Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes: Forget Rovers: NASA's InSight Lander Will Learn About Mars By Sitting Still Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? You Might Have the Most Common Form of Synesthesia
Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes:
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/nasas-insight-lander-mars-mission-the-chicken-or-the-egg-and-common-synesthesia
- Hi, I'm Cody Gough.
- And I'm Ashley Hamer. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.
- Today you'll learn about NASA's InSight Lander mission to Mars and how you can watch the launch as early as this weekend, which came first, the chicken or the egg, and a common form of synesthesia that you might have.
- Let's satisfy some curiosity.
Hey, Cody, know what's happening this weekend?
- Is it Cinco de Mayo? Margaritas?
- It is, but it's also the beginning of the launch window for the Mars InSight mission. It could launch as early as Saturday, May 5th. And in true Curiosity fashion, we did our homework on the latest and greatest space mission. So it's called the InSight Lander.
InSight is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport. It's a Mars Lander, and it's going to study the inner space of Mars, its crust, mantle, and core. That's important because the closest planets to the sun are all super different.
Mercury is barren like our moon is. Venus is totally hellish, and Mars has a thin atmosphere that disappeared over the millennia. And Earth is the only one that supports life that we know of.
Planetary scientists are trying to figure out why these worlds are all so different. They think part of the reason might come from the composition of the core, crust, and mantle inside each planet.
- OK, so we're basically going to get to watch a drive around Mars like the Curiosity Rover?
- Well, InSight will actually pretty much just sit there. But it's still really cool. It'll use a heat probe to dig as far as 16 feet into the surface, and collect data on seismology, heat flow, and precision tracking. And it'll transmit its position to a network of NASA antennas on Earth called the Deep Space Network.
The fun part is in the two mini-spacecraft that will fly on their own path to Mars behind InSight. They're called CubeSats. And their goal is to provide data on InSight's landing. That's super important because so many Mars landing missions have failed. Oh, and the CubeSats are named Eva and Wall-E in honor of the 2008 Pixar movie.
- Nice.
- Yes. You can find a full write up, including links to watch the launch live on curiosity.com or the Curiosity app.
- For Android or iOS.
- That's right.
- I've got a question. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
- Well, isn't that an unanswerable question? Like what's the sound of one hand clapping?
- What is the sound of one hand clapping?
- I can't do it.
- I've seen people do it. I can't. Unanswerable. It's 2018. We've answered a lot of things. And people are curious about a lot of things, but people have been asking this question for thousands of years. So that's why we looked into it, and Curiosity found some answers.
So this argument is actually over-easy. Get it? It's the egg. Eggs have been around since fish evolved, way before birds in general, especially chicken specifically. And eventually a bird that was a lot like a chicken laid an egg, and a chicken hatched out of it. And you can argue about where in evolution we get to chicken versus not chicken, but basically, no matter how you scramble it, the egg was first.
- All right. Well, technically you could still argue that the chicken came first, though, right? Because according to researchers at Warwick and Sheffield universities, chicken eggs rely on a specific protein found in chicken ovaries to form. Basically that means that any individual chicken egg we come across today had to have been through a chicken at some point. So, in that sense, the chicken was first.
- OK. But in 2013, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted that it was the egg.
- All right. Then you win.
- Deciding argument. But it is kind of cool to see that scientists have actually broken down this question. That must have been a tough case to crack.
- Oh, let's move on from that.
- That was egg-ceptional.
- All right, Cody. Do you ever taste music, or hear colors? Or see flavors, or experience any symptoms of synesthesia?
- I have not, no.
- And I'm sure most of our listeners haven't either, at least in the form of seeing letters, and colors, or numbers with different personalities. But today we covered a new study that found that one form of synesthesia pops up in more than 20% of people.
- 20% of people in general?
- Yeah.
- Wow.
- Yeah. That's one in five. According to a new study from City University of London, as many as one in five people hear the sound of flashing lights and rapid movement, even if the actual visual cues don't make any sound. They call it visually-evoked auditory response, or VEAR for short. Fewer than one in 20 people experience other forms of synesthesia, so this one is definitely the most common.
Researchers don't know exactly why this happens. But you know how it's fun watching a concert with a light show, or how a rave is better with lasers?
- Yes
- Well, humans do like lights with sound, so maybe it's not surprising that our brains are wired to imagine noises when the lights are too quiet for our brains. And many of the participants in the study who experienced this reported experiencing other auditory phenomena like tinnitus and musical imagery.
- Musical imagery?
- Yeah, like when you get a song stuck in your head, or maybe a jingle just pops into your brain all of a sudden.
- Got it.
- The study's author said these sensations might reflect leakage of information from visual parts of the brain into areas that are more usually devoted to hearing.
- So this kind of reinforces the idea that senses are more than just tools for one purpose to learn about the world around us, or a part of-- not just what they tell us about what we experience, but they actually shape those experiences.
- Absolutely. Yeah, they all interact together to form a coherent picture of the world.
- It's very cool. You can read more about all these stories and so much more on curiosity.com or on the Curiosity app for Android or iOS. What can you learn about this weekend, Ashley?
- Well, you'll be able to learn about myths and facts about Cinco de Mayo, a trick for getting people to like you, where Las Vegas signs go when they retire.
- Also, how to get your life together using a habit-based role-playing game, an animal considered to be one of the greatest athletes of all time, and so much more.
- Join us again Monday for the Curiosity Daily, and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
- And I'm Cody Gough.
- Have a great weekend, and stay curious.
- On the Westwood One Podcast Network.