Learn about why criminal profiling doesn’t seem to work in real life; planets with oceans of molten rock that basically eat the sky; and superhuman red blood cells that could be used to deliver life-saving drugs.
Learn about why criminal profiling doesn’t seem to work in real life; planets with oceans of molten rock that basically eat the sky; and superhuman red blood cells that could be used to deliver life-saving drugs.
Criminal Profiling Probably Doesn’t Work by Kelsey Donk
Some Exoplanets’ Magma Oceans Eat Their Skies by Grant Currin
Superhuman Red Blood Cells for Drug Delivery by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/criminal-profiling-doesnt-work-exoplanets-magma-oceans-eat-their-skies-and-superhuman-red-blood-cells-for-drug-delivery
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 criminal profiling doesn’t seem to work in real life; planets with oceans of molten rock that basically eat the sky; and how scientists measure how serious a disease like coronavirus really is.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you have fantasies of being like a character on Mindhunter or Criminal Minds, we have bad news for you. It turns out that criminal profiling is mostly fiction. “Criminal profiling” as in, the idea that you can peek at a crime scene and know what the perpetrator looks like and how he thinks. In real life, it just doesn’t appear to work.
The whole idea all started with the “Mad Bomber,”who was a real-life criminal who planted tons of bombs in New York City in the 1940s and ‘50s. A psychiatrist — the first criminal profiler — gave police a description of the bomber based on the crimes. He predicted the bomber was an unmarried man who wore buttoned double breasted suits. And he was! But that could have been a lucky guess. Lots of men wore double breasted suits in those days. And most of the other predictions by that psychiatrist were either wildly off-base or worthless to investigators.
And that psychiatrist wasn’t the only one with faulty guesses. One recent study found that expert criminal profilers aren't much better at judging a crime scene and coming up with a profile of the perpetrator than random people off of the street. Another study found that there was next to zero similarity between the demographics of criminals who committed similar crimes.
In other words, the central claim of criminal profiling is nonsense. And the problem is pretty simple. According to criminologist Dan Kennedy, it all comes down to the false idea that how you behave at a crime scene is also how you are in your day-to-day life. That might seem like common sense, but the correlation is actually too weak to be of use in criminal investigations.
But even though we know criminal profiling doesn’t really work, we still use it. In fact, the use of criminal profiling in criminal investigations has only increased, and examining that practice isn’t getting any easier. In 2015, a study showed that criminal profilers are reluctant to have their work studied; they claim that because people want it, it must work. And the FBI refuses to turn over their files. So, researchers have a hard time figuring out how much of profiling actually does work.
According to all the research, it seems like we’re wasting a massive amount of resources and intellectual power on this non-science-science. Criminal profiling will probably stick around on our favorite TV shows, but we need to try to remember that it’s fiction, not science.
ASHLEY: Have you ever wondered how big a rocky planet can get? From the planets we’ve found, there seems to be a limit. And now, scientists have figured out why — at least, when it comes to the many rocky planets with oceans of magma. The magma EATS the atmosphere.
CODY: You can pretty much sum up this story in five words: magma oceans eating the sky
ASHLEY: You can blame this mystery on the Kepler space telescope. It spent nearly a decade scanning our corner of the Milky Way for stars and planets. But researchers noticed a strange pattern when it came to the sizes of the planets Kepler found. There are a lot of planets that are about the same size as Earth. There are also a lot of planets that are twice as big, and three times as big as Earth. But if you ask the Kepler telescope, there are hardly any rocky planets bigger than that. And scientists didn’t know why.
That is, until December 2019, when a team of researchers solved one piece of the puzzle. Their reason: the floor is lava. Not just the floor, but whole oceans. Put more scientifically, it looks like the surfaces of these small, terrestrial planets are blanketed endless seas of magma.
What do these planets’ molten surfaces have to do with their size? Well, the reason these planets are covered in lava is that they have heavy, thick atmospheres that are rich in hydrogen. The atmospheres are so thick that they make up most of the planets’ volume. So, the bigger the atmosphere, the bigger the planet.
As they form and grow, the planets acquire more and more hydrogen, which makes their atmospheres heavier. These heavier atmospheres push harder on the surface of the planet, increasing the atmospheric pressure.
Here’s where things get wild: When the pressure gets high enough, hydrogen atoms from the atmosphere dissolve into the magma. The oceans of molten rock basically eat the sky!
This makes the atmosphere shrink, which lowers the atmospheric pressure and makes the magma dissolve hydrogen more slowly. The researchers turned these concepts into equations, plugged in the numbers they knew, and found that atmospheric pressure and reactivity between hydrogen and magma reach a point of equilibrium when a planet is about — wait for it — three times the size of Earth.
The researchers say even though their work solves this one puzzle about big terrestrial planets, these planets still have a lot to teach us. Hopefully the next thing we learn isn’t quite so...violent.
Researchers have figured out a way to deliver life-saving drugs more effectively with way fewer side effects. How? By tweaking the body’s own red blood cells.
When you get sick, your immune system can be your best friend. You’re constantly bombarded with pathogens and viruses, and for the most part, your immune system is really good at fighting them off. Sometimes, though, it needs a little help. Immune-resistant pathogens, tumors, and degenerative diseases tend to be an extra challenge for the immune system, so in those cases, people go to the doctor for treatment, whether that’s an antibiotic or cancer drugs. But the immune system really doesn’t like foreign substances like these. When it spots them, it’ll sometimes attack them — and that keeps the drug from doing its job. To get around this, doctors will prescribe drugs in higher doses. But that can lead to unpleasant side effects, especially with very potent medications.
So researchers at McMaster University decided to tackle this problem by being sneaky. They have developed what they’re calling super-human red blood cells, which sounds a little like something that could get your country banned from the Olympics. But it’s really a new drug delivery method that takes advantage of your existing biology to fool your immune system.
Here’s how it works. Your red blood cells are responsible for carrying oxygen from your lungs to the rest of your body. They’re basically little capsules of oxygen-loving proteins called hemoglobin. These researchers have developed a way to take a person’s red blood cells and replace the hemoglobin with medication, like an antibiotic or an anti-cancer drug. Then, they modify the outside of the cell to be sticky, which helps it attach to bacteria or cancer cells and release the drug on contact.
While they haven’t clinically tested this method in humans, previous research shows that using red blood cells is a fantastic way for drugs to fly under the radar of your immune system. By disguising drugs like this, doctors hope to be able to prescribe those drugs in lower doses to cut down the risk of side effects while still getting the job done.
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Grant Currin, and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was scripted, produced, and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!