Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, explains how today’s unprecedented closures can help save lives from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Plus: learn how birds avoid spreading fake news and how astronomers are using auroras to find distant exoplanets.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, explains how today’s unprecedented closures can help save lives from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Plus: learn how birds avoid spreading fake news and how astronomers are using auroras to find distant exoplanets.
Birds alter the spread of information based on its trustworthiness by Kelsey Donk
Astronomers are finding distant exoplanets by looking for auroras in their home stars by Grant Currin
Additional resources recommended by Dr. Amesh Adalja:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/dr-amesh-adalja-explains-social-distancing-for-covid-19-birds-wont-spread-fake-news-and-using-auroras-to-find-exoplanets
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 how birds avoid spreading fake news; and how astronomers are using auroras to find distant exoplanets. And if you’re stuck at home wondering about the unprecedented closures happening around the world right now, then stick around. Because Dr. Amesh Adalja will join us from Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security to explain how these big changes can help save lives.
CODY: Animals, astronomy, AND epidemiology? Talk about an action-packed episode. And you’re getting TWO episodes tomorrow. More on that later! Right now, let’s satisfy some curiosity.
A new study says birds measure the trustworthiness of information before repeating it. And they won’t spread fake news. So much for being “bird-brains,” am I right? Let’s see what we can learn from these little tweeters.
Well first off, there aren’t any secrets in the animal kingdom. So when a chickadee calls a high-pitched, “seet,” other birds go silent, look up, and dive in the bushes. A hawk is flying through, and all the birds know to look out for it immediately. Sound familiar — maybe like how news spreads on Twitter?
Researchers call these complex bird alert systems the “original tweeting,” and they mimic our own social media networks in more ways than one. Fake news exists in nature, too. And thanks to new research, we now know that birds look at the source of their information before they decide to share.
That’s right — we now understand how birds decide whether or not to “retweet” the news they get. Birds have different warning calls for different threats they see or hear. So a call for “there’s a snake on the ground” sounds different from “there’s a hawk flying over there!” The calls are ridiculously sophisticated. They can tell nearby animals both how big and how immediate the threat is.
But what researchers found for this most recent study is that birds called nuthatches [NUT-hatches] vary their calls based on the source of information. When they hear the call of one of their predators directly, they send out a really specific warning. But when they hear the information from another species, like the chickadee, they send out a sort of generic alarm. Basically, the birds try to confirm information for themselves so they don’t end up spreading “fake news” around the forest.
So, yeah. The big takeaway here is that birds have a more impressive system for deciding if information is credible than humans do. Oh well! Good for the birds.
Scientists have found yet another exoplanet, but this time it’s different. That’s because they did it using a new way of finding worlds beyond our solar system. Even cooler, that method was inspired by the celestial bodies in our own backyard.
Jupiter’s moon Io [EYE-oh] holds the title of most volcanic in the solar system. It’s positively covered with volcanoes, which spew charged particles out into space. As the moon orbits Jupiter, those charged particles interact with the planet’s magnetic field. The result? Huge, circular, glowing auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere. They’re like the northern lights on steroids.
So imagine astronomers’ surprise when they spotted huge, circular radio flares coming off of a faraway star called GJ 1151. The flares were way bigger than you’d expect from this kind of star — which is a dim, magnetically active star known as an M dwarf. These flares lasted for hours and hours, and they seemed to be swirling around the star instead of straight out into space — kind of like an aurora.
The researchers spotted this strange sight using a network of 20,000 small radio antennas positioned across Europe. The network is called the Low Frequency Array, and it works like a huge satellite dish that’s sensitive enough to see objects we’ve never been able to detect before.
The researchers noticed GJ 1151 because its solar flares showed surprisingly strong signals in the new data. When they compared those observations with a map of stars in the Milky Way, the evidence suggested that just like Io and Jupiter, these flares were indeed caused by an interaction between the star’s magnetic field and charged particles coming from a planet — a planet we never knew existed.
The researchers haven’t seen the planet itself, but it’s the best explanation they have for why an otherwise-quiet star is throwing off such spectacular auroras. To be fair, though, they did try to check their work with other planet-hunting methods and came up empty. That could either mean there’s no planet there or that the planet is too small to see with traditional methods: that is, less than five times the size of the Earth. If the latter ends up being true, that would make this the only method capable of finding such small planets. This could be the first object discovered with a method that’s set to discover dozens or even hundreds more small, rocky worlds that we’ve never seen before.
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CODY: We’re releasing this podcast during what is pretty much a global lockdown. We know Curiosity Daily is kind of an escape from the news, but virtually everyone on the planet is affected by what’s happening right now. And we ARE a science podcast. So we got in touch with an expert to help you understand what’s going on right now.
ASHLEY: Dr. Amesh Adalja [AY-mish uh-DAHL-jah] is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. And tomorrow, along with our regularly scheduled episode of Curiosity Daily, we’ll also be releasing an extra BONUS episode with our full interview. We want to do what we can to help you stay informed.
CODY: That said, we know that a LOT of people — including Ashley and me — are stuck at home right now. Everything seems to be closing. And some people are wondering why. Here’s a preview of our conversation with Dr. Adalja that’ll hopefully help you understand.
[CLIP TBD]
ASHLEY: Again, that was Dr. Amesh Adalja [AY-mish uh-DAHL-jah], Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. Keep an eye on your podcast feed for a bonus episode featuring him tomorrow.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, and Grant Currin, 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!