Learn about why it’s relaxing to breathe in through your nose and the first woman who’s ever been struck by a meteor. We’ll also answer a listener question about why smacking electronics helps to make them work again.
Learn about why it’s relaxing to breathe in through your nose and the first woman who’s ever been struck by a meteor. We’ll also answer a listener question about why smacking electronics helps to make them work again.
Why do relaxation exercises have you breathe in through your nose? Two words: nitric oxide by Grant Currin
Only One Woman Has Ever Been Struck by a Meteor by Mae Rice
LISTENER Q: Why does smacking electronics make them work again? by Ashley Hamer
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-its-relaxing-to-breathe-in-through-your-nose
ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn about why it's relaxing to breathe in through your nose. And you'll hear the story of the first woman who's ever been struck by a meteor. We'll also answer our listener question about why smacking electronics helps to make them work again.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity. If you've ever done relaxation exercises like yoga, or guided meditation, you've probably been told to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Have you ever wondered why? Well, it turns out that something special happens to the air you breathe in through your nose. So special, in fact, that the scientists who discovered it nabbed the Nobel Prize in 1998.
Go ahead and breathe in through your nose, while I explain what makes it so relaxing. The nose actually does quite a few things to help transform air into breath. It filters out some particles, including potential allergens and pathogens. It also starts the process of warming up and humidifying air before it gets into the lungs. But how does nose breathing affect the way you feel?
Well, as those Nobel Prize winning chemists figured out, it all comes down to a molecule that your nose makes right there in your very own nasal cavities. That molecule is called nitric oxide. It's a signaling molecule that does a lot of stuff in the body, including relaxing the muscles that regulate breathing and blood flow.
When you breathe in through your nose, nitric oxide mixes into the air you've inhaled. On its way to your lungs, it relaxes the muscles in your windpipe, lungs, and arteries, to boost oxygen and take in blood flow. More blood flow through the lungs means more oxygen in the blood. More oxygen in your blood, can give you an extra boost of energy and endurance. But that's just one of the many ways nitric oxide helps your body do its thing.
Nitric oxide also helps to fight off bacteria and viruses that could make you sick. In fact, one small study of college students found that students whose bodies made more of the stuff, had fewer cold symptoms after finals week than people with less nitric oxide in their systems. So if it can fight cold viruses, can it fight COVID-19? The answer is a strong maybe. There are at least 11 ongoing clinical trials to figure out if giving COVID patients supplemental nitric oxide can help shorten their recovery.
It seems possible. But we're still waiting on evidence to confirm that. What we do know is that breathing in through your nose is easy, relaxing, good for you, and free. So go on. Take a nice big sniff.
NATALIA REAGAN: The chances of getting struck by a meteorite are roughly the same as getting struck by lightning. That is, pretty low. But it does happen. And there are people who live to tell about it. That includes the first person ever confirmed to be struck by a meteorite. A 34-year-old woman named Anne Hodges. 1 December day in 1954, there was an explosion in the sky above Southeast Alabama.
A meteor had shattered on contact with Earth's atmosphere, painting an arc of red light across the sky. Anne Hodges didn't see it, though. She wasn't an astronomer. She wasn't even outside. She was a normal lady, napping on her couch in Sylacauga, Alabama. That is, until a shard of the exploded space rock, weighing about 8 pounds or 3 and 1/2 kilograms, crashed through her roof, ricocheted off her radio, and hit her in the hip.
It left a dark, elliptical bruise, but miraculously, didn't kill her. Hodges wasn't the first person to claim to have been hit by a meteorite, but she was the first person whose claim was verified. This was a borderline miraculous event, but it soon became the opposite of a miracle.
A bureaucratic battle. First, the meteorite was turned over to the Air Force to make sure it wasn't Soviet spy technology. It was 1954, and the US was in the thick of the Cold War. So suspicions, even of rocks, ran high. Then the question of extraterrestrial property rights emerged. Hodges felt the meteorite belonged to her. It hit her, after all. The public agreed. But her landlady felt similarly entitled to the rock. It hit her property, after all.
The two eventually settled out of court. The landlady took the rock and paid Hodges $500. Later though, the meteorite got back to Hodges. She and her husband donated it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History, where it remains to this day. It's displayed alongside the Philco radio it grazed as it fell to the Earth. It's place in a museum makes sense, as the meteor really was one of a kind. It remains the first confirmed extraterrestrial object to hit a human without killing them.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Moana, who wants to know, why we bang TV remotes when they don't work properly. And, why that actually works. Banging on an appliance to get it working again, also known by the very serious and technical term percussive maintenance, is such a tried and true method that it was even used on the Apollo 12 mission to fix an issue with the TV camera.
And why it works is pretty simple. Old-fashioned electric devices like the Fonzies jukebox and NASA's TV cameras worked pretty differently from the advanced electronics of today. They were full of vacuum tubes, mechanical switches, and wires that were physically soldered into place. If one of those switches fell out of alignment, or a faulty soldering made for a weak electrical connection, the device would stop working.
But because that was a physical problem, a physical fix could sometimes do the job. One firm whack, and you might jostle the switch or wire back into place. Where it could go on, doing its job. These days, we don't have many devices that rely on mechanical doodads. But we do have devices that rely on batteries. And that's the key to why slapping your TV remote gets it working again. The batteries in your remote aren't just sitting and waiting for you to press a button before they produce energy. They're always discharging, little by little.
As a battery discharges, it produces a tiny bit of hydrogen gas that increases the pressure in the battery, and sometimes makes it leak potassium carbonate. That shows up as that telltale white powdery stuff you've probably seen on old batteries. That powder resists the flow of electric current. And since a TV remote doesn't use that much current in the first place, it's not powerful enough to overcome that resistance.
So when you smack a remote on the couch, you can sometimes shake that powder loose and allow the electric current to flow freely again. But a better less violent way to do it, is to simply take the batteries out and put them back in again. You could also swab the terminals with some vinegar if they look really corroded. But whatever you do, don't smack modern electronics. Your smartphone, tablet, computer, TV, and smartwatch, do not work this way. And you're likely to do some damage.
Thanks for your question, Moana. If you have a question, Send it into our new podcast email address curiosity@discovery.com. Or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
NATALIA REAGAN: 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 how you need self-compassion for self-improvement. Why adding cold cream to your coffee keeps it hotter for longer. And the medieval drama of naked mole rats. Seriously. We'll also talk to author and social psychologist Devon Price about why laziness doesn't exist. OK. So now, let's recap what we learned today.
NATALIA REAGAN: We learned that breathing through your nose does more than just relax you. It actually produces its own gas, nitric oxide, which also helps relax muscles in the windpipe and the lungs, and actually can help fight bacteria and viruses too. This has gotten doctors thinking that maybe giving COVID patients nitric oxide might help them get better faster.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I tried to find out whether the out through your mouth part of that advice actually held water, and I think it doesn't actually matter. The most I could find was that breathing out through your mouth lets you breathe out faster, than it does through your nose. I always like to think that it makes it so you don't blow snot anywhere. But that's just me.
[LAUGHTER]
NATALIA REAGAN: I mean, it's a fair assumption. I wonder though, there's so many people that have issues with deviated septums or can't really breathe in through their nose fully. And what that does for their immune system. I have a friend whose child had to have their nose basically opened up because he couldn't breathe through his nose. He was a chronic mouth breather. And I'm just curious about maybe how that long-term affects somebody.
ASHLEY HAMER: I knew a vocalist who had to do that. Which can you imagine, not being able to breathe in through your nose when you're a singer. It's rough. But, it seemed to be successful because she's still working, and she sounds great. So.
NATALIA REAGAN: That's good. [LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: And we learned that the only woman struck by a meteorite survived, with only a nasty bruise and a small legal battle to keep the out of this world offender. I want to go to Alabama and see that meteorite in a museum. That seems great.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. I just love how the landlady. That's my rock. It didn't hit you, lady.
ASHLEY HAMER: I think we all know landlords who would do that. Not my landlord. Actually, my landlord told me that his son listens to this show so, hello. [LAUGHS]
NATALIA REAGAN: That's awesome. Oh, I love that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It's great.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh man. We might have actually heard the landlord, my old landlord at some point, because he used to cut metal in the background when I'd record. And I'd try to get it out of the ambience. But, yeah. I just think this is amazing. Like just getting hit by a space rock. That's a very cool thing to survive.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, definitely. Everyone needs to look at the show notes for this one. Because there are links to newspaper clippings of her. And, she is not having it in these photos. She's just like what, yeah, it's me. I have a meteorite. Like she's just not happy to be there.
NATALIA REAGAN: We also learned that smacking old timey electronics, or even your modern battery powered remote control can help jostle, dislodge batteries and other mechanical doodads back into place. But, modern technology doesn't need that adjustment. So please avoid smacking your iPhone if it gets glitchy. Your best bet is probably just to reboot it. And there's actually an episode about that too, if you want to go searching for that. Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's right. I feel like smacking electronics is the Boomer version of just turn it off and turn it back on again.
NATALIA REAGAN: Or shaking a Polaroid picture.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: Did you have Polaroids as a kid?
ASHLEY HAMER: I did. Yes, yes.
NATALIA REAGAN: And they've made a resurgence. But, yeah. Polaroids as a child. You always shook the Polaroid. That does nothing to expedite its development, that I've been told.
ASHLEY HAMER: No, I'm pretty sure right, yeah. I mean, Polaroid's just in on it now. Their ads and stuff talk about shaking it. They just, they love that. So it's fine.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Mae Rice, Grant Currin. And edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonia Hodgin. Today's episode was edited by Jonathan McMichael, and our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Take a deep breath through your nose. 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.
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