Learn about the big impact we could have on our planet by cutting work hours; the strange behavior of superbolts of lightning; and, which personalities people associate with the sounds of certain names. Please support our sponsors! Get 10% off your first order from Saturday Morning Coffee Company at SaturdayMorningCoffeeCompany.com 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: Cutting Work Hours Could Have a Big Impact on the Planet — https://curiosity.im/2LvLsav Superbolts Have 1,000 Times the Energy of Regular Lightning — https://curiosity.im/2LteaIQ People Associate the Sounds of Certain Names with Certain Personalities — https://curiosity.im/2Oe9OXR 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 the big impact we could have on our planet by cutting work hours; the strange behavior of superbolts of lightning; and, which personalities people associate with the sounds of certain names.
Please support our sponsors! Get 10% off your first order from Saturday Morning Coffee Company at SaturdayMorningCoffeeCompany.com
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:
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/personalities-associated-with-certain-names-working-less-to-save-the-earth-and-superbolts
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 the big impact we could have on our planet by cutting work hours; the strange behavior of superbolts of lightning; and, which personalities people associate with the sounds of certain names.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Cutting Work Hours Could Have a Big Impact on the Planet — https://curiosity.im/2LvLsav (Cody)
New research suggests that cutting work hours could have a big impact on the planet. And the good news from the European think-tank behind this research is that it’s probably more doable than you’d think.
So just how many hours are we talking? The report concludes that, quote, "The actual sustainable work week, based on today's levels of productivity and carbon intensity, would likely need to be well below 10 hours per week per person, even in relatively carbon-efficient economies,” unquote.
That, of course, is not going to happen in any world that even remotely resembles our current reality. But even if we can't limit full-time work to a breezy 10 hours a week, we can still make a significant impact on global warming with smaller downward adjustments in work hours. The report notes that even a 1 percent decrease in working hours could lead to a 1.46 percent decrease in carbon footprint.
That means that even if not all, but many of us just switch to a four-day workweek, it could make a big dent in CO2 emissions. Working from home could also help; a study by Global Workplace Analytics finding that if every American with a job that could be done from home did so half the time, it would have the same effect on greenhouse gases as taking the entire New York State workforce off the road.
And it turns out 40-hour weeks aren’t productive anyway. There have been experiments looking at reducing employees' hours, including a whole town in Sweden that cut public employee workdays down to six hours. And those studies are finding that employees are able to accomplish the same amount on a reduced schedule — and are a lot happier for the change. It seems we’re not wired to work eight straight hours, and there’s a lot of fat to be cut from the workday.
So send this podcast to your boss. Who knows? Maybe all this evidence will convince ‘em to do the environmentally conscious thing and let you knock off early a few days a week. Maybe.
Superbolts Have 1,000 Times the Energy of Regular Lightning — https://curiosity.im/2LteaIQ (Republish) (Ashley)
A “superbolt” has a thousand times the energy of regular lightning. And a new study looking into their location and timing has revealed some surprising patterns that we’re measuring for the first time ever.
As reported by Futurity, this study was led by Earth and Space Sciences Professor Robert Holzworth, who manages the World Wide Lightning Location Network. That network runs about a hundred lightning detection stations around the world. When lightning reaches three or more different stations, the network can compare the readings to figure out a lightning bolt’s exact size and location.
The network has been around since the early 2000s and up until now, researchers didn’t have enough data to do a study specifically on superbolts. Out of 2 BILLION lightning strokes recorded between 2010 and 2018, only 8-THOUSAND were confirmed superbolts.
But this new research shows that superbolts are most common in the Mediterranean Sea, the northeast Atlantic, and over the Andes. Slightly lesser hotspots include areas east of Japan, in tropical oceans, and off the tip of South Africa.
Unlike regular lightning, superbolts tend to strike over water. They also don’t follow the rules for typical lighting when it comes to time of year. Regular lightning hits in the summertime and coincides with summer thunderstorms. But superbolts strike most often in the fall and winter, between the months of November and February.
The reason for the pattern is still mysterious and some years have many more superbolts than others. The researchers say it could be related to sunspots or cosmic rays, but for now, the major lesson is that this pattern exists. The pattern was unknown before, and now scientists have a whole new mystery to solve.
[SM COFFEE]
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People Associate the Sounds of Certain Names with Certain Personalities — https://curiosity.im/2Oe9OXR (Cody)
New research suggests we associate the sounds in certain names with certain personality traits — for better or for worse. In a paper published recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, University of Calgary researchers examined the science behind "sound symbolism" and how it might apply to names. Sound symbolism describes the phenomenon where certain phonemes (or, the units of sound that make up speech) are associated with certain types of shapes, brightness, speed, hue, and taste. Scientists have done a lot of research into how people form first impressions based on things like facial features, gender, and ethnicity. But names are just as important. I mean, what’s the difference between finding out you’re going on a blind date with a Chris or an Allen, or looking at a resume and thinking about interviewing a Renee or a Patty? So the researchers gave study participants a list of personality traits that were each paired with two names. Then, the participants matched the traits with the names they thought the adjectives described the best. And the participants were pretty clear. They thought certain people were more emotional, agreeable, and conscientious, and other people were more extraverted. I’ll get to those names in a second, but I want to note that these results held even after the researchers corrected for name familiarity and gender bias. The researchers ran a second experiment where participants matched 36 different traits with specific names, where they were only looking at one name, not pairs of names. And the results were the same — even when the researchers included fake names like “Mauren” and “Tatie” to make sure participants weren’t judging based on previous associations with each name. By the way, it’s important to mention that you can't really predict your personality based on your name. The researchers analyzed how people reported their own personalities, and they didn’t find any significant relationship between whether those personalities matched up with their name sounds. So! Onto the names. You can find a full list of names in our write-up on this on curiosity-dot-com, but the paper’s main findings show that “sonorant” phonemes seem to be associated with high emotionality, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. According to phonology, sonorants include vowels, liquids like R and L, glides like J and W, and nasal sounds like M, N, and NG. Names like Allen, June, Owen, Renee, Will, and Mara. On the other hand, names with “voiceless stop phonemes” are associated with extraversion. In phonology, stops are consonant sounds that are formed when the airflow of talking completely, well stops. Voiceless stops include P, K, and T sounds. Names like Chris, Erica, Ted, Katie, Tucker, and Zach. According to the paper's authors, future research should look into just how much first impressions on résumés and job applications depend on sound symbolism. More research is sure to come.
ASHLEY: And now, let’s recap what we learned today. Today we learned that cutting work hours could have a big impact on the planet — even if just SOME of us cut back. Working remotely could help, too!
CODY: We also learned that superbolts have a thousand times the energy of regular lightning, and scientists are trying to figure out why.
ASHLEY: And that people associate sounds in certain names with certain personality traits.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Stay curious!