This week in science: mysterious X-rays, movement and learning, and memory formation

Emily Kwong and Ari Daniel of NPR's Short Wave talk about mysterious X-ray objects, the link between movement and learning and how a small part of the brain triggers memory formation. Transcript JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: It's time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi, Juana. ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Hello there, Juana. So like you always do, you've brought us three science stories that caught your attention recently. Tell us what they are. KWONG: How lightsabers can help with some types of learning. DANIEL: A surprising area of the brain involved in long-term memory. KWONG: And some Halloween-y objects in outer space emitting X-rays. SUMMERS: OK, we have a whole lot to talk about today, clearly. Are scientists just out there battling it out in the lab? OK, so the idea for this study, published in the journal Science Advances, came from Luke Rosedahl, now based at Florida Atlantic University. During the COVID lockdown, Luke was playing a lot of virtual reality video games. SUMMERS: Oh, those are the ones where players put on a headset that totally covers their eyes, and then they're plunged into this, like, 3-D environment, right? It's a game that requires your whole body to play. And at the time, Luke was studying the striatum, a region of the brain that controls both motor movement and decision making. And while gaming, he wondered if there was some unexplored link there. Could big movement help people figure out how to sort things? - what's known as category learning. SUMMERS: That's an interesting question. How'd he try to figure it out? DANIEL: In the lab, Luke got a bunch of participants to put on VR goggles. They were then showed striped objects, and the stripes were a different angle and thickness. And as the game went along, participants learned how to categorize the stripes, how to sort them into one bucket or another. KWONG: And while some participants pressed buttons to learn, others did much bigger motions, like swinging a lightsaber to hit the stripes or punching a response box in front of them. And the difference in their learning was dramatic. LUKE ROSEDAHL: With the larger movements like punching, people learned somewhere between four and six times faster, which is just absolutely incredible. SUMMERS: That is a huge difference, but this was just for sorting stripes in a lab, right?