Learn about what happened when scientists put antimatter through the double-slit experiment; how a role-playing game could test your personality better than an actual personality test; and why more animals don’t reproduce asexually. 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: Scientists Put Antimatter Through the Double-Slit Experiment. Here's What Happened — https://curiosity.im/2Ws6sFs This New Personality Test Relies on Your Choices in a Role-Playing Game — https://curiosity.im/2WriDSR Why Don't More Animals Reproduce Asexually? — https://curiosity.im/2HGIPzh 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 what happened when scientists put antimatter through the double-slit experiment; how a role-playing game could test your personality better than an actual personality test; and why more animals don’t reproduce asexually.
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/personality-test-role-playing-game-antimatter-double-slit-science-and-asexual-reproduction
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 what happened when scientists put antimatter through the double-slit experiment; how a role-playing game could test your personality better than an actual personality test; and why more animals don’t reproduce asexually.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Scientists Put Antimatter Through the Double-Slit Experiment. Here's What Happened — https://curiosity.im/2Ws6sFs (Republish) (Ashley)
Scientists have made a breakthrough in studying anti-matter, and, As reported by Universe Today, it could pave the way for new experiments to teach us about antimatter, gravity, and even principles that lie at the heart of the theory of relativity. So this is great news! Let’s start with the basics and build up to what happened.
Particle wave duality is a concept that was proposed early in the 20th century, where the subatomic particles that make up light behave both as particles and waves. This property has been tested and shown to apply to electrons and neutrons and to larger, more complex molecules. And now, scientists are demonstrating that it applies to antimatter as well!
Antimatter is made up of atoms just like regular matter, but with the electric charges reversed. When a particle of antimatter meets its regular-matter twin, the two particles mutually annihilate in a flash of energy. And because most of what you see is regular matter, antimatter doesn’t tend to hang around long, so it’s super tricky to use in experiments.
But researchers from the University of Milan conducted what they called the Quantum Interferometry and Gravitation with Positrons and Lasers experiment. It had a similar setup to the original double-slit experiment, where particles are fired from a source through a grating with two slits towards a detector. Whereas particles traveling like particles — that is, in straight lines — would produce a pattern that corresponds to the grating, particles traveling like waves would generate a striped interference pattern.
For the experiment, the scientists used an interferometer to shoot a beam of positrons — the antimatter version of the electron — through a micrometric grating toward a positron-sensitive detector. Using this setup, the research team was able to generate an interference pattern that corresponded to single antimatter particle waves — for the first time.
The detector was designed in a way that enabled the team to precisely determine the impact point of individual positrons, which allowed them to reconstruct the pattern with micrometric accuracy. That helped them get a better handle on the behavior of the antimatter particles, which helped them successfully demonstrate that antimatter follows the rules of quantum mechanics and that positrons have a wave-like nature.
The success of the experiment will pave the way for investigations into antimatter interferometry.
For instance, gravity measurements could be conducted with exotic matter-antimatter symmetric atoms like positronium, an exotic atom that binds together an electron and a positron. This would allow scientists to test some fundamental theories in physics that are pretty much ironclad with regular matter, but have never been tested with antimatter.
This New Personality Test Relies on Your Choices in a Role-Playing Game — https://curiosity.im/2WriDSR (from Saturday) (Cody)
I’ve finally hit the jackpot for Curiosity stories, and it could be a game-changer when it comes to personality tests. This story is about a new personality test that relies on your choices in… wait for it… a role-playing game. I like this because there are so many tests out there, from Buzzfeed quizzes to Myers Briggs, that have no rooting in science. They’re just for fun. But even more legitimate questionnaires still rely on personal reporting, which isn’t always the best way to get truly accurate results. These questionnaires don’t usually consider the fact that answers could differ depending on the situation being presented, or the way it’s worded and interpreted, or even just by how a person is feeling that day. And in those questionnaires where you answer with options like “disagree” or “strongly agree,” some people are predisposed to only answering the extremes, while others only answer in the middle. On top of all that, sometimes people don’t really care about the test they’re being told to take, so they just kinda fudge it. Well, this new paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that immersing test-takers in a role-playing game may help overcome some of these issues. As in, researchers at Louisiana State University believe the solution is to make personality tests less "teen magazine" and more game-like. So the team developed a roleplaying scenario where a mythical character wakes up in an underground cave with no memory of how they got there. The goal is to reach the Earth's surface by traversing a labyrinth of tunnels. Players run into new creatures and challenges as they move throughout the tunnels, and they have to choose between three courses of action, each of which represents a different personality factor. And the researchers found the game format had two major benefits: first, people were engaged by the game, which made them more likely to complete the entire assessment with thoughtful and honest answers. And second, participants were less likely to fake answers based on social bias, because the game focused on an abstract character rather than themselves. Best of all, the personality traits determined by the players' choices in the game were moderately correlated with their personality traits on a standard personality questionnaire. Those traditional questionnaires might be imperfect, but having their results match up at least somewhat with the new game's results meant that the researchers were onto something. As for next steps, the researchers said, quote, “We believe that the future of game-like personality testing has promising potential for both research and practice,” unquote. [ad lib] Grab your d20 and I’ll help you test your personality any time.
[ARM &HAMMER]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is sponsored by Arm & Hammer.
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CODY: New Cloud Control Cat Litter by Arm & Hammer. More Power to You.
Why Don't More Animals Reproduce Asexually? — https://curiosity.im/2HGIPzh (from Saturday) (Ashley)
ASHLEY: Why don’t more animals reproduce asexually? I mean, we all know that evolution happens because animals mutate when they reproduce, and one of the main ways that reproduction happens is when genes mingle through sexual reproduction. But if that's true, then how did sexual reproduction evolve in the first place? Well if you know how we roll, then you can bet that we’ve got some answers for ya. For some perspective, research suggests the oldest known example of a sexually reproducing organism lived 565 million years ago. It was called Fractofusus [FRACK-tow-FEW-sis], and it wasn’t a plant OR an animal. It would’ve been able to reproduce in two ways: first, spreading asexually from chunks that break off, and second, by launching packets of genetic material to hopefully run into something compatible. Researchers think that this was probably pretty normal for early takes on sexual reproduction. Even today, lots of fish reproduce by spawning, where fertilization happens outside of the body, but the earliest known example of sex itself also went down underwater. There’s a now-extinct type of fish that lived in a Scottish lake 385 million years ago, which researchers have been able to identify as having the very first sexual organs. But believe it or not, these are not likely to be our ancestors — sex evolved several times in the history of life. So maybe we do have a pretty decent picture of how sexual reproduction got started — but that doesn't answer WHY it's become so universal. After all, asexual reproduction is still around, and even relatively complex animals like boa constrictors and hammerhead sharks have demonstrated the ability to pull it off under certain circumstances. Asexual reproduction has a lot of advantages, like getting to pass on a hundred percent of your genes, and not having to waste your time on a dating app trying to find someone to actually reproduce WITH. But on the other hand, sex allows for much faster changes than asexual reproduction does, so when organisms DON’T mix and mingle, they might end up getting left behind. Guess the grass is always greener on the other side, huh?
CODY: That’s all for today, but you can keep learning all weekend on curiosity-dot-com.
ASHLEY: And keep an eye on your podcast feed, because starting tomorrow, we’re going to be releasing special sponsored Saturday episodes of Curiosity Daily. It’s the beginning of a 5-week series on how science and technology are being applied to drive innovation and change the world.
CODY: We’ll be doing our usual thing every Sunday through Friday, so if there’s anything you’re curious about, then drop us a line through our podcast website, curiosity-daily-dot-com.
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m Ashley Hamer.
CODY: And I’m Cody Gough. Have a great weekend!
ASHLEY: And stay curious!