Learn about how most of the world’s lying comes from a small group of people; an invisible dye that stores vaccine history in the skin; and how language shows us that the ways we feel emotions are not universal. Most Lying Is Done by a Few People by Steffie Drucker Sources: Men think they're better liars | EurekAlert! — https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/uop-mtt122019.php Lie prevalence, lie characteristics and strategies of self-reported good liars | PLOS — https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225566 Storing Vaccine History with Invisible Dye by Mae Rice Sources: Storing medical information below the skin's surface | EurekAlert! — https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/miot-smi121619.php Medical history that’s skin deep | Cosmos — https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/medical-history-that-s-skin-deep Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination | Science Translational Medicine Vol. 11, Issue 523, eaay7162 — https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162 Emotion Words Vary Across Cultures by Kelsey Donk Sources: Words to express emotion vary greatly in their meanings across languages | EurekAlert! — https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/aaft-wte121619.php Mapping words reveals emotional diversity | Science, 20 Dec 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6472, pp. 1444-1445 — https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6472/1444 Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure | Science, 20 Dec 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6472, pp. 1517-1522 — https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/366/6472/1517.full.pdf Subscribe to Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com to learn something new every day! You can also hear Discovery’s Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing
Learn about how most of the world’s lying comes from a small group of people; an invisible dye that stores vaccine history in the skin; and how language shows us that the ways we feel emotions are not universal.
Most Lying Is Done by a Few People by Steffie Drucker
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Storing Vaccine History with Invisible Dye by Mae Rice
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Emotion Words Vary Across Cultures by Kelsey Donk
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Subscribe to Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com to learn something new every day! You can also hear Discovery’s Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/most-lying-is-done-by-a-few-people-storing-vaccine-history-with-invisible-dye-and-emotion-words-vary-across-cultures
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 most of the world’s lying comes from a small group of people; an invisible dye that stores vaccine history in the skin; and how language shows that the ways we feel emotions are not universal.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
STEFF: Most lying is done by a small handful of people (Cody)
Have you ever heard the phrase “Everybody lies?” This idea isn’t just the guiding philosophy of the medical drama House; it’s a common belief in real life, too. But is it...true? Not exactly, according to a recent study published in PLOS One. Instead, the study found that a small minority of people tell most of the world’s lies. Yeah: Most lying is done by a small handful of people.
Researchers from the UK and the Netherlands recruited 194 people, half men and half women, and quizzed them on their lying habits. Specifically, they asked about:
· How many lies they’d told in the last 24 hours
· The types of lies they told
· Who they lied to
· Whether the lie was delivered face-to-face
And
· How good of a liar they considered themselves to be.
The team found that overall, people told an average of 1.6 lies in the last day, which might suggest that yeah, everybody does lie. But that average was HEAVILY skewed. Six of the nearly 200 participants, or less than 1 percent of them, told nearly 40 percent of the lies reported in this study.
The most prolific liars were also the most likely to report being really good at lying. The team found that these expert liars tend to have a way with words and often weave their lies into simple, true stories so they’re hard to distinguish from what’s real. They also tend to prefer fibbing to your face rather than over text or on social media, and are more likely to lie to friends and colleagues than family or authority figures.
Overall, though, both prolific and occasional liars most commonly admitted to telling little “white lies,” exaggerating information, and telling “lies of omission.” Garden-variety liars were less likely to make things up whole-cloth or bury their lies in truth.
This study is important because past research suggests that people have about a 50-50 chance of correctly detecting a lie. The team believes that by studying the liars instead of the people being lied to, we might boost our odds of sniffing out deception.
So if you’re a perpetual Pinocchio, be warned: Scientists are onto you!
MAE: MIT scientists develop an invisible dye that stores vaccine history in the skin (Ashley)
What if you could store your medical history on your body? Well, MIT researchers have figured out a way to do just that. They’ve developed an invisible tattoo that could one day be used to store people’s vaccination history not in complicated medical records, but right on their skin.
See, vaccines save lives, but not as many as they could. About 1.5 million people die each year because they weren’t appropriately vaccinated, most of them in the developing world where medical records aren’t stored in a central, accessible database. This means doctors often don’t know what vaccines a patient needs. Spotty records make it especially hard to give vaccines that require multiple doses, spaced out at specific intervals — like the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella, for example.
The MIT researchers’ invisible tattoo offers an interesting solution to this problem: why not store vaccination records on patients’ bodies, in invisible ink?
The ink in question is made of nanocrystals called “quantum dots,” which emit near-infrared light. That means the ink isn’t visible to the naked eye, but smartphones can still detect it. The invisible dye is administered right along with the vaccine, but instead of using a traditional needle, it’s injected with microneedle patches. The quantum dots are only 4 nanometers across — half the size of a red blood cell — but they’re encased in spheres thousands of times larger that are made of a body-friendly material. Those help the dye stay in place under the skin. By selectively placing the dye in certain microneedles within the patch, researchers can inject it in a pattern that corresponds to the type of vaccine it was administered with.
It’s early days, but invisible-ink-enhanced vaccines look promising so far. Rats given polio vaccines with and without invisible ink had similar immune system responses — which means the dye doesn’t hurt the vaccine’s effectiveness. The ink lasts a while, too — at least five years, based on trials run on human tissue. Researchers need to do more safety tests before actually injecting people with quantum dots, but one day, invisible ink could give centralized medical databases a run for their money.
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KELSEY: Emotion words vary in meaning across cultures [this is a long one, also I'd like dibs on reading! -Ashley] (Ashley)
Most every language has a word for “love,” right? But how do we know that the English word for love describes the same feeling as the French word or the Bengali word or the Arabic word? When I say “I love you,” does it really mean the same thing as “je t’aime” [jzuh TEM] or “ami tomake bhalobashi”? [a-MEE toe-mah-KAY PAH-low BAH-shee: https://youtu.be/fcEnuAewlcM?t=30] (PS this is a fun little nod to our Indian listeners, but if this is too hard let’s just say “te amo”)
All of those statements may not mean the same thing, says a new study. Emotion words actually vary in meaning across cultures.
Researchers from around the world mapped emotion words used in a whopping 2,474 languages from 20 major language families. To determine what these emotion words really meant to the language, they looked at instances where multiple concepts might be expressed by the same word. Like, the Persian word for grief, “ænduh” [ahn-DOO], can also mean “regret,” while in the Dargwa language, “dard” [no pronunciation found] is the word for both “grief” and “anxiety.” That suggests that to Persian speakers, grief may be an emotion closer to regret, while it might feel more like anxiety for Dargwa speakers.
Across the board, the researchers found that emotion words vary greatly in meaning. So while Google Translate might tell you two words are the same, they could actually describe pretty different emotions.
This might sound like it’s out of left field, but it actually builds on a lot of research that suggests that while humans all feel the same set of biological sensations, their interpretations of them are different. I mean, you probably feel butterflies in your stomach when you’re afraid and when you’re excited, but the name you give that feeling depends on whether you’re on a rollercoaster or a first date, right? So it’s not a stretch to imagine that the word for “happiness” means “feeling upbeat” in Western individualist cultures, but refers to a more solemn, reserved emotion in Eastern collectivist cultures — and it does, according to past research. This all suggests that our emotions are shaped by biology and culture. The language we have available to us could actually change the emotions we feel.
Biological sensations may be universal, but emotions? They’re more complicated. At the very least, our emotion words aren’t easily translated. So no, “love” probably doesn’t mean the same thing in every language. The good news, though, is that the scope of human emotion could be bigger than we thought. And that means we have lots more to learn about each other.
RECAP
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Steffie Drucker, Mae Rice, and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode of Curiosity Daily was scripted, 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!