Learn why your mom calls you your sibling’s name; why pollen isn’t just plant sperm; and what really causes sore muscles. If Your Mom Calls You Your Sibling’s Name, It Means She Loves You Both by Joanie Faletto Trudeau, M. (2017, January 16). When The Brain Scrambles Names, It’s Because You Love Them. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/16/509353565/when-the-brain-scrambles-names-its-because-you-love-them Deffler, S. A., Fox, C., Ogle, C. M., & Rubin, D. C. (2016). All my children: The roles of semantic category and phonetic similarity in the misnaming of familiar individuals. Memory & Cognition, 44(7), 989–999. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0613-z Dupont, M. (2019). Experimentally Induced Single and Repeated Personal Name Confusions: The Impact of Phonological and Semantic Similarity. Psychological Reports, 123(3), 781–805. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294118825098 Pollen is not plant sperm. It’s something much weirder. by Cameron Duke Alternation of generations | Definition & Examples | Britannica. (2021). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/alternation-of-generations BD Editors. (2018, May 17). Alternation of Generations (Plant): Definition, Life Cycle | Biology Dictionary. Biology Dictionary. https://biologydictionary.net/alternation-of-generations/ Pollen - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics. (2016). Sciencedirect.com. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/pollen Reece, J. B., Urry, L. A., Cain, M. L., Alexander, S., Minorsky, P. V., Jackson, R. B., & Campbell, N. A. (2014). Campbell biology (10th ed.). Pearson. Lactic Acid Is Not What Causes Sore Muscles originally aired April 24, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/hubble-telescope-history-selfie-science-and-exerci Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free!
Learn why your mom calls you your sibling’s name; why pollen isn’t just plant sperm; and what really causes sore muscles.
If Your Mom Calls You Your Sibling’s Name, It Means She Loves You Both by Joanie Faletto
Pollen is not plant sperm. It’s something much weirder. by Cameron Duke
Lactic Acid Is Not What Causes Sore Muscles originally aired April 24, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/hubble-telescope-history-selfie-science-and-exerci
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/pollen-is-not-actually-plant-sperm
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 why it’s not a bad thing if your mom calls you your sibling’s name; why pollen is not plant sperm — it’s a LOT weirder; and why lactic acid is not what causes sore muscles.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Has your mom ever called you by your sibling’s name? I know mine has. And according to research, it’s super common. And it doesn’t mean you’re not important to her. When your mom calls you by the wrong name, it may just mean she loves you just as much as the siblings whose names she said first.
This comes from a 2016 study in the journal Memory & Cognition. Psychology researchers surveyed 1,700 men and women to find out how often they mixed up people’s names and whose names they said by mistake. They found that the way that person was categorized in the namer’s head mattered: people were most likely to mix up family members’ names with other family members’ names, and friends’ names with friends’ names. But they rarely confused a family member’s name with a friend’s name. It got even worse when the two names were similar — which means that if you’re a parent who has given all of your kids alliterative names, like Kim and Khloe and Kylie and Kendall, you’re going to have a tough time.
Another study in 2019 found that this doesn’t just happen with loved ones — it even happens with people you’ve just been introduced to. That team had people look at pictures of people labeled with their names and occupations, then had them recall each person’s name later. Sure enough, participants were more likely to confuse the names of two people who were both teachers than they were to confuse two people with different occupations.
This research suggests that mixing up people’s names isn’t a sign of a bad memory — it’s just a quirk of the way your brain categorizes names. So when your mom calls you by your siblings’ names, it’s just her brain quickly grabbing a name from the “loved ones” pile. Kind of sweet, if you think about it.
Every allergy season, you’ll see someone joking about how the air is full of plant sperm — by which they mean pollen. And yeah, because of the role it plays in plant reproduction, it’s easy to assume pollen is plant sperm. But in fact, it’s something a bit weirder. To understand what it is, let's have a little talk about the ferns and the trees.
Plants have a very different life cycle than animals do. I mean, it's tough to find a mate as it is, and being rooted to the ground doesn’t make that any easier. But plants have a clever way of solving this problem. Plants have a two-part life cycle. You’re most familiar with one stage: the sporophyte stage. This is the dominant stage of the life cycle, when they’re a big tree or a leafy shrub. But there’s a second stage of that life cycle hiding in plain sight. It’s called the gametophyte [guh-MEE-tuh-fite]. You might know it as pollen.
That’s right. Pollen isn’t plant sperm. Instead, it’s the sperm-producing stage of the plant’s life cycle. Essentially, pollen is a little microscopic clone version of the plant that is free to hitch a ride on an animal’s fur or to glide along in the wind.
This might sound confusing, but stick with me here. The sporophyte, or big plant stage, is named that because it produces spores. Specifically, the male parts of the plant’s flowers produce spores that become male gametophytes, and the female parts do the same thing. Female gametophytes stay in the flower, but the male ones strike out on their own. So, to summarize: the sporophyte’s job is to produce little clones of itself. The little clones’ job is to get busy.
Pollen — which, again, is a male gametophyte — might hitch a ride on the back of a dog, stick to a bee, or just ride the wind. At the end of its journey, if it comes in contact with the female gametophyte, it will connect with it and release a single sperm cell. That sperm cell will combine with the seed and ultimately become the embryo from which a big sporophyte will grow.
Flowering plants don’t produce sperm directly because sperm cells are fragile and don’t last long. Pollen, which can produce sperm, is much more robust. It can survive for years and even be fossilized. In this way, pollen is like a sci-fi colony ship that leaves Earth with a handful of humans in search of other planets. It’s a tiny, mobile microcosm of the species that can travel for long periods of time in order to seed new worlds.
Or make you sneeze.
CODY: Summer is a great time to get out and about and exercise. But it can be discouraging when you go for a run and feel sore for the next week. So we remastered this clip from 2018 to help you understand why exercise makes you feel the way you feel — and hopefully, motivate you to keep going.
[ASHLEY: 1:30 clip]
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Joanie Faletto and Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also a writer on today’s episode.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes, with me and Allison-- Allie-- Amy-- Natalie-- Sally--
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!