Learn about how much you can say with simple noises called vocal bursts; why you might keep hearing about the Kepler Space Telescope even though it’s retired; and how you can find out where your house would’ve been on Pangaea. Please support our sponsors! Small business owners: visit https://www.ondeck.com/curiosity to receive a free consultation with a US-based loan specialist. Apply online or by phone and get approved in minutes. 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 Created an Audio Map of Emotions Using Only Noises — https://curiosity.im/2GXuYWv This Is the Kepler Space Telescope's Final Image — https://curiosity.im/2tuLndn Find Out Where Your House Would Have Been on Pangaea — https://curiosity.im/2tuw9oH 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! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about how much you can say with simple noises called vocal bursts; why you might keep hearing about the Kepler Space Telescope even though it’s retired; and how you can find out where your house would’ve been on Pangaea.
Please support our sponsors! Small business owners: visit https://www.ondeck.com/curiosity to receive a free consultation with a US-based loan specialist. Apply online or by phone and get approved in minutes.
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:
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! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/communicate-using-simple-noises-find-your-house-on-pangaea-and-keplers-legacy
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how much you can say with simple noises; why you might keep hearing about the Kepler Space Telescope even though it’s retired; and how you can find out where your house would’ve been on Pangea.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Scientists Have Created an Audio Map of Emotions Using Only Noises — https://curiosity.im/2GXuYWv (Cody)
There’s new research into how much we can communicate using a thing called vocal bursts. You absolutely use these. They include laughs and roars, oohs and ahhs, sighs and shrieks. It’s those little non-language-based noises we make. And this study is SUPER FUN. [ad lib]
CODY: This research was published in a recent paper in American Psychologist. And it comes from an emerging field in psychology called emotion science. It has its own journal and everything! Anyway, the point of the study was to see how many feelings you can communicate with these little vocal bursts. According to past studies, people can recognize 13 emotions in vocal bursts. But those studies took answers from multiple-choice questions, so the options were kinda limited. For THIS study, researchers put together a library of more than two-thousand vocal bursts, and then they asked more than a thousand people to describe them. Some of the participants used the 13-item affective scale that was popular in previous emotion science research. But other participants got to describe the bursts in free responses, and a third group categorized the bursts in one of 30 emotional categories, like love, relief, and disappointment. And the result was that according to this study, you can reliably communicate feelings with vocal bursts in not 13, but 24 emotional categories. You can see the full list of categories in our write-up on Curiosity-dot-com and on our free Curiosity app for Android and iOS, ALONG WITH AN INTERACTIVE MAP the researchers put together. This part is pretty fun. You can pull up the website on your computer and hover your mouse over different emotions, and they’re color-coded based on their primary category. Most of the sounds have a mix of categories, like there’s one vocal burst that’s 50 percent amusement, 25 percent embarrassment, and 8 percent each for anger, ecstasy, and elation. The sounds for desire and ecstacy are a bit, um, parental guidance suggested, by the way. Let’s go over a few of the other categories, though, are you ready? [ASHLEY MAKE SOUND EFFECTS AFTER EACH ONE] Sympathy; disgust; positive surprise; negative surprise; disappointment; confusion. This study just leaves me with one feeling: triumph! [make a triumph effect]
This Is the Kepler Space Telescope's Final Image — https://curiosity.im/2tuLndn (Republish) (Ashley)
On October 30th, 2018, The Kepler Space Telescope retired after 9 years of teaching us about the universe. The thing is, it’s not done yet! We cover a lot of stories about space here at Curiosity, so we thought it might make sense to tell you why you might be hearing about Kepler for years to come. Not to mention Kepler just released its final image, which you can see on curiosity-dot-com. As reported by Universe Today, Kepler collected a LOT of data. And that data is going to take years to sift through. Some of the stuff Kepler found has already made a big splash. Remember when astronomers announced that they’d found a system of 7 rocky planets in the TRAPPIST-1 star system? Well, Kepler discovered that system. Kepler also observed GJ 9827, which is a nearby star where we detected three possible Super-Earths in 2017. In the end, Kepler discovered almost four-thousand planetary candidates from outside our solar system, and confirmed the existence of more than twenty-six-hundred. It also statistically showed that our galaxy has even more planets than stars. Not bad for a 9-year mission. The satellite didn’t just take pictures, by the way: during its last mission, Kepler’s camera took 30-minute recordings of certain targets. It took those recordings to measure the brightness of the stars it was observing, which is important for helping us find transits by exoplanets — and it ALSO helps us understand key aspects of stellar behavior. With all those photos and videos to sort through, here’s some good news: Kepler’s data is public. In fact, in April 2017, citizen scientists used Kepler data to find a system with up to six planets. That’s right: citizen scientists discovered a planetary system, for the first time ever! Now that Kepler’s enjoying its golden years, it’ll be up to next-generation telescopes to help us collect information about our universe. The James Webb Space Telescope and the Wide-Field Infrafred Survey Telescope are slated for launch in 2021 and in the mid-2020s, respectively. They’ll use improved instruments with optical, infrared, and spectographic capabilities. And they’ll probably discover several thousand more exoplanets, according to scientists. What’s cool about them is that they’ll hopefully also play a role in exoplanet characterization. That’s a growing field where scientists can use the advanced resolution and imaging capabilities of new telescopes to study the atmospheres of other planets, and even search for signs of life. Until then, don’t be surprised if you hear Kepler pop up on this podcast again in the near future. There’s so much more we can learn from its work!
[ONDECK]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is sponsored by OnDeck.
CODY: Listen up, small business owners! Whether you’re trying to send a telescope up into space, or you’re just looking to purchase inventory or upgrade your office supplies, it’s really hard to get access to capital. Most traditional banks would rather just lend to larger, more established businesses. That’s where OnDeck comes in.
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ASHLEY: Apply online or by phone and get approved in minutes. Just visit on-deck-dot-com-slash-curiosity, that’s C-U-R, I-O-S, I-T-Y, for your free consultation now.
Find Out Where Your House Would Have Been on Pangea — https://curiosity.im/2tuw9oH (Cody)
Remember the good old days? When all the continents were just one big mega-continent? Uh… alright, well you probably don’t remember those days, because they were like, 175 million years ago. BUT! If you’re still somehow nostalgic for those geographically simpler times, when you only had to remember the name “Pangea” instead of all 7 continents, then we’ve got some good news. Thanks to a software engineer named Ian Webster, you can load up an ancient map of the Earth and find out where your house would’ve been. You can find the interactive map on his website, dinosaur-pictures-dot-org. And you can use it to pinpoint a modern address in any of 26 different geological areas. It’s an out-of-the-box way to connect yourself to the planet’s history. You can set the map to 20, two-hundred, six-hundred years ago… as far back as 750 million years ago, with lots of intervals in-between. We checked out our address here in Chicago, because of course we did, and the further back you go, the closer Chicago and the rest of North America drifts towards Africa. Around 220 million years ago, you'll find Florida wedged right in there between South America and Africa, with the region that will eventually become Europe and Asia hovering a little bit overhead. By the way, did you know that Pangea split into two sub-supercontinents before it split into the 7 continents we know today? The one in the north was called Laurasia, which included North America, Europe, and Asia. And the one in the south was called Gondwanaland, which included Africa, South America, Australia, and Antarctica. They broke into their current configurations later on, and that division is still going on today. In fact, Africa is splitting into two continents — but that’s a story we’ll get into next week. In the meantime, you can drop a pin on a map to see where you would’ve lived on the website dinosaur-pictures-dot-org. Enjoy!
ASHLEY: Read about today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com!
CODY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!