WTF Fun Fact 13073 – Teens Tune Out

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Got teenagers? Do you feel like they listen to you? If not, it’s likely because our brains rewire themselves to tune out our parents in our teen years. In fact, Stanford University research shows that teens tune out their mothers’ voices around the age of 13.

How teens tune out

More specifically, according to Stanford (cited below), “Around age 13, kids’ brains no longer find their moms’ voices uniquely rewarding, and they tune into unfamiliar voices more.”

Of course, this doesn’t give a person a free pass not to listen to their mom. But it does seem to be an evolutionary mechanism. Our brains are preparing to separate us from our parents in the long run – something we all have to do in order to become successful adults.

Clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Daniel Abrams, Ph.D. told Stanford News: “Just as an infant knows to tune into her mother’s voice, an adolescent knows to tune into novel voices. As a teen, you don’t know you’re doing this. You’re just being you: You’ve got your friends and new companions and you want to spend time with them. Your mind is increasingly sensitive to and attracted to these unfamiliar voices.”

Rewarding signals

All of these changes have to do with the reward centers of the brain. The brain prioritizes stimuli (like certain voices) that activate the reward centers. Unfamiliar voices start to stimulate the brain more around age 13. So while they are still capable of listening to their moms, teens simply don’t get the same level of stimulation and comfort from her familiar voice as they did as children.

In most ways, this is a good thing. It’s a sign that their brain is maturing and getting ready to engage with the world independently from their parents. This allows them to become “socially adept outside their families” – something required for any adult.

How things change over time

Under the age of 12, kids can identify their mom’s voice with great precision, and it tends to activate reward centers and emotion-processing regions of the brain. But if you’re a mom, take heart. Your voice is what sets your child’s brain up for their social and emotional future.

According to co-author Percy Mistry, Ph.D., “The mother’s voice is the sound source that teaches young kids all about the social-emotional world and language development.”

But things change as we grow up. And the switch towards privileging unfamiliar voices between ages 13 and 14 happens at the same time in all genders. — WTF fun facts

Source: “The teen brain tunes in less to Mom’s voice, more to unfamiliar voices, study finds” — Stanford University

WTF Fun Fact 13072 – Elephants Swim

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Despite their size and weight, elephants swim with great skill. They can cross rivers, swim underwater, and even float when they get tired.

How do elephants swim?

The elephant’s trunk is one of its best swimming tools. It acts as a snorkel when they go underwater, helping them breathe.

Not all elephants get the chance to swim unless they live in swampy areas or near deep enough rivers. But they’re built to do it. Even their feet have webbing that helps them glide through the water. Their ears help them keep water out of their ear canals, and their tails can even act as rudders.

Learning to swim

Elephants aren’t born knowing how to swim. They typically learn how to use their trunk as a snorkel at a few months old. That’s when their mother brings them to a nearby body of water and watches over them while they learn.

Despite looking like they’d immediately sink to the bottom of the water, elephants are also naturally buoyant. That makes it very difficult for them to drown (unless they get caught up in rapids).

According to the Elephant Guide website (cited below):

“Elephants typically swim using somewhat of a breaststroke. For us humans, this will be comparable to a “doggy swim” type of stroke rather than a clean human breaststroke.
The elephants’ four legs are used to propel them through the water. Their legs are so powerful that they can swim continuously for as long as six hours! An elephant’s head and torso are generally kept just below the surface of the water as it paddles its massive limbs back and forth on a typical swim.”

Swimming for distance

The longest recorded elephant swim was 22 miles and 6 meters deep!

But typically they go for short swims to cool off. Distance swimming only occurs when they need to cross a body of water. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Can Elephants swim? They even swim underwater!” — Elephant Guide

WTF Fun Fact 13071 – The Man Who Invented Pop-Up Ads

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Ethan Zuckerman is the man who invented pop-up ads. And he’s very sorry he did.

Pop-ups pay the bills

Zuckerman wrote a long apology to the world in The Atlantic in 2014 (cited below). In it, he explained that from 1994-7 he worked for a website that needed a creative new revenue stream:

“At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content.”

Of pop-up ads, Zuckerman admits “I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”

The best intentions of the man who invented pop-up ads

Creating better, more targeted ads required better surveillance of web users’ behaviors. Specifically, “tracking users’ mobile devices as they move through the physical world, assembling more complex user profiles by trading information between data brokers.”

The more a business relies on ads for income, the more they need people to see those ads. The ads become more invasive as a result. Enter pop-ups.

While the man who invented pop-up ads regrets his creation, he also notes that there’s no other way to offer the free services of the Internet without some sort of advertising.

People aren’t willing to pay for services like social media, for example. As a result, the ads we see have to be visible and valuable – and that means targeting us with things the algorithm knows we’re interested in and making sure we see the ads by forcing us to click through them in order to get to the content we want to see at the moment. — WTF fun facts

Source: “The Internet’s Original Sin” — The Atlantic

WTF Fun Fact 13070 – Recessions and Mortality

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You might expect more people to become ill, have accidents, develop chronic health issues, and die during times of economic recession. After all, poverty and stress have a strong correlation and stress can often lead to fatal outcomes. But research throughout time and from around the world found a surprising correlation between recessions and mortality. Most people are healthier and live longer during economic downturns.

How are recessions and mortality related?

An article in the scientific journal Nature (cited below) found that during recessions, “the health of a majority of people improved, while the health of a minority declined.”

The author, science journalist Lynne Peeples, noted a few reasons for the surprising results.

“One of the more predictable perks of a poor economy is fewer job-related accidents. The most-experienced workers are the ones most likely to keep their jobs during a recession, and slower production can allow for more attention to safety. People also tend to drive less, which translates to fewer traffic accidents. And fewer vehicles on the road might also help to explain why air quality is better.”

Even poor employment rates can have surprisingly beneficial effects on overall human health. Peeples quoted Tufts University’s environmental-policy specialist Mary Davis to explain: “When employment pops up, so do things related to pollution — commerce, industry, trucks on the road.” Similarly, Peeples noted that “The air-quality connection might also help explain why studies have also linked recessions to reduced cardiovascular and respiratory problems, as well as infant mortality.”

Is recession good for us?

No one would recommend a recession to improve public health. But noting the correlations can help us understand some of the issues that lead to poor health and tighter fatality rates. These can theoretically be fixed without encouraging an economic recession if organizations cut back on things like pollution and commuting and upped their worker safety protocols.

However, researchers also speculate that having less money is correlated with better health because people have less to spend on things like alcohol and tobacco. And while those without jobs face other stressors, the lack of job-related stress, the ability to get more sleep, and increasing the number of home-cooked meals are also related to better overall health.

In the past, data reveals that recessions are related to decreases in smoking and drinking and an increase in time to get physical activity. But reducing work stress and advocating for a healthy work-life balance could probably have a similar effect.

Of course, there are downsides for health during recessions. Those who do continue to drink during recessions may binge drink. Low-income and unemployed Americans also tend to have higher rates of opioid abuse. The stress of being under or unemployed can lead to self-medication. — WTF fun facts

Source: “How the next recession could save lives” — Nature

WTF Fun Fact 13069 – Enoteca Maria’s Nonnas of the World

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A restaurant on Staten Island has two kitchens – and both are run by grandmothers with cooking skills. Enoteca Maria’s Nonnas of the World program provides customers with a rotating series of international grandmothers who offer their own menu each night based on their homeland’s regional cuisine. The main kitchen is always staffed by an Italian nonna.

Nonnas in the kitchen

According to the restaurant website: “Our two kitchens at Enoteca Maria will continue to serve regional Italian cuisine from the nonne of Italy, while offering a second menu of a different nonna every night from any and every country in the world.” Start following the online book that is being generated at www.nonnasoftheworld.com“

The restaurant’s unique angle was born out of tragedy. According to Atlas Obscura (cited below): “The project came about after owner Joe Scaravella lost his mother in the early 2000s. When he opened Enoteca Maria two years later, Scaravella staffed his kitchen with Italian grandmothers (“nonnas”) to create a feeling of homey comfort in his restaurant.”

Enoteca Maria’s nonnas go international

Once the restaurant was up and running, Scaravella tried an experiment. In 2015, he invited a Pakistani grandmother to cook for a night. It was such a success that he opened up a second kitchen in the restaurant with its own rotating menu of international cuisine. Patrons can choose from the Italian nonna or the international nonna menu.

While the nonnas are all skilled in regional cuisine, these days they live in and around Brooklyn. Atlas Obscura notes that “To date, Nonnas of the World has featured cooks from Japan, Syria, France, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Poland, Greece, Turkey, Liberia, Kazakhstan, the Dominican Republic, Czechia, Belarus, Pakistan, and of course, Italy, just to name a few.”

How does it work?

“Two nonnas work in the kitchen at any given time, one as the head chef, the other as her sous chef. This means a South American nonna and a Middle Eastern nonna could be working side by side in the kitchen, learning from each other’s recipes. Cooking classes are offered as well—for women only, many of whom are grandmothers themselves—and get booked months in advance. It’s another opportunity for cross-cultural recipe sharing, as well as a chance to eat food made with love.”

—WTF fun facts

Source: “Nonnas of the World” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 13068 – Religious Websites and Malware

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When we think of dangerous websites that might infect our computers with a virus, we tend not to think of our local church blogs. Endless pop-ups and viruses are more often associated with adult content websites. But in 2012, antivirus software maker Symantec reported the increasing link between religious websites and malware.

Why target religious websites with malware?

According to Slate (cited below), Symantec “found that ‘religious and ideological sites’ have far surpassed pornographic websites as targets for criminal hackers. According to the company you’re now three times as likely to encounter malware—insidious software that can steal your data, pelt you with spam, or enslave your machine in a botnet—on your local church blog as you are on a porn site.”

The reason? People who run adult websites have long had to deal with hackers and became far more adept at blocking them from infiltrating their websites. “Those who build and host church websites, by contrast, may have the best intentions, but they tend to be naive and inexperienced. For hackers, that makes them easy prey.”

Protection is key

When an organization is eager to build a website, it may not hire security experts at the beginning. That’s because site builders may simply be unaware of the risks. Many people also fail to consistently download the security updates that come with host sites like WordPress, leaving them vulnerable to hackers.

But religious websites aren’t the most dangerous to your cyber safety.

“According to Symantec, pornographic sites now rank at the bottom of the top-10 list for malware threats. Blogs are first, followed by personal and self-hosted sites, business sites, and shopping sites. Religious sites aren’t a category unto themselves, but are split between blogs, self-hosted sites, and “education/reference” sites, which rank fifth on the ‘most-infected’ list.”

As a web user, it can be hard to protect yourself since the malware can infiltrate your machine as soon as you load the webpage. While overall cybersecurity has improved drastically over the last decade since the report came out, you still have to be careful what you click.

And if you build a website, it’s crucial not to cut corners when it comes to cybersecurity. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Unprotected Sects” — Slate

WTF Fun Fact 13067 – The Man With the Golden Arm

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James Harrison earned the nickname “the man with the golden arm” after saving the lives of millions of children. That’s because Harrison not only has unique blood with disease-fighting abilities, but he donated that blood every week for 60 years. He “retired” from blood donation in 2018 at age 81.

Who is the man with the golden arm?

James Harrison is an Australian man who needed chest surgery at age 14. After blood donations saved his life at a young age, he pledged to become a life-long blood donor.

After Harrison started giving blood, doctors realized he had unique components in his blood plasma that allowed them to make Anti-D injections. These injections are given to pregnant women whose fetuses are at risk from Rhesus disease, which causes a mother’s immune system to attack her fetus’ blood cells. This puts them at higher risk of anemia and jaundice after birth.

Rhesus disease is rare and occurs when a mother has a rhesus-negative blood type, and her fetus has a rhesus-positive blood type.

Doctors believe that Harrison’s rare blood may be the result of transfusions he received as a child after surgery.

Saving millions

Harrison’s blood plasma can be used to make an injection that prevents women from developing antibodies that harm the fetus during pregnancy.

In Australia, roughly 3 million women with the rhesus-negative blood type have been given an Anti-D injection, nearly all of which are a result of Harrison’s donations. Even his own grandchild was saved by the injection.

Prior to Harrison’s blood donations, thousands of fetal deaths, stillbirths, and baby deaths occurred in Australia each year as a result of Rhesus disease.

For his donations, Harrison is considered a national hero in Australia and has received the country’s national Medal of Honor.

Harrison retired at the age of 81 – but that’s only because in Australia you can no longer donate blood beyond that age. —WTF fun facts

Source: “He donated blood every week for 60 years” — CNN

WTF Fun Fact 13066 – Video Games and Surgeons

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Surgeons who play video games for at least a few hours a week make fewer errors during surgery. This specifically relates to non-invasive and very precise laparoscopic surgery.

Surgeons who play video games

In an article titled The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century (cited below), researchers from Beth Israel Medical Center, New York University Medical Center, Montefiore Medical Center, Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, Iowa State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University found that video games are correlated with better surgical outcomes.

According to the authors:

“Past video game play in excess of 3 h/wk correlated with 37% fewer errors…and 27% faster completion…Current video game players made 32% fewer errors…performed 24% faster…and scored 26% better overall…than their nonplaying colleagues…Regression analysis also indicated that video game skill and past video game experience are significant predictors of demonstrated laparoscopic skills.”

Videos games for surgical success

The researchers set out to measure the relationship between “laparoscopic skills and suturing capability, video game scores, and video game experience.”

Because they found a correlation between video game skills and positive laparoscopic surgical skills, the researchers suggest that medical training curricula might video games in the future. But this applied to surgery that didn’t require a large incision. Instead, laparoscopic surgery uses a small incision or hole and is largely computer-guided. It’s a more popular kind of surgery because there are typically fewer risks involved for the patient and less down-time.

While the authors acknowledged the drawbacks of playing video games excessively (such as poor grades and possible heightened aggressiveness), they also highlighted the benefits.

More specifically:

“Disturbing negative correlations with video game play include lower grades in school; aggressive thoughts, emotions, and actions (including physical fights); and decreasing positive prosocial behaviors. Excessive game playing has also been linked to childhood obesity, muscular and skeletal disorders, and even epileptic seizures. Other physical findings have included increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones (norepinephrine and epinephrine)… However, positive benefits of video game play include increased performance on eye-hand coordination tasks and neuropsychological tests and better reaction time, spatial visualization, and mental rotation.”

The benefits of gaming

The authors cited other studies that found correlations between playing video games and the ability of gamers to process visual information, improve their spacial awareness skills, and develop better visual attention processing.

These are all crucial skills for surgeons. — WTF fun facts

Source: “The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century” — JAMA Surgery

WTF Fun Fact 13065 – World’s Largest Diamond Mine

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The Popigai crater, located in Siberia, is estimated to be the world’s largest diamond mine. It may contain trillions of carats of diamonds. Previously, the Russian government has claimed that, if mined, the diamonds could tank the entire worldwide diamond market. But there’s a catch.

Is Popigai crater the world’s largest diamond mine?

There are a few things we know for sure about Popigai. First, it’s one of the largest (the 4th largest, to be exact) and most well-preserved asteroid impact craters on the planet. It’s located in northern Siberia and is roughly 60 miles in diameter.

According to NASA, “The crater sits on the northeastern margin of the Anabar shield, which contains a mix of graphite-bearing rocks and sedimentary rocks. The impact from the asteroid melted 1,750 cubic kilometers (420 cubic miles) of rocks and instantly transformed the flakes of graphite into diamonds. Diamonds formed in a hemispherical shell about 1.6 kilometers (a mile) thick and about 12 to 13 kilometers away from the impact site. Scientists estimate that diamonds did not form at the impact site because the collision’s heat and pressure were likely too great to survive there.”

The Russians have claimed for decades that the crater contains “trillions of carats” of diamonds. But it’s been largely left unexplored.

Not your average diamonds

Because the diamonds in the Popigai crater are impact diamonds, they didn’t form the same way as gemstones. That means they’re of no use to the jewelry industry.

While they range in size, most are smaller than 2 millimeters. But more importantly, they aren’t pure.

While they hold great value for industrial uses, Russia has left Popigai largely unmined because they have the means to produce synthetic diamonds for industrial purposes without going through the trouble of mining at such a large scale.

First discovered in the 1970s under the Soviet regime, the diamond mind made world news in 2012. At the time, the Russians claimed the crater held enough diamonds to supply the international diamond market for 3000 years. But, again, that would be for industrial diamonds.

Russia already has a series of diamond mines. Right now, it appears the cost of mining the diamonds so far does not outweigh their value – at least to Russia. Others have speculated that mining the diamonds could lead to an enormous technological revolution. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Popigai: Russia’s Crater of Diamonds – Estimated To Contain ‘Trillions of Carats'” — SciTechDaily