Learn how calling loved ones builds stronger social connections than texting does, why the return of wolves improved life for every animal in Yellowstone, and how body snatchers of the 19th century contributed to modern medicine.
Learn how calling loved ones builds stronger social connections than texting does, why the return of wolves improved life for every animal in Yellowstone, and how body snatchers of the 19th century contributed to modern medicine.
Call, Don't Text, for a Stronger Social Connection by Kelsey Donk
The Return of Wolves Improved Life for Every Animal in Yellowstone by Reuben Westmaas
Why 19th-Century Body Snatchers Were an Essential Part of Medical Science by Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-19th-century-body-snatchers-contributed-to-medical-science
ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn how calling builds stronger social connections than texting does, why the return of wolves improved life for every animal in Yellowstone, and how body snatchers of the 19th century contributed to modern medicine.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity. The pandemic is still here and winter is coming. That means it's as important as ever to find ways to stay connected to socially distanced friends and family. It's easy to shoot someone a text or send them an email. But new research from the University of Texas is a good reminder that those seemingly easy routes aren't necessarily The. Best ones.
For the strongest social connections, we should call the friends and family that we're missing. In one experiment, the researchers behind this study asked 200 people to name an old friend they'd like to reconnect with. Then say whether they'd rather reconnect over the phone or email and why.
Obviously, people said they'd rather skip the awkward phone call and just send an email even though they knew the phone call would probably make them feel more connected. But then the researchers did something dastardly. They randomly assigned the participants to either call or email that old friend. This is making me nervous.
But wouldn't you know it? People reported that they formed stronger bonds with their old friends over the phone. Phone calls also didn't feel any more awkward than emails. So even though the people thought the phone call would be uncomfortable, it wasn't. Their fears were unfounded.
They found the same result in another experiment that had strangers ask each other personal questions over a live text chat, video chat, or a phone call. Once again, people felt more connected to each other when they could hear each other's voices, whether that was via phone or video chat.
I know what you're thinking, but Ashley, phone calls takes so much time. I can't just drop what I'm doing and call a friend. Well, get a load of this. The team found that calling took about the same amount of time as reading and responding to an email.
So take it from science. It's always a good idea to pick up the phone and call a friend. It probably won't be awkward, won't take too much time, and will make you feel less lonely and more connected. And we could all use more of that these days.
NATALIA REAGAN: This isn't going to make a lot of sense, but I swear, it's true. The best thing to ever happen to elk at Yellowstone was a pack of hungry wolves. Really. And the elk were only part of the picture. Ever since Rangers reintroduced eight wolves to Yellowstone in 1995, the park has changed in ways that not many people could have predicted.
Here's how it happened. Back in the late 1800s, the US government sent an expedition to explore the area that would become Yellowstone National Park. The verdict, the scenery is nice, but the bloodthirsty predators would have to go.
By the end of the 1920s, Yellowstone's gray wolves had been hunted to eradication. The people rejoiced. Finally, the elk and the other grazers could flourish. And that's exactly what happened for a little while, at least. Without wolves to keep them in check, the elk population exploded.
The animals decimated, the bark and leaves of aspen and willow trees, leaving only young sprouts and shrubs. Without those trees, the beaver population began to fall. If only they had parachutes. Without the beavers in their dams, the shape of the rivers changed. Without the scraps the wolves left behind, scavengers like eagles, coyotes, and wolverines languished too. And on top of it all, the elk started to suffer.
So after two decades, how did just eight wolves undo all that damage? Pretty effectively as a matter of fact. Today, the park is home to roughly 100 wolves. Because the wolves hunted the elk, the aspen and willow returned. Gradually, the ecosystem returned to a state of equilibrium.
But not everyone was on board with the wolves' return. Least of all, the ranchers. December 2012 saw the biggest setback when a wolf known as 06 female was shot and killed outside of the park by an unknown hunter.
The wolf was the dominant member of her pack and was beloved by Rangers and tourists alike for her incredible intelligence and powerful build. Her story was immortalized in a National Geographic documentary, She Wolf. But many of the park's employees still get emotional when talking about her.
Still, the overall story has been one of triumph and success. And it's given us a greater understanding of exactly how delicate the balance of nature really is.
ASHLEY HAMER: Doctors have to be intimately familiar with the human body and comfortable with death. Medical school students check both of these boxes by dissecting cadavers, that is dead human bodies. As you might expect, cadavers haven't always been easy to come by. And that has sometimes led to a proliferation of grave robbing, body snatching, and even murder.
For centuries, anatomy students studied the bodies of executed criminals as those were the only bodies that were actually legal to use for dissection. But by the early 1800s, demand outstripped the supply. Medical institutions flourished while executions waned.
This created a ghoulish business opportunity. People known as resurrectionists stole bodies from fresh graves and sold them to medical schools. Stealing a corpse from its grave actually wasn't illegal since the law didn't consider bodies to be anyone's property. It was only a crime to steal the stuff buried with a body.
But dissecting the body was a crime, albeit one with a light sentence. The doctors who purchased the bodies just didn't question where they came from. Many even condoned body snatching as a necessary evil the ends justify the means.
Resurrectionists made pretty good money from these unsavory missions sometimes earning up to 10 pounds per body, roughly 1,000 pounds, or $1,300, today. The fresher a body, the more it was worth. So it wasn't long before some body snatchers graduated to murder.
William Burke met William Hare in Scotland in 1827. Over the next year, they're said to have killed at least 16 people for profit. They'd lure poor people to a boarding house that Hare managed, and then poison or suffocate them. This way, the bodies arrived at the medical school intact and without suspicion.
But their greed got the best of them. The pair was caught when their final victim was discovered in the boarding house on Halloween, 1828. Hare was granted immunity to testify against Burke, so he got off scot-free. Burke was convicted and hanged in front of 25,000 people. His body was publicly displayed and fittingly, donated to medical science.
Nowadays, medical schools use bodies that have been donated. Thanks in part to Burke and Hare. Their crimes and subsequent copycats led the UK to amend its laws, making the dissection of unclaimed or donated corpses legal.
Today, many medical schools are opting for virtual dissection over using actual cadavers. It's a high tech step forward for a science with a very gruesome past.
NATALIA REAGAN: So let's recap what we learned today to wrap up, starting with-- well, we learned that picking up the phone to catch up with loved ones is a better way to stay connected and actually takes, on average, about an equal amount of time as it does to read and respond to an email. And I've got to say, I've got a soft spot for those who pick up the phone.
ASHLEY HAMER: I am always terrified when my phone rings. I'm definitely a socially awkward millennial. But this is a good reminder that talking on the phone is a better way to forge connection with people. And it's not actually as awkward as I think it's going to be. But boy, it's a tough hurdle to get over.
NATALIA REAGAN: It is. And it's funny. We don't have a huge age difference between us, but when I was a little kid, growing up, when I got the access to be able to talk on the phone to friends, I'm not kidding, five hours a night, I would talk to people I saw eight hours a day at school. Did you do that?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, yes. I absolutely did that. Yeah. I knew all of my friends' phone numbers by heart. And I remember I had one of those phones that you'll see in like teen movies from that era, where it was clear and you could see all the gears inside.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Do you remember that?
NATALIA REAGAN: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, those were the days. But then all of that went away because I was able to text with people. And suddenly, I wasn't talking to them anymore.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, God. I mean, it's a far cry from Alexander Graham Bell wanting so desperately to make it easier for people to communicate with each other. And now we're back to sending each other long letters back and forth, whether it's a text, an email, a tweet.
ASHLEY HAMER: Old Alex is turning in his grave.
NATALIA REAGAN: He's turning that rotary phone in the grave. That's what he's doing.
ASHLEY HAMER: And we discovered that the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, not only improved the elk population, which is kind of surprising, but actually changed how Yellowstone National Park looked, including how the rivers flowed. It just goes to show that every part of the ecosystem is important.
NATALIA REAGAN: Absolutely, yeah. That's something that-- I did conservation biology in grad school. I studied spider monkeys, which are kind of-- they're different, obviously, from wolves because they're not necessarily an apex predator.
They are of apex predator of fruit. But they are considered a keystone species, an umbrella species that when you're conserving something like a spider monkey or like a wolf, you're conserving all the other animals in that ecosystem.
So it allows you not only to conserve them, but the beavers, the trees, the way the rivers flowed. So again, it's that butterfly effect. You take one thing out of the ecosystem, it can be drastically affected.
ASHLEY HAMER: I also feel like I am an apex predator of fruit. I will house a bag of cherries like that. So I have something in common with spider monkeys for sure.
NATALIA REAGAN: Do you swallow the seeds because you could be a great seed distributor if you did and randomly pooped all over Chicago.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's true.
NATALIA REAGAN: And we heard the gruesome story of how grave robbers, a.k.a. resurrectionists, dug up freshly buried bodies to sell as cadavers to make a few extra bucks. And when business really began to boom, two ressurectionists really started to slay, literally. But they are eventually caught and brought to equally as gruesome justice when they were basically hung-- well, one of them was hung in front of 25,000 people.
ASHLEY HAMER: Just deserts.
NATALIA REAGAN: Man, ouch. Did you see the Body Worlds exhibit by any chance when it came out? The plastinated bodies.
ASHLEY HAMER: I did. I remember being struck by seeing that huge horse with a man on it and none of it had skin. It was wild.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. The one that got me was the pregnant woman. She was about eight months. But I also thought, who are these people? These particular bodies from Body Worlds, they weren't exactly sure where they got them from. And there was question of whether or not they were prisoners that had been executed.
So that reminded me of this story, where they were making money from these dead bodies. And ironically, I remember hearing that people were clamoring because they wanted to be a part of this. They wanted to donate their body to be one of these plastinated people.
ASHLEY HAMER: Take off my skin and let everyone see my organs. I want to be a star.
NATALIA REAGAN: That's an interesting 15 minutes of fame. That's perfect for the person that's always late to the party. Today's stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Steffie Drucker, and Reuben Westmaas, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Natalia Reagan, and our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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