Learn what researchers found when they tried to build the perfect profanity, then learn how playing an online game called Stall Catchers can help scientists speed up Alzheimer’s research. Then, test your knowledge with Curiosity Challenge trivia questions.
Learn what researchers found when they tried to build the perfect profanity, then learn how playing an online game called Stall Catchers can help scientists speed up Alzheimer’s research. Then, test your knowledge with Curiosity Challenge trivia questions.
A new study tried to build the perfect swear word by Kelsey Donk
Thousands of volunteers are speeding up Alzheimer's research by playing an online game by Steffie Drucker
Curiosity Challenge episodes:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/play-a-game-to-help-cure-alzheimers-building-the-perfect-swear-word-and-mays-curiosity-challenge
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about what researchers learned when they tried to build the perfect profanity; and an online game you can play to speed up Alzheimer’s research. Speaking of games, we’ll wrap up by testing what you’ve learned recently with trivia during this month’s Curiosity Challenge. Stick around and play along!
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
A new study tried to build the perfect swear word. Seriously. A new paper from researchers at Temple University was designed to help us invent the most profane word combinations possible. And it’s titled: “Building the perfect curse word: A psycholinguistic investigation of the form and meaning of taboo words.” Don’t worry, though, parents: I’m here to help you understand the finer points of what these scientists have learned about cursing — without actually cursing.
First of all, what makes one word more profane than another? I mean, there are a lot of words you might not say in church or at a job interview that don’t actually count as curse words. To find out, the researchers asked people to rate a thousand English words on a scale from least to most “taboo.” They found that the most obscene sounding words were more abstract, and had to do with body parts, bodily acts, gender, or disease.
But to truly understand what made a curse word a curse word, the researchers needed to figure out how to invent one that didn’t already exist. So they took 487 common nouns like “door” and “gibbon” and asked participants to imagine combining those words with profanities. The goal was to decide which normal words sounded the most profane when combined with actual curse words.
The volunteers rated each word for how easy it was to combine with profanities, then combined them with whichever taboo word they thought would best pair with each normal word.
Here’s an actual sentence from the study’s Methods section that describes this process. It uses a curse word, but I’ll substitute a cleaner syllable in its place. Quote, “We examined a potential source of emergent tabooness when combining extant taboo words (e.g., ish) with common nouns (e.g., gibbon) to form novel compounds (e.g., ishgibbon).” That’s a wild sentence to read in a scientific journal.
In this case, what the word sounded like seemed to be the most important. Shorter words with more stop consonants, like “pig,” were the participants’ favorite to pair with existing profanities. Meaning mattered too, though. The researchers said the best words involved body parts, receptacles, and animacy, or things that were alive.
So if you find yourself fumbling for a curse word that doesn’t yet exist, go ahead and make one. Words you’ll want to stay away from include: fireplace, restaurant, tennis, newspaper, and physician. They’re just not as catchy. But if you really want to go for gold, try sack, trash, pig, rod, or mouth. Have fun!
You — yes, you — can help find a treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease. And all you have to do is play a computer game.
Helping researchers with this is important because nearly 50 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer’s, and it’s currently the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. We know a lot about how the disease happens, but there’s no treatment or cure.
One telltale sign of the disease is reduced blood flow in the brain, but the cause for that wasn’t clear until last year. That was when Cornell University researchers studying the disease in mice discovered that white blood cells were getting stuck to the inside of capillaries, which are the smallest blood vessels in the brain. These “stalls” can add up to a 30 percent drop in blood flow, which is about the same reduction in oxygen that you get when you stand up too quickly. But less oxygen isn’t the only thing these blockages cause — they can also lead to a buildup of harmful proteins that can lead to amyloid plaques that collect between neurons and keep them from communicating with each other.
Now the team is working to find treatments that would remove those stalls and help the brain function better. But spotting the stalls in the brain imagery is difficult and time-consuming: It could take a trained lab tech six to 12 months to analyze just one week’s worth of data! And we can’t outsource this task to computers; most of the stalls are so subtle that an algorithm wouldn’t accurately detect them. This research bottleneck could delay the studies needed to develop a treatment by decades.
That’s where you come in. The team turned this part of the research into a game. It’s called Stall Catchers, and anyone can play it. All you have to do is create an account and then watch moving images of mouse brains to determine whether a given blood vessel is flowing or stalled. The scientists help you catch your first few stalls. Don’t worry if you get some wrong — other players double-check the same images.
A month after the game’s launch, a thousand people had analyzed 96-thousand blood vessels. That means they completed the equivalent of 3 and a half months of research. Their assessments were right 95 percent of the time, and they even exposed mistakes the scientists had made! Today more than 14-thousand people as young as six are playing the game and helping accelerate Alzheimer’s research. Wouldn’t it be amazing if being quarantined could lead to a cure?!
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is sponsored by KiwiCo.
CODY: KiwiCo creates super cool hands-on projects designed to expose kids to concepts in STEAM — that's science, technology, engineering, art and design, and math. All from the comfort of home!
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ASHLEY: They have everything you need to make STEAM seriously fun — delivered to your doorstep. Get your first month FREE on select crates at kiwico-dot-com-slash-CURIOSITY. CODY: That’s K-I-W-I-C-O dot com slash CURIOSITY
It’s time once again for the Curiosity Challenge! Every month, I call up a listener and put them to the test by asking three questions from stories we ran on Curiosity Daily in the previous month. For this Curiosity Challenge, I talked to Brescia in Mexico City. She’s a longtime listener who has sent in lots of fascinating questions for us to answer. Like, remember back in December when we answered a listener question about what happens when nukes explode in outer space? That was Brescia! So without further ado, here’s this month’s Curiosity Challenge.
Pretty good, right? She nailed it. If you’d like to play next month, OR if you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, shoot us an email at podcast at curiosity dot com or
Leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208!
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about a surprising tip for de-cluttering your house;
How tarantula venom could be an alternative to opioids;
Whether you should wad or fold toilet paper, according to science;
Why allergy medications make us sleepy;
And more!
CODY: You’ll also learn about why we give antibiotics to farm animals, from science journalist Maryn McKenna; and how to “hack” your emotions, from psychology Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. ASHLEY: Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Steffie Drucker, and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!