Learn about introverts’ and extroverts’ pandemic response; astronaut farts; and why violet and purple are different. Introverts fared better than extroverts during the pandemic by Kelsey Donk Benz, M. (2021). COVID-19 and College Students: Introverts Coped Better than Extroverts During Shutdown. Medicalresearch.com. https://medicalresearch.com/mental-health-research/covid-19-and-college-students-introverts-coped-better-than-extroverts-during-shutdown/57012/ Extroverts and introverts showed differences in mood during early COVID 19 pandemic. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/p-eai032221.php Rettew, D. C., McGinnis, E. W., Copeland, W., Nardone, H. Y., Bai, Y., Rettew, J., Devadenam, V., & Hudziak, J. J. (2021). Personality trait predictors of adjustment during the COVID pandemic among college students. PLOS ONE, 16(3), e0248895. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248895 In the 1960s, people were worried that astronaut farts were a fire hazard by Grant Currin Krulwich, R. (2010, October 4). Space Propulsion Made Easy: Eat Beans. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/09/16/129908529/space-propulsion-made-easy-eat-beans Seriously Science. (2018, August 23). Farts: An Under-appreciated Threat to Astronauts. Discover Magazine; Discover Magazine. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/farts-an-underappreciated-threat-to-astronauts Starr, M. (2018). Here’s The Really Gross Reason Why You Don’t Want to Burp in Space. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-the-really-gross-reason-why-you-don-t-want-to-burp-in-space Calloway DH, Murphy EL. (2021). Intestinal hydrogen and methane of men fed space diet. Life Sciences and Space Research, 7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12197533/ Violet and purple are completely different forms of color by Ashley Hamer Pappas, S. (2010, April 29). How Do We See Color? Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/32559-why-do-we-see-in-color.html https://www.facebook.com/sciencequestionswithchris. (2012). Why are there only six fundamental colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet? Science Questions with Surprising Answers. https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2012/12/04/why-are-there-only-six-fundamental-colors-red-orange-yellow-green-blue-and-violet/ Color. (2021). Gsu.edu. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/specol.html Marian, J. (2021). Difference between “violet” and “purple.” Jakubmarian.com. https://jakubmarian.com/difference-between-violet-and-purple/ Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Learn about introverts’ and extroverts’ pandemic response; astronaut farts; and why violet and purple are different.
Introverts fared better than extroverts during the pandemic by Kelsey Donk
In the 1960s, people were worried that astronaut farts were a fire hazard by Grant Currin
Violet and purple are completely different forms of color by Ashley Hamer
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/introverts-fared-better-than-extroverts-during-the-pandemic
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 introverts fared better than extroverts during the pandemic; that time people were afraid that astronaut farts were a fire hazard; and why violet and purple are completely different colors.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
No one has had a great time during this pandemic, but new research suggests that introverts may have fared better than extroverts — for a pretty surprising reason.
That’s the news from the University of Vermont, where researchers were simply hoping to take a look at college students’ mental health and how much they engaged in wellness activities over the course of a normal college semester. First, they had a group of 484 college freshmen take a Big Five personality test at the start of the semester… aaaand then the coronavirus pandemic sent them home.
But the study continued! Even from home, the researchers had the students complete daily ratings of their mood, stress, and wellness activities using a smartphone app. They noted how much exercise they got, how mindful they felt, and whether they got enough sleep. The researchers realized that instead of tracking wellness over the course of a regular semester, they were getting some pretty interesting information about the effects of pandemic lockdowns.
Unsurprisingly, as the pandemic set in, the students’ moods and wellness habits fell. To the researchers’ surprise, though, their stress actually decreased.
Then, the researchers started noticing some differences in how students with different personality traits responded to the pandemic. Extroverts were having a hard time. The researchers noticed that extroverted students’ moods declined as the pandemic set in. But the moods of the introverted students increased. But despite their rotten moods, extroverts also felt less stress than the introverts over the course of the pandemic.
The researchers wondered why less stress and a worse mood would happen at the same time. It’s possible that some stress is “good stress,” especially to extroverts who find the challenges of a busy, full, slightly chaotic life to be rewarding. The lack of that stress led to a dip in their moods. But introverts appeared to get a mood boost when that stress was removed from their lives.
This study took place at the start of the pandemic, so it’s not yet clear how people with different personality traits have fared over this long haul. But until now, most scientists considered people with high levels of extraversion to be more resilient. This study paints a different picture — a reminder that it’s not always easy to predict who will have a rough time in a crisis.
Researchers and engineers had to solve a lot of problems before humans could safely venture into space. They had to worry about things like cosmic radiation, microgravity, and farts.
Why farts? It’s because they contain two flammable gasses: hydrogen and methane. NASA was worried that a crew of astronauts sealed inside a small capsule for days would hot box the spacecraft and trigger an explosion.
Of course, you couldn’t know for sure without a proper experiment. One scientist approached the problem with an… unusual idea. His name was Edwin Murphy, and his experimental setup involved a diet of beans and some rectal catheters. He got some volunteers and measured the volume and chemical composition of their toots. He shared his findings at the 1964 Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems.
A lot of his data established baselines. Feed the average person some beans, wait for the window of peak flatulence, and you can expect them to be passing between 1 and 3 cups or up to 700 milliliters of gas per hour.
But Murphy wasn’t all that interested in averages. He wanted to recruit people who didn’t produce any methane when they let one rip. And according to his research, those supertooters are out there. But it was one volunteer that got Murphy really excited. This person could eat a meal of beans, wait a few hours, and... nothing. Crickets. According to Murphy, this subject produced hardly any gas at all.
Unfortunately, Murphy’s dream of gassless astronauts is a footnote to the history of science. Instead of seeking astronauts who didn’t fart, NASA decided to focus on the food that regular astronauts ate.
A study published 5 years later compared the hydrogen and methane produced by twelve volunteers. They spent six weeks eating either a “space” diet, similar to what astronauts on the Gemini mission really ate, or a bland diet. They analyzed, quote, “breath and rectal gasses,” end quote, during the first week and the last week of the experiment. There was a lot of individual variation, but the bland diet won out. On average, those volunteers produced about one-third as much gas as the people who ate the space diet. By the way, Murphy was a co-author on this study.
Those results meant beans, broccoli, cabbage, and other gassy fare were forbidden on early space flights. But the menu isn’t all that restrictive these days. The International Space Station has a sophisticated way of circulating and processing air, so astronaut farts are no longer the death traps they... might have been in the past.
Violet and purple are totally different colors. That’s not just my own picky aesthetic opinion. In terms of physics, they’re totally different forms of color. One is spectral and the other isn’t.
Here’s the deal. Our eyes have three types of color-sensitive cells called cones. Each type is specialized for one color: red, green, or blue. These colors lie in order on the visible light spectrum: red has long wavelengths, blue has short ones, and green’s are in the middle. Of course, the world is made up of more than three colors. In the presence of more than one color, your cone cells generally combine forces. For example, green and orange both activate the red and green cones, but in different ratios.
But not all colors are in the light spectrum. Like, you don’t see brown in a rainbow. Brown is not a spectral color, but a combination of many different colors on the spectrum. When you see brown, you’re seeing a mixture of light wavelengths that activate different cones in varying ratios to produce a color your brain finally interprets as brown. You can think of it like a flavor: salt molecules activate an individual taste receptor to make you perceive the taste of salt, but a Cool Ranch Dorito activates salt receptors and all sorts of other taste and smell receptors to create the sensation that you’re eating a Cool Ranch Dorito. There’s no Cool Ranch Dorito molecule, just like there’s no brown wavelength.
In the case of violet and purple, violet would be salt, and purple would be a Dorito. Violet is on the light spectrum, so it activates only the blue and red cones — the blue cones a lot, the red cones a little less. Purple is not on the light spectrum. It hits your eyes in the same way our brown example did earlier. It's a combination of the spectral colors blue and red. Instead of activating blue and red cones in a given ratio, purple combines the cone ratio for blue with the cone ratio for red to come up with an entirely new color.
So if you’ve ever wondered why people say the colors of the rainbow are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet instead of purple, now you know. Only spectral colors are invited to that party.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Kelsey Donk and Grant Currin.
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: Go eat some beans. It’s not like you’re in space. Then, join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!