Water Breakthrough, Suppress Stress, Ancient Wood

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You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you're learning super cool stuff. I'm Nate. And I'm Callie. If you're dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you're a loyal listener, welcome back.

Today you'll learn about a new way to turn salt water into drinking water, research that suggests stuffing your bad feelings deep down might actually be a good thing, and an amazing 500,000-year-old discovery in Tanzania.

Without further ado, let's satisfy some curiosity. Scientists have developed a new way to desalinate seawater that requires less electricity than current methods. And that could be a real game changer for people living in drought stricken regions where energy sources are limited. I think we have talked a little bit about water desalination on the show before. And if memory serves, it's a massively expensive process that uses enormous amounts of energy, right? Pretty much.

There are a few ways to yank the salt out of seawater to make it safe to consume. There's distillation, the oldest method, which has been around for thousands of years. Basically the water is just boiled and the steam is collected. That seems like an okay way to do it. Sure, but it takes a ton of energy to boil water. And another method, electrodialysis, uses an electric current to separate the water and the salt across a membrane.

Electricity, again, you need lots of energy. Yeah. And the most commonly used method, reverse osmosis, uses pressure to push water through a permeable membrane, leaving the salt behind. Sounds easy, but you actually need to create a ton of pressure to make this happen, and that also means Mm, energy. Yeah. In fact, you need an industrial scale plant to get drinking water from the sea. It's not so viable for most populations, especially some of the populations who need drinking water the most.

So this new method could be revolutionary. All right. How does it work? Well, we have our typical porous membrane, but in this case, a tiny electrical current pulls chloride ions through. Those chloride ions drag water molecules along for the ride, but a negatively charged electrode keeps the sodium ions, the salt, from passing through.

Okay, let me see if I understand this. A kid pulls one of her parents to the Lego store, but the other parent is a super tech nerd and stays put at the Apple store. Sure. I mean I love a good mall analogy. That's that's pretty great. Uh once the chloride ions in the mall analogy, uh that would be the kid who wants to go to the Lego store, makes it through the membrane with the water, it then gets recycled back to repeat the whole process.

So this still takes energy though, right? Like there's an electric charge causing all this to happen, isn't there? Yep, but unlike reverse osmosis, there's no need to apply pressure to smoosh the water through the membrane. The chloride is just attracted to the slight electrical charge and heads over there all on its own. So the energy demands are pretty low.

Really, really low. And that could mean life-saving water could be available in disaster zones or in remote areas without the energy or the infrastructure to support huge desalination plants. Is this a gadget I can hold? Am I gonna be able to order this thing online or what? Okay, so not yet. So far, they've only been able to convert a few milliliters of water.

But the team hopes to scale it up to liters of water in their next phase of development. That will allow them to get a better read on just how efficient this tech is. And if they can scale it up, it could be huge. Current desalination methods aren't just energy hogs. The water they produce is expensive.

Well, the world is only getting thirstier. This could be a refreshing discovery for millions of people. Good way to put it. Researchers at Cambridge University have published a report that suggests we might be better off.

Stuffing our bad feelings deep down inside and just forgetting about them. Okay, wait a second. I thought suppressing our worries and all that stuff was a bad thing. Like, isn't the whole point of therapy to drag out all the stuff you're suppressing so you can deal with it? That is what makes this study so incredible.

There's the old Freudian idea that whatever bad stuff we suppress doesn't go away, it just lingers somewhere in our unconscious mind, waiting for the day can spring back and wreak havoc on our mental health. Right. And if you can dredge that garbage out and have a look at it, you can kind of get over it. Not only that, but common wisdom treats thought avoidance as a maladaptive coping behavior. In other words, most theories say we should avoid the impulse to avoid our stressful thoughts.

I mean, yeah, and when you try to avoid thinking about something, you just can't stop thinking about it. So Professor Michael Anderson at Cambridge. had been doing brain research on a mechanism called inhibitory control. And that's just the ability to sort of override reactions to things that would otherwise be reflexive.

After the COVID pandemic, he was seeing a lot of stress, anxiety, and emotional trauma, and he wondered what would happen if he trained people to just Stop retrieving those painful memories. To just kind of forget about it? Sort of. Participants were asked to come up with 20 negative scenarios they feared happening, 20 positive hopes, and 36 neutral routine events.

They rated each one on vividness, likelihood, anxiety level, and so on. The team had the participants do three days of no imagined trials where they suppressed some of those thoughts. One group suppressed the negative thoughts and one suppressed the neutral thoughts. How did they suppress their thoughts? They were shown keywords to remind them of the specific thoughts and then told to just avoid thinking about them. They had to keep looking at the keyword, but continue to just block the thought.

They were told not to use distraction techniques or to think about something else. But to literally just directly block the thoughts from happening. That sounds really hard. Yeah, maybe so. Uh but after the training, participants reported suppressed events were less vivid and anxiety-provoking.

But not only that, those who were told to suppress the negative thoughts actually reported improved mental health overall, and those with worse mental health at the start of the trial improved the most by the end. Okay, so stuffing those thoughts down actually helped.

But aren't those thoughts still floating around in there somewhere? Anderson and the team checked back in with the participants after three months and found the benefits were persistent. In fact, many participants kept doing the suppression techniques after the study finished. They were so impressed by the results. There were no signs of a rebound where suppressed thoughts returned at some point more vividly.

And in fact, one participant reported teaching the technique to family members to help them overcome their own stress and anxiety. Okay. Do they know why this works? They have their theories. But they think it has a lot to do with simply giving people power over their own negative thoughts.

And there's a lot more research to do on this, obviously, but it could be a huge deal because it flips conventional wisdom on its head. If suppression works, it could be a powerful new tool to combat anxiety, depression, even post traumatic stress disorder. The potential implications for mental health treatment could be profound. I also imagine it could make therapy sessions a lot shorter, like stress? Yes, forget about it.

Yeah, I guess that's possible. Of course, anyone feeling anxiety or trauma or stress should still seek help. Even if this technique can be proven out, we all need someone to guide us through life's ups and downs. Granare är som bäst när man vinner tillsammans och snart har ni chansen att få dela på 101 miljoner. Köp din lott senast 31 mars på poskodlotteri. 188 kronor per månad. Håldersgräns 18 år. stödlinjen.se. Hallå, det här är Måns. Och Anders också.

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selamat menikmati Archaeologists from the University of Liverpool in the UK recently traveled back to an old dig site that had been excavated back in 2006. The site was near the Kalambo River and Kalambo Falls, a really high, iconic seven hundred seventy foot waterfall that cuts between two massive cliffs and is located right on the border between Zambia and Tanzania.

When they got there, they found that the river had changed course over the last decade or so and flooded the old dig site. So they made a plan B. Slide down a thirty foot cliff to the banks of the river and do some exploring. Why did I not become an archaeologist? Can you imagine if that was your job just slide down cliffs to the bottom of a massive waterfall to just

But explore. Just wait, it gets better. So when he got to the bottom of his scramble, he saw something kind of strange. It was a wooden stick that looked like it had been crafted into a tool by human hands. After that, the team started finding other wooden tools, like a wedge and a branch with a little notch on it that would have made a great little animal track.

Cool. So someone had been living there. But who? That's where it gets really fascinating, because at that point they found a couple of logs that were positioned on top of each other. Each had marks on them showing that they were shaped using stone tools, which were also found at the site. They knew that the site was old, but it wasn't until they used radiocarbon dating that they discovered that this wood was at least four hundred seventy-six. Thousand years old.

Were there even humans back then? Yeah, but not the kinds of humans we all know and love. Homo sapiens didn't show up until about three hundred thousand years ago. Okay, so whoever made this little Pile of wood was doing their crafting almost two hundred thousand years before we even walked onto the scene. That is correct. And that makes this the world's oldest known wooden structure ever built.

And it changes a lot about what we know about the humans who came before us. Wow. All right. So what is this structure? Why did they build it? So one of the logs lays on top of the other and has a big U-shaped notch carved out of it so it can kind of wedge into the log below.

Scientists think this could have been part of a walkway or a platform, or else a foundation for some kind of shelter. Okay, so who built it? Like what kind of humans were these? Uh there's no way to be sure exactly, but the carpenters think they were homohedral brightens.

These guys were kind of like what you'd think of when you think of a caveman. They had wide brow ridges and flat faces, with broad, short, but strong bodies, and they were among the earliest humans to use tools. That's pretty amazing. So how did this wood survive? I mean like a tree falls in the forest and it's eaten away by bugs and weather in a couple years. How did this stuff last almost half a million years?

Great question. So remember the river that had flooded in the area? Well, it had been preserved in the muddy sediment of the river, which has a very low oxygen content and is great for preservation. That said, this was a super lucky discovery, and it shows that these early humans Whoever they were, were adept at using natural materials to modify their environment.

As anyone who's been on the 405 in LA knows, that is a legacy that continues on to this day. Experts say this is a groundbreaking find and gives us a rare glimpse into early human innovation and their use of natural materials like wood. And they think there's probably still more to find. Well, sign me up. You'll get your chance to be an archaeologist after all. Let's recap what we learned today to wrap up.

Researchers have developed a new desalination method that applies a small electrical current to pull chloride ions through a membrane, dragging water molecules along and leaving sodium ions behind to produce fresh water. This technique could provide drinking water in disaster zones and remote areas without requiring the high pressure and electricity of conventional reverse osmosis.

Challenging the notion that suppressing negative thoughts is unhealthy, a new Cambridge study found training people to actively block intrusive anxious thoughts reduced their vividness and emotional impact, leading to improved mental health. A finding that could transform psychotherapy practice.

Archaeologists discovered the world's oldest known wooden structure dating back to five hundred thousand years ago in Zambia. The interlocking log platform indicates early humans were using wood and tools to modify their environment long before modern humans emerged. Curiosity Daily is produced by Wheelhouse DNA for discovery. You can find our show wherever you get your podcasts, and we'd love if you could leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Our Discovery executive producer is Dominique Vu. Our Wheelhouse DNA executive producer is Cassie Berman. This show is hosted by Callie Gate and Nate Bonham. Our producer is Chiara Noni, and our associate producer is Kamaya Floyd. Writing is done by Sam Osterhaus. Sound Design, Audio Engineering, and Editing by Nick Kerisimi. I'm Nate Bonham. And I'm Callie Gade. We'll see you next week. Tänk till exempel att en träfiberskiva över skyltfönstret hjälper lite, ifs företagförsäkring hjälper mycket.

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