Learn about how bumblebees bite plants to make them bloom early; why loving your job too much could lead to unethical behavior; and how Jupiter’s largest moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto each built themselves up from a single grain of dust.
Learn about how bumblebees bite plants to make them bloom early; why loving your job too much could lead to unethical behavior; and how Jupiter’s largest moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto each built themselves up from a single grain of dust.
When pollen is scarce, bumblebees bite plants to force them to flower by Cameron Duke
Loving your job too much might lead to unethical behavior by Kelsey Donk
Jupiter's largest moons each built themselves up from a single grain of dust by Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/loving-your-job-may-lead-to-unethical-behavior-bumblebees-bite-plants-to-make-them-bloom-and-jupiters-moons-formed-from-specks-of-dust
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 bumblebees bite plants to make them bloom early; why loving your job too much could lead to unethical behavior; and how Jupiter’s largest moons each built themselves up from a single grain of dust.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
When bumblebees are searching for food and flowers haven’t bloomed yet, it’s no fuzz off their back. That’s because bumblebees have evolved a really cool trick: they can force flowers to bloom by biting them.
Bees and the flowers they pollinate have a symbiotic relationship. In other words, they can’t live without each other. This relationship is all about timing, which is something that’s becoming more difficult for many species as the climate changes. As springtime temperatures arrive earlier and earlier, bees come out of hibernation before the flowers bloom, and their whole system ends up out of sync. Basically, they wake up in a world without food. Scientists call this a phenological mismatch, and it’s something many animals don’t seem to have a good time dealing with.
But it turns out that the bees have a surprising workaround for this. European researchers first spotted it by accident: they were observing bees in enclosures for an unrelated experiment, when they noticed the bees chewing on leaves. That made the researchers curious, so they decided to place pollen-deprived bees in new enclosures, with unbloomed tomato and mustard plants. Sure enough, the pollen-starved bees chewed tiny holes in the leaves of each plant — and those bee-damaged plants bloomed much earlier than undamaged plants. They also bloomed faster than ones that the scientists cut with razors, which suggests that bumblebee saliva might play a role.
Bees are weird, so the evolution of this behavior is a bit of a puzzle. After all, the worker bees doing this won’t even live long enough to see the plant flower and reap the benefits. Instead, the adaptation is probably working on a colony level. Bumblebees are a eusocial species, which means that the queen is the only female in the colony that lays eggs, while the workers are all sterile. Natural selection might favor this biting behavior if the increase in pollen helps the queen’s survival. Confirming that will require more experiments. For now, just remember that cool discoveries can be hiding where you least expect them.
CODY: Ashley, I have a serious question. Do you love your job?
ASHLEY: [original text: I have a confession to make: I love my job. Like, it feels like a natural extension of who I am as a person.]
CODY: Okay well, a new study says you might want to slow my roll: apparently, if you’re too invested in your job, you might behave in unethical ways. And in the long term, those behaviors could hinder your career and reputation. [ad lib]
But before we get too into it, let’s be clear. It’s not bad to be invested in your work. High ‘job engagement,’ as it’s called, can make someone a better performer, a good team player, and generally an asset to their company. But high job engagement can also make people physically, cognitively, and emotionally consumed by their work. As a result, they tend to think of their job as something they own — or even as an extension of themselves. So the researchers wanted to know: if you consider your job to be a part of you, will you do unethical things to keep it?
To find out, Chinese researchers conducted surveys of employees and their supervisors in two different workplaces. They measured their job engagement, performance, and any unethical tendencies, like territorial behavior or information hiding.
They also assessed their motivational traits. People with what’s called attraction motivation are fueled by what can be gained from a situation, while people with avoidance motivation are fueled by avoiding loss.
And the researchers found that that second part is where the trouble lies. People with avoidance motivation are more likely to be worried about losing their job and the power that comes with it. So they might not be motivated to, say, share information about upcoming promotions with their colleagues. The results showed that people with avoidance motivation were more likely to hide crucial information from coworkers and lay claim to important clients.
If you’re the type to worry more about what could go wrong than what could go right, I’ve got good news: you can become a more ‘approach motivated’ person. First, figure out what really motivates you. Make a list of potential job-related losses in one column and a list of potential gains in another, then focus your energy on achieving everything in that second column. It’s also a good idea to take stock of your behavior every month. Have you concealed information? Engaged in a little light sabotage? Recognize your mistakes and resolve to do better next month. Finally, it may be helpful to focus on the process of learning rather than the outcome. The outcome doesn’t matter as much if you enjoyed the journey. With this kind of personal work, you’ll not only be a better person, but you may also see more job success over time.
The moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto aren’t just Jupiter’s biggest moons — they’re some of the largest moons in the entire solar system. So it’s kind of mind-blowing to imagine that these icy giants may have each built themselves up from a tiny grain of dust. That’s according to research partly based on newfound knowledge of how exoplanets form. So let’s talk about how these hulking moons came to be.
To tell the story, we have to go way back to the early days of the solar system. Back then, young Jupiter had a wide, thin disk of gas called a circumplanetary disk. This disk acted sort of like a net, capturing tiny grains of icy dust about a millimeter in size around the planet as it followed its elliptical path around the sun.
As the dust accumulated and the flecks collided and joined, the disk eventually collapsed into thousands of icy, dusty, asteroid-like clumps around 100 kilometers, or 60 miles in diameter, called satellitesimals [SAT-ill-eye-TESS-imm-uhls]. But as big as they were, they were still nowhere close to the size of the Jovian moons today.
But they kept growing. Gravity brought the satellitesimals together into larger and larger clumps, which themselves continued to merge and grow as they orbited Jupiter. After about 6,000 years, clumps that would become Io and Europa became so massive that they began to migrate inward, toward Jupiter. It took the others much longer to form. Ganymede formed in about 30,000 years. By the time Callisto was forming, a lot of the gas had evaporated in the heat of our growing sun, so it took nine million years for Callisto to reach its current mass. *sigh* Youngest siblings always get the hand-me-downs.
Astronomers are excited about the new theory for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the first convincing explanation of how the moons got as big as they are today. It also explains why the orbits of Io, Europa, and Ganymede seem to be coordinated. In the space of just over a week, Ganymede revolves around Jupiter once, Europa makes the trip twice, and Io goes around four times. The calculations are pretty complex, but the theory explains how Europa may have fallen into an initial pattern with Io before Ganymede later harmonized with Europa.
The researchers are hopeful that this new theory can also apply to other icy moons in our solar neighborhood, like Saturn’s. All this from studying planets beyond our solar system! It’s a reminder that looking somewhere new can help you see the familiar in a different light.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Cameron Duke, Kelsey Donk, and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!