9 Fresh Ideas in Science

And it's actually a pretty expensive problem. Training a guide dog cost about fifty thousand dollars a pup and it's a two year training course, so it can be both a drain on time and money. So I mean, obviously there's a need for guide dogs though, so like, is there some sort of like no dog left behind policy that's getting institute, Well, not quite, but there are researchers at Georgia Tech that are trying to come up with

a solution. In fact, they figured out a way to draft winners before they even go to school, and this is by using smart chew toys. So basically they put sensors in these toys and balls to monitor how the puppies work. They created profiles based on how they bite and chew and tug and play, and then use this

data to pick the winners, and it's surprisingly effective. The team claims they can select dogs who will graduate with almost accuracy, and by using smart toys to weed out the duds, Georgia Tech can actually save these guide schools about five million dollars a year. And that's just the first of nine stories and science we're about to share with you. Let's dive in a their podcast. Listeners, Welcome

to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend man Guesh Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass showing off his collection of vintage test tubes and beakers. I know he's so proud of those things, but they really just look like regular test tubes and beakers to me. I know, but you know, let's not tell him that. But that's our PALIN producer Tristan McNeil so mago. One of the things I know you and I both love but don't get to spend

enough time doing is finding these weird little science stories. Yeah. So, at Mental Class we used to do a ten issue every year, and for people who don't know, it's just like a weird magazine issue of lists of ten So we'd feature things like ten guys named Fred you should know, or how ten presidents popped the question, or things like that. And in the first few years we always did a ten Bright Ideas and Science and then a ten not so Bright Ideas and Science, which was, you know, a

much shorter list. And I don't think people thought it was not funny, except we thought it was funny. So we just kept putting it in there. Oh man, I'm still doing and even though we're not publishing the magazine, it's still just too much fun to do well, all right, So we kicked off today's nine Things with a fact about guide dogs. So so where do you want to take it from there? Mango? How about a weirdo study

out of the University of Queensland. And this claims that wild leopards make good neighbors and cities because they actually protect the population from rabies. So this is obviously super weird and the data comes from the outskirts of Bombay, where leopards apparently live in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Anyway, so as the researchers were looking into the diet of these leopards on the city's fringe, they realized that feral dogs from the city actually make up forty percent of

the average leopards diet. And you know, for the thirty five leopards there, that meant fifteen hundred dogs a year. It's obviously a lot of dogs. Yeah, But this is where it gets even weirder. So, I mean, my family is actually from Bombay, and this is not my experience of the city at all. From the summers I spent there in church, kid or vend or or whatever. And because you know, to me, the city doesn't feel provincial at all. It really feels more like New York City.

But apparently these leopards were eating so many dogs that they were actually preventing about a thousand dog bite incidents per year and about nine cases of rabies and uh as, one of the authors told New Scientists, quote, this study is a striking example of a large carnivorous animal providing

a direct benefit to humans. Now, obviously I don't think he's telling like Mayor di Blasio or other mayors, like, if your city has a rabies epidemic, go adopt some leopards, Because the scientists are pretty clear that there could be some downsides to bring in a leopard population to deal with their feral dog population. Yeah, maybe just a couple of downsides. That is such a weird one, but it

is super interesting. All right. So, I know we did an episode on weather We'll ever Cure Blindness a little while back, But did you read about how Microsoft has been working to create virtual reality for blind people? No, that that's fascinating. How how's that work? Well, by manipulating a walking kane or a cane troller as they call it, it's and it's really awesome. So basically, the walking Kane uses vibrations to make the user feel like they're exploring

new worlds filled with different types of objects. Plus there's a vest that presses against your body to give you the feeling of walls or other obstacles. And but is their sound design paired with this experience, it can actually create these amazing worlds. Obviously, the simulations can be used for gaming, but there are practical applications as well. A Microsoft employee expected that people will practice walking through heavy traffic or you know, get a better feel for navigating

a city and a snowstorm. And I'm sure they're all sorts of things we haven't thought about, but it's amazing how well it works. People feel like they're winding through narrow pathways and navigating icy curbs even though they're just in these wide, empty spaces. That's pretty cool. So here's a quick one I think is pretty interesting, and it's that Chinese scientists have actually figured out how to make

a smart wallpaper. Now, Initially, when I saw a link to the zap Boing Boing, I figured like the wallpaper was something that resisted stains. And I think that's just because that's where my mind goes, having like a four year old banksy at our house who just draws all over the walls and crayon. But you know, the wallpaper is actually much much smarter than that. So first off, it's made from a material that's found in your bone and teeth called hydroxy appetite, and according to the American

Chemical Society, that material is brittle and inflexible. But if you make it into these really long, thin nano wires and then join them, it kind of ends up with the thickness of a wallpaper. And the reason it's exciting is because that material is actually fireproof, so already that makes it smarter, right, because it's protecting your walls and house. But then the scientists also equipped it with these sensors

and smoke detectors. So basically, if a fire breaks out anywhere in your house, it's both equipped to set off an alarm within the house at the first instance of a fire, but it can also communicate to the outside world to like fire departments, to alert them. I mean, this kind of stuff is so cool. It's just crazy. You can take something like a chew toy or wallpaper and you know and say, like, what does it connected

smart version of this really do for society? And you know, when scientists ponder these questions, they figure out ways to give the world more seeing eye dogs and save people from fires. And it's just it's just incredible, all right. So here's a study we didn't talk about in our Science of Paying killers, but scientists in Denmark have discovered that taking six hundred milligrams of ibuprofen twice a day will give you hypogonadism or or what I think they

call medically. I think they call it small balls, So I don't think that's a medical term, but I do think you're gonna have to explain yourself. Well, from what I understand, the scientists were looking into fertility issues, and they got thirty one healthy guys and they had them take ibuprofen for six weeks, and across the board, the

drug lowered their testosterone production. But what the scientists realized was that when the body noticed the drop, the pituitary gland kicked in another hormone and to overdrive, and that triggered more testosterone production. And because the tests were overworked to compensate for what the ibuprofen was doing, they basically shrunk significantly. So I mean, is this much of an issue? Like, like,

I don't know anyone who takes ibuprofen twice a day regularly. Well, according to the study, it can be a problem in things like sports, where you know, apparently a lot of athlet eats to take hyboprofen daily to reduce swelling. But if you're looking to go back to r T S or what we obviously know is regular testable size, all you have to do is quit taking the eyboprofen, and if you do it soon enough, it won't have any

permanent damage. So I'll definitely keep that in mind. And here's one that people have been talking about for a while, but it's fun to see finally coming true and it's creating plants that glow. So for a while, scientists have been able to genetically engineer plans to express the gene that fireflies use, which is called luciferase, and it produces

this sort of weak glowing light. But unfortunately it isn't particularly easy to do or effective, like the light that emerges is too dim to read by, and also they could only pull off this trick with a few types of plants. But scientists M. I. T. Have actually figured out this new method where they could basically turn any plant into a glow stick. So far, they've actually done

it with a arugula, kale, spinach, water cross. I. I don't know why it's only vegetables for some reason, I was gonna but from the photos you can actually read by the plant's glow. And what's cooler is that the next iteration of this is to be able to like create a spray that sprays nanoparticles onto plants to have

that same effect. So it isn't a far fetched idea like this should be able to be done fairly soon, and the result is that instead of like our neighborhoods using lamp posts, we'd have like glowing trees casting light for us. Or if you like ambient light around your house, like you might purchase tulip bulbs instead of light bulbs. It's not awesome, that's that is really cool. Or well, here's another idea I saw out of M I T. And and the backstory of this is ridiculous. And this

is from new scientists, always with the great stories. But apparently a professor named Jeffrey Lipton at M I T was friends with a carpenter who accidentally cut off each of his thumbs with a saw twice. That's four thumbs, mango. I don't know how many thumbs this guy had and how that happened exactly, but I just like to leave it at that, know that he cut off four thumbs. But anyway to prevent this from happening again, you would think, like to prevent this of it happening again, would just

be like, don't use this is four thumbs. This is a problem anyway. So Lipton and his team have designed a system where you submit a design for tables or sheds or frames or whatever it is, and then the team of robots cut all the pieces out for you, and it's it's pretty amazing because what you end up with is basically this personalized flat pack furniture. But the funnier part is how he built the things. So to cut wavy patterns, he attached a jigsaw to a roomba.

So I really want to watch the team of machines at work. It sounds kind of amazing. Yeah, so Lipton expects you'll see these robot carpenters in the next few years. But until then, he's begging people, please don't just trap a jigsaw to a room. But unless you're a roboticistem that's pretty good advice. So we've got two more facts to do before we declare winner. But let's take a quick break. First, welcome back to Part Time Genius, where

we're talking about some new science studies we've been reading about. So, Mago, this is your last fact. What do you got for us? So there are a ton of studies we won't get to today, Like there was one on babies and how they actually expect adults to behave morally, like babies are kind of born with ethics, which is kind of amazing. And uh, there was one on woodpeckers possibly being communists, which I really like, Like, there's a lot of great

stuff we'll get into in future episodes. But there's a study that actually kind of bothered me, and it was about how people who are more disgusted by body odor prefer to vote for authoritarian leaders. Next, there's just like so much bad news going on right now that I kind of wanted something the opposite of that. So I was looking for, like, what's the study on something that actually increases empathy? And it turns out one thing that

will increase empathy is reading Harry Potter. H Yeah, So this comes from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and this is why epacific standard. But in two different studies in Italy, kids who paid attention to Harry Potter's behavior to marginalized groups and characters actually reduced their prejudices and

became more empathetic for marginalized communities. And obviously there's a lot of this in the book, right, like Harry himself as an outsider, he's making friends with people like Hagrid and these muggles and animals and house elves. And the study also showed that kids who read Harry Potter tend to have fewer homophobic tendencies, which is equally amazing to me.

But all of this comes with the catch, So the empathy only increases with young readers who actually feel connected to Harry, and for those who are on Team Baltimore, the researchers didn't see the same changes. No way, is that really true. That's pretty wild. I mean, of course, natural born Slytherins aren't going to look out for others, so I guess we can't be that surprised. But I do like that reading Harry Potter has this positive impact

on so many people's lives. But I do have to say I also like my last fact, and yeah, that's that any type of regular reading might help you live longer. So this comes from mental flaws and it's about a study at Yale. But basically, the scientists there have looked at things like how watching TV and being a couch potato can reduce your lifespan. So they decided to turn their attention to reading and analyze people over the age

of fifty. And here's how the study worked. They started by sorting the groups into people who didn't read books, people who read up to three and a half hours a week and people who read more than that. Then they followed up with them twelve years later, and after adjusting for factors like education, income, health, and a few other things, actually found that quote book readers experience the reduction and the risk of mortality over the twelve years

of follow up compared to non book readers. On average, the book readers lived twenty three months more than non readers, which the author points out should make everyone want to get a library card. Oh. I like that. Hooray for reading. And there are a lot of fun facts in here. But I I think the fact that we both got to plug books and reading at the end of it makes us both winners. So what do you say we share today's prize. I think that's a great idea. Well,

that's it for today's episode. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow. Thanks so much for listening. H