Learn about why bats are the source of so many deadly virus outbreaks; and the surprisingly strong influence older siblings can have on their brothers and sisters — just in time for Siblings Day. Then, test your knowledge from this podcast with a Curiosity Challenge trivia game.
Learn about why bats are the source of so many deadly virus outbreaks; and the surprisingly strong influence older siblings can have on their brothers and sisters — just in time for Siblings Day. Then, test your knowledge from this podcast with a Curiosity Challenge trivia game.
Why bats are the source of so many deadly virus outbreaks by Andrea Michelson
Older Siblings Might Be More Influential to a Child Than Parents by Anna Todd
https://curiosity.com/topics/siblings-shape-our-close-relationships-curiosity
Hear the answers to today’s trivia questions in these episodes of Curiosity Daily:
Pick up “Wanderers: A Novel” by Chuck Wendig on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Xvx20x
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-do-bats-cause-so-many-virus-outbreaks
CODY GOUGH: Season's greetings. We're wrapping up the year with a look back at your favorite episodes of 2020.
ASHLEY HAMER: Enjoy this Curiosity Daily classic and stay subscribed for brand-new episodes starting January 1. We'll see you in 2021.
CODY GOUGH: Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about why bats are the source of so many deadly virus outbreaks and the surprisingly strong influence older siblings can have on their brothers and sisters. Then you can play along with a special edition of the Curiosity challenge to test your knowledge from this podcast.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy and challenge some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Bats have gotten a bad rap lately. They're the original hosts of many diseases that have plagued humanity, including SARS, MERS, Ebola, and now, possibly COVID-19. But why do so many of these deadly outbreaks come from bats, of all things?
A recent study from a team of researchers at UC Berkeley found that the reason they're so good at spreading viruses may be because they're so good at fighting them. That's our old pros when it comes to keeping their systems safe from harm. The metabolic demands of flying are super high. And all that exercise can lead to an accumulation of DNA-damaging free radicals.
Damaged DNA gets kicked out of its cell's nucleus and left to float around aimlessly, where it could cause harm, at least if it wasn't for some smart adaptations of the bat immune system. In the blink of an eye, bats wall off their cells from potential intruders by releasing a molecule called interferon alpha, which tells their immune cells to prepare to fight off an invader like a virus. Some bats even have this defense switched on permanently, which leaves their immune systems on high alert for their entire lives.
Of course, if your immune system did this, you'd be sick all the time. Inflammation is one result of the human immune response that helps your body fight off infection, but it can also do damage if it hangs around for too long. Bats, on the other hand, have evolved anti-inflammatory traits to avoid that damage. Some have actually lost the genes responsible for inflammation altogether.
This supercharged immune response is good for the bats. But for a virus, it's a sort of evolutionary thunderdome. It makes viruses evolve strategies to rapidly reproduce before the bats can protect their cells.
When a virus that's evolved to reproduce at bat speed infects an animal with a normal immune response, it will quickly overwhelm the new host. That includes us humans. And like I said, not only are we slower at responding to viruses, but our immune defenses rely on inflammation, which causes the unpleasant symptoms we associate with the coronavirus or the flu.
So the fact that bats are virus super fighters also means that they can be super spreaders. Still, it's important that we protect bats and their habitats. Invading their ecosystems makes it more likely that our two species will cross paths. And stressed bats are more likely to shed viruses in the first place. It's in our best interest to keep bats happy and healthy. And maybe down the line, their super-powered immune system could teach us a thing or two.
CODY GOUGH: So is Batman immune to this stuff too or--
ASHLEY HAMER: That is a good question. I'm sure Alfred would keep him safe no matter what. So it's fine.
CODY GOUGH: Cool. Releasing today's episode of this podcast on Siblings Day, which is an unofficial US holiday to celebrate the bond between siblings. That might seem strange to you, if you spent your whole childhood fighting with your brother or sister over who's in charge of the remote control, or who gets the next turn on the swing set, or who gets to put the cheese in the macaroni and cheese.
ASHLEY HAMER: Did you guys fight about that?
CODY GOUGH: My sister and I may or may not have fought about that. It's hard to know. Who could? Anyway, research shows that siblings can have a big impact on each other that goes way beyond fighting about stuff. And that impact can last for a lifetime.
For a study back in 2004, researchers asked 20,000 teenagers about smoking habits, specifically theirs, their siblings' and their parents'. And they're also asked about family dynamics. The team found that the closer the bonds between two siblings, the more likely one sibling's smoking habits were to rub off on the other. That's even when controlling for the habits of their parents and peers.
Other studies have found that when one sibling is a smoker, the other sibling is 25% more likely to smoke. The risk is even higher with drinking at 36%. Luckily, siblings don't just give bad habits as hands me downs. They can also encourage good behaviors, like academic success.
This is due to one study called the sibling spillover effect, which says that a boost in an older sibling's test scores is linked to a smaller but significant boost in a younger sibling's test scores. An older sibling can act as a positive role model for academic achievement, both through their own study habits and by helping their younger siblings with homework. This is especially true for children with parents who may deal with a language barrier or have less access to information.
Investing in the firstborn can have a ripple effect for the success of their younger siblings. Older siblings can even be a predictor of a younger sibling getting pregnant. In a weird 2009 study by developmental psychologist, Patricia East, she discovered that even when controlling for socioeconomic status and life circumstances, a woman whose older sister got pregnant was five times more likely to get pregnant herself.
So older siblings are important. The decisions they make rub off on you. And as an older sibling myself, I would just like to tell my little sister, you're welcome.
ASHLEY HAMER: So for our next segment, we thought we'd change things up a little bit. Usually, on Fridays, we have a listener question. And we're absolutely going to keep doing that, because we love getting your questions and answering them. But we thought that maybe once a month or so, we would call up a listener and do a Curiosity challenge with them, ask them some trivia questions about the stuff that we talked about on our show for the past month.
So I put out a call for volunteers on Twitter, and our first volunteer is Cameron Duke. His name might be familiar, because he's one of our writers. So I made sure that every question I asked him wasn't about something that he wrote obviously. Anyway, feel free to play along at home. Cameron is a biologist himself, so I was in for a real challenge.
CODY GOUGH: Or was he? I guess we'll find out.
ASHLEY HAMER: So number one, new research suggests that people with social anxiety may suffer from a memory bias. So what's up with their memory? Is it A, they have a hard time remembering social interactions in general, B, they have a hard time remembering social interactions that ended positively, or C, they have an easier time remembering negative events in general?
CAMERON DUKE: Ooh, as somebody who's a bit social anxious myself, I think I'm leaning toward the negative bias for some reason. I guess maybe it comes to the fact that maybe as somebody who might have social anxiety, maybe they're biased to kind of go into a social interaction maybe expecting the worst out of it. Sometimes I'll be talking to somebody, and I'll remember just one dumb thing I said to them, that they probably didn't even catch.
ASHLEY HAMER: One of these could be right then. Either they have a hard time remembering social interactions that ended positively, or they have an easier time remembering negative events. Which one are you going with?
CAMERON DUKE: Oh, easier to remember the negative ones.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right. The correct answer is actually, they have a hard time remembering social interactions that ended positively. So your thought process is totally right, like it's what the researchers said is that they have such a view of themselves as someone who doesn't do well in negative-- in social situations that they can't remember times when they did well. People were asked to imagine 10 social and nonsocial scenarios.
Some of them went well, and some of them went badly. And when they're asked to recall those later, the people with social anxiety were worst at remembering the social scenarios with positive outcomes. But they were just fine at remembering everything else.
CAMERON DUKE: Hah, that's fascinating.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CAMERON DUKE: Do I get a half point for that one?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, you get a half point for that. Because I liked your reasoning. It was good.
So number two, this is a food one. Contrary to popular belief, brown rice isn't all that much healthier than white rice. Is that because, A, brown rice is harder to digest so the nutrients aren't as accessible, B, brown rice contains higher levels of toxic chemicals, or C, brown rice contains a compound that prevents the body from absorbing its nutrients?
CAMERON DUKE: Hmm, I would say definitely A.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's C. Brown rice actually contains a compound called phytic acid that prevents the body from absorbing minerals.
CAMERON DUKE: Really? I had no idea. I had no idea about that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. All right, third one. Astronomers have used a brand-new technique to discover an exoplanet. They did it by looking for a phenomenon that's pretty familiar to us here on Earth. What phenomenon was it? A, an aurora, B, a lightning strike, or C, a sunrise?
CAMERON DUKE: A lightning strike. That would imply that it has an atmosphere. I'm going to guess that it's probably a lightning strike, because that one seems to be the most implausible. And that seems to be the right one.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, you're 0 for 3. It's an aurora actually.
CAMERON DUKE: An aurora. OK, that's really cool. See, I learned so much. See, I love trivia games, but I'm not I'm not great at them.
ASHLEY HAMER: No, it's fine. This is my first one, and I'm sure I'm going to have to get a lot easier, if a real-life scientist can't get my answers. Whoo, that was tough. Did you get more answers right than Cameron? Let us know.
If you want to participate in the Curiosity challenge next month, or if you have a listener question, then send it in to podcast@curiosity.com or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
CODY GOUGH: Before we recap what we learned today, here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Next week, you'll learn about why humans have so much back pain, a paradox that asks why the night sky isn't blazing with light, why we eat differently when we're stressed, the surprising genetic reason why females outlive males, and more. OK. So now, let's recap what we learned today.
CODY GOUGH: Well, we learned that lots of very powerful viruses come from bats, because their immune systems are super strong. So only the toughest survive. There can be only one.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right, like a few months before this pandemic hit, I read this book, Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig. And it's eerie how many similarities there are to what's going on right now and what happened in that book. There's a worldwide pandemic.
It started in bats, like all of the same things happened. The only difference is I think the book ends a little worse than we're going to end. Knock on wood. And we learned that siblings can have a much bigger influence on us than we think. Give your siblings a call today and let them know they're important to you.
I know I have started doing Zoom calls with my sister every week. It's been nice.
CODY GOUGH: Nice. My oldest brother, Jason, was texting me during WrestleMania last weekend about the Undertaker match, which was amazing. The boneyard brawl, so good. Look it up. And my brother, Zack, posted a video on Facebook of he and his wife drinking a beverage that I got them for Christmas.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Theoretically, I'm going to talk to all of my siblings this Sunday, because I'm in charge of putting together our Easter Sunday brunch Zoom call.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, that's great.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, and my wife was at a record store a couple of months ago, and she found a copy of the vinyl album of the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, which I've never heard. But I love Andrew Lloyd Webber, so that's how we're going to celebrate.
ASHLEY HAMER: Perfect.
CODY GOUGH: Have you seen the musical?
ASHLEY HAMER: I haven't seen the whole musical, no. I think I watched the movie. There's a movie, right?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, there's a movie. Got to get creative in these weird times. Today's stories were written by Andrea Michelson and Anna Todd and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY GOUGH: Have a great weekend and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.