Hi, we've got three stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you'll learn about our favorite ongoing science debates, tips for planning for an emergency,

and the science behind how your DNA could determine how easily you're fooled by

placebo's.

Let's just find some curiosity.

Cody, do you know what a placebo is?

Yeah, it's like a fake drug. Yeah, right? Like a sugar pill kind of thing. And researchers will give it to make sure that you're not just thinking, I don't know how to, this is really hard to explain.

Yeah, no, totally. I I know what I know exactly what it is you're on the right track I have no idea how to actually say what it is totally well like you you have the main gist of it that they it doesn't do anything it's a fake

drug right but it actually does something that's the crazy thing they're

specifically used as the sham treatment to rate how effective a drug or a therapy is. So if patients

respond just as much to the placebo as they do to the drug, that usually means

the drug doesn't work, right? But not always. That's the crazy thing.

Placibos can create real biological effects, mostly thanks to your own expectations.

One great example of this comes from the 1980s when neuroscientist John Levine did a study on a bunch of people who had just had an operation.

So you know they were in a lot of pain.

He gave half of them a secret dose of morphine, which is a powerful painkiller,

and the other half an out in the open injection of something described as a powerful painkiller,

but it was actually just regular saline solution.

Both groups reported the same amount of pain relief.

Wild, right? The people who expected to feel better from the so-called powerful

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