Learn how accurate fossil preparators must be; why electric cars are an old concept; and words on the tip of your tongue. Additional information about fossil preparators and other resources from Caitlyn Wylie: Pick up the open-access book "Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes": https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5180/Preparing-DinosaursThe-Work-behind-the-Scenes Faculty page https://engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/caitlin-donahue-wylie Follow @CaitlinDWylie on Twitter https://twitter.com/CaitlinDWylie Electric cars are the future, but they are also the distant past by Cameron Duke Hanlon, M. (2012, June 27). Le Jamais Contente - the first purpose-built land speed record car. New Atlas. https://newatlas.com/le-jamais-contente-first-land-speed-record/23094/ Kirsch, D. A. (2021). The electric car and the burden of history: Studies in automotive systems rivalry in America, 1890--1996 - ProQuest. Proquest.com. https://www.proquest.com/openview/2615595fdc7e4891b8fac5ddfb762066/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y The History of the Electric Car. (2014). Energy.gov. https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car Wilson, K. A. (2018, March 15). Worth the Watt: A Brief History of the Electric Car, 1830 to Present. Car and Driver; Car and Driver. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g15378765/worth-the-watt-a-brief-history-of-the-electric-car-1830-to-present/ Word on the tip of your tongue by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Mariana in Lisbon, Portugal) Emmorey, K. D., & Fromkin, V. A. (1988). The mental lexicon. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, 124–149. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511621062.006 The Virtual Linguistics Campus. (2012). PSY112 - The Mental Lexicon [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8HIAVTeGNk D’Angelo, M. C., & Humphreys, K. R. (2015). Tip-of-the-tongue states reoccur because of implicit learning, but resolving them helps. Cognition, 142, 166–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.05.019 Oliver, L. K., Li, T., Harley, J. J., & Humphreys, K. R. (2019). Neither Cue Familiarity nor Semantic Cues Increase the Likelihood of Repeating a Tip-of-the-Tongue State. Collabra: Psychology, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.200 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn how accurate fossil preparators must be; why electric cars are an old concept; and words on the tip of your tongue.
Additional information about fossil preparators and other resources from Caitlyn Wylie:
Electric cars are the future, but they are also the distant past by Cameron Duke
Word on the tip of your tongue by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Mariana in Lisbon, Portugal)
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/fossil-prep-mistakes-1840s-electric-cars-tip-of-your-tongue
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 accurate fossil preparators have to be when they’re dusting off dinosaur bones, with help from author Caitlin Wylie. You’ll also learn why electric cars are just as much the future as they are the past; and we’ll answer a listener question about how you can know something’s on the tip of your tongue even when you don’t know what that thing is.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Yesterday, Caitlin Wylie told us about how painstaking and difficult it is to prepare a dinosaur fossil for research. Today, she's going to tell us what could happen if that process goes wrong. Caitlin Wylie is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia and author of the new book "Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes." We asked her: how often do preparators accidentally damage these fossils?
[CLIP 2:31]
Caitlin told us that her theory for why fossil preparators are left so removed from the science is that it maintains objectivity. Preparators don't have an incentive for the bone to be any particular species, so they'll prepare the fossil the way it should be prepared and leave it up to the scientist to examine. Makes sense to me! Again, that was Caitlin Wylie, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia and author of the new completely free, open-access book "Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes." You can find a link to the book in the show notes — just in time for the weekend.
Every year, more and more electric cars come on the market as we slowly move away from fossil fuels. It’s easy to think of these shiny new vehicles as cutting-edge technological innovations, but actually, electric cars aren’t new. In fact, they’re older than gas-powered cars.
Get this: the first electric car was built in the ‘40s. And I don’t mean the 1940s; I mean the 1840s. As you might imagine, its creation was an impressive technological feat. I mean, the thing could travel a full mile and a half, or 2.4 kilometers, before the battery needed to be replaced. It was a powerful proof of concept, but it was more of a parlor trick than practical transportation. And it stayed that way for about 20 years.
When the rechargeable battery came along in 1859, electric cars became cool again. They hit the mainstream in the 1890s when the first commercially successful electric car went to market. It was a taxicab called the Electrobat, a name that’s probably still fair game if you wanted to start a renewable Batmobile rideshare company.
The Electrobat topped out at 25 miles per hour, which doesn’t sound that impressive. But that’s not to say electric cars were sluggish in general: at the time, other electric cars were busy setting land speed records. The first car to break the 100 kilometer-per-hour speed barrier was a torpedo-shaped electric car made in Paris.
At the turn of the century, electric cars were common in cities and largely preferred for being quieter and cleaner than their fossil-fuel burning counterparts. But by the 1920s, electric cars began to disappear. That was for a variety of reasons. One was the fact that they could only drive a few dozen miles before they needed to be recharged, and recharging took hours. (By comparison, a Tesla can run for at least 250 miles before it needs charging). Another reason was cost. Ford’s assembly lines churned out gas powered cars for roughly half the price of an electric car. As gas-powered cars became more common, electric cars fell into obscurity.
As electric cars become more common again, remember, this isn’t uncharted territory. Cars today are just returning to their battery-powered roots.
We got a listener question from Mariana in Lisbon, Portugal, who asks “How does your brain know that you know something without being able to remember it at the time? For example, knowing a word that could be used perfectly in context but not being able to remember the word.” Great question, Mariana!
This all comes down to a system known as the mental lexicon. The mental lexicon is basically where words live in your brain. But if you’re imagining a mental dictionary, complete with definitions, spelling, and pronunciation all in one place, think again. Instead, all of those words are stored in four different ways. One is by how they sound or their phonological details, another is by how they look on the page or their morphological details, another is by what they mean or their semantic elements, and another is what role they play in grammar or their syntactic details.
So, for example, let’s think about the word “see,” S-E-E. It sounds like several other words, including S-E-A, and the letter C. So you need more than just the sound to know what it means. If you saw it written down, you’d know it was spelled S-E-E, and those other options would be off the table. Then you’d realize that its definition refers to vision or sight, and you’d know that it was a verb, or an action word.
But what about if you had to come up with a word yourself? Let’s make that word a little more complicated: let’s try to think of the word “perceive.” You might start out knowing that you want a verb that means something like “observe” or “take in,” but that’s where your train of thought comes to a stop. You’ve got the meaning and which part of speech it is — in other words, you know its semantic and syntactic details — but nothing else. That’s how your brain can know you know something without actually being able to come up with it.
So, how do you retrieve the rest of the word? More importantly, how do you keep yourself from forgetting next time? Luckily, science has some clues. First of all, research suggests that when a word lands on the tip of your tongue once, it’s likely to do it again later. To fix that, do your best to actually find the word. Studies suggest that if you can correct yourself, you’re less likely to forget the word next time. The key word is yourself — having other people tell you the word won’t help you. Thanks for your question, Mariana! If you have a question, send it in to curiosity at discovery dot com or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about why “trusting science” makes you more likely to share false science;
How researchers plan to map the ocean floor by 2030;
Whether you should kill spiders inside your home;
Why it took more than 70 years to guarantee 8-hour workdays in the US;
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: The writer for today’s second story was Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also a writer and audio editor on today’s episode.
ASHLEY: Our producer and lead audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend! [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Then, join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!