Learn about anger makes you look guilty; a new quantum microscope; and why the fight against cancer is going very well. Anger makes you look guilty by Kelsey Donk Johnson, S. (2021, June). Falsely accused? Stay calm, because anger makes you look guilty. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/signs-of-guilt DeCelles, Katherine, Gabrielle Adams, Holly S. Howe, and Leslie K. John. "Anger Damns the Innocent." Psychological Science (in press). https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/DecellesEtAl20%20-%20Anger%20Damns%20the%20Innocent_7e5cda61-ed8b-4592-866e-bea68f944a70.pdf New quantum microscope can reveal biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see by Briana Brownell Lu, D. (2021, June 9). Quantum leap for medical research as microscope zooms in on tiny structures. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/10/quantum-leap-for-medical-research-as-microscope-zooms-in-on-tiny-structures Researchers create quantum microscope that can see the impossible. (2021, June 9). Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-06-quantum-microscope-impossible.html Casacio, C. A., Madsen, L. S., Terrasson, A., Waleed, M., Barnscheidt, K., Hage, B., Taylor, M. A., & Bowen, W. P. (2021). Quantum-enhanced nonlinear microscopy. Nature, 594(7862), 201–206. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03528-w We'll never "cure cancer," but the fight against cancer is going very well by Cameron Duke Berezow, A. (2021, June 14). We’re winning the war on cancer. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/were-winning-war-on-cancer Mulcahy, N. (2021, April 14). Rankings of Most Common Cancers to Shift Over Next 20 Years. Medscape; Medscape. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/949253 Rahib, L., Wehner, M. R., Matrisian, L. M., & Nead, K. T. (2021). Estimated Projection of US Cancer Incidence and Death to 2040. JAMA Network Open, 4(4), e214708. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.4708 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about anger makes you look guilty; a new quantum microscope; and why the fight against cancer is going very well.
Anger makes you look guilty by Kelsey Donk
New quantum microscope can reveal biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see by Briana Brownell
We'll never "cure cancer," but the fight against cancer is going very well by Cameron Duke
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/anger-looks-guilty-quantum-microscope-good-news-about-cancer
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why anger makes you look guilty; a new quantum microscope and the impossibly small things we can see with it; and why the fight against cancer is going very well.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you’re ever accused of doing something you definitely didn’t do, scientists have one important tip: stay calm. According to new research, anger makes you look guilty. Unfortunately, that same research says that people tend to get angrier when they’re falsely accused than when they’re actually guilty. So this is pretty important research for people to understand.
To uncover this uncomfortable paradox, researchers conducted six studies. In one study, participants watched clips from a courtroom TV show, then got to say whether they thought each person was innocent or guilty. Sure enough, people were more likely to rate the angriest defendants as guilty. The same thing happened in scenarios outside the courtroom, like when a man was accused of infidelity, and when the participants were all professionals who assessed truthfulness for a living.
In another study, participants were given a text editing task that was either easy (capitalizing a few letters) or difficult (deleting all of the adverbs). If they did the task correctly, they’d receive a bonus payment. Afterward, some participants were randomly told that they had done the task incorrectly. The accused who were assigned the easy task — and less likely to have made mistakes — were much angrier about the accusation than those who had performed the difficult task.
So if innocent people get angrier than guilty people, why do we think the opposite? It may come down to trustworthiness. Past research has shown that people decide how trustworthy someone is before deciding whether or not they’re guilty. And anger makes people seem less trustworthy. So people see someone’s anger, decide they’re not super trustworthy, and conclude that they must be guilty.
Staying calm can help, but the research also suggests not staying completely silent. In one of the studies, participants thought a defendant seemed most guilty when he invoked his Fifth Amendment right and stayed silent. Anger was the next most guilty thing the defendant could express. So silence, unfortunately, is even worse than anger.
The research just highlights, once again, that people really aren’t great lie detectors. We really think we can tell if someone is lying, but we’re actually just judging whether or not someone appears trustworthy or reliable. And that is not the same as guilt.
It’s important to keep these findings in mind, since they probably have an impact on both our social conflicts and actual criminal convictions. Next time someone appears angry, we can try to remind ourselves that that probably means they’re more likely to be innocent than guilty.
Quantum entanglement is one of the oddest truths in physics: entangled particles can act in tandem, even when separated by long distances. And now, a team of Australian researchers has harnessed this strange phenomenon to create a more powerful microscope that can take an unprecedented look inside living cells.
Here’s how it works. Traditional microscopes create images by bouncing bursts of light off an object and collecting the photons in a sensor. But, there is an inherent randomness thanks to all those photons bouncing off of the subject and the background, and arriving at the sensor at different times. This randomness adds noise to the final image.
To compensate for this, scientists typically dial up the intensity of the light. And I mean dial up: the best imaging systems use light that is billions of times brighter than the sun. So it’s no surprise that such a bright light can damage or alter the behavior of the thing they’re trying to image. This is especially true when scientists try to look at biological processes and living systems. I mean, imagine how you’d act if someone shined a super bright light on you!
But quantum entanglement gives scientists a way to reduce the noise in the image without increasing the intensity. Because pairs of photons that are entangled move together, each detected photon provides slightly more information about the subject under the microscope. This new quantum microscope, therefore, can provide better resolution. And this first-of-its-kind experiment showed a 35 percent improvement in image clarity.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the new microscope technique to look at living cells, scientists compared images of a yeast cell taken with both methods. With a standard microscope, the cell wall was clearly visible in the first image, but in images taken immediately afterward, it was obvious the strong light pulse caused significant damage to the organism. But with the quantum microscope? They didn’t see any damage. And even better, several specialized structures were visible inside the cell, which showed how much better the clarity was. The images had a resolution of a stunning 200 nanometers. That’s smaller than wavelengths of visible light, and close to the size of the smallest bacteria we know of.
The team hopes that this experiment will be able to create a new era of quantum sensors that could be used in everything from medical diagnostics to molecular biology to organic chemistry. You might even say the field of quantum microscopy has a bright future.
Cancer is scary — there’s no way around that. But the good news with cancer is that, well, it’s not all bad news. While we will never truly cure cancer, the fight against it is actually going really well.
At the moment, cancers are the number two leading cause of death in the US. But in a recent paper, a group of medical researchers have pointed out an optimistic trend. More than 600,000 Americans died of cancers in 2020, but they expect that number to fall to 410,000 by 2040. Considering the population of the US is projected to grow by 12 percent in that same time, that’s actually a huge drop in cancer deaths.
Lung cancer, the biggest killer of the bunch, is likely to decrease by more than 50 percent as people increasingly stop using tobacco products. Other common cancers will fall as well due to preventative measures like improved screenings and other incremental advances. All that’s looking pretty good.
The biggest problem with cancer is that we will never cure it. This is because there really is nothing we can point to and call “cancer.” Lung cancer, breast cancer, and colon cancer are often treated like individual diseases that have distinct causes, but this isn’t true. At its core, cancer is uncontrolled cell growth, typically in tissues with quickly dividing cells, like skin. A segment of the DNA in a cell mutates, and the cell loses its ability to know when it should stop growing and dividing. All cancers have this in common. The problem is that there are so many things that can mess up DNA and so many places in the body these errors can happen that it’s almost impossible to point to a single cause for any given cancer.
The second problem is that cancer is a numbers game. We are all made of cells that grow and divide, and this happens throughout our lives. Little mutations can happen naturally, and most of the time our bodies are good at spotting cells that have stepped out of line and setting them straight. But the longer we live, the more chances we have for those failsafes to break down.
Finally, one of the reasons cancer has become more prevalent is because we’ve become really good at not dying of other things. Cancer rates are what they are mostly because diseases like polio, tuberculosis, and typhoid aren’t getting us first any more.
So while cancers may very well be a fact of life, the outlook is getting a lot better.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Kelsey Donk, Briana Brownell, and Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!