Using Lava Lamps to Generate Randomness (w/ Matt Parker), How Ritalin Makes You Focus, and What Bacteria Beneath the Sea Floor Means for Life on Mars
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 935 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2020
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about how drugs like Ritalin and Adderall actually make you “focus,” how tech companies are using lava lamps to make computers more secure, and why new life discovered at the bottom of the ocean opens up new possibilities for finding life on Mars.
Scientists figured out how Ritalin actually makes you focus by Grant Currin
- Ritalin and similar medications cause brain to focus on benefits of work, not costs. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/bu-ras031820.php
- Westbrook, A., van den Bosch, R., Määttä, J. I., Hofmans, L., Papadopetraki, D., Cools, R., & Frank, M. J. (2020). Dopamine promotes cognitive effort by biasing the benefits versus costs of cognitive work. Science, 367(6484), 1362–1366. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz5891
Additional resources from Matt Parker, stand-up mathematician:
- Pick up “Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World” on Amazon https://amazon.com
- Matt Parker’s official website http://standupmaths.com/
- Subscribe to Matt Parker’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths
- Follow @standupmaths on Twitter https://twitter.com/standupmaths
- Liebow-Feeser, J. (2017, November 6). LavaRand in Production: The Nitty-Gritty Technical Details. The Cloudflare Blog; The Cloudflare Blog. https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty-gritty-technical-details/
- Scott, T. (2020). The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUUfMeOijg
- US5732138A - Method for seeding a pseudo-random number generator with a cryptographic hash of a digitization of a chaotic system - Google Patents. (1996, January 29). Google.com. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5732138
Researchers discover bacteria living in rock beneath the sea floor (which is good news for life on Mars) by Cameron Duke
- Discovery of life in solid rock deep beneath sea may inspire new search for life on Mars. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/uot-dol033020.php
- Suzuki, Y., Yamashita, S., Kouduka, M., Ao, Y., Mukai, H., Mitsunobu, S., Kagi, H., D’Hondt, S., Inagaki, F., Morono, Y., Hoshino, T., Tomioka, N., & Ito, M. (2020). Deep microbial proliferation at the basalt interface in 33.5–104 million-year-old oceanic crust. Communications Biology, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-0860-1
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/using-lava-lamps-to-generate-randomness-w-matt-parker-how-ritalin-makes-you-focus-and-what-bacteria-beneath-the-sea-floor-means-for-life-on-mars
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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 Curiosity.com. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamard. |
| 0:08.0 | Today you learn about how drugs like Ritalin actually make you focus, how tech companies are using lava lamps to make computers |
| 0:14.5 | more secure, and why new life discovered at the bottom of the ocean opens up new |
| 0:19.0 | possibilities for finding life on Mars. |
| 0:21.6 | But satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:23.7 | Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall |
| 0:25.8 | definitely help people focus on difficult projects |
| 0:28.6 | and during long study sessions. |
| 0:30.3 | But how exactly? |
| 0:32.4 | That's something that scientists are only starting to understand. |
| 0:35.6 | And now new research solves a piece of the puzzle. They may work by making the brain |
| 0:40.8 | care more about the benefits than the costs of completing a difficult task. |
| 0:46.3 | A group of Dutch researchers started with a simple question. |
| 0:49.8 | Do these drugs improve performance by boosting the brain's ability to think, or by boosting people's motivation to keep going. |
| 0:57.5 | They knew the drugs led to higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. |
| 1:02.0 | They also knew dopamine motivates people to complete physical tasks. |
| 1:06.8 | What they didn't know was whether dopamine could motivate cognitive tasks, like writing a term |
| 1:11.7 | paper. So they brought 50 young healthy volunteers into the lab to figure it out. |
| 1:17.0 | The researchers first measured each participant's dopamine levels, then had them take some memory tests that varied in difficulty. |
| 1:24.0 | Next, participants took either a generic version of Ritalin |
| 1:28.0 | an antipsychotic that increases dopamine levels but in a different way from Ritalin or a placebo. The researchers then let the participants |
... |
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