Daily Smart Fact #33: This is My Nightmare
Key Takeaway: Lampsilis Mussels spend their youth living inside of a large-mouth bass. They get in their by their doting mom, who lures the bass in by pretending to be a darter fish and then…get this…SQUIRTING her babies into the fish’s mouth when it takes a bite. The babies then clamp onto the mouth until they develop into maturity. Ever heard of the movie…ALIENS?!
I stumbled upon this video about Lampsilis Mussels – they have a tough life cause, you know, they don’t have legs. Seems like a big problem since they need to spend a portion of their lifecycle inside the mouth of a large-mouth bass. (Do they have small-mouth bass? Seems kind of rude to point out someone’s unattractive feature as a part of their name. Like Big Butt Brenda or Small Hands Larry). Anyway, since these mussels don’t have legs, they get pretty creative in camouflaging themselves as darter fish. Watch the video, it’s incredible. These freaking mussels make themselves look like fish!
The moment the bass gets tricked and tries taking a bite, BAM, the mussel literally squirts hundreds of babies into its mouth. How freaky deaky is that? Watch the video below and let me know what kind of nightmares you have later tonight…you’re welcome.
Daily Smart Fact #32: Why You’re Fattest at Night and Skinniest in the Morning
Takeaway: You lose more than a pound every night from breathing. That’s because you breathe in oxygen (O2) and breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2 – two oxygen atoms plus a carbon atom), “so there’s an extra carbon atom leaving in every round trip.”
I like weighing myself. Call it my own personal body experiment, but I enjoy seeing the fluctuations of my weight throughout the day – in the morning, after I eat, before/after I go to the restroom, right at night. It might sound obsessive, but I’m not trying to lose weight – it’s just fascinating to observe the fundamentals of input/output on your own body. Eat a POUND of cheese? Yeah, you’ve just gained an immediate pound. Drink 24 oz of water? Yeah, you just gained 24 oz. on that scale.
Anyway, I stumbled upon a neat article that my friend (hi Li!) posted on Facebook and found it intriguing: Every Night You Lose More Than a Pound While You’re Asleep (For the Oddest Reason). Basically, this guy records himself over a couple of days weighing himself at night and then again in the morning, wearing the same clothes. He interviews people and eats hamburgers and goes to the bathroom, fun stuff. Not the most rigorous scientific experiment. But his finding at the end is that, just breathing at night, thousands of breaths over a typical 8-hour sleep, results in us losing about a pound or more just from the extra carbon that gets expelled.
Daily Smart Fact #31: Boiler Rooms, Pump and Dump, and Leonardo DiCaprio
DiCaprio with a puppy, just because.
Takeaway: Jordan Belfort, the inspiration for the movie Boiler Room and the upcoming DiCaprio flick The Wolf of Wall Street, spent 22 months in jail for “crimes related to stock market manipulation and running a boiler room“. He cooperated with the FBI and was indicted in 1998 for a “pump and dump” scheme that resulted in a $200 million loss for investors. Jordan now lives in L.A. as a motivational speaker and lives the high life with hookers and cocaine. Fine, the last part may or may not be true. But 22 months seems a little light for screwing over thousands of investing suckers, don’t you think? Life is unfair.
Leonardo DiCaprio. Dammit, what can’t that man do. His most recent movie The Wolf of Wall Street is yet another testament of his abilities to make drugs, hot women taped in hundred dollah bills, and midget-throwing just look so darn fun. I recently viewed the new movie preview and it inspired me to look into the man who inspired the movie – Jordan Belfort. In the 90’s, Belfort founded a brokerage firm that functioned as a Boiler Room. Boiler Room, you say? Like that awesome movie with Ben Affleck and Giovanni Ribisi and quotes like “don’t pitch the bitch” movie? Yup, the very one – since that movie was also inspired by Belfort.
Knowing little to nothing about Wall Street, I thought I would use today’s post to highlight these key terms and some interesting tidbits about Belfort’s life:
Daily Smart Fact #30: Science! Top 10 Catchiest Songs of All Time
Badass mofos and arguably the best band of all time.
Takeaway: “Science” (I don’t know why that’s in quotation marks, just seems right) has identified the top 10 catchiest songs based on 4 guiding principles: 1) They contained long and detailed musical phrases; 2) The chorus (or hook) had several pitch changes; 3) The singers were male (pfft); and 4) There was a noticeable higher male vocal level. Shockingly enough, Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson, and Robin Thicke are not mentioned in this list.
I’ve been driving myself and my husband crazy the past couple of days because I have been humming Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” non-stop. This earworm has been consistently in my brain, “hey hey hey”, driving me batty. Which made me think…why is this song so catchy? What makes any song so catchy, and more importantly, how do we replicate this for my next successful career in pop rock? Well, look no longer…appears I just need to be a man, with a high singing voice.
Daily Smart Fact #29: Why Coffee Always Smells Better Than It Tastes
Key Takeaway: Humans have two senses of smell. One sense is when we inhale and the other is when “the air comes out of you up the nasal passage and is breathed out through the nose.” The receptors in our nose react to odors differently depending on which direction they are moving in.
I’m a coffee lover. More for the morning routine and warm fuzzies I associate coffee with than the actual taste (or the much-needed jolt of caffeine to avoid the afternoon slump). But I have always found it odd that coffee smells so much better than the actual, somewhat bitter, taste. I recently learned that we have two senses of smell (source). “One sense is when you inhale things from the environment into you, and the other is when the air comes out of you up the nasal passage and is breathed out through the nose.”
Daily Smart Fact #28: You’re Probably Pooping Wrong
Takeaway: Humans were not meant to sit on toilets while doing #2, but rather “squat in a field.” The modern toilet aka porcelain throne aka poo bucket forces our bodies into a position that is not optimal for doing our business.
Growing up, my family and I would sojourn to Korea every other summer to spend time with our extended family. I have very fond memories of hanging out with my grandparents in their home near the rice fields, catching frogs and sleeping with mosquito nets and those coils. A not-so-fond memory was the outhouse at our grandparents’ home. They didn’t have a “modern” bathroom with a porcelain toilet – the outhouse, which was a stone throw away from the main house, was a hole in the ground. A big, stinking hole. To us 3 granddaughters visiting from the U.S., going to the bathroom was a nightmare. And forget about middle-of-the-night bathroom trips, we held it.
One summer, our grandfather, being the resourceful and awesome man that he was, built a spanking brand new American-style bathroom for us. The bathroom was beautiful, blue tile with a sink and sparkling white porcelain toilet. Side note, my grandparents still used that outhouse and the new bathroom went largely unused when we weren’t visiting.
Anyway, that’s a long story to note that squatting over a hole may have been the best way to poop. According to this article, the “ideal position for defecation is in the squatting position” – and there is a growing following who believe in this position (hehe, pun intended). These squat evangelists attest that this squatting posture is “more natural” and “wards off all sorts of health problems, from Crohn’s disease to colon cancer.”
You can try this position yourself by 1) going to your backyard, digging a hole and doing your business or 2) purchasing a “health squat” device for $63.
Either way, you may be warding off cancer! excess strain! Chron’s disease! and more! Good luck.
Daily Smart Fact #27: Cranky, Overweight, or Tired? There’s an easy remedy for that.
Note to self: Don't look up "shower" ever again on flickr.
Takeaway: A cold shower can increase fat loss, enhance pain and stress tolerance, strengthen immunity, ward off depression, and the list goes on and on and on.
A friend of mine recently shared an article about the great benefits of taking cold showers on Google+ (you know that facebook-like technology that only your friends who work at Google use?) and I found it quite intriguing, especially because I had heard something similar from Timothy Ferris’ 4-hour Body book about the benefits of cold showers, especially in the area of boosting metabolism and burning fat. Essentially, Ferris recommends taking a 5 to 30 minute cold shower (working your way up in time, and working your way down in temperature) because “cold temperature activates brown fat, the fat-burning fat tissue in your body that burns energy to keep you warm.”
Besides boosting metabolism and increasing your ability to burn fat, cold showers have other great health benefits like:
- Increasing and improving blood circulation
- Increasing alertness (better than caffeine!)
- Helping with insomnia
- Improving skin texture and minimizing pores
- Reducing stress
- Stopping hair loss
- Decreasing chronic pain
And the list goes on. One of our good friends only takes cold showers and he happens to also be tall, skinny, and athletic – coincidence?? Probably, but still, I thought I would give it a try. So I did. And holy crap I was miserable…for the first 30 seconds or so. But then my body became acclimated and I felt good, dare I say, rejuvenated. Nay, I felt freaking awesome. I liked it, a lot. I probably won’t be taking only cold showers but I’ve resolved to end my showers with an icy cold rinse, which is good for now. And maybe I’ll become tall, skinny, and athletic too…
Photo credit: uzi978
Daily Smart Fact #26: Fear Factor ain’t got nothin’ on you. I guarantee you are eating insects.
Takeaway: For every chocolate bar you eat, the FDA allows you to consume 60 insect parts. That’s 60 little insect legs…yum, protein!
So I thought this was common knowledge (being this brilliant keeps me in a bubble sometimes…JOKE) but after talking to some folks, I realized that some people may still be surprised that the FDA provides allowances for insect parts in foods, including chocolate. Not only insect parts but rodent hair – yay! I’m not one to get disturbed by this, I figure every bite of insect just toughens up my body in preparation for other horrific things (like giving birth to the world’s largest baby).
For your amusement (if you dare), here’s a list of other FDA allowances (from The FDA Handbook)
- 60 insect parts per 100 grams of chocolate: What does that even mean? It means nothing until I took a bite into a chocolate bar yesterday and realized that 100 grams is the size of a regular Godiva chocolate bar. I’m not usually that shi shi but it was free, and my Korean butt can’t say no to free.
- Fly eggs in fruit juices: 5 Drosophila and other fly eggs per 250 ml or 1 or more maggots per 250 ml. Drink Odwalla juice? The usual bottle size is 450ml – that means there could be close to 10 fly eggs in that bottle. (This fear mongering is making me feel like Dr. Oz)
- Parasites in Red Fish and Ocean Perch: 3% of the fillets examined contain 1 or more parasites accompanied by pus pockets…I don’t know what that means but the word “pus pockets” made me want to share. You’re welcome.
Daily Smart Fact #25: Key to a Successful Marriage? A Much Hotter Wife
Key Takeaway: Studies have shown that the best predictor of “both husbands and wives displaying positive marital behavior was wives being more attractive than their husbands.”
We are in full swing of wedding season. Our close friends are now all getting married (see my Prima Nocta post) and it’s made me question: What makes a successful marriage?
Ok, obviously there’s a lot of factors that go into this. Not to de-emphasize hard work, similar values, love, compromise, religion, etc…but I DID find this study about hotter wives really interesting and wanted to share it with you.
Here are some key findings from this study:
- Attractive levels of husbands and wives didn’t matter (they both could be celebrity-level hot or both ugly slobs), it was the disparity in attractiveness between the two, and in particular, the wife being hotter than the husband, that mattered the most.
- Hotter husbands weren’t good spouses because “attractive men have available to them more short-term mating opportunities which may make them less satisfied and less committed to maintain the marital relationship through their behavior.”
- Uglier wives are meaner to their husbands, because hot husbands are mean to their ugly wives – “Because physical attractiveness is less important to wives, in contrast, relative attractiveness may only affect them through its effect on husbands. That is, because the satisfaction and behavior of husbands’ should positively predict the satisfaction and behavior of wives, less attractive wives’ may be less satisfied and behave more negatively in response to their more attractive husbands.”
- Hotter women, on the other hand, don’t care about looks as much – “more attractive wives behaved more constructively during social support interactions with their husbands.”
Daily Smart Fact #24: How to Lose 23 lbs and 12 oz in 1 day. Have the World’s Largest Baby.
Takeaway: The world’s largest baby to ever be born was 23 lbs, 12 oz and 30 whopping inches. To put that into context: you know how people give the analogy that giving birth is like forcing a watermelon through the size of a lemon? Well, the average weight of a watermelon is 3 lbs. So the mother to the world’s largest baby was carrying around EIGHT watermelons.
Today’s post is dedicated to babies, because Eric and I are the proud auntie and uncle to our new baby niece – Hana Bahn Feng! We were at the hospital last night awaiting her arrival and it spurred me this morning to check out some cool baby facts.
Here’s what I found:
- The biggest baby ever born was 23 lbs and 12 oz but died only after 11 hours of life. The biggest baby ever to be born and survive was 22 lbs, 8 oz in Italy. It must be all that pasta! (Source: Pregnancy & Baby)
- May babies are the heaviest babies, weighing an average of 200 grams more than their non-May baby peers. I found this fact in multiple places but can’t seem to find the explanation behind this. (Source: Online Nurse Practitioners)
- Men are best at changing diapers: on average they take about 1 minute to change diapers whereas women take about 2 minutes on average. So…NO EXCUSES MEN, change your baby’s diapers. 🙂 (Source: Infobarrel)
- Breast Milk can benefit adults: Some adults are taking breast milk to help fight some diseases like Crohn’s Disease and Cancer. Just additional evidence that women are freaking awesome. (Source: Yahoo Associated Content)
- Babies can’t cry: That’s right, you heard me, they can’t technically cry. They don’t produce tears until about 3 weeks in and in some cases not until 4 or 5 months. I just rocked your world. (Source: Online Nurse Practitioners)
Daily Smart Fact 