Learn about why scientists made a plant that lights up when it’s attacked; the history of what might be the creepiest house in the United States; and a 5-minute trick to help you fall asleep faster. Plus: hear Cody and Ashley react to Curiosity Daily being recognized as the 2018 Best Science & Medicine Podcast in the 13th Annual People’s Choice Podcast Awards! 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: Watch Plants Light Up When They're Attacked This Is Hands-Down the Creepiest House in the United States This 5-Minute Trick Can Help You Fall Asleep Faster Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey 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! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about why scientists made a plant that lights up when it’s attacked; the history of what might be the creepiest house in the United States; and a 5-minute trick to help you fall asleep faster. Plus: hear Cody and Ashley react to Curiosity Daily being recognized as the 2018 Best Science & Medicine Podcast in the 13th Annual People’s Choice Podcast Awards!
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:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
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!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/plants-that-light-up-when-attacked-a-5-minute-trick-for-falling-asleep-and-the-creepy-carleton-villa
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiositydotcom to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about why scientists made a plant that lights up when it's attacked, the history of what might be the creepiest house in the United States, and another trick to help you fall asleep faster.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning 2018 Science and Medicine Podcast of the Year from the 13th Annual People's Choice Podcast Awards--
ASHLEY HAMER: Aaah!
CODY GOUGH: Curiosity Daily. Stay tuned for more on that later.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scientists have genetically modified plants to light up, and they didn't just do it for fun. They did it for, well, science. And we'll get into why. I thought this video was amazing to see.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, did you watch it?
CODY GOUGH: Nope.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, you did.
CODY GOUGH: I watched it.
[LAUGHTER]
That'd be so mean. No, it's cool-- a plant lighting up.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: But not just like a glowy plant. It's not just glow in the dark. It would light up when certain things happened.
ASHLEY HAMER: Totally. You know, this is like my deepest, darkest, like, weird nerd thing is that plants are freaking awesome, and they're way smarter and way cooler than anyone gives them credit for.
There are plants that can see. There are plants that can hear. There are plants that can make caterpillars eat each other. It's amazing.
CODY GOUGH: And you haven't even mentioned the Entwives.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, those aren't even real, Cody.
CODY GOUGH: They're real to me, Ashley.
ASHLEY HAMER: [LAUGHS] Well, you might not know this, but when a leaf is attacked, it sends an electrical signal to the rest of the plant to let it know it should ready its defenses. And in a new study, scientists figured out a way to see that signal as light to help them understand what's going on.
We've posted a really cool video of the plants lighting up in our full write-up on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. But even if you don't get to see it, we can explain what's going on in the video.
Scientists have known for a while that plants react to predators. There's this one plant called Arabidopsis thaliana that pumps its leaves full of extra mustard oil when it senses vibrations from a caterpillar.
Scientists also knew that if you damage one leaf, an electric charge spreads across the plant, essentially to help the plant defend itself against its attacker. They didn't know what triggered that charge, but they thought it might be calcium.
Yeah, you heard that right. Calcium doesn't just build healthy bones and teeth. It's also an electrolyte, meaning it carries an electric charge when it's dissolved in fluid like blood, which helps it regulate the contraction of your muscles and heart.
You can find calcium in most biological cells, including those of plants. Calcium concentrations can be really erratic. They tend to spike and dip. So researchers couldn't just open up a leaf and measure its calcium levels. That's where the lights come in.
To help them watch plant calcium levels in real-time, they developed a new version of that mustard oil Arabidopsis plant I mentioned earlier. This new version produces a protein that glows in the presence of calcium. That way, they could just turn out the lights, injure their mutant plants, and watch the fireworks show.
For the study, researchers hit the plant with caterpillar bites, scissor cuts, and other wounds. And with every attack, researchers could plainly see glowing pathways traveling from the wound to the other leaves at about a millimeter per second. That's slow for an animal but really fast for a plant.
It only took a few minutes for the signal to spread out to the rest of the leaves. The surprising part is that plants do all of this without a nervous system. Who knew plants could be so cool?
CODY GOUGH: You did, apparently.
ASHLEY HAMER: I did.
CODY GOUGH: I think I'm finally recovered from our heated discussion about the House on the Rock from Sunday. Ashley, are you simmered down?
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, a little bit.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Well, today, we don't have a story about a place that's quite that weird, and neither of us have been to this place, but we do have the story behind what might be the creepiest house in the United States. Just in time for Halloween season.
ASHLEY HAMER: The greatest season of all.
CODY GOUGH: It's my favorite, too.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I got married in October, so.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, that's right.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: But not on Halloween.
CODY GOUGH: Nah, although we almost got married on Friday the 13th. Fun fact. And our wedding reception was in the most haunted hotel in Chicago.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, my gosh.
CODY GOUGH: So I don't shy away from that stuff.
ASHLEY HAMER: I would totally get married on Friday the 13th.
CODY GOUGH: We would have. Well, join us as we head to the Thousand Islands. Not the salad dressing. I'm talking about the islands on the Saint Lawrence River dividing New York from Canada.
They're home to ritzy summer homes for the rich and famous, but one of those homes has a strange, dark history. It's called Carleton Villa. Construction on the house started in 1894 on Carleton Island, one of the 1,800 islands in the Thousand Islands archipelago.
The estate covered seven acres and was notable for the stately stonework, towering turrets, and eye-popping stained glass. Sounds lovely, right? But the guy who commissioned this place ran into some terrible luck before it was finished.
William Wyckoff and a couple of business partners had purchased the Remington Typewriter company, and they turned it into a really lucrative business, so he should have been all set.
But a month before move-in day, his wife passed away from cancer. And the very first night the rest of the family moved in, Wyckoff himself had a heart attack in his sleep, and he never woke up.
His youngest son, Clarence, inherited the house after his father's death, but then, the Great Depression. The Wyckoffs sold Carleton Villa to General Electric, who plans to demolish the building for scrap and build a new employee resort and plant on the site.
All the windows were removed from the villa, including the beautiful stained glass, and the marble around the mansion's four-story tower was also removed. But then, World War II broke out, and the demolition stopped. The house has been virtually abandoned ever since.
If you're in the market for a fixer-upper, It can actually be yours for just under half a million dollars. There are more modern houses elsewhere on Carleton Island, so you'd have some pretty well-to-do neighbors. If you get the chance to visit one, at least you know where to go for a fun Halloween trick or treat.
ASHLEY HAMER: Our audience seems to love sleep tips. So today, we've got a five-minute trick to help you fall asleep faster, and it's backed by research.
CODY GOUGH: I, for one, am thrilled that our audience loves sleeping.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, sleeping is one of the greatest things that you could do.
CODY GOUGH: It's really healthy, basically next to water and oxygen.
ASHLEY HAMER: It also feels great. You get to fly sometimes. That's cool. That's the only time you get to fly.
CODY GOUGH: Yes.
[LAUGHS]
I have no follow-up to that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Flying's great, man.
CODY GOUGH: You heard it here first on the award-winning Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, anyway, in a recent study, researchers from Baylor University asked 57 participants to try something before bedtime. They told half of the participants to spend five minutes writing about everything they had to remember to do the following day and over the next few days.
The other half of the participants were told to spend five minutes writing about what they'd done that day and earlier. And the people who wrote a to-do list fell asleep 10 minutes faster than the other group, in about 15 minutes on average.
This is just some of the latest research showing that writing stuff down has a lot of benefits. A different study from 2014 showed that for people who generally express their emotions, writing about a stressful or traumatic event helped reduce anxiety.
And another study from the same year showed that students understand class material more fully when they take notes by hand instead of typing them out. There's a real benefit to putting your fleeting thoughts down on paper, both for your mental health and your productivity overall.
CODY GOUGH: Before we wrap up today, I wanted to officially announce that Curiosity Daily has been recognized as the best science and medicine podcast in the 13th Annual People's Choice Podcast Awards, which we are very happy about.
ASHLEY HAMER: Super happy.
CODY GOUGH: You might remember us asking you to nominate us back in July and we were a finalist in a couple of categories, but we took home the award for the science and medicine category, and we want to say thank you for taking time out of your busy day to nominate us. This is like a really big deal for us.
ASHLEY HAMER: We are so appreciative that you think highly enough of us to take time out of your day. You're wonderful.
CODY GOUGH: It was awesome. I don't, like, win awards, really.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: So, like, genuinely, this is a huge deal to me. I mean, we both work hard to do this show, so it's really-- it's really cool. You've affected both me and Ashley in a way that I don't think words can properly express, even though that is our job on this show because what we're doing is talking.
ASHLEY HAMER: I think Cody's getting a little misty-eyed.
CODY GOUGH: Well, we'll just move on from that. Back to the script that I won an award for writing. So, anyway, Ashley and I shot a 90-second acceptance speech video that I edited and submitted for when we won the award.
If you're curious to check that out, then you can find the video in our latest post on our Patreon page at patreon.com/curiositydotcom, all spelled out. We've been posting a lot of free stuff on our Patreon page, like bonus interviews over the weekend, and Ashley's been getting some great selfies up on there, so you should really check out our Patreon page even if you're not able to send us monthly support to keep our show going.
Sure, it's a great place to kick us a couple of bucks a month if you love the show, but honestly, we also see it as a place where we can post more cool audio that we can't always get to on this show or on your regular podcast feed.
So follow us there to check it out. And one more time, that's patreon.com/curiositydotcom. Anything to add, Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: Just that you can read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Seamless transition. This is why we won an award.
ASHLEY HAMER: Exactly.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
NARRATOR: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.