan on retiring a little after the usual schedule. [ad lib]
[SKILLSHARE]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is sponsored by Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community for creators. They offer more than 25,000 classes in design, business, and more, to help YOU find new ways to fuel your curiosity, creativity, and career.
CODY: I’ve been tapping into my creativity lately by planning a little side project I’m hoping to get to if I ever have any free time. I actually want to try my hand at making a short documentary… but I’ve never worked on one of those before, let alone actually done one on my own. But thanks to Skillshare, I’m taking a class on documentary interviewing techniques — from the head of a documentary film school who’s won several awards for his work over more than 30 years working in filmmaking and broadcast production.
ASHLEY: And ALL of Skillshare’s classes are taught by real experts in their field or public motivational speakers. You can take classes in social media marketing, mobile photography, creative writing, illustration, and pretty much everything in-between.
CODY: And today, YOU can join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare with a special offer just for Curiosity Daily listeners: Get two months of Skillshare for free.
ASHLEY: That’s right, Skillshare is offering Curiosity Daily listeners two months of unlimited access to over 25,000 classes for free. To sign up, go to Skillshare dot com slash CURIOSITY. Again, go to Skillshare dot com slash CURIOSITY to start your two months now.
CODY: One more time, that’s Skillshare dot com slash CURIOSITY.
Scientists Just Discovered How Shoelaces Come Untied, and It's Weirder Than You'd Think — https://curiosity.im/2Gr3t7g (Ashley)
We mentioned in a recent episode that scientists only recently figured out how shoelaces come untied, but we didn’t have time to get into the details. Today we do! And believe it or not, these findings have a lot of implications for medicine. In 2017, a team of Berkeley mechanical engineers took slow-motion footage of shoelaces coming undone — and the results weren’t what they expected. Since nobody had ever researched this before, the first STEP of this study was for the researchers to figure out how to make shoelaces come undone in the first place. They found that running on a treadmill seemed to do the trick. Once they had their slow-motion camera aimed at the treadmill and an accelerometer on the shoes, they were ready to run. And they were surprised to find that the knot didn't slowly unravel; instead, the laces came untied pretty quickly. As the researchers wrote in their 2017 study published in The Proceedings Of The Royal Society A, quote, "the failure of the knot happens in a matter of seconds, often without warning, and is catastrophic," unquote. That quote-unquote “catstrophic” faliure included many elements: repeated impacts loosen the knot, while the repeated change in direction pulls out the laces. In all, these combined forces total 7gs, or roughly the force of an Apollo spacecraft on reentry, as Scientific American put it. It might sound silly to study shoes untying, but think about how many things involve knots. Surgery stitches need them, high-speed network cables are challenged by them, and even computer animators can learn from them. So hopefully you see that this study was “KNOT” a catastrophic waste of time.
CODY: Read about today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com!
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!