Learn about what we discovered when astronomers watched a star turn directly into a black hole; new science into how much your genes determine your athleticism; why some materials shouldn’t go in the microwave; and one of the strangest places in the country: the House on the Rock. 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: Astronomers Once Watched a Star Turn Directly into a Black Hole The House on the Rock Is the Tourist Trap to End All Tourist Traps Are Some People Just Natural-Born Athletes? Science Has an Answer Additional resources discussed: What Should and Shouldn't I Microwave? | Lifehacker Here's Why Fruit and Vegetables Spark in the Microwave Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey 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! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about what we discovered when astronomers watched a star turn directly into a black hole; new science into how much your genes determine your athleticism; why some materials shouldn’t go in the microwave; and one of the strangest places in the country: the House on the Rock.
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:
Additional resources discussed:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
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!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/microwaveable-metals-athlete-nature-vs-nurture-the-house-on-the-rock-and-supernova-skipping-stars
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got the latest and greatest from curiosity.com 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 about what we learned when astronomers watched a star turn directly into a black hole. New science into how much your genes determine your athleticism. And one of the strangest places in the country, the House on the Rock. We'll also answer a listener question about why some materials shouldn't go in the microwave.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Do you hear about the time astronomers watched a star turn directly into a black hole? That's not the setup for a joke. It's a thing that happened between 2009 and 2015. And it's an event that taught us more about stars and could help us uncover the mysteries behind some of the universe's most massive black holes.
CODY GOUGH: I want you to know. I worked on this script for hours, trying to think of a punch line if that were a joke. I came up with nothing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
CODY GOUGH: If you do it off the top of your head, I will be so angry.
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't know. Something like, yeah, it was pretty heavy. No. Let me workshop it.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. We got to work on that. Let's continue.
ASHLEY HAMER: Anyway, here's what went down. Scientists at the Ohio State University were watching a galaxy 22 million light years away called NGC 6946. Not a real catchy name. So we'll call it by its nickname, the Fireworkds Galaxy. The galaxy's nickname comes from the fact that it sees a lot of supernova that scientists observe using the large binocular telescope. Well, back in 2009, scientists noticed that one star, N6946-BH1, was beginning to weaken.
CODY GOUGH: Now that's a catchy name.
ASHLEY HAMER: Heck, yeah. It is. In 2015, it disappeared. But there was no big flash. No epic supernova. The scientists concluded that instead, it had become a black hole, something they thought could only happen after a supernova. Scientists aptly called this unusual event a massive fail and published their results in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Scientists still don't know how often stars go through massive fails. But researchers Scott Adams predicts that it occurs in about 10% to 30% of massive stars. These findings could help explain the origins of very massive black holes since they might be easier to form if no supernova is needed. That's because the explosion of the supernova ends up blasting out the star's outer layers, leaving behind less mass to create a black hole. If no supernova was involved, then more of the star's mass would be available to transform into a more massive black hole. Not a bad find for space scientists.
CODY GOUGH: Today, we wrote about a place called the House on the Rock. It's a tourist spot about an hour west of Madison, Wisconsin, opened to the public in 1959. And Ashley and I have both been there separately. And just wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: I cannot explain it to anyone. And we're going to try.
CODY GOUGH: Do you like it?
ASHLEY HAMER: I love it. It takes like 4 hours to get through the whole thing. And when you exit, you feel like your brain has turned to mush. Did you have that experience?
CODY GOUGH: I came out an angry person. I hated every second that I was there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Seriously?
CODY GOUGH: It is a nightmare.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, my gosh.
CODY GOUGH: I couldn't handle it. So you're going to get two very different experiences from Ashley and me. Here's the history of the House on the Rock or at least what we know about it. It was built by a guy named Alex Jordan Jr., but its origins are a bit mysterious. In some versions of the story, he started his project as kind of a spite house after he had an unpleasant encounter with the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. And Frank Lloyd Wright had an iconic home about 10 minutes away from the House on the Rock.
In other versions of the story, Jordan had a more vague explanation for his creation. Quote, one thing just sort of led to another, unquote. Either way, Alex Jordan lived there for about 50 years. The house sits on Deer Shelter Rock, which is a massive stone column that rises up from the woodlands all around it.
The mansion contains 14 rooms, and they get progressively weirder. And when we say room, we're not just talking about your living room. Some of these rooms are really, very, very large. You start out in large, comfortable rooms filled with massive fireplaces and chandeliers hanging over dimly lit chambers. Then the, quote unquote, adventure begins. The infinity room is next. And it sets the tone for the rest of the experience. This is the room I thought was kind of cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's super cool.
CODY GOUGH: It's 218 feet long, and it tapers to a single point 156 feet above the forest floor. So it creates the illusion that the walls extend into eternity. Picture basically a long triangle jutting out from this house, and the point of the triangle is just hanging with no support, just in the middle of the air above a forest, which is kind of terrifying.
So then you go deeper into the house, and you'll find a massive indoor carousel aglow with 20,000 lights and 182 chandeliers. Then there's the antique gun collection. The music of yesterday room filled with old fashioned instruments and automated musical devices. And the dollhouse room, boasting literally thousands of miniature figures. Among the cannonball-powered clock and the two-story Rube Goldberg machine, you cannot tell what's real and what isn't.
Here's another fun fact. The house claims the indoor carousel is the largest carousel in the world. But the truth behind that is unclear at best. Some of the antique guns in the antique gun collection are real, but others are just guns Alex Jordan had made in an old fashioned style. And I'm just going to put this out there, Ashley. Why is there a 200-foot long sea monster hovering above a gigantic room among literally hundreds of model ships, and looking glasses, and other nautical themed stuff?
ASHLEY HAMER: To break your brain, of course.
CODY GOUGH: It is brain-breaking. So possibly the most bizarre place you'll ever see. Maybe you'll love it. Maybe it'll be a living nightmare.
ASHLEY HAMER: Please let us know.
CODY GOUGH: I'm glad you enjoyed it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Are some people just natural born athletes? According to new research, the answer is no. What you do with your body is more important than what you were born with. This was really happy news to me. I think especially as a musician, a lot of times, people will just say, oh, some people are just born with it. Some people are just born with natural ability. And the same goes with athletes. And it's nice to know that it's what you do with your genes that really counts.
So for this study, scientists looked at identical twins. They have identical DNA, but lived separate lives. So they're a natural science experiment to see how much our environment impacts our traits. In a new study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers looked at two twins nicknamed TT and UT. That stands for trained twin and untrained twin, since TT was a high school track coach who competed in marathons, and UT was a truck driver who didn't exercise.
TT weighed more than 20 pounds less and had an 8.6% lower body fat percentage than UT. TT also had a greater VO2 max, which is a measure of aerobic endurance, and lower blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. But the twin's muscle fiber ratios were the most striking. Your muscles are made up of two types of fibers. And how well your muscles work in a given sport depends on your particular mix.
So slow twitch fibers are super efficient, and they're great for endurance. Fast twitch fibers can get really big, and they're really powerful, but they don't have a lot of endurance. So while UT had a 40-60 split of slow twitch to fast twitch fibers in his thigh muscles, TT's thigh muscles were made up of 94% slow twitch fibers. A clear sign that his decades of endurance training had changed his body.
This muscle fiber difference was much larger than any previous study had ever found. In simpler terms, this means that your habits matter. With the right habits, it's likely that virtually everyone can live a healthy, fit life, regardless of the genes they were born with. Your athletic ability isn't written into your genes. It's written into your daily routine. The hard part is starting that routine and sticking to it.
We got a listener question from Rajiv in Michigan, who wanted to know why only certain materials were allowed in the microwave. To start, what materials aren't allowed in the microwave? Basically, anything that could spark, melt, or catch fire. That means most metal, any plastic that's not labeled microwave-safe, like takeout containers and margarine tubs, and maybe surprisingly, brown paper fast food or grocery bags. They can catch fire or emit toxic fumes.
With plastic and paper, it's kind of obvious why they melt and catch fire, right? The microwave heats stuff up. And that's what happens when those materials get too hot. But metal sparks. Even weirder, not all metal sparks in the microwave. First of all, your microwave is literally align with metal, so if it caused a problem, you'd be in trouble. And you've probably seen a metal lining on microwave-safe frozen meals like hot pockets, and that doesn't spark either. The difference between metal that sparks and metal that doesn't is its geometry.
Let's back up. Microwaves produce, well, microwaves, which is a certain wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. They do different things to different materials. Water molecules in your food absorb microwaves, which causes them to move around and heat up. But metal acts as a sort of lightning rod for these waves, creating a stronger electric field than that of the air around it. And that electric field desperately wants to discharge somewhere.
If there's a material with a lower electrical potential nearby, like the next fork prong over or the plastic in your plate, it'll make a beeline for it and spark. That's why crumpled tinfoil will spark, but the flat metal that lines your Hot Pocket won't. It's shaped in a way that gives the electricity nowhere to go. By the way, did you know that sometimes the minerals in fruits and vegetables will spark in the microwave. We'll link to our story on that in the show notes.
CODY GOUGH: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com. And in case you didn't notice, Ashley and I got really animated in our little discussion about House on the Rock. So if you want to hear our full conversation without the cuts I had to make for time, visit our Patreon page at patreon.com/curiosity.com. Wow. We had a lot of anecdotes.
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.
ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.