Learn about a simple way to reduce your internet carbon footprint; how brain images can make you more likely to believe fake science; and how loud the sun is.
Learn about a simple way to reduce your internet carbon footprint; how brain images can make you more likely to believe fake science; and how loud the sun is.
The internet has a big carbon footprint, and you can reduce yours with a simple fix by Kelsey Donk
You'll Probably Believe Fake Science if It Comes With a Brain Image by Ashley Hamer
How loud is the sun? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Noro)
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-loud-is-the-sun
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 a simple way to reduce your internet carbon footprint; and how brain images can make you more likely to believe fake science. We’ll also answer a listener question about how loud the sun is.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Usually, we think of the internet as helping the planet: emails save paper, after all! But what you may not know is that the internet is also bad for the planet: it has a massive carbon footprint. Don’t worry, though: you can help to reduce it with a simple fix.
That’s according to a new study, which is the first one ever to analyze the internet’s many footprints — from carbon use to water and land. Researchers from Purdue, Yale, and MIT were interested in how our energy use has changed during the pandemic.
Since the pandemic’s start, lots of people have celebrated the fact that our global carbon emissions are down. We’re traveling less and using less gasoline. But these researchers suspected that this transition to an all-digital future wasn’t all good news — so they looked into it. They calculated the amount of carbon emitted and water and land used up with every gigabyte of data on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Zoom, and other platforms. As it turns out, the more video on an app, the bigger the footprint.
Here’s an example: when we Zoom or stream videos for an hour, we end up adding between 150 and 1,000 grams of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, using up to 12 liters of water and using land space the size of an iPad Mini. That may not sound like much, but think about how many video conferences you join or shows you stream each week. Then think about how many of your friends do the same...and their friends. It adds up.
Since the pandemic started, many countries have said internet traffic is up about 20 percent. And if that continues through 2021, we’ll need enough water to fill more than 300,000 Olympic swimming pools. The land footprint of all that internet use? About the size of Los Angeles.
Look at your own screen time report and the calculation will probably start to feel a little yucky. But there’s a simple fix to reduce your footprint. Turn off your video on Zoom! The researchers say that when you leave your camera off on a web call, it reduces your footprint by a whopping 96 percent. Streaming videos in standard definition instead of HD can reduce it by 86 percent. Not bad for such a tiny change!
The next time your boss tells you to turn on your video, you’ll have a great reply. You can’t. You’re saving the Earth.
If I showed you a study saying that watching TV improves math skills, would you believe the findings? What it came with an image showing the areas of the brain that lit up while watching TV? According to research, you'd probably believe it. You’re more likely to believe brain science if there's an image of a brain along with it — and you really shouldn't.
In 2008, researchers from Colorado State University had participants read three articles about brain imaging studies. Not only were all of them fake, but they also drew illogical conclusions.
For example, one study claimed that because both watching television and doing math problems activated the temporal lobe, the evidence suggested that watching TV improves math skills. The participants then answered questions about how well the article was written and how much sense it made.
It turns out that participants were much more likely to rate the article as high quality and logically sound if it included a picture of a brain than if it included a bar graph or no image at all.
The errors that the study used in its fake articles are actually super common. Usually, the mistake goes like this: when study subjects do activity A, brain area Z is active. In other studies, when subjects engage in thinking task B, brain area Z is active. Therefore, because brain area Z is active during activity A, activity A must cause thinking task B.
This is an example of the fallacy affirming the consequent. That’s where you see that the consequence of something is true, so that something must be true too — like, it’s true that if it’s raining, the streets will be wet; but it would be a fallacy to say that because the streets are wet, it must be raining. What if a hydrant broke? An active area of the brain is the consequence part of the argument. You can't use it to infer the cause.
So what's a science fan to do? Just be aware that brain images aren't airtight evidence. Scientists are human, and at risk of all the same biases and errors that the rest of us are. Read scientific news with a critical eye, and you'll be better off for it.
We got a listener question from Noro in Ghana, who asks, “How loud is the sun?” The answer? Incredibly loud.
So, just to get it out of the way: no, there’s no sound in space, because sound is a pressure wave and it needs a medium, like air, to move through. But if there was sound in space? Well, if you got near the sun and its heat didn’t kill you, its dubstep surely would. (Just kidding, everyone knows the Sun’s favorite music is soul.)
The sun is roiling with superheated plasma that rises to the surface as it heats and descends as it cools. The spots where it does that are called convection zones. Think about making chocolate pudding on a stove: big bubbles rise to the surface, pop, and sink back down. Except now imagine that every one of those bubbles is the size of Texas and a blistering 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 million degrees Celsius. This violent process produces a noisy, throbbing vibration — and that means actual sound waves. But just like a big church bell rings at a lower frequency than a tiny dinner bell, the sun’s massive size means those vibrations ring at an incredibly low frequency — too low for our puny human ears to comprehend.
But how loud is that bass drop? Well, the sun produces 383 yottawatts of energy per second. That translates to a whopping 290 decibels. For comparison, the loudest sound ever recorded by NASA was the Saturn V rocket, which clocked in at 204 decibels. 290 decibels is loud enough to kill you.
But here’s the cool part: Scientists actually use the sun’s sound waves to learn more about its interior, just like they use seismic waves to learn more about the inside of the Earth. That’s why this field is known as helioseismology.
So, wait one second: if scientists use sound to study the sun, they must record those sounds. Can…we...listen to those sounds? Can we actually hear what the sun sounds like?
The answer is yes! Feast your ears on this. It’s from recordings performed on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, or SOHO, which launched back in 1995 and is still going strong. It’s been sped up 42 thousand times to bring it into the range of human hearing. Take a listen!
[sunsounds.aiff]
Isn’t space awesome? Thanks for your question! If you have a question, send an email or a voice recording 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 working from home in your pajamas could be hurting your mental health;
Why our pets can’t eat chocolate;
A new type of extravert that’s only outgoing in certain situations;
How your ear turns sound into electrical activity that protects our hearing;
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Ashley Hamer, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, turn off your webcam, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!