In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: This Simple Trick Keeps All Your Favorite Experiences Feeling Fresh and New If You Drop a Feather and a Neutron Star in a Vacuum, Which Lands First? Plus, Kristi in Pennsylvania asks: "Is water itself actually wet?" Here are the sources we discuss in our conversation: Is Water Wet? | Debate.org Is Water Wet? | UCSB ScienceLine Water's surface not all wet: Some water molecules split the difference between gas and liquid | ScienceDaily Ingenious: Richard Saykally — The chemist tells us why water is wet | Nautilus [VIDEO] Further Reading: Scientists Find That Water Might Exist in a Whole New State | Smithsonian Water Has a Quantum State | Curiosity.com The Triple Point Is When a Liquid Can Boil and Freeze at Once | Curiosity.com Small changes add up over time. Learn to keep your happiness replenished and your personal goals in sight in "One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way" by Robert Maurer, Ph.D. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase through that link, Curiosity will get a share of the sale. Want to support our show? Register for the 2018 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. Just register at the link and select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2018 Follow Curiosity.com for updates to learn about these topics and more: 5-star Curiosity App for Android and iOS Email Newsletter Facebook Twitter Instagram Alexa Flash Briefing for Amazon Echo smart speakers
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Plus, Kristi in Pennsylvania asks: "Is water itself actually wet?" Here are the sources we discuss in our conversation:
Small changes add up over time. Learn to keep your happiness replenished and your personal goals in sight in "One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way" by Robert Maurer, Ph.D. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase through that link, Curiosity will get a share of the sale.
Want to support our show? Register for the 2018 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. Just register at the link and select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2018
Follow Curiosity.com for updates to learn about these topics and more:
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/is-water-wet-plus-neutron-star-weight-and-a-trick-to-keep-experiences-feeling-fresh-and-new
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got two stories from curiosity.com plus the answer to a compelling listener question to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you'll learn why you get sick of your favorite things and how you can make them exciting again, what bowling balls and neutron stars have in common.
CODY GOUGH: And we'll answer the legendary question, is water wet? Let's satisfy some curiosity. All right, Ashley. What's the last thing you got sick of?
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't get sick of very many things. I case you haven't noticed, I eat the exact same thing for lunch every single day.
CODY GOUGH: I'm so weirdly the same way. If I had to eat lean ground turkey meat or chicken and veggies every day, that would be it. Yeah. I don't know what it is.
ASHLEY HAMER: You don't have to think about it.
CODY GOUGH: But not everybody's like us. So today we've got a simple trick to help you keep your favorite experiences feeling fresh and new.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: And this is really about fighting off something called hedonic adaptation, also called the hedonic treadmill. It has the treadmill nickname because it's talking about how you get back to a stable level of happiness even after something really good or really bad happens in your life. It's like if you're on a treadmill in a trip or something, you eventually go back to that regular speed. And to give you an idea of how big of a thing this is, one study showed that people who won the lottery weren't even very much happier than they were in the first place a full year after they won the lottery. Even a million bucks gets old.
So why is this? One paper blames hedonic adaptation on two main causes. First, we all love something new, but you can only discover so many things about that thing, right? Got a new car? OK. Well, there's only so many features and settings you can find and mess with before they aren't new anymore. Same for me, goes for video games.
The second cause is that even if you get a lasting benefit, like winning the lottery, your newfound wealth just becomes the new normal. It's not really a benefit anymore if it's just life. So let's talk about how to get over it. A new study says all you need to do is liven up the things you're used to by experiencing them in new ways.
In this study, researchers had participants eat popcorn with chopsticks, and they enjoyed the popcorn more. Another study had people watch their favorite movies with their hands cupped around their eyes like goggles.
ASHLEY HAMER: I love that.
CODY GOUGH: And the way I make things new again, video games. I do this all the time by playing as a new character, or trying a new mode or difficulty when the main experience gets stale. Maybe do singleplayer instead of multiplayer.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. And actually when I train for marathons, because I've done a bunch of them and that gets boring, is I'll just use a new training plan.
CODY GOUGH: I'm the same way with yoga also. So many different things. Anyway, try switching things up. You can email us to let us know how you come up with awesome ideas at podcast@curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right, Cody. If you drop a feather in a bowling ball, which one lands first?
CODY GOUGH: The bowling ball.
ASHLEY HAMER: What about if you drop a feather and a bowling ball in a vacuum?
CODY GOUGH: And they fall and land at the same time.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's right.
CODY GOUGH: I paid attention in high school physics.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. That's one of those really fun physics experiments that you never really get to see, although there is a wonderful YouTube video that you can see on our story about this in curiosity.com today, where physicist Brian Cox went to a giant vacuum chamber, and he did the experiment with a feather and a bowling ball. And it's so cool to see.
So why does the feather fall more slowly than a bowling ball if you're just doing it in the room right now?
CODY GOUGH: Sure.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's due to air resistance. Certain shapes and materials produce more drag than others, and that slows them down. But if you take away all the air, then everything falls at the same rate. That's the force of gravity.
But scientists have constantly wondered, does this hold all the time? What if there's an object that's really, really massive and really, really dense? Does it have a special amount of gravity that makes it move differently than a normal object? And one example of one of these really, really massive objects is a neutron star.
A neutron star is one of the densest objects in the universe. It forms when a star way bigger than our sun collapses into an object the size of a city.
CODY GOUGH: That's pretty small.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. So it's super dense because it's still all of that mass into that tiny, tiny little space. To see if the neutron star falls differently than other objects in the universe, they had to find a neutron star. And they actually found the perfect one because they found one in a triple star system made up of a neutron star in a less than two-day orbit with a white dwarf star, and then both of them were in this wide 327-day orbit with another white dwarf star. So you've got your super dense neutron star and your normal white dwarf stars, and you can compare how they orbit because orbiting is really just a controlled fall. So it's basically like dropping a bowling ball in space.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, all right.
ASHLEY HAMER: So they were able to measure the speed of these stars super, super accurately. And they found out that, yeah, they're all kind of falling at the same rate. So a feather, a bowling ball, and a neutron star all fall the exact same speed in a vacuum.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: So there's a good riddle for your next party.
ASHLEY HAMER: Definitely.
CODY GOUGH: What do a feather, a bowling ball, and a neutron star have in common?
ASHLEY HAMER: Gravity, man.
CODY GOUGH: If you're at a party and someone gets the right answer to that, your friends are nerds.
(TOGETHER) [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: You have the greatest friends.
CODY GOUGH: You have the coolest nerd friends, like we are. Sorry, but you're in great company.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: I would love to go to that party.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: Speaking of questions to ask at parties, we got this email from Christie in Pennsylvania. And she wrote, quote, "Love your podcast. Please resolve this ongoing controversy in my family. Is water itself actually wet?" unquote. So I told Ashley this happened.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: And you just sent me the definition, like the Webster's definition--
ASHLEY HAMER: I did.
CODY GOUGH: [CHUCKLES] --of water. And you're like, there, solved.
ASHLEY HAMER: I did it.
CODY GOUGH: Well, I didn't do that. I did a quick Google search, and the results spoke to me.
ASHLEY HAMER: Did they?
CODY GOUGH: They really did. They took me down a rabbit hole I did not expect to go down ever [CHUCKLES] because there's just so much here. I found this question on debate.org, is water wet? And it has a practically even split, with 49% saying yes and 51% saying no.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Now I don't know if I'll have a super satisfying answer that will resolve the ongoing controversy in your family, Christie, but I will do my best. According to UCSB Science Line, it depends on how you define the term "wet." There's a few different ways to do this. If we define wet as the condition of a liquid sticking to a solid surface, like water wetting our skin, then no. Water is not wet by itself because it takes a liquid and a solid to define the term "wet."
Now if we define wet as a sensation that we get when a liquid comes into contact with us, then the answer is a conditional, relative yes. Water is wet to us. And if we define wet as made of liquid or moisture, then yes, water is definitely wet because it's made of liquid. So all liquids are wet because they are all made of liquids. You see where I'm going with that.
So there's three completely different answers, depending on how you define the word "wet." And the definition I actually found was literally--
ASHLEY HAMER: The literal definition is covered or saturated with water or another liquid.
CODY GOUGH: Not really the most helpful definition. So I did some digging, and I found a 2011 study out of the University of Southern California titled "Water's Surface Not All Wet, Some Water Molecules Split the Difference Between Gas and the Liquid." That's the name of the paper. The summary reads, quote, "At any one time, 1/4 of water molecules in the uppermost layer have one hydrogen atom in water and the other vibrating freely above. Such molecules straddle gas and liquid phases according to a new study that bears on atmospheric chemistry and raises the question of how exactly to define the air-water boundary," unquote.
So on a molecular level, if you have a surface of water, it is both wet and not wet at the same time, depending on the state of the atoms. And along the lines of this microscopic definition, chemist Richard Saykally told the Nautilus that water is wet because of strong tetrahedral hydrogen bonding. You'll get a similar answer, by the way, if you ask your Amazon Echo device if water is wet. Trust us. We tried.
ASHLEY HAMER: So long story short, this is really just one of those unanswerable questions, like how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. I wish we had a more solid answer again. But depending on your definition, you can kind of make it work for you.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
NARRATOR: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.
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