Ways Black Holes Can Kill You (w/ Katie Mack), Rituals to Improve Self-Control, and Ice Cream Types

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Self-improvement, Science, Astronomy, Education

4.6 • 935 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2018

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — and talk to astrophysicist Katie Mack about black holes — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:

More from Dr. Katherine “Katie” Mack, theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist:

If you like black holes, you'll love the story of how scientists first detected gravitational waves. That's beautifully told in "Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space" by Janna Levin, a theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase, Curiosity will get a share of the sale.

Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!

Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/ways-black-holes-can-kill-you-w-katie-mack-rituals-to-improve-self-control-and-ice-cream-types

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, we've got three stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.
0:05.6	I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn how performing meaningless rituals can improve your self-control.
0:11.6	The difference between ice cream, jolato, frozen custard,
0:14.8	frozen yogurt, and other delicious frozen foods. And you'll hear again from astrophysicist Katie Mack,
0:19.6	as we explore some distinctly different ways that a black hole could kill you. Let's satisfy some more
0:24.8	morbid curiosity.
0:25.8	Ashley do you have any meaningless rituals
0:28.1	like before a race or anything?
0:29.7	Oh, no not really.
0:31.4	I'm pretty. I actually have before a race and stuff, I actually don't have any rituals, which is weird. A lot of people have like the dinner they always have before a race or the lucky shirt they always wear or something but I don't really
0:44.0	have anything like that but I feel like you could probably have guessed that about me
0:47.4	you never know I'm not generally a very superstitious person so sure I don't
0:52.1	really do a lot of meaningless rituals, but a new study says that performing meaningless rituals can actually improve our self-control. So maybe we should start thinking about doing meaningless rituals. Yeah. And in this context, a ritual is defined as a fixed episodic sequence of actions
1:05.2	characterized by rigidity and repetition. The study looked at the effects of
1:09.2	rituals in five different situations. In one for example,
1:12.3	undergraduate women who are trying to lose weight
1:14.4	performed a ritual before each meal. They would cut their food into small pieces,
1:18.3	arrange it symmetrically on their plate, and then press each piece three times with a fork. And the people who perform the ritual ate way fewer calories on average than the other
1:27.0	participants.
1:28.0	Other situations in the study had people perform meaningless whether to say go to a fundraiser or a friend's party participants picked the
1:44.5	fundraiser the more responsible choice in situations that had nothing to do with
1:48.4	self-control though rituals didn't have any impact on the choices people made
	...

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