Learn about a new discovery about rain on the sun; why flamingos stand on one leg; and why you blink the way you do when you’re watching a movie. 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: It Rains on the Sun — https://curiosity.im/2GwjSHm The Real Reason Flamingos Stand on One Leg — https://curiosity.im/2GzHYkO Moviegoers Blink in Sync for an Eerie Reason — https://curiosity.im/2GzHSts 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! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about a new discovery about rain on the sun; why flamingos stand on one leg; and why you blink the way you do when you’re watching a movie.
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:
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! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/moviegoers-blink-in-sync-rain-on-the-sun-and-why-flamingos-stand-on-one-leg
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about a new discovery about rain on the sun; why flamingos stand on one leg; and why you blink the way you do when you’re watching a movie.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
It Rains on the Sun — https://curiosity.im/2GwjSHm (Ashley)
A new discovery about our sun could create a new link between two of the biggest mysteries in solar physics. Before I get into that, though, I should probably ask: did you know that it rains on the sun? It’s not a rain of water, it’s actually a rain of superheated gas. And understanding how it works is important, so here goes. The sun is a ball of hydrogen and helium that's constantly fusing elements together. The sun is also a hotbed of magnetic activity that periodically belches out rivers of charged particles. When Earth gets in the way, those charged particles can cause auroras in the high atmosphere and can even short out satellites. And that's a part of how the sun's "rain" works, too. The elements that make up the sun are mostly in the form of plasma, which is an electrically charged gas. Plasma tends to flow along magnetic loops of material that spring up from the sun's surface and back down again. The track that plasma follows up and out of the sun is kind of like a car on a roller coaster. At the peak of the loop — like at the top of the roller coaster — plasma is at its coolest because it's farthest away from the sun. At that highest point, some of it cools and falls back down to the sun as precipitation, just like rain on Earth. Got all that? Okay, now onto the new discovery.
Lead researcher Emily Mason at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland was looking for evidence of rain in helmet streamers. Those are the pointy, million-mile high magnetic loops that you can see sticking out from the sun during an eclipse. She didn’t find rain there, but she DID find rain in smaller magnetic loops that had been imaged in high definition by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. These loops are only 2 percent as tall as the helmet streamers, so they should have less of a chance to cool off. And that discovery led scientists to think that these little structures might also help solve another solar mystery. You see, the sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere, is millions of degrees in temperature. The layer just below that is only a few thousand degrees. What's causing the upper atmosphere to be hotter than the lower atmosphere is a mystery. But given the location and structure of the raining loops, scientists will look there next to see if the heating mystery lies in that region. Even better, NASA also has a spacecraft called the Parker Solar Probe, which is taking periodic close-ups of the sun in the next several years from a perch inside Mercury's orbit. Between the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Parker, it's possible the coronal mystery may not be a mystery much longer.
CODY: Now that’s what I call a… hot take
The Real Reason Flamingos Stand on One Leg — https://curiosity.im/2GzHYkO (from Sunday) (Cody)
There’s recently been a major breakthrough on why flamingos stand on one leg. This breakthrough really refers to why an individual flamingo has the habit, not a group of flamingos, although I’ll get into that, too. For the individual flamingo, researchers say the main reason is that it’s just plain easier. And how MUCH easier it is for them to stand on one leg is pretty astonishing: In videos of eight juvenile flamingos at Zoo Atlanta, researchers saw that not only did the birds easily fall asleep while standing on one leg, but also when they were sleepy, they would sway much less on that one leg than when they were awake on two. That suggests that flamingo joints have a locked resting position that secures them in place — as long as they're standing on one leg. But just to make sure, they wanted to prove that a flamingo could stand on one leg without any muscle activity whatsoever. So they did something kinda grim: they tried to balance deceased flamingos. They used two flamingos from the Birmingham Zoo who’d recently passed away, and once the researchers put them in the correct one-legged position, they were able to stand up with no problem. The way their legs work means they can rest all their weight on one side without having to use their muscles to maintain balance. As for WHY they evolved this unique trait, there are a few theories. One is that the behavior helps the birds manage their heat regulation. According to a 2009 study, more flamingos start standing on one leg as it gets colder outside, but it’s been hard for other studies to recreate those findings. Another idea is that since flamingos hang out on some of the most toxic bodies of water in the world, including alkaline that can strip flesh, their scaly legs help them survive just fine. We may not know for sure, but at least with this new knowledge about flamingo legs, you may never look at those weird-looking pink birds ever again.
[NHTSA]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is paid for by NIT-suh. It can be a little frustrating, especially if you’re in a hurry or running late, to find yourself at a railway crossing, waiting for a train. And if the signals are going and the train’s not even there yet, you can feel a bit tempted to try and sneak across the tracks.
CODY: Well, don’t. Ever. Trains are often going a lot faster than you expect them to be. And they can’t stop. Even if the engineer hits the brakes right away, it can take a train over a mile to stop. By that time, what used to be your car is just a crushed hunk of metal.
ASHLEY: And what used to be you? Well, better not to think about that. The point is, you can’t know how quickly the train will arrive. The train can’t stop even if it sees you. The result is disaster.
CODY: If the signals are on, the train is on its way. And you... just need to remember one thing… Stop. Trains can’t.
Moviegoers Blink in Sync for an Eerie Reason — https://curiosity.im/2GzHSts (from Sunday) (Ashley)
Here’s something to think about the next time you watch a movie: You blink 15–20 times per minute. That means if you go see Avengers: Endgame, that could translate to about 15 minutes worth of screen time you’re missing. That’s a lot of action scenes you’re missing! Fortunately, studies suggest that our brains have figured out a way to compensate. Here’s the science. For every few tenths of a second it takes to blink, there's a gap in information that your brain has to fill in. Add that up to the amount of movie plot missed, and it's a wonder we can keep the storyline straight. But for a 2009 study, researchers from the University of Tokyo set out to figure out how moviegoers are able to understand a film when they lose so much time blinking. So they divided study participants into groups and played them clips from either a silent comedy, an aquarium film with no narrative, or an audiobook. The results showed that the group watching the silent comedy blinked in near-unison about 30 percent of the time. The aquarium and audiobook groups had no such synchronized blinking. The researchers suspect that this was probably not a coincidence, because the synchronized blinks happened during what they called "non-critical" parts of the film — like after action sequences, or when the main character couldn't be seen. Basically, we all find common implicit breaks for blinking while watching a video. When people blink during a film, they temporarily decrease activity in the attention-centric parts of their brains, but increase activity in the default mode network. That's the part that turns on when you stop paying attention and let your mind wander. The results suggest that eyeblinks are actively involved in the process of attentional disengagement, according to the researchers. [ad lib]
CODY: Read about today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com!
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!