Entrepreneur, physicist, and author Safi Bahcall explains “loonshots” and how Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, can help us understand where good ideas come from. Plus: learn about why illness puts your brain in a fog, and new research that found a place on Earth where there’s no life. Additional resources from Safi Bahcall: Pick up “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries” on Amazon — https://amazon.com Follow @SafiBahcall on Twitter — https://twitter.com/safibahcall Official Website — https://www.bahcall.com/ Other sources: Link between inflammation and mental sluggishness shown in new study | University of Birmingham via EurekAlert! — https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-11/uob-lbi111519.php Selective effects of acute low-grade inflammation on human visual attention | NeuroImage — https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1053811919306895 What is an extremophile? | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/extremophile.html Extremophiles and Extreme Environments | National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4187170/ The Father of Modern Spaceflight Was Originally Mocked By The New York Times | Curiosity.com — https://curiosity.com/topics/the-father-of-modern-spaceflight-was-originally-mocked-by-the-new-york-times-curiosity/ Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Entrepreneur, physicist, and author Safi Bahcall explains “loonshots” and how Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, can help us understand where good ideas come from. Plus: learn about why illness puts your brain in a fog, and new research that found a place on Earth where there’s no life.
Additional resources from Safi Bahcall:
Other sources:
Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/where-good-ideas-come-from-w-safi-bahcall-why-illness-puts-your-brain-in-a-fog-and-a-place-on-earth-that-supports-no-life
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 why illness puts your brain in a fog; and new research that found a place on Earth where there’s no life. You’ll also learn how the origins of modern rocketry can help us understand where good ideas come from, with special guest Safi Bahcall.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Why illness puts your brain in a fog (Cody)
When you’re sick, even simple things like watching TV can feel overwhelming. People often call this zoned out feeling “brain fog,” and a new study from the University of Birmingham suggests that you’re not imagining it: this experience is real and measurable. Your brain has a harder time thinking when you’re sick.
Sickness and thinking are pretty broad, unscientific terms, though, so for this study, the researchers defined them more concretely. Sickness was inflammation in the body, and thinking broke down into three different mental processes: “alerting,” “orienting,” and “executive control.”
Alerting is basically staying or becoming alert; orienting means picking important sensory information out of all the sensory input coming in; and executive control means deciding what to pay attention to when multiple important things are happening.
For the study, the team worked with 20 male volunteers on two different days. Both days started with an injection: either a salmonella vaccine that triggered inflammation or a placebo that contained only water. The volunteer didn’t know which was which. A few hours after both shots, the volunteer did a basic attention exercise where he responded to digital images while hooked up to a brain scanner.
So: Did the inflammation affect people’s responses to the attention test? Short answer: kind of. The volunteers performed the same after both injections, but after the vaccine, their brain scans looked different than they did after the placebo. Specifically, the researchers saw a decrease in alertness-related brain activity. This suggests that “brain fog” might, technically, be a loss of control over your ability to stay alert.
Scientists have suspected that inflammation in the body could affect the brain for a long time, but it was hard to demonstrate that one caused the other. This study might be a small step forward on that front. It suggests that even very minor inflammation can impact our alertness. In the future, the researchers said, reports of “brain fog” may even help diagnose tricky inflammation-inducing diseases, like Alzheimer’s.
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Summary: "A team in the University's Centre for Human Brain Health investigated the link between this mental fog and inflammation - the body's response to illness. In a study published in Neuroimage, they show that inflammation appears to have a particular negative impact on the brain's readiness to reach and maintain an alert state."
Sources: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-11/uob-lbi111519.php
Study: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1053811919306895
Scientists found a place on Earth where there’s no life (Ashley)
Living things have spent billions of years evolving. Through competition and exploration, organisms have managed to establish themselves in just about every nook and cranny on the planet. But can they survive everywhere? New research may definitively say no.
Some organisms are known for living in places that are especially inhospitable to life, such as the hydrothermal vents at Yellowstone National Park. Scientists call those organisms extremophiles because they thrive in extreme environments. Some extremophiles live deep in the Earth’s crust. Others live frozen in sea ice or in acidic environments where the pH is 0. But according to a paper published this October in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, scientists have found a habitat where there isn’t any life at all.
The Danakil [DAN-uh-kull] Depression in Ethiopia is one of the hottest, driest places on Earth. It receives less than two centimeters of rain per year, yet in the middle of this desert, there’s a false oasis: the Dallol [daa-LOL] geothermal pools. These stunning pools are full of dissolved minerals that make the water appear green, teal, and blue. Other colorful mineral formations fringe the edges of the pools, making them look like they belong on some distant planet. Now, it turns out that they have one more thing in common with the other worlds in our solar system: we’re pretty sure they’re devoid of life. According to new research, these pools are one of the few places on Earth where the environment is so extreme that life hasn’t found a way to exist.
What’s so special about the geothermal ponds in Dallol? Why here? The researchers point to two reasons these pools can’t support life. First, they contain high levels of chaotropic [KAY-uh-TROH-pick / KAY-uh-TROE-pick] magnesium salts. These chemicals break the hydrogen bonds that help the molecules in living things keep their shape. The second problem is the combination of extremely high heat, salinity, and acidity. Extremophiles across the world have developed strategies for contending with one or two of those extreme environmental variables, but there seems to be something about dealing with all three at the same time that life hasn’t quite figured out. But while this all might sound like bad news in the search for extraterrestrial life, it’s not — not really. To know where life could exist, we need to know where it can’t exist. It’s one more step to knowing what’s really out there.
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Summary: When it comes to living beings, the universe presents us with a paradox: we've found life nowhere else but Earth, suggesting that it requires precise conditions to exist, yet there's nowhere on Earth we *haven't* found it, suggesting that it can occur pretty much anywhere. But a new discovery is awarding a point to the "precise conditions" end of that argument: scientists found a place on Earth that cannot support life. Located in Dallol, Ethiopia, it's a pool that's a triple threat: it's super hot, super salty, and super acidic. Places like this are known as "multi-extreme," and although past research has claimed to find bacterial life here, this new discovery shows that not to be true. That makes this environment a particularly good place to study the limits of life, which could help us better understand where we might find life on other planets — and where we might not.
Sources: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-11/f-sf-sfa112219.php
Study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-1005-0
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Safi Bahcall 1 — What are Loonshots and why do they matter [2:30] (1 segment) (Cody)
Where do good ideas come from? Safi Bahcall may have an answer. He’s a physicist and a biotech CEO who took his company public, and among many other accomplishments worked for President Obama’s council of science advisors. He’s also the author of the new book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.” The book offers a new explanation for what causes groups of people to either embrace or dismiss new ideas. And every Thursday for the next next few weeks, Safi will take us on a journey through science, business, and history, to give you a new way to look at the inner world of teamwork and entrepreneurship. This week, we’ll start with a pretty important question: why did he call the book “Loonshots” and why are they important? Here’s Safi.
[CLIP 2:30]
Safi Bahcall makes a pretty great case for why we should nurture Loonshots. And next week, you’ll learn why groups of people working together have such a hard time doing that. Or if you can’t wait that long, then just pick up the book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.” You can find links to pick up the book — and to read more about Dr. Robert Goddard — in today’s show notes.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Mae Rice and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity.com.
ASHLEY: Today’s podcast was scripted, 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!