Learn about how scientists mapped where people feel emotions in their bodies; how scientists can make things levitate using sound; 3 times Stephen Hawking placed a bet on science; and why your car makes different noises when the windows are open. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Scientists Have Mapped Where People Feel Emotions in Their Bodies — https://curiosity.im/2D8oJyj We Can Make Things Levitate Using Sound — https://curiosity.im/2Da0iQU 7 Times People Made Bets on Science — https://curiosity.im/2D8HZeP “Helmholtz Resonance” and why your slightly opened car windows make those awful thudding noises: Why Do Slightly Opened Car Windows Make That Awful Sound? | Jalopnik Flute acoustics: an introduction to how a flute works | UNSW Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! 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!
Learn about how scientists mapped where people feel emotions in their bodies; how scientists can make things levitate using sound; 3 times Stephen Hawking placed a bet on science; and why your car makes different noises when the windows are open.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
“Helmholtz Resonance” and why your slightly opened car windows make those awful thudding noises:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
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/acoustic-levitation-stephen-hawkings-science-bets-helmholtz-resonance-and-where-your-body-feels-emotions
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got the latest and greatest from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn how scientists mapped where people feel emotions in their bodies, how scientists can make things levitate using sound, and three times Stephen Hawking placed a bet on science. We'll also answer a listener question about the sound you hear when your car windows are open.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Researchers have mapped emotions to where most people feel them in their own bodies. And it turns out that most of us feel our emotions in similar places. I mean like, where do you feel anger?
CODY GOUGH: Usually my fists.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. They felt anger in their fists.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I mean, it's this wonderful little heat map that people will have to see on our story on this on curiosity.com because it's really cool. It's a whole bunch of bodies with little heat maps and what emotion they were feeling. But with anger, your fists, your heart, your shoulders, there's a lot. Yeah. I mean, I think we all kind of feel them in similar places, which is really interesting.
CODY GOUGH: Can't wait to hear all about it.
ASHLEY HAMER: So a team of Finnish researchers have been working on this since at least 2014. That's when they published a smaller body map that showed where people felt 14 basic and non-basic emotions in their bodies. So that was stuff like happiness versus pride, for example.
But for this new study, they mapped out a whopping 100 different feelings. There were seven categories. They included cognition, like thinking and reasoning, sensation and perception, like seeing and hearing, homeostatic states, meaning bodily functions like hunger and thirst, physiological processes, like sleeping and breathing, feelings associated with illnesses, like coughing and fever, and feelings associated with psychiatric disorders, like depression and anxiety.
They recruited more than 1,000 participants and had them rate how much they experience each feeling in their body versus in their mind. They also had to try to sort out their feelings by how similar they were. And in the final experiment, participants were asked to color the place in the body where they felt each individual feeling.
The researchers put all the data together and came up with 100 bodily sensation maps to show where in the body those feelings were felt. Some of the locations made a lot of sense. Hunger was in the stomach. Thirst in the throat. Stuff like that. But some totally opposing feelings came up in the same places.
For example, the positive emotions of gratefulness and togetherness were in the same place as the negative emotions of guilt and despair. Those feelings were mapped in the heart for the most part, followed by the head and the stomach. Even when some feelings were kind of similar though, each one was unique when it came to exactly where and how intensely they happened. You can see where all the emotions ended up in our full write-up on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But this is just more evidence that our mind and body are more strongly connected than some people think.
CODY GOUGH: Levitation is pretty cool, right? From speeders in Star Wars, to Marty McFly's hoverboard in Back to the Future 2, we all want levitation to be here now. Well, it is here now. We've already got magnetic levitation to levitate, you know, magnetic stuff. But for everything else, we can actually make things levitate using, wait for it, sound. Ashley, what if people turn up our podcast really loud, and we make stuff levitate with our voices?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, man. We totally could. We just have to go like buuuhhh. All right. Turn up really loud and make something happen. You're welcome.
CODY GOUGH: At least people will know why we renamed our show the Curiosity buuuhhh. The levitation I'm talking about is called acoustic levitation. And it works by using sound waves to suspend stuff in midair. Acoustic levitation creates tiny pockets in space, where sound waves resonate with each other to create a standing wave.
A standing wave has certain points called nodes that stay still while the rest of the wave oscillates. So think of a node as a really chill music fan trying to just leave a concert. Everyone else is moving in different directions around him, but they're all pushing on him with the same amount of force. So it never goes anywhere.
On a standing wave, you get the same amount of energy coming from opposite directions, so the nodes don't move anywhere. But that's just the problem. Scientists have believed that acoustic levitation couldn't be done if the object was bigger than the wave. Right now, acoustic levitation only works on things that are smaller than the sound waves themselves. So you can float all the antsy ones, but it's probably not going to work on, say, your 1983 DeLorean.
But a new report suggests that might change in the future. This new method doesn't create a solid standing wave between two sound waves coming from opposite directions. Instead, it rotates sound waves in opposite directions. That creates tornado-like structures of sound known as acoustic vortices. The center of the vortices is kind of like the eye of a tornado. And that's where objects can be held.
Researchers have already proven larger scale levitation is possible. They have floated a 2-centimeter sphere made of synthetic polymer. Now sure, that's just a proof of concept more than anything else. But it does prove that it's at least theoretically possible to levitate large objects and maybe even people. And there's a practical application too. Think contactless production lines. Delicate objects can be assembled without touching them. It might not be as fun as a hoverboard or as bright neon pink for that matter, but it's not a bad start.
ASHLEY HAMER: Today on Curiosity, we wrote about seven times people made bets on science. We don't have time to get into all of them on this podcast, but I want to share my favorite ones. And they all come from legendary physicist, Stephen Hawking. Don't ever say the betting is just for sports fans.
Anyway, we all know that Hawking was a leading expert on black hole theory, but he actually lost a bet about black holes. In 1975, scientists discovered an object called Cygnus X-1. And we hadn't found evidence of black holes by then. Hawking made a bet against another black hole expert named Kip Thorne, that Cygnus X-1 wasn't a black hole. Hawking had to concede the bet in 1990 after the evidence became incontrovertible. What did he bet? An adult magazine. Don't ever say scientists don't have a sense of humor.
But Hawking wasn't done there. This time, he actually teamed up with Thorne to make a bet against theoretical physicist John Preskill that black holes destroyed anything that goes into them. This was despite the fact that quantum mechanics says information can neither be created nor destroyed. Well, in 2004, Hawking conceded the bet when he announced that he had solved the so-called black hole information paradox. This time, he gave up a baseball encyclopedia.
That's two losses. But how about Hawking's third bet? This time, he bet physics professor Gordon Cain $100 that the Large Hadron Collider would not find the Higgs boson. That's the particle that gives mass to every other particle. At the time, Hawking explained that his bet was more about the hope that the universe was extra interesting than it was about the actual chances. Well, you know where this is going. Hawking lost his bet when the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. Apparently, being one of the most renowned scientists in modern history doesn't mean you're a good gambler.
CODY GOUGH: Ashley, this was a great article, and you did a great job. But I have an anecdote that is going to make it 10 times better.
ASHLEY HAMER: Here we go.
CODY GOUGH: Do you know who is the only person who has ever appeared on an episode of any series of Star Trek as himself?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, yeah, no. That was Stephen Hawking. I knew that.
CODY GOUGH: You did know that it was Stephen Hawking?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Do you know what the scene was?
ASHLEY HAMER: No.
CODY GOUGH: This is amazing. Stephen Hawking appeared in the season finale of season six of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993. And he appeared as himself because Lieutenant Commander Data created a holodeck program in which he plays poker with Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Guess who wins the hand of cards?
ASHLEY HAMER: Who?
CODY GOUGH: After he bluffs Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking wins the hand of cards.
ASHLEY HAMER: At least he won something in fiction.
CODY GOUGH: So even though he lost these three science bets, he beat Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Data in a game of cards.
ASHLEY HAMER: Amazing.
CODY GOUGH: Amazing. I was really excited to throw this in.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got a listener question from Aiden who asks, when you're driving down the highway and you open a window, there's a head pounding thud, thud, thud sound. Now, to combat this, you just open a second window. The second window only needs to be opened a bit to solve the problem. What is going on? Great question, Aiden.
Basically, you've turned your car into a giant flute. So when a flute player blows a stream of air over the hole in the mouthpiece, the air strikes the far edge of the hole and creates a pressure wave that moves through the air molecules and the flute itself to create a tone. That's all sound is, a pressure wave.
The same thing happens to your car window. When it's open, the air whooshing by strikes the back edge of the window and creates a constant pressure wave inside the car. The difference is that your car is much bigger than a flute, so the tone is a lot lower. Instead of a musical note, it's more like a deep throbbing against your eardrums. Scientists call this phenomenon, Helmholtz resonance. The reason opening another window helps solve the problem is that it creates a whole new pressure wave that interferes with that perfect resonance. So all you hear is wind. Thanks for your question, Aiden.
CODY GOUGH: Before we wrap up, we want to give a special shout-out to one of our patrons for supporting our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Dr. Mary Yancey, who gets an executive producer credit for her generous support on Patreon. Thank you so much.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you're listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily, then visit patreon.com/curiosity.com, all spelled out. Even a couple of bucks a month would be a huge help. That's less than you'd lose in a hand of cards against a bunch of physicists. One more time, that's patreon.com/curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.