Learn about how the average phone typing speed is catching up to the keyboard; how it can drizzle in Antarctica even when it’s cold enough for water to freeze; and, how an ancient supernova could be the reason why humans walk upright. 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: The Average Phone Typing Speed Is Catching Up to the Keyboard — https://curiosity.im/34Ny0pf A Striking New Study Says an Ancient Supernova Is Why Humans Walk Upright — https://curiosity.im/2QtZhZE Additional sources: Persistent drizzle at sub-zero temps in Antarctica | EurekaAlert! — https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-11/ps-pda110519.php How do snowflakes form? Get the science behind snow | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — https://www.noaa.gov/stories/how-do-snowflakes-form-science-behind-snow Persistent Supercooled Drizzle at Temperatures Below −25 °C Observed at McMurdo Station, Antarctica | American Geophysical Union — https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019JD030882 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 how the average phone typing speed is catching up to the keyboard; how it can drizzle in Antarctica even when it’s cold enough for water to freeze; and, how an ancient supernova could be the reason why humans walk upright.
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:
Additional sources:
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/phone-typing-is-speeding-up-a-supernova-may-be-why-humans-walk-upright-and-rain-on-antarctica
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 how the average phone typing speed is catching up to the keyboard; how it can drizzle in Antarctica even when it’s cold enough for water to freeze; and, how an ancient supernova could be the reason why humans walk upright.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
The Average Phone Typing Speed Is Catching Up to the Keyboard — https://curiosity.im/34Ny0pf (11/7 DOC) (Cody)
Remember how hard it used to be to type out a text message on your flip phone? You know the struggle was real, if you’re at least about as old as Ashley and me. Obviously it’s easier to tap out a text or email these days, but just how quickly you can do that might surprise you. A new study crunched the numbers, and comes along with some tips on how to become a texting titan.
The study used an online typing test to analyze the typing speed of 37,000 people from 160 countries, on both smartphones and computer keyboards. It came to a shocking conclusion: These days we're almost as fast at typing on our phones as we are on our laptops. Users typing with two thumbs achieved 38 words per minute on average. That’s only about 25 percent slower than the typing speeds in a similar larg-scale study of physical keyboard.
Of course, some people can type way faster on a traditional keyboard. If you aced touch typing in school or work as a secretary, you can probably knock out a hundred words a minute on a computer. But most people are nowhere near that fast, so smartphone speed is closing in on keyboard speed. The study also found that teenagers managed 10 more words a minute than those in their 40s. One texting hero even managed 85 words a minute on a phone.
All this brings us to some tips to improve your phone typing skills. Firstly, it turns out that two thumbs is significantly faster than one. Rely on autocorrect, even though you’ll run the risk of autocorrect fails. But don't use predictive text. You'll end up spending more time evaluating the options your phone suggests than you would have spent just typing your intended message.
So, follow these tips and you’ll whipping up messages on your phone nearly as fast as you can on a keyboard. You can even track your progress with the typing test the researchers used for the study. There’s a link to that in our full write-up on this on curiosity-dot-com, which we’ll link to in today’s show notes. Good luck!
Audio script (Mae Rice) - it can drizzle on Antarctica (Ashley)
Scientists have discovered that it can drizzle on Antarctica, even when the temperature is low enough to freeze water. And that has implications for climate predictions.
You might think of snow as “frozen rain,” but that’s an oversimplification. Snow isn’t 100 percent water. To get a snowflake, you need to start with an ice crystal. For that, water needs to freeze to something, like a mote of dust in the air. Rain doesn’t freeze automatically when the temperature drops below freezing — it can still fall in tiny droplets, less than one-five-hundredth of an inch across, or half a millimeter. In normal temperatures, this type of rain is called “drizzle,” and when it falls in below-freezing weather, it’s called “supercooled drizzle.” This phenomenon has been documented in short bursts, but recently, researchers discovered that it can also last quite a while.
In Antarctica, supercooled drizzle recently fell for almost eight straight hours. The temperature was below minus four degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 20 degrees Celsius, and the drizzle fell from a cloud that was even colder: less than minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 25 degrees Celsius. It was the first time this kind of precipitation had been documented for such an extended period, but researchers doubt it was the first time it’s actually happened.
See, based on the researchers’ climate simulations, supercooled drizzle is most likely to happen when the air is ultra-clean, with almost no dust or sea salt particles floating in it. This makes sense, because, again, snowflakes need those particles to form. In pristine climates like Antarctica’s, where there’s minimal dust, the raw material for snow just isn’t there!
That means supercooled drizzle is probably pretty common on the South Pole, which could affect meteorology in big ways. Clouds are made of water, and when they drizzle, they shrink, which shortens the cloud’s lifespan and changes how heat from the sun reaches the Earth. So supercooled drizzle has implications for weather forecasting and climate simulations. It may also have implications for how you react the next time it snows. Feel free to ooh and ahh, but remember — that’s frozen rain plus a little dirt.
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Summary: When there's precipitation in freezing temperatures, you'd naturally expect it to turn into snow. But recently, researchers on an Antarctic field expedition observed drizzle coming from the sky — despite the fact that it was 13 degrees F (-25 C). And it lasted for HOURS. The scientists think this is possible because there's so little dust, sea salt, and other pollutants in the air there, so there's nothing for them to grab onto and freeze (generally, snowflakes form from the interaction of a water droplet and a dust particle). This new discovery may mean that our climate models need tweaking.
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A Striking New Study Says an Ancient Supernova Is Why Humans Walk Upright — https://curiosity.im/2QtZhZE (Repub) (Cody)
A striking new study suggests that humans walk upright because of… wait for it… an ancient supernova. Yes, a supernova, which set off a chain of cosmic events and eventually led to why we are the way we are. This is gonna sound really out-there, so let’s go through this step by step. In a nutshell, here’s the story: a supernova detonates nearby, let’s say within a 150 to 300-light year radius of our solar system. That showers the Earth with energetic cosmic rays. This, in turn, showers Earth’s atmosphere with highly energetic particles. THAT raises the frequency of lightning strikes. Okay, so what does lightning do? Well, it turns out that lightning is the biggest natural ignition source for wildfires. More lightning means more wildfires, which means more treeless savanna. If you’re hunting on the savanna, you’re gonna have a major advantage if you can see your prey from far away by walking upright. And a world with lots of tree-free open space would have selected for a random mutation that would let our ancestors run down prey. Walking upright would help you succeed on the savanna. The authors of this study cite an increase in the number of lightning strikes seen in carbon levels in the geological record, and an enhanced rate of forest fires. Okay, so obviously it’s kinda cool to think about the idea that a supernova could have affected our evolution. And we do THINK that cosmic rays trigger lightning… but that idea is actually still debated. On top of that, it’s a bit hard for us to study the full effects of a supernova. Sure, we see supernovae pretty regularly in other galaxies, but not so much in our own galaxy. A bright naked-eye supernova hasn’t happened in our galaxy since the start of the age of telescopic astronomy, and the last galactic supernova we saw was by astronomer Johannes Kepler — in 1604. A modern galactic supernova could help us figure out whether these things really have an impact on terrestrial lightning. But one of the study’s authors told Universe Today that, and I have to quote this, “We are working on other effects that may be relevant, but it will be a long time before anyone can sort out what caused what, as is usual in geology,” unquote. For now, we’ll just call it a fun story to share at a cocktail party, and a great example of how much geology can tell us about our universe.
What got us excited about today’s episode?
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Jessica Stillman and Mae Rice, and by David Dickinson for Universe Today, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity.com.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough, and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is 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!