Defending Against “Murder Hornets” with Bee Balls, Aphantasia and the Two Extremes of the “Mind’s Eye,” and Venus’s Freaky-Fast Atmosphere
Learn about the surprising way Japanese honeybees defend themselves against "murder hornets" (actual name: Asian giant hornets); how “atmospheric tidal waves” make Venus’s atmosphere rotate faster than the actual planet; and the wide spectrum of how people mentally visualize images, including aphantasia and hyperphantasia.
Japanese honeybees defend against 'murder hornets' by forming bee balls by Cameron Duke
Venus's atmosphere rotates 60 times faster than the planet because of "atmospheric tidal waves" by Grant Currin
The two extremes of the "mind's eye": aphantasia and hyperphantasia by Kelsey Donk
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/defending-against-murder-hornets-with-bee-balls-aphantasia-and-the-two-extremes-of-the-minds-eye-and-venuss-freaky-fast-atmosphere
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 the surprising way Japanese honeybees defend themselves against “murder hornets”; how “atmospheric tidal waves” make Venus’s atmosphere rotate faster than the actual planet; and the surprisingly wide spectrum of how people mentally visualize images.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you live in North America, you might be aware of the hype and fear surrounding the recent arrival of the Asian Giant hornet — you know, the “murder hornet.” It’s not a big threat to humans, although the species is responsible for up to 50 deaths per year in their native Japan. The real threat they pose is to honeybees. Luckily, one species of honeybee has evolved a pretty impressive defense against them. Impressive and… extremely violent. So fair warning that this story is going to describe some serious insect carnage.
When the Asian Giant hornet happens upon a honeybee nest, things get real ugly, real fast. The hornets start with what’s called the slaughter phase, where they use their massive mandibles to decapitate the worker bees one by one. Once they’ve killed off the nest’s defenses, they move in, chowing down on the honeybee pupae and larvae. Obviously, this causes serious damage to honeybee colonies. But Japanese honeybees have co-evolved with these wasps to defend themselves.
When a scout from a hornet colony encounters a Japanese Honeybee nest, they rarely have a chance to send word back to their colony. That’s because the honeybees immediately surround it to create a literal “bee ball.” They don’t sting the hornet — it has too much armor for that. Instead, the hundreds of bees piled on the lone hornet begin batting their wings back and forth. The friction from the bees’ movements and body heat raise the temperature within the ball. Like, a lot. The heat rises to around 114 degrees Fahrenheit, or 46 degrees Celsius. Toasty! But the heat alone is not what does the hornet in.
Scientists who were curious about how bee balls worked took some giant hornets and placed them in an incubator at that same temperature. They found that the hornets are perfectly capable of tolerating the heat. But there’s a second jab of the bee ball one-two punch: CO2, which the bees are exhaling a LOT as they heat the bee ball. It turns out that the heat lowers the hornet’s tolerance for carbon dioxide, which causes it to suffocate. The scout hornet never makes it back to her friends to bring the rest of the swarm.
There are other bee species known to form bee balls, but the European honeybee we use as a pollinator in the states isn’t one of them. That makes the arrival of the Asian Giant Hornet a real risk to their survival. Our only hope is that researchers can find and eliminate the hornets’ hives before they can do damage. They say it’ll be tough, but they’re working on it.
Earth’s atmosphere rotates at about the same rate as the planet does. That’s good: it means we aren’t constantly pelted by hurricane-force winds. If you lived on Venus, you wouldn’t be so lucky. Because Venus’ atmosphere rotates 60 times faster than the planet does. And new research might explain why. Astronomers who carefully tracked clouds of sulfuric acid have figured out the mechanism behind the waves, tides, and turbulence that keep Venus’s atmosphere spinning.
Venus has a heck of an atmosphere. Its mass is greater than any other terrestrial planet, and its greenhouse effect is so powerful that the planet is hotter than Mercury, even though it’s twice as far from the sun. Venus’s atmosphere also moves way, way faster than the planet itself. It takes Venus 243 Earth days to rotate one time, but the atmosphere makes a full rotation in just four Earth days.
How’s it even possible for an atmosphere to move so much faster than its planet? Astronomers call the phenomenon super-rotation, and it’s all thanks to the sun.
The story starts near the planet’s equator, where the sun’s rays pump a ton of energy onto Venus’ dayside. Because the planet rotates so slowly, its dayside has time to heat up while its nightside stays cold. Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft has been in orbit around Venus since 2015, and it recently let astronomers see how that daytime energy dissipates around the planet. Images from ultraviolet and infrared cameras show that the solar energy causes powerful tidal waves of gas that race around the planet. Those atmospheric tidal waves cause the whole atmosphere to rotate at an incredibly high speed.
After combing through their data on cloud movements and wind speeds, the astronomers also found other patterns of waves and turbulence that affect the atmosphere’s rotation. They still don’t have a clear picture of exactly what’s happening everywhere on the planet, but it looks like the tidal wave that moves from dayside to nightside also causes other systems of waves and eddies. Some of them support the atmosphere’s super-rotation and others work against it, slowing things down at certain latitudes.
Astronomers have been trying to figure out why Venus’s atmosphere moves so fast ever since the phenomenon was discovered in the 1960s, so this new discovery is certainly welcome. But the researchers behind this study hope their findings will also shine a light on mysteries that lie beyond our solar system. This new information may help us figure out what it’s like on exoplanets with one side that always faces their sun.
Not everyone visualizes things in the same way. And sometimes those differences can be downright extreme. So picture this:
Think about a friend you see a lot. Visualize what they look like: the contours of their face, the color of their eyes, their expression after you tell a bad joke. How vivid is that image in your mind? If you’re one of the rare people with aphantasia, you probably see no image at all. If you’re on the other end of the spectrum with hyperphantasia, you see your friend’s face as if they’re standing right in front of you. A new study dug into these two extreme but understudied forms of visual imagery, and here’s what it found.
The idea that someone could lack a “mind’s eye” dates back to the 19th century with British psychologist Sir Francis Galton. But the topic fell out of favor until 2015, when Professor Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter wrote a paper describing 21 people with this absence of visual imagery, which he named “aphantasia.” Since then, there have been a flurry of studies, along with growing interest in the opposite extreme of hyperphantasia. This boost in popularity also led to an increase in study volunteers, so Zeman had thousands of willing participants for his latest study.
For that study, researchers gave a questionnaire to 2000 people who have aphantasia and 200 people who have hyperphantasia. Here’s what they found.
First of all, it’s clear that visual imagery has implications for more than just imagining a friend’s face. People with aphantasia were more likely to say they had a bad memory, and past research has found a link between aphantasia and trouble recognizing faces. On the other end, people with hyperphantasia are also more likely to have synesthesia, where one sense is simultaneously perceived by another sense, like “hearing” colors or tasting numbers. But hyperphantasia isn’t all good news: past studies have found that that super-vivid imagination can also make Parkinson's disease hallucinations and PTSD flashbacks even worse.
Visual imagery also seems to influence a person’s career path. They found that more than 20 percent of people with aphantasia worked in science, computing, or mathematics. More than a quarter of the people with hyperphantasia worked in arts, design, entertainment, and other creative industries.
Interestingly, most of the people with aphantasia said they dreamt visually, even if they had difficulty thinking visually in their waking lives.
The good news, if you think your visualization abilities are on either end of the spectrum: people with both aphantasia and hyperphantasia see their abilities as advantages. The researchers stress that neither aphantasia nor hyperphantasia is seen as a disorder. Instead, they give us a sense of how vast the human experience really is.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Cameron Duke, Grant Currin, and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was 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!