Basketball Positions, Self-Healing Plastic, IQ Decline
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 935 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today you’ll learn about how fruit flies are inspiring new forms of gameplay in basketball, how IQ levels are falling around the country, and a potential solution to difficult-to-recycle plastics!
Basketball Positions
- “Physics model could optimize basketball player positioning” by Kathy Hovis
- https://phys.org/news/2023-03-physics-optimize-basketball-player-positioning.html
- “Fruit flies and electrons: Researchers use physics to predict crowd behavior” by Linda B. Glaser
- https://phys.org/news/2018-08-fruit-flies-electrons-physics-crowd.html
- “Density-functional fluctuation theory of crowds” by J. Felipe Méndez-Valderrama et al.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05750-z#Abs1
Self-Healing Plastic
- “Researchers build hard, self-healing plastic that can be reshaped and recycled” by Wageningen University
- https://phys.org/news/2023-03-hard-self-healing-plastic-reshaped-recycled.html
- “Hard plastics can be recycled if they are constructed differently” by Maarten Smulders
- https://www.wur.nl/en/news-wur/show-home/hard-plastics-can-be-recycled-if-they-are-constructed-differently.htm
IQ Decline
- “Historic decline in IQ could stem from poor education, study shows” by Shelby Kearns
- “Looking for Flynn effects in a recent online U.S. adult sample: Examining shifts within the SAPA Project” by Elizabeth M. Dworak et al.
- “Online tests suggest IQ scores in US dropped for the first time in nearly a century” by Bob Yirka
- “IQ Scores In The US Have Recently Dropped For First Time This Century” by Tom Hale
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. |
| 0:08.6 | Time flies when you're learning super cool stuff. |
| 0:10.6 | I'm Nate. |
| 0:11.6 | 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. |
| 0:19.0 | Today, you'll learn about how fruit flies are inspiring new forms of gameplay in basketball, how IQ levels are |
| 0:26.1 | falling around the country, and a potential solution to difficult to recycle hard plastics. |
| 0:31.7 | Without further ado, let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:35.5 | All right, Nate, I know you're a big sports guy. |
| 0:39.9 | But actually, if you want to figure out |
| 0:41.8 | how to play the best moves in basketball, |
| 0:43.7 | then you should probably pay attention to those renowned little Titans of sport, |
| 0:48.4 | the fruit flies. |
| 0:50.0 | Am I missing? |
| 0:51.0 | Is that a new NBA team that I don't know? That's a terrible name, frankly, for a team. |
| 0:56.7 | Does not inspire fear. |
| 0:58.0 | Nope, I am actually talking about Drosophila Melanagaster. That is the common fruit fly. A new study dropped that says it's figured out the best way to place every player on a |
| 1:06.6 | basketball court and incidentally it comes from an older physics theory about how |
| 1:11.0 | fruit flies and molecules are going to move around at any |
| 1:14.0 | given time. Okay, hold on a sec what does this have to do with basketball? Like we're not |
| 1:19.5 | telling fruit flies where to go or telling molecules how to move, right? |
| 1:23.2 | No, but the mathematical models used in the study come from methods created by a man |
| 1:27.2 | named Professor Thomas Arias from the Department of Physics at Cornell University. |
... |
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