Curiosity Daily

Your Dance Style Is as Unique as Your Fingerprint, the Myth of Muscle Confusion, and How Animals Get Color Without Pigment

Episode Summary

Learn about whether the exercise trend of “muscle confusion” really works; how structural colors give animals their vibrant hues; and why the way you dance is just as unique as your fingerprint.

Episode Notes

Learn about whether the exercise trend of “muscle confusion” really works; how structural colors give animals their vibrant hues; and why the way you dance is just as unique as your fingerprint.

The Myth of Muscle Confusion by Kelsey Donk

How Animals Get Color Without Pigment by Grant Currin

Your Dance Style Is as Unique as Your Fingerprint by Steffie Drucker

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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/your-dance-style-is-as-unique-as-your-fingerprint-the-myth-of-muscle-confusion-and-how-animals-get-color-without-pigment

Episode Transcription

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 whether the exercise trend of “muscle confusion” really works; how animals get color without pigment; and why the way you dance is just as unique as your fingerprint.

CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity. 

Is "muscle confusion" a thing? (Ashley)

Something called “muscle confusion” has been floating around exercise classes and gyms lately. It might sound like some sort of medical problem, but it’s not. In fact, it’s supposed to be a good thing. According to this fitness trend, “confusing” your muscles by changing up your workouts is more effective than doing the same routine over and over again. But is that real? Does “muscle confusion” actually work?

First, let’s sort through the logic behind muscle confusion. The claim is that mixing up your workout routine will keep your muscles from settling into a rut or hitting a plateau. The shifting workouts are supposed to keep your muscles on their toes, so to speak, so they’ll keep adapting. Confused muscles get bigger and stronger than muscles in a routine, the story goes. 

But there hasn’t been a ton of science to back that up — until now. In December, researchers from Spain and the United States published a new study where they had 21 fit young men do eight weeks of strength training. The volunteers were healthy, but not bodybuilders. Researchers had them either do the same exercises over and over, or perform a random workout chosen by an app with 80 different exercise options. 

So, what happened? Well, after eight weeks, both groups gained almost exactly the same amount of muscle, whether they “confused” their muscles or not. If anything, the group that did the repeated exercises had a little more muscle by the end. Whomp whomp. Turns out our muscles don’t really get bored and we can’t really confuse them. 

Our brains, on the other hand, do get bored — and that’s where muscle confusion may have an edge. Researchers found that what did change over the course of the study were the men’s motivational scores. The men who got random workouts were much more motivated to continue than the men who’d been doing the same workouts on a schedule. If you’re looking for a way to keep up with your exercise goals, changing your routine might be the secret sauce. It won’t confuse your muscles, but it will keep things interesting. 

Structural color is how some animals get their hue without pigment (Cody)

There’s more than one way to make a color. When humans want to dress something up with a splash of color, we almost always rely on paints, dyes, or some other form of pigment. Nature uses pigments too. But after a few billion years of trial and error, it also has another trick up its sleeve. It’s called structural color — and it gets its hue not from chemical properties, but physical shape.

So like, have you ever wondered why hummingbirds have such vibrant colors? I mean, they’re not just bright, they’re iridescent. But if you took a hummingbird feather and ground it up into a powder, you wouldn’t get that beautiful hue. That’s because their color comes from the physical structure of the feathers — specifically, incredibly small pancake-shaped structures. The colors we see are the result of light physically interacting with those stacks of nano-scale flapjacks. Scientists have known for centuries that tiny structures were probably responsible for the iridescent shimmer of peacock feathers and butterfly wings. It’s become clear over the last couple decades that colorful micro- and nano-scale structures give color to living things across the natural world, in everything from insects to fish to plants. 

So, to back up, pigments get their color because their molecules absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect others. Structural colors, on the other hand, come from the physical properties of the material itself. In nature, these are usually something like cellulose, collagen, chitin [KITE-in], and keratin. But if you look closely enough at the carapace [KARE-uh-payce] of a beetle or at the berry-like fruit of the herb Pollia condensata and you’ll see a complex microstructure far more advanced than anything human engineers have ever designed.

Take that herb, Pollia condensata, and its metallic blue berries. While naturally occurring pigments tend to fade over time, there are 40-year-old specimens of these berries that haven’t begun to fade. But try to extract blue pigment from the fruit, and you’ll get nothing.

That’s because the metallic blue comes from the way thin strands of cellulose are arranged in the berries’ cell walls. The tiny threads are stacked in zillions of helix shapes in an arrangement that allows blue light to be reflected while light of other wavelengths passes through. 

Scientists are studying structural colors in nature to try and make some themselves in a field called synthetic photonics. In fact, this field has given rise to technology you probably know pretty well, like Blu-ray. But nature did it first. And if we want to get to that level, we’re going to have to do our homework.

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Computers can identify you by watching you dance (Ashley)

Think about the way you move when you hit the dance floor. Do you put your hands in the air like you just don’t care? Have you got the moves like Jagger? Do people watch you whip and watch you nae nae? Can you teach me how to Dougie? [AD LIB: No, really, I’m serious, can you? I’m trying so hard to sound cool right now.] Well, whatever you do when the music’s right, it’s all you. And I mean, YOU. Scientists at a Finnish university recently discovered that your particular dance style is as unique as your fingerprint.

The team made this discovery kind of by accident. Initially, they wanted to know whether they could teach an artificial intelligence system to distinguish between musical genres only by watching people dance to the music. To find out, the researchers recruited 73 people to get down to eight different styles of music: blues, country, jazz, EDM, metal, pop, reggae, and rap.  Their only instruction was to move to the music however it felt naturally.

 

So how did the algorithm do? Well, it failed pretty miserably. It correctly identified the genre people were dancing to only 30 percent of the time. But the computer redeemed itself with an unexpected talent: Correctly identifying who was dancing. It got that right 94 percent of the time. 94 percent! Scientists say the computer only had about a 2% chance of being right if it had just guessed randomly, so that is quite an achievement.

 

The type of music did have some effect on the system’s ability to identify the dancer. Like, it had a harder time recognizing the dancers when they were dancing to metal. The team thinks that’s because there are universal dance moves associated with the genre, like headbanging.

 

So the next time you’re feeling the beat, dance like no one’s watching. No one can replicate your moves — they’re uniquely yours!

RECAP

Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with

  1. Summary: The idea behind "muscle confusion" is that by constantly switching up your workout, you‚Äôll get bigger gains than if you just do the same exercises over and over again. Researchers tested this idea on 21 volunteers who did eight weeks of strength training either doing the same exercises over and over, or doing a workout randomly drawn each day from a database of 80 different exercises. The workouts were matched for load and targeted muscles. And by the end of the program, there were no meaningful differences between groups (but, if anything, perhaps a hint of an advantage for the group doing the same exercises repeatedly). On the other hand, the muscle-confusion group reported significantly greater motivation to keep exercising after the study. 
  2. Summary: Pigments and dyes are molecules that produce colors by the selective absorption and reflection of specific wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Structural colors, on the other hand, rely exclusively on the shape of the material and not its chemical properties. While pigments and dyes degrade and their colors fade over time, some types of structural coloration, which rely on the same materials that make up tree bark, insect exoskeletons, and claws or nails, can persist hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years after the death of the organism. (PS, this script was inspired by the recent discovery of why hummingbirds are so vibrant: they have complex, pancake-shaped structures in their feathers that are unlike those of other birds).
  3. Summary: Researchers originally set out to see if they could use machine learning to identify the musical genre people were dancing to -- but it ended up being much more accurate at identifying the individual person based on their dance moves. The algorithm was able to identify the correct genre less than 30% of the time, but it could correctly identify which of the 73 individuals was dancing 94% of the time. "It seems as though a person's dance movements are a kind of fingerprint," says Dr. Pasi Saari, co-author of the study and data analyst. "Each person has a unique movement signature that stays the same no matter what kind of music is playing."

[ad lib optional] 

CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Grant Currin, and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.

ASHLEY: 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!