Learn about why envy isn’t always a bad thing; how the Coriolis Effect affects the way things on the Earth rotate; and how RNA knows how to read DNA, with some help from a special guest from Science News and Qs (also known as SNaQ), a Carnegie Science Center podcast. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — and get some help from SNaQ creator and host Ralph Crewe answering a listener question — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Envy Can Be Good for You — https://curiosity.im/2DmlK2I Do Toilets in the Southern Hemisphere Really Swirl the Opposite Direction? — https://curiosity.im/2DhYz9T More from Ralph Crewe: Science News and Qs (SNaQ), a Carnegie Science Center Podcast — http://snaq.podbean.com/ Getting Curious with Ashley and Cody of Curiosity on SNaQ — https://snaq.podbean.com/e/getting-curious-with-ashley-and-cody-of-curiosity/ Learn more about the Carnegie Science Center — http://www.carnegiesciencecenter.org/ Follow @CarnegieSciCtr on Twitter — https://twitter.com/carnegiescictr Follow @RalphCrewe on Twitter — https://twitter.com/RalphCrewe If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about why envy isn’t always a bad thing; how the Coriolis Effect affects the way things on the Earth rotate; and how RNA knows how to read DNA, with some help from a special guest from Science News and Qs (also known as SNaQ), a Carnegie Science Center podcast.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — and get some help from SNaQ creator and host Ralph Crewe answering a listener question — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
More from Ralph Crewe:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-rna-reads-dna-w-snaqs-ralph-crewe-how-envy-can-be-good-and-coriolis-effect
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why envy isn’t always a bad thing; and how the Coriolis Effect affects the way things on the Earth rotate. We’ll also answer a listener question about how RNA knows how to read DNA, with some help from a special guest from the Carnegie Science Center.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Envy Can Be Good for You — https://curiosity.im/2DmlK2I (Cody)
If you’re like me, you may have learned over the years that envy isn’t always the healthiest emotion out there. What good is it to want what someone else has, anyway? Well according to research study, there IS some good in that — but only if it’s the right kind of envy. I’ll get into how you can use envy to your advantage, but first let’s define some terms. Psychologists say there are three main ways we react to successful people: with admiration, with benign envy, or with malicious envy. All three of these feelings start with what's technically known as an upward social comparison. In other words, you look at someone who's better than you at something, and you’re reacting to the difference between the two of you. Now, that first feeling of admiration is when you take joy in that other person’s success while you accept yourself for who you are. Envy is the opposite of that, where you want to close that gap between you and the other, better, person. The two flavors of envy are very different, though. Malicious envy means you close that gap by attacking the better person and bringing them down. A lot of the time, you feel that way because you feel like the other person didn’t deserve their success. You probably see where I’m going with this. Benign envy is where you wanna close that gap by working harder and rising to that “better” person’s level. By the way, there are languages that use completely different words for malicious envy and benign envy, including Dutch, Thai, and German. So, not a completely novel idea. In 2011, Dutch researchers studied Dutch university students for a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They found that benign envy was actually more motivational than admiration. When they thought about those moments of benign envy, the students said they were more motivated to work harder in school — and actually did study harder — than when they thought about mooments of admiration. The researchers found that this was most effective where students believed that change was easy and within their reach. This is important because research has shown that compulsively working towards impossible goals can be bad for your health. But if you can keep the mindset that yes, you CAN rise up to be as good as that person you envy, then you’ll be on the right track to making yourself a better person. [ad lib]
Do Toilets in the Southern Hemisphere Really Swirl the Opposite Direction? — https://curiosity.im/2DhYz9T (Ashley)
ASHLEY: Remember when we talked about some of the most-Googled scientific misconceptions on this podcast? Well one of them was the myth that toilets in the southern hemisphere swirl in the opposite direction as they do up here in the northern hemisphere. That’s not a thing that happens. And we mentioned the myth probably came from people not fully understanding a thing called the Coriolis effect. Today we wanted to circle back to that concept and dig into what the Coriolis Effect actually is, and how it affects us. [CODY: you know where I first learned about this? /ad lib]
ASHLEY: The Coriolis Effect makes wind, water, and pretty much every other free-moving thing curve with the rotation of the Earth on its axis. The two basic concepts at play here are the spherical geometry of the Earth and Newton's First Law. The Earth is about 24,000 miles around at the Equator, and it makes a complete rotation once a day. This means that someone standing still in Ecuador is actually moving about a thousand miles an hour faster than someone standing still on the North Pole. You’re moving faster the closer you are to the equator. If you’re standing on, say, the 45th parallel, on the border between Wyoming and Montana, then the ground is moving about 750 miles per hour. Now, Newton's First Law states that objects in motion tend to stay in motion. This means that if you stood in Montana and threw a baseball hard enough to reach a city in Ecuador, you’d miss your target because that city in Ecuador would be rotating along the Earth's axis faster than Montana was. Now, imagine the difference in velocity in the ground under the northernmost edge of a hurricane and its southernmost edge. Hurricanes can be several hundred miles in diameter. It's a big difference. Hurricanes spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere because of their enormous size. Their hundred-mile diameters lead to huge differences in ground velocity between the northernmost and southernmost edges of the storm system. In order for Coriolis forces to be noticeable, the systems they impact have to be very large. Its effect on small fluid systems — like toilets — is so small, it’s virtually undetectable. What this means in practice is that the direction a toilet flushes has more to do with the shape of the bowl and incoming water's inertia than it does with the rotation of the Earth. Myth, busted!
Listener Question answered by Ralph (Both)
CODY: We got a question from a curious listener like you, and we decided to talk to an expert. Ralph Crewe is the creator and co-host of Science, News, and Qs, also known as SNaQ, a Carnegie Science Center podcast. Here’s the question he tackled — straight from one of our friends in Brazil!
[CLIP 1:19]
ASHLEY: Ralph also went on to say that the start codon really just talks to one element of RNA, and then there’s a whole other enzyme that THEN attaches to that, and not every start codon works in the same way, so of course you can always get more detailed and talk more about this stuff. But in general, his answer is a pretty good bird’s-eye view that should hopefully satisfy Jason’s curiosity. Once again, that was Ralph Crewe, who’s a Program Development Coordinator for Buhl Planetarium and Observatory at Carnegie Science Center. And you can hear more from Ralph on his podcast, Science News, and Qs — also known as SNaQ. That’s S-N-A-Q. We’ll put a link to that in today’s show notes. And thanks for your question, Jason!
CODY: Today’s ad-free episode was brought to you by our Patrons. Special thanks to James Paterniti [PAT-er-NIT-ee], Steve Guy, Paul Larsen, Sergio Moreno, and Reid for your support on Patreon. We really appreciate it!
ASHLEY: To learn more about how you can support Curiosity Daily, please visit patreon-dot-com-slash-curiosity-dot-com, all spelled out.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!
Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!