We love these strange stories, these strange science stories. So let's kick that off, shall we.
Strange science, It's like weird science, but strange.
I'm gonna say this amino acid wrong, but that's what we do during strained science is mispronounced things just to get to get your anger up. B tain b taine b E t ai n E b tane a modified amino acid that plays an important role when it comes to metabolism. And btaine is a molecule that's made by your kidneys. It's also found in some foods, and they're saying it can produce a bunch of benefits just like exercise does, and can slow some signs of aging, at
least when you feed it to mice. We don't know if it happens to humans, but it's worth the shot, right. There's a new study that came out in the magazine or journal Sell that shows consistent exercise does raise levels of that compound of btane, at least in young men. That study also found that feeding that betaane to the aged mice boosts their immune health and their grip strength. How do you study the grip strength of a mouse? For now, obviously there's nothing that can replicate the actual
benefits to your body of just doing the exercise. Exercise itself sharpens the mind. It can smooth and sooth i should say inflammation. It can help your cells damage, repair damaged tissue, keeps some diseases at bay, or at least at the very least eases some of their symptoms. But this deep level molecular mechanism as to why it works
is still not fully clear. So a group out of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, enlisted the aid of thirteen healthy young men to lounge about for forty five days. It's really hard to do, isn't it. Yeah, sure, it was lounge about for forty five days, limit their physical activity, and then have them run five.
K's every one or two days.
And the researchers would take the blood and the stool samples from these guys and they would do a bunch of measurements on them after their forty five day rest and then twenty five days into their new running routine, and they said that they found the exercises were reshaping
the body at a molecular level. After twenty five days of regular running, there were changes in immune cells in lipid metabolism in the gut microbiome, et cetera, but that the biggest change was the abundance of that amino acid that btane, and following up on those results, they then started feeding btaane to mice. Old mice that drank water spiked with btain had stronger muscles, less inflammation, and more
youthful skin than their counterparts who did not get the supplement. Again, still no answer as to how they were able to test the grip strength of a mouse. There's a new study also into spiders that says the female when you look at a species of spider where the female eats the male after sex, that the males are pretty picky about who it is they go. Afore, scientific studies spent an ordinate amount of time and effort to demonstrate something that is rather obvious, and in this case, they have
done it again. This one specifically is looking at cooi males and seductive females in the sexually cannibalistic colonial spider Cryptophora citricola, and it's about the relationship dynamics in a group living spider cecies, a species that is where females are prone to eat the males after sex. Researchers found that the males were selective about their mates. They favored the younger ones duh, and the well fed females, maybe because the males hoped they wouldn't get eaten. We're in
the middle of austrange science. We saw that lake I think they called it Ti Larry Lake here in central California where outside of Fresno, there was a lake that had kind of come back after this naturally occurring lake, after it had been dammed and irrigated, and you know, they've changed basically the water table of the central Valley when agriculture came in. They're seeing something like that out
in the outback in Australia. Catty Tanda Lake Eyre is a thirty seven hundred square mile ephemeral lake and despite the fact they call it a lake, it rarely has any water in it. They get about five and a half inches of rain in that part of Australia every year, and they said it's more like a giant saltpan in the South Australian desert. In fact, like we see the
Great Salt Flats here in the United States. A British speed record breaker in nineteen sixty four used the racetrack that was this just dried saltpan to record a world speed record at four hundred and three miles an hour. In nineteen seventy four, the lake filled to its capacity for just the third time on record. That flooding has been taken as the high water mark and they haven't
seen it since then. But as of right now, this year, tropical Cyclone Alfred dumped a bunch of rain on that Queensland area, the water flowing down to this Catty Tanda Lake Eyre and they said it appears to be filling for just the fourth time in one hundred and sixty years. A huge tourist boom as people go check that out. The waterbirds that have made their way inland now are also one of the reasons why so many people are headed out that direction. If you're a fan of books
on neurology, listen. I know not everybody's going to say, oh yeah, that sounds great, But Malcolm glas Well wrote a book called Blink, and in it he talked about the difference between our gut reactions. You know, something that happens immediately and we just react to something. Sometimes it's we react to the way someone looks or re react to a sound.
We react in a way that.
Is faster than we can consciously even make a decision, which takes a lot of brain power and a lot of time. There's another book called Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, Doctor Daniel Canneman a similar book, much more detailed in terms of the science behind all of that.
But this continues to be one of.
Those issues where people are fascinated by what is the difference between the flash reaction to something and an actual time spent by your brain making a decision about something. Cognitive psychologists have talked about how to distinguish insight from analytical problem solving.
It's a better way to put it.
And they say that the insight is kind of lives by itself.
Not everyone agrees for that.
With that, there's a psychologist out of Temple University and he says that insight might not be as different from analytical thinking as it seems. And he says that insight also comes from the brain gradually building on what it already knows, which incorporates new information. Each failed attempt that exists, your brain constantly learns and alters the way it's going to react. To something based on how many times you've
experienced this thing. Now, that doesn't explain some of the very early experiences that we have when we're kids, When we're babies, there are things that we react to instinctively without any previous exposure to it. I mean, think about when you put a baby down in a crib and their arms kind of shoot out like they're falling. Well, they've never fallen before. How would they know to do that? What is it about that?
Now?
This psychologist says, the main feature of insight is the emotion that someone feels after they find an answer or they create something that seems new. That's that aha moment that I was talking about, the Eureka thing, and whatever happens in your brain at that time, he says, releases the right chemical or something happens in your brain neurologically that reinforces whatever it was that you did that was correct, That you solved a problem that you hadn't been able
to solve before. All that exists in this world of trying to figure out how your brain works now