Learn about how blind people can describe what animals look like, how “Ring Around the Rosie” probably doesn’t reference the Plague, and why scientists used Cladosporium sphaerospermum, a radiosynthetic species of fungus, to build a radiation shield.
Learn about how blind people can describe what animals look like, how “Ring Around the Rosie” probably doesn’t reference the Plague, and why scientists used Cladosporium sphaerospermum, a radiosynthetic species of fungus, to build a radiation shield.
Ring Around the Rosie probably doesn't reference the plague by Kelsey Donk
Blind People Can Describe What Animals Look Like — But How? by Sonja Hodgen
We might be able to use fungus as a radiation shield by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-blind-people-describe-animals-plague-myths-about-ring-around-the-rosie-and-radiation-shields-made-from-fungus
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 “Ring Around the Rosie” probably doesn’t reference the Plague, how blind people can describe what animals look like, and why scientists used fungus to build a radiation shield.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
The COVID-19 pandemic has a lot of people thinking about plagues and pandemics of history. Which is why you may have heard people mention the children’s rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” recently: after all, isn’t it a coded reference to the Black Plague? Well, I’m here to tell you that’s almost definitely a myth. “Ring Around the Rosie” probably doesn't reference the plague at all.
Cody, do you remember how Ring Around the Rose goes?
If you haven’t heard the plague theory, it goes like this.
The “ring around the rosie” in the rhyme refers to the red rash that was an early symptom of the Bubonic Plague.
“A pocket full of posies” refers to the way people would carry flowers for protection against the disease.
“Ashes” is kind of like what it sounds like when someone sneezes.
And “we all fall down” refers to, you guessed it, death.
Some of the details of the plague in this common “Ring Around the Rosie” explanation are pretty accurate. You did sneeze when infected with the plague, and people did carry flowers, incense, and perfumed oils for protection. So it’s easy to understand why this explanation would be convincing. But there are three big reasons why “Ring Around the Rosie” can’t have started with the plague:
One: The plague began in the 1300s and had a resurgence in 1665, but “Ring Around the Rosie” didn't appear in print until the 1800s. So for the plague theory to be true, we’d have to believe that children were singing it for five centuries before someone thought to write it down.
Two: The nursery rhyme actually has a bunch of different forms and a lot of them don't make any plague-like references at all. Some of them end with the line “ring for little Josie.” None of those variations has anything to do with the plague.
Three: even after it was published, nobody mentioned its association with the plague until the 1960s. So… that sure seems like someone invented the whole connection.
People love to make sense of what they don’t understand by assigning meaning to it. In this case, though, the meaning doesn’t fit. “Ring Around the Rosie” is almost certainly just a rhyme about dancing.
Blind people can describe what animals look like. But how? How can we know what we can’t see? A recent study looked into the question. The answer? First-person experience isn’t the only way to understand the world.
The researchers gave a list of animal names to 20 blind and 20 sighted adults and asked them to sort them in various ways. Things like ordering them by size; grouping them based on shape and color; and choosing from various texture options — like, does the animal have feathers, fur, skin, or scales?
At first glance, there wasn’t really a difference between the groups. Blind and sighted participants organized and described the animals in similar ways. Like, blind and sighted participants judged that dolphins and sharks are a similar shape and sloths and grizzlies have a similar texture. Most of the blind and sighted participants said elephants were bigger than rhinos. But the groups also showed some differences.
At first, the scientists thought that blind people must learn what animals look like from sighted people's descriptions of them. But it turned out that blind and sighted participants disagreed most about the dimension that was easiest for sighted people to describe in words: color.
Sighted participants created groups for white, pink, black, black and white, brown, and grey animals, and they easily labeled these groups according to their primary colors. By contrast, blind people didn’t make consistent color groups.
The researchers found that blind people infer what animals look like using the same kinds of biological classifications that scientists use to group species. This strategy works very well for shape and texture: birds, for example, have feathers and a characteristic winged shape. But it doesn’t work as well for color because two animals can be the same color but look very different otherwise.
That shows that verbal communication can give us surprisingly accurate knowledge, even when you’d otherwise assume that knowledge is strictly visual. There are more ways of learning about the world than we assumed.
Space is deadly. There are plenty of dangers space travel might present to an astronaut, and DNA-shredding radiation is at least in the top ten. Scientists have come up with a lot of possible ways to protect future space explorers, but using radiation-eating fungus is probably the most bizarre.
This possibility came to light in the aftermath of a disaster. In 1986, reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant ruptured and spewed radioactive material into the surrounding environment. Radiation levels at the site were intense enough to kill a human in as little as 60 seconds. It was the biggest nuclear disaster in history, and it’s consequences still echo today. But not everything fared so badly. Several species of fungus have been found thriving near the reactor. Here’s the incredible part: they’re “eating” the radiation. Scientists call this radiosynthesis.
This might sound like the beginning of a superhero origin story, but it’s actually not as weird as it sounds. In fact, radiosynthesis is very similar to photosynthesis, which plants do every day. In photosynthesis, a pigment, called chlorophyll, is used to convert light, a form of radiation, into chemical energy. In radiosynthesis, a pigment, melanin, is used to convert gamma radiation into chemical energy.
So here’s where space comes in. Scientists recently sent one of these radiosynthetic species, Cladosporium sphaerospermum [CLAD-oh-SPOR-ee-um SFEE-roh-SPER-mum], to the ISS. Scientists wanted to know if this species could be used to build a farmable, self-healing radiation shield for space travel.
In their experiment, they covered one half of a petri dish with the fungus, leaving the other half blank as a control. An astronaut placed the dish in front of a radiation detector that took continuous radiation measurements for 30 days. The scientists found that the radiosynthetic fungus was able to block 2 percent more radiation than the control.
Now this doesn’t sound like much, but the researchers were encouraged by the result. After all, they only used a very thin layer of the fungus just to see if it worked. Their data suggest that a 21 centimeter or 8-inch-thick layer of radiosynthetic fungus could fully insulate a spacecraft. The biggest advantage, they say, is that the whole radiation shield could be grown and installed in space from just a few tiny spores.
So in the future, spaceships could be covered in fungus. Can’t wait to see that revision in the next Battlestar Galactica!
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is 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!