Today you’ll learn about whether or not birth order affects how rebellious you are, how researchers are working to turn a human brain into a machine, and what Zimbabwe is doing to try and solve their energy crisis.
Today you’ll learn about whether or not birth order affects how rebellious you are, how researchers are working to turn a human brain into a machine, and what Zimbabwe is doing to try and solve their energy crisis.
Birth Order
Braincell Computers
Zimbabwe Hydro
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/birth-order-braincell-computers-zimbabwe-hydro
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about whether or not birth order affects how rebellious you are, how researchers are working to turn a human brain into a machine, and what Zimbabwe is doing to try and solve their energy crisis.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: I don't know about you, but I kind of like the song Born to Be Wild.
CALLI: Oh, it's going to be one of those episodes.
NATE: And it's actually interesting because researchers have recently found that birth order can affect how wild or rebellious your personality is.
CALLI: The Science of Steppenwolf, a podcast by Nate Bonham now available on every platform. Tell me, how are some of us Born to Be Wild?
NATE: To be clear, it's actually called the Born to Rebel Hypothesis, and it was developed by the American psychologist Frank Sulloway back in 1996. And it's centered on the idea that later born children are more likely to develop traits diverging from societal norms to make themselves different from their older siblings. As the theory goes: firstborn kids are way more likely to conform to the needs and expectations of their family or society. But all the kids born later are more likely to take risks and pick up worldviews that are different from their families.
CALLI: So what you're saying is the younger kids are more likely to get their motor running head out on the highway looking for adventure or all that?
NATE: Well, you know, born to rebel, born to be wild. Same thing. The hypothesis is quite popular in culture, but it's become a bit of a source of contention in the scientific community because very few scientists have been able to come to the same conclusion as Sulloway.
CALLI: What do you mean?
NATE: Well, his work has been criticized for its methodology and its use of statistical analysis. As an example, one review of Born Tribal from back in 1987 starts with the line A strange aroma is drifting downwind from Born to Rebel. It is the odor of missing data and overcooked research.
CALLI: Wow that’s gotta sting. So, okay, so what does this mean?
NATE: It means that the born to rebel theory is controversial, but still prevalent, despite any concerns that critics might have in Soloway's theory. There's one part of it that remains interesting to modern scholars: the link between birth order and personality. Gareth Richards from the School of Psychology at Newcastle University in the UK and his colleagues wanted to put the Born to Rebel hypothesis to the test. So in a new study they examined the relationship between birth order and one of the most iconic images that comes to mind when you picture a rebel leather jacket. Ooh, no good guess, but tattoos. Oh, they put together a study with over 2000 participants from the UK and Poland and used tattoos as a variable because of what they represent. Risk taking, rebelliousness, high stakes adventures, etc.. Ironically, they're also really prevalent in the general population. Richards and his team predicted that later born individuals would be far more likely to have tattoos than anyone else because of the born to Rebel checklist of traits like openness, risk taking, sensation seeking and the need for uniqueness. But it's not what they found.
CALLI: Okay, what did they find?
NATE: Birth order wasn't a big predictor for whether someone had tattoos or not. Which is interesting because people with tattoos did indeed score higher when it came to questions about risk taking and sensation seeking and the need for uniqueness. That last one proved to be an interesting deviation too. Later born people scored lower on the need for uniqueness than firstborn individuals, meaning that firstborn children were actually shown to be way more likely to have a need to prove their individuality than their younger siblings.
CALLI: Oh, okay. So no dice on the born to Rebel hypothesis then.
NATE: Birth order might not be a significant predictor of any rebellious behavior or nonconformity. And to be honest, we can look back at Steppenwolf themselves to provide a little more anecdotal evidence to this. Born to Be Wild was written by a man named Mars Bonfire, the brother of Steppenwolf's drummer Jerry Edmonton. Jerry was born in 1946, but Mars was born in 1943.
CALLI: Huh. So the older brother was the rebel. Okay, well, there you go. Case closed.
NATE: All right, well, all joking aside, the authors of the new research admit that there are a few limitations to their study. For example, they only surveyed university students who are not only not likely to be representative of the General population, but they're probably not even representative of what constitutes a rebellious attitude. Plus, the study only looked at tattoos as an outcome variable. Maybe if they looked into other types of risk taking or rebelliousness, a study could show different results. But despite all that, this study does add some pretty compelling information to the ever growing body of work being done on the link between birth order and personality. Even though the Born to Rebel hypothesis might not be a universal explanation for the differences between firstborn and later born children, the study could lead to further research that examines this link in other ways.
CALLI: Well, I think, darlin, the scientists are gonna make it happen.
NATE: All right, All right. Just let me know when you're out of Steppenwolf's lyrics.
CALLI: I'm done. Okay.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: We’ve discussed a few times on the show how I can't perfectly emulate the human brain, thankfully. But this did get scientists considering. What if we made A.I. more like a human brain?
NATE: Okay, look, I have not read and watched all of the sci-fi that's out there, but I think I've read and watched a fair amount of it. And like, if you're talking about putting a human brain in a robot body, it's been done and it does not end well. I hope that's not what you're talking about right now. Are we doing this?
CALLI: Sort of. For quite some time now? We've actually been capable of growing brain organoids, which are sometimes called mini brains. They're a sort of lab grown cell culture that looks like a bunch of tiny, creamy balls stored in clear pink liquid. But when you look underneath a powerful microscope, you see intricate shapes and layers of many colors swirling around that reveal themselves to be human brain cells. Those swirls, they're outgrowths connecting to one another, sparking electrical impulses, a.k.a. the stuff thoughts are made of.
NATE: So are these just smaller brains?
CALLI: No, not exactly. They have a lot of the key components that make up brain function and structure like neurons and other essential cognitive cells relating to learning and memory. And unlike other cell cultures, brain organoids are three dimensional, meaning they can expand their cell density nearly a thousand times over so that neurons have more chances to connect. So think about it. Like think about it like a tree. The trunk is the brain cells, and the branches are the outgrowths that continue to expand. But they're not capable of working exactly the same as a brain. Yet they are powerful enough to act as a sort of biological hardware for a computer.
NATE: So a lot less RoboCop and a lot more. 2001 A Space Odyssey.
CALLI: Okay, but less scary since mini brains aren't likely at the moment to gain sentience. What they are good at is retaining information. This comes from research at Johns Hopkins University, where Professor Thomas Hartung is leading the charge on a new field known as Organoid Intelligence, or AI for short. The reason for AI is simple You would get the best of both worlds with an AI based computer. Normal computers are better with numbers, but brains are better at learning.
NATE: Okay, but what would one of those computers look like? It's kind of hard to imagine merging soft tissue with current technology.
CALLI: The team at Johns Hopkins have actually developed a brain computer interface that covers the organoids, while still using it as the main hardware for the computer. The interface is a flexible shell, densely covered with these tiny electrodes that can pick up signals from the mini brain and transmit signals to it. So simply just like think of a pacemaker, it reads your heart and adjust it to a healthy rhythm. They're also working on technologies that can communicate with the organoids, which is massive.
NATE: What do you mean by communicate? Are we are we talking to the brain?
CALLI: They're working on ways to send the organoids information and then read out whatever they're thinking. They're using bioengineering and machine learning to make it so they can basically read the minds of these things. At the moment, it seems like the machinery can only receive signals from the organoid. It can't read its process. This would actually change that. Eventually, they hope to develop additional ways to stimulate and record the mini brains and eventually connect them across multiple networks that can combine their intellectual powers to handle more complex computations.
NATE: Okay. I hate to be a bit of a wet blanket here, but I think I have a few ethical questions about this. Fair said they can't now, but can the mini brains eventually develop consciousness? Can they experience pain or suffering? I mean, what rights do people whose cells are harvested to make the organoids have?
CALLI: So these are all really, really good questions and ones that the researchers are actually taking into consideration. They claim that a key component of their OI experiment is keeping things ethical and socially responsible, which is why they teamed up with a bunch of ethicists. Help me out here. Ethicists, thank you to establish an embedded ethics approach. Basically, all potential ethical issues will be assessed at all times by a collaboration between scientists, ethicists and the public. There I managed to say the word. To be fair, that's just what they're saying. So we have to wait to see how they do it. But they are acknowledging upfront that this could be very ethically concerning.
NATE: Ethics assessed by ethicists. Good, Good.
CALLI: Oh, my gosh.
NATE: So this is a lot less scary and a lot more cool. The more I hear about it sounds good. But other than being a slightly more bizarre version of AI, what's the point, really.
CALLI: Other than advancing the power of computing? This is actually a really big deal in the medical field, too. So there's groundbreaking technique developed by Nobel laureates John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka that makes it so brain organoids could be produced from adult tissues. What this means is that scientists can now create personalized mini brains out of skin samples of patients suffering from neural disorders like Alzheimer's disease. Then they can run tests to look into how genetic factors, medicines and stuff like toxins influence these conditions.
NATE: Okay, that sounds pretty cool.
CALLI: And that's that's. I'm not even done yet. Brain Organoids provide a direct look into the cognitive aspects of those conditions. So for instance, we could compare how memories form in organoids made of tissue from healthy people against organoids made from Alzheimer's tissue, which could help us learn how to repair any of the deficits in the brain directly. Or we can test certain substances on the mini brain like, say, pesticides, and see if they cause memory loss or learning deficiency.
NATE: Okay, so hypothetically speaking, not building robots to take over the world or anything, where could you get one of these organic brain substitute computers?
CALLI: Well, for the moment, it's still very much a young field. But a new study from Dr. Brett Kagan of the Cortical Labs, who co-wrote the initial research with Hartung, provides proof of concept for a functioning AI computer. His team showed that a normal, flat brain cell culture can learn to play the video game pong. Yeah, like I'm not even joking here. The video game with the paddles, that one. They did this through connecting the cells to microchips, which were then connected to a computer playing the game and the cells began to learn, OI is on its way to becoming a reality, but it needs some work, for example, to be part of a network. As Harding described current brain organoids need to be scaled up. So right now each one has about 50,000 cells. The ideal mini brain needs about 10 million. But once the mini brains can handle what it means to be organoid intelligence, it's really just a matter of building the community, building the tools and waiting for OI to become less science fiction and more scientific reality.
NATE: This is very exciting news, Dave.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Like so many places in the world today, Zimbabwe is in the middle of a drought with no end in sight. It's gotten so bad that it's affecting their hydropower. But that could change with the introduction of some incredible technology.
CALLI: Hopeful beginning. What kind of technology are we talking about here?
NATE: Biogas systems. Biogas is rich with energy. It's created through a certain kind of decomposition of waste that you can find in landfills. And it's composed primarily of methane, which is the same compound in natural gas and carbon dioxide. It can be burned directly as a fuel or it can be treated to remove CO2. So it can be used like natural gas. And best of all, it's one of the world's best contenders when it comes to renewable fuels that can generate electricity.
CALLI: Okay, that all sounds wonderful. So I am curious, though, you mentioned the drought in Zimbabwe. How bad is that?
NATE: It's bad. Zimbabwe's main hydropower dam produces nearly 70% of the entire country's electricity. But the water levels have gotten so low that they can't reliably generate power anymore for 16 million Zimbabweans. And what's worse is that in order to preserve the water they do have, plant managers have to impose rolling blackouts on citizens, sometimes for as long as 20 hours a day. Researchers agree that this highlights how large a threat the increasingly dry climate in Africa can be to nations relying on hydropower.
CALLI: Holy cow. Okay. Are there any solutions other than changing the whole hydropower system?
NATE: Honestly, there are quite a few proposed solutions, but none of them have taken off quite yet. No matter what the solution, it's believed that hydropower isn't the way to go in Zimbabwe anymore because every year rainfall levels have varied way too dramatically across all of Africa. One study even predicts that by 2030, new hydropower dams will no longer be an attractive option across most of Africa. So recently, the government put out a call for researchers to step it up when it comes to finding more dependable energy resources. One possible solution is to expand coal fired power plants. Unfortunately, coal is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, which means that this solution would contribute dramatically to climate change. And that is where biogas comes in. A team out of Galgotias University in India even put this to the test back in 2021 when they created 700 biogas systems for Zimbabwe.
CALLI: 700? Okay. That seems like a lot. Did they just, like, not work or something?
NATE: Well, they did, but these systems were small household units. The gas was good for cooking, good for heating water, but not good enough to generate electricity, especially on a mass scale. Still, there's a lot of evidence that bio gas on a larger scale can help Zimbabwe's power crisis. But according to the study, that's still a bit of a ways away as the technology is still in its infancy. If not, there's always the potential for solar power.
CALLI: Solar power seems like it would be a great option. Why not?
NATE: Well, another study from Shanghai University in China said that Zimbabwe receives around 3000 hours of sunlight per year, but hasn't really tapped into the solar power game yet. And they could do that by building arrays of solar panels linked to battery storage systems. In fact, that same study even claims that fitting just 10% of the suitable land for solar systems has the ability to create 30 times the current power demand of the nation, even when operating within the least amount of efficiency.
CALLI: You know, that does sound great. So where's the catch?
NATE: The catch in this case is the government current regulations are a little strict when it comes to how renewable energy is priced and how it's fed into grids, making it a promising but unrealistic goal. So for now, at least, the government has said that they want to help consumers install smaller rooftop solar systems to help persuade people into going solar. And they've even banned new installations of electric water heaters for the same reason.
CALLI: Okay. So until one of these solutions comes to fruition, what can be done?
NATE: Well, there is one other option, and that option is hydropower.
CALLI: Well, okay, no backup. You just spent the last several minutes telling me hydropower is out of the question.
NATE: I did. But there is a proposed solution to fix the hydropower situation. One idea is to fine tune the amount of water the dam releases to match the highs and lows of the river. This could prevent too much water being used during a drought in the future.
CALLI: What would this do to help the current drought?
NATE: Unfortunately, it doesn't work for the current drought. There are a lot of moving parts to this issue, including investment in infrastructure, national regulations in renewable energy, and an overhaul of the transmission grid that is holding back a clear solution. And again, the government continues to pursue the coal based alternatives I mentioned, which would help in the short term but would be detrimental to the environment. So the pressure remains on them to pursue a solution that will work in both the short and the long term.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: As the great Canadian poets in Steppenwolf once said, “like a true nature’s child, we were born to be wild.” But new evidence suggests that might not be the case! The “born to rebel” hypothesis, which suggests that later-born children are more likely to be rebellious than their older siblings, has been dealt a nasty blow from new research that suggests the opposite. Apparently, you’re more likely to crave individuality if you’re a FIRST-BORN child - an interesting development in the ever growing body of research on the concept of “birth order”!
CALLI: Tired: putting a brain in a robot body. Inspired: making a brain INTO a robot. New research out of Johns Hopkins suggests that the field of organoid intelligence is expanding fast, a field that posits the idea that we can use brain cells to create the hardware necessary to run massive neural supercomputer networks. OI research is still in its early stages, but the innovations in this research could lead to anything from faster computers to even more efficient medical treatments!
NATE: Zimbabwe is currently facing a nearly unprecedented energy crisis due to a massive drought limiting their ability to use hydropower, but they’ve also come up with an equally unprecedented number of solutions. One such solution is biogas, which is made from specially fermenting landfill waste to create a sort of renewable gas that’s equal parts methane and carbon dioxide. Another could be creating a solar grid infrastructure in the country! No matter the solution, Zimbabwe has their work cut out for them - hydropower is projected to be nearly useless in the country by 2030.