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: Music Lessons Will Improve Your Language Skills Thousands of People Have Mysteriously Disappeared in "Alaska's Bermuda Triangle" Notes from the story about 10th-century Vikings and the Muslim world: The Strangely Revealing Debate Over Viking Couture | The Atlantic The Rise and Fall of the Viking “Allah” Textile | Hyperallergic If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please considersupporting 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 onCuriosity.com, and download our5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable ourAlexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
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:
Notes from the story about 10th-century Vikings and the Muslim world:
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/alaskan-triangle-viking-interactions-with-muslims-and-music-lessons-improve-language-skills
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiositydotcom 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 about the mysterious Bermuda Triangle of Alaska, how music lessons can help you learn language skills, and archeological evidence that there was contact between 10th century Vikings and the Muslim world.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Ashley, what do you think of when you think of Vikings?
ASHLEY HAMER: I think of my heritage, actually. I'm related to Eric the Red.
CODY GOUGH: What?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Shut up.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's like the most famous ancestor that I have.
CODY GOUGH: How do you know that?
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know. My mom told me. I mean--
CODY GOUGH: I believe it.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK.
CODY GOUGH: I don't know why, but it just sounds cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: I have big feet and so I feel like that means that I'm a Viking.
CODY GOUGH: Awesome.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, there's mounting evidence that Vikings had contact with the Muslim world and it might make you think about history a little bit differently. Hey, I'd like to make a quick correction on the next story you're about to hear, and if you're hearing this, then you're hearing a revised version of our original episode. We're about to get into some news that Arabic writing was found on Viking burial clothing. When this news first broke, it was widely reported on by major publishers including The New York Times, The Guardian and The BBC.
The story made sense to us because there is abundant and uncontested evidence that there was contact between 10th century Vikings and the Islamic world. But the particular textile fragment mentioned in the story should not be counted among that evidence. The viral story of Arabic writing on Viking burial clothes was actually debunked by Stephanie Mulder-- an associate professor of Islamic arts and architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.
According to her, the style of Kufic writing found on the Viking burial clothes didn't become common until the 15th century, about 500 years after the clothing was created. Now, we intended for the main takeaway of this story to be that archeology can help us see history in a new light. And again, there's mounting evidence that Vikings were in touch with the Muslim world, which might change the way you think about the world 1,000 years ago. So that lesson still stands.
But we work really hard to be as scientifically accurate as possible and we wanted to make sure we were completely transparent about that factual error we made in the story. The devil's in the details after all. A set of Viking burial clothes was discovered during World War II and for 70 years, it held a secret that was just discovered in 2017.
Textile Archeologist Annika Larsson was preparing it for a Viking couture museum exhibit and she noticed that when she put the fabric in front of a mirror, a geometric pattern that looked like runes turned out to be the word Allah in Kufic script. OK. So maybe Vikings were in contact with the Arabic world. So what? Right? Well, think about this. If Vikings in Sweden were burying their dead with reverence references to Allah, that suggests that the relationship between Vikings and Muslims wasn't just war and hatred.
And this is why archeology and history is so cool. Stuff from the past can suggest a lot of different things and really change your perception of what the world used to be like. If you're interested in a bit more evidence around the Viking-Arab connection, we've got you covered. In 2008, Viking era silver coinned from Baghdad and Damascus were found near the site of a Stockholm airport.
And in 2015, a silver ring was found in a Scandinavian site bearing an inscription reading, or to Allah. Other research has shown a link between Arabic and Viking metal smithing techniques as well. Makes the ancient world seem a little bit smaller, doesn't it?
ASHLEY HAMER: It really does.
CODY GOUGH: And the modern world now that I know that you're related to Eric the Red.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. If you've ever wanted to learn a new language, then we've got a surprising pro tip for you. Music lessons are so good for language comprehension. They might even be better than reading lessons. Cody, do you speak any other languages?
CODY GOUGH: I learned a little bit of German before I went to Germany last year, and I am on and off in semi-fluent Spanish.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice. I was really good at French in high school, and I've pretty much forgotten it. And I've been trying to learn Spanish because I've been playing in a lot of Latin bands, but it's been slow going.
CODY GOUGH: Oh. But you're a musician so it should be easier for you, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. Well, that is what they say. There have been plenty of studies that show a close link between musical training and language skills. But in this new study from MIT, researchers were able to see music lessons improve word comprehension right before their eyes. They recruited 74 kids between the ages of four and five to see how their growing language skills were affected by piano lessons.
They were split into three groups. One group simply took school classes, the second group took three 45-minute piano lessons per week, and the third group took three 45-minute reading lessons per week. After six months, the researchers tested how well the kids could pick out words based on consonants, vowels, and tone.
Tone was a factor because these students' native language was Mandarin, which is tonal. Well, the kids who took the music lessons performed better than all the rest. The study's authors say that when kids are learning a language, it's a big thing to be able to hear the differences between words. Now, the lessons didn't make a difference when it came to IQ, working memory, or attention span.
And again, this study was focused on kids who speak a tonal language. But even non tonal languages rely on tiny sound differences to differentiate certain words. So if you're trying to learn a new language, maybe sign up for guitar lessons at the same time just to see what happens.
CODY GOUGH: Today's episode was sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
ASHLEY HAMER: Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a crash, people could get hurt or killed. Let's take a moment to look at some surprising statistics.
CODY GOUGH: Almost 29 people in the United States die every day in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes. That's one person every 50 minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year.
CODY GOUGH: Drunk driving can have a big impact on your wallet too. You could get arrested and incur huge legal expenses. You could possibly even lose your job.
ASHLEY HAMER: So what can you do to prevent drunk driving? Well, plan a safe ride home before you start drinking. Designate a sober driver or call a taxi. If someone you know has been drinking, take their keys and arrange for them to get a sober ride home.
CODY GOUGH: We all know the consequences of driving drunk, but one thing is for sure, you're wrong if you think it's no big deal. Drive sober or get pulled over. You've probably heard legends about planes and ships mysteriously disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle or the Devil's Triangle. That's the part of the ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. But there's another triangle that's even more deadly and sinister and cold, for that matter, because it's in Alaska.
It goes by a few names including Alaska's Bermuda Triangle, the Bermuda Triangle of Alaska, or what we'll call it the Alaskan Triangle. Its borders stretch all the way from Barrow on the state's North Coast down to Anchorage and Juneau across the Southern coast, and it includes huge areas of largely unexplored wilderness.
We're talking sprawling forests, icy mountain peaks, and desolate tundras. Sounds dangerous, but the creepy part is that there are hundreds of search and rescue missions conducted each year and state troopers rarely find any trace of bodies-- dead or alive. The Alaskan Triangle got widespread attention in 1972 when US House Majority Leader Hale Boggs's airplane vanished somewhere between Anchorage and Juneau.
The disappearance triggered one of the country's largest ever search and rescue operations involving 40 military aircraft, 50 civilian planes, and 39 days of searching an area of 32,000 square miles. But the search yielded not a shred of results. No wreckage, no debris, no human remains, nothing.
The silver lining was that after that incident, Congress passed a law mandating the installation of emergency locator transmitters in all US civilian aircraft. The bad news is that since 1988, more than 16,000 people have disappeared in the Alaskan Triangle. Now, there's at least one possible scientific explanation for this and that's shifting terrain.
For example, an airplane crashed in Argentina in the 1940s and was missing for more than 50 years until two climbers found the plane's wreckage. Investigators concluded that in that case, the plane had probably crashed into a nearby vertical glacier which had caused an avalanche that totally buried the wreckage. So the same kind of thing might be happening in the Alaskan triangle.
Another explanation is that the deceptively beautiful glaciers of Alaska are honeycombed with hidden chambers. And those crevices can be larger than houses or even office buildings. Add regular snowfalls from the northern climate and it's possible that vanishing into thin air just means buried by nature. Just remember to stay safe if you do venture into the Alaskan wilderness and contact Alaska's Missing Persons Clearinghouse if you find or need help finding a wayward traveler.
ASHLEY HAMER: Read about these stories and more today on curiositydotcom.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.