Learn about 5G’s wireless power grid potential; the emotions of human screams; and the 3 categories of friendships. We could use 5G as its own wireless power grid by Grant Currin Leveraging the 5G network to wirelessly power IoT devices. (2021). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210325150019.htm Eid, A., Hester, J. G. D., & Tentzeris, M. M. (2021). 5G as a wireless power grid. Scientific Reports, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-79500-x Gaura, E., & James Peter Brusey. (2021, April 9). Nikola Tesla: 5G network could realise his dream of wireless electricity, a century after experiments failed. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/nikola-tesla-5g-network-could-realise-his-dream-of-wireless-electricity-a-century-after-experiments-failed-158665 Human screams communicate at least six different emotions by Steffie Drucker Human screams communicate at least six emotions. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/p-hsc040721.php Kiefer, P. (2021, April 15). The human scream that’s the most recognizable | Popular Science. Popular Science. https://www.popsci.com/story/science/human-scream-study/ JV Chamary. (2021, April 23). Are Humans More Sensitive To Screams From Sex Than Fear? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/04/14/science-human-screams/?sh=2be610c12fc2 Frühholz, S., Dietziker, J., Staib, M., & Trost, W. (2021). Neurocognitive processing efficiency for discriminating human non-alarm rather than alarm scream calls. PLOS Biology, 19(4), e3000751. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000751 Screams used with permission from Sascha Frueholz Friendships fall into three categories by Anna Todd McCabe, J. (2016). Friends with Academic Benefits. Contexts, 15(3), 22–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504216662237 Wang, A. X. (2016, October 26). Ivy League research says there are three types of social friendships people make. Quartz; Quartz. https://qz.com/819754/ivy-league-research-says-there-are-three-types-of-social-friendships-people-make/ Most People’s Friendships Fall Into One of Three Categories. (2017, January 6). Mentalfloss.com. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/90636/most-peoples-friendships-fall-one-three-categories Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free!
Learn about 5G’s wireless power grid potential; the emotions of human screams; and the 3 categories of friendships.
We could use 5G as its own wireless power grid by Grant Currin
Human screams communicate at least six different emotions by Steffie Drucker
Friendships fall into three categories by Anna Todd
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/human-screams-communicate-a-rainbow-of-emotions
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 we could use 5G as its own wireless power grid; how human screams communicate at least 6 different emotions; and how friendships fall into 3 categories.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Nikola Tesla had a dream, and a new invention puts humanity one step closer to making it come true. A team of researchers have figured out a way to harvest energy from electromagnetic waves in the air. The breakthrough could — in theory — lead to Tesla’s dream being realized: a power grid without any wires.
Researchers have known for a long time that a beam of radio waves can transport energy through thin air. That’s not super surprising given that pretty much every form of wireless communication uses electromagnetic energy to encode data. But there’s a huge difference between the amount of energy it takes to power a phone and what it takes to encode the data on that phone. Data just doesn’t need much energy at all. Electromagnetic waves used for communications are so weak that harvesting useful energy from them was a non-starter — until 5G came along.
Here’s what’s new: researchers at Georgia Tech have used 3D printing to create a special antenna that can capture energy from 5G transmissions. They managed to transmit 6 one-millionths of a watt from a 5G transmitter in their lab to the newly designed antenna. For comparison, an LED light bulb uses about one million times more electricity. The signal travelled about the length of a pool table.
It was possible because 5G transmits information using electromagnetic waves that are much shorter than the waves traditionally used to send data. Those shorter waves contain more energy and offer a lot more bandwidth, but it comes at a cost: they can’t travel very far. That’s why telecom companies have to build a lot of 5G stations.
And as it turns out, a dense network of higher-frequency transmitters is exactly what a wireless power grid would look like. Someone go tell Tesla! ...Nikola Tesla. Not the company. Although, who knows, these days.
If you’re worried about 5G, let me take a second to put you at ease. First of all, 5G is NOT dangerous. It’s been tested super thoroughly, and independent groups of researchers across the world have concluded that it isn’t a health risk. Second of all, when we talk about “energy” we’re talking about a teeny tiny amount.
And that’s one reason this breakthrough is still very, very far off from widespread wireless power transmission. The wattages we’re talking about are too small for anything beyond maybe powering sensors in factories, which is exactly what these researchers think their invention might be good for. The technology is also just incredibly inefficient.
But if engineers plow through those problems, the future might look a little more futuristic — just like Tesla imagined.
Imagine you were waiting for a loved one at the airport, and you heard two women scream. The first turns out to be a scream of joy as a woman is reunited with her best friend. The second is a scream of fear: someone just hugged the other woman from behind with no warning. Here’s the question: which scream would you react to faster?
The answer probably isn’t what you think. Swiss scientists recently discovered that we’re more sensitive to screams from non-scary situations.
That was a surprise to the scientists too. Our primate relatives use scream-like calls mostly in bad times, like when they need to call for help in a turf war or to alert others to a predator’s presence. Those are survival screams — the listener needs to understand and react FAST! So scientists figured our brains would also react fastest to these kinds of alerts.
To put this to the test, researchers instructed 12 volunteers to scream in response to various emotion-inducing scenarios — things like being attacked in a dark alley or their favorite team winning the World Cup. The resulting scream samples illustrate six distinct feelings: pain, anger, fear, pleasure, sadness, and joy. Those negative scenario screams are considered “alarm screams” because they signal a warning or need for help.
Want to hear a few examples?
Here’s a scream of joy: [male joy scream]
And here’s a scream of pain: [male pain scream]
And here’s a scream of fear: [female fear scream]
Humans have got a pretty wide variety of screams, don’t we?
Next a different group of participants listened to the screams. They identified which emotion was behind them and how urgently the screamer needed a response. Unsurprisingly, participants said the alarm screams called for a more immediate reaction. But when scientists scanned the listeners’ brains, they saw their neural activity light up faster for non-alarm calls. The participants were faster and better at pinpointing the positive feelings behind screams, too.
So why are we better at recognizing screams of pleasure than pain? That’s not certain, but the possible reasons are kind of heartwarming. One theory is that joy plays a larger part in our society, so our brains have evolved to be more attuned to those signals. Or it could come down to our individual, day-to-day experiences. If the participants have had more happy experiences than frightening ones, they may be able to identify those sounds faster.
So, go ahead, scream with joy! Passersby will...probably know what you’re doing.
What kind of a friend are you? Have you always had a few different friend groups, a collection of solo friendships, or one, united wolf pack? According to a 2016 study from Midwestern University, most people's friendships fall into one of those three categories.
Janet McCabe is the researcher behind the study, and she labels these categories “tight-knitters,” “compartmentalizers,” and “samplers.” If you've had the same big group of friends since grade school and you're all still connected in some way, you're probably a "tight-knitter." According to McCabe, tight-knitters are people who have cultivated a "sense of belonging," and might refer to their friendships as family or their home. In the study, which centered on college students, this type of friendship was most common for minority students who found social support in their close friend groups. Tight-knit friend groups do have drawbacks, though — that strong bond leaves friends liable to letting their buddies pull them down, whether that’s academically or in other ways.
If you have a group of hometown friends, others you met in college, a few from your first job, and others from your intramural soccer team, you sound like a "compartmentalizer." People who tend toward this friendship category have friends who are connected within friend groups, but not across friend groups. So, your friends from college don't know your work friends, and your work friends don’t know your soccer friends. In McCabe's college sample, compartmentalizers were often white and middle-class. According to the study, this friend category didn't need as much social support as the tight-knitters, and they tended to be friends with other white, middle-class students, which only increased their advantages.
If you've been friends with one buddy from birth, another from your freshman dorms, another from the first city you moved to after college, and another from your improv group, then you are a tried-and-true "sampler." Samplers make one-on-one connections with different people from different places, but none of them are clustered together. Since this makes for a less supportive social group, many samplers are more independent, have a greater focus on academics (or their jobs), and are typically more family-oriented than their counterparts.
Which one are you? [ad lib]
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Grant Currin and Steffie Drucker.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also a writer on today’s episode.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Just chill… til the next episode. And join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!