Learn about what online trolls are like in real life; an auditory illusion rattlesnakes use to trick humans; and blazars. Online trolling might be due to personality rather than the anonymity of the internet by Steffie Drucker New research: The internet does not turn people into trolls – it just makes real-life trolls more visible. (2021, August 26). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/926582 BOR, A., & PETERSEN, M. B. (2021). The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis. American Political Science Review, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055421000885 Rattlesnake rattles use auditory illusion to trick human brains by Cameron Duke Forsthofer, M., Schutte, M., Luksch, H., Kohl, T., Wiegrebe, L., & Chagnaud, B. P. (2021). Frequency modulation of rattlesnake acoustic display affects acoustic distance perception in humans. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.07.018 Turner, B. (2021, August 19). Rattlesnake rattles use auditory illusion to trick human brains. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/rattlesnakes-trick-brains-auditory-illusion.html Introducing The Universe’s Most Epic Object: The Blazar by Ashley Hamer Atkinson, Nancy. (2009, March 19). Astronomers Observe Bizarre Blazar with Battery of Telescopes. Universe Today. https://www.universetoday.com/27518/astronomers-observe-bizarre-blazar-with-battery-of-telescopes/ Carlson, E. K. (2018, July 12). Blazars explained. Astronomy.com. https://astronomy.com/news/2018/07/what-is-a-blazar Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about what online trolls are like in real life; an auditory illusion rattlesnakes use to trick humans; and blazars.
Online trolling might be due to personality rather than the anonymity of the internet by Steffie Drucker
Rattlesnake rattles use auditory illusion to trick human brains by Cameron Duke
Introducing The Universe’s Most Epic Object: The Blazar by Ashley Hamer
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/psychology-of-online-trolls-rattlesnake-illusions-blazars
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 how online trolls might be just as bad in real life; an auditory illusion rattlesnakes use to trick human brains; and the universe’s most epic object: the blazar.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Are internet trolls just as nasty in real life? Or is there something about the internet that makes good people turn nasty? Researchers recently took a look at this question, and it turns out that when it comes to online discussions, some users are just bad apples.
This new study from Aarhus University in Denmark tested “the mismatch hypothesis,” which is the idea that people act differently online than they do in person. It’s a common explanation for why political discussions turn especially toxic online. I mean, you’re much more likely to be polite to someone you’re interacting with face-to-face than an anonymous stranger on the internet, right?
Wellll, the scientists didn’t find much evidence to support that. Instead, they say that people who act aggressively online are just as hostile in person. The internet just makes their behavior easier to see.
The team surveyed more than 8,000 Americans and Danes about their experiences and behavior in political conversations both on- and offline. People with more peaceable personalities reported opting out of political talk in any form. If you don’t like confrontation in the real world, you don’t like it online, either. But people who tended to be hostile reported being the same way in online political discussions as they were in offline ones. That suggests that a troll’s aggressive behavior would be the same offline — it’s just more visible online.
The researchers found that the people who were hostile online were more motivated by the desire for status and the thrill of risk. These personality traits led them to use the features of the internet to fight with people and fulfill those needs.
But one thing was true across the board: participants agreed that political discussions feel way worse online. Scientists say it’s because exchanges on the internet are so much more public.
Unfortunately, the team thinks this isn’t a problem we can fix through education. Trolls know that their words hurt, which is exactly why they hurl the hate they do. Instead, they say the best approach is for platforms or group moderators to describe what kind of conduct is acceptable. Making the comments of trolls less visible denies them the attention they seek. That might help to break the cycle of online hostility by showing other users that their conduct is not okay.
So when it comes to trolls, use the “report” button freely. Maybe that can help make online discussions a little more civil.
The rattle on a rattlesnake’s tail is way more advanced than a simple warning signal. It turns out that a rattlesnake can create an auditory illusion that tricks us into thinking it’s a lot closer than it is.
In case you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting a rattlesnake in the wild: when a rattlesnake feels threatened, it’ll create a rattling sound with its tail. That sound is a clear signal to stay away. If you’ve ever heard it firsthand, you probably got the message quickly.
Recently, scientists studying how rattlesnakes fend off threats have found that there’s a lot more to the rattle than we thought. Rattlesnakes have rules for their rattles — and they change those rules to fool us.
In their study, the researchers pushed various objects toward the rattlesnakes while recording their reactions. As they pushed things like a fake human torso toward a snake in a lab, it would begin shaking its rattle… slowly. As the object approached, the snake rattled faster and faster. The researchers figured out that the snakes weren’t just warning potential predators; they were communicating some metric of distance. It’s kind of like how the backup sensors in your car might beep faster and faster as your car approaches a wall.
But that’s not all that happened. Once the object was so close that the snake was rattling at 40 times per second, it changed the rules. Instead of rattling slightly faster the closer the object got, the snake doubled its rattling speed.
To find out how this influenced would-be intruders, the researchers had volunteers use VR to walk through a virtual grassland. The volunteers were asked to tell the researchers when they thought they were about three feet or one meter from the snake. On average, the volunteers would stop walking right after the rattling jumped in speed and would guess the snake was a meter away — despite the fact that it was still four meters away.
Because the participants learned that the rattle got faster as they got closer, the jump in speed tricked them into thinking the snake was much closer than it was. The researchers think that the rattlesnake uses this illusion as a sort of “distance safety margin” that warns attackers not to come any closer.
They wouldn’t have to tell me twice.
What’s the most powerful thing in the universe? A star? A supernova? A black hole? None of those compare to the epic awesomeness that is a blazar.
A blazar is the Turducken of awesome space objects: it’s a supermassive black hole inside a radioactive accretion disk inside an active galaxy. Oh, and it shoots jets of radiation from either end at close to the speed of light, right in our direction. Let me explain.
Most large galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centers (even our own Milky Way). Black holes collect the gas, dust, and other debris around them so fast that not everything can keep up. This forms a sort of traffic jam around the black hole known as an accretion disk. The black hole exerts enough gravitational pressure on this disk to heat it up to millions of degrees, which makes it emit a massive amount of radiation. Meanwhile, the black hole is spinning rapidly, which forms a magnetic field strong enough to turn the radioactive material into powerful jets that blast out of each end at close to the speed of light for hundreds of thousands of light years.
If those jets aim perpendicular to our vantage point, the object is called a radio galaxy. If they’re at an angle, it’s called a quasar. And if the jet is pointed right at us — making it bright enough to be detectable by Earth-based instruments as far as 9 billion light-years away? It’s a blazar.
Why are they called “blazars”? It’s not because of their powerful blaze of light. See, the first blazar ever discovered was actually mislabeled. In 1929, German astronomer Cuno Hoffmeister published a list of 354 objects that he thought were variable stars, or stars whose brightness fluctuates over a short period of time. One of those objects was called BL Lacterae, or BL Lac for short. But a few decades later, scientists started to realize that BL Lac didn’t behave like other stars. It behaved more like a quasar, another mysterious object they were studying at the time. Eventually, they figured out that BL Lac was a quasar-like object at the center of a distant galaxy. They also began finding other objects just like it, which they called “BL Lac” objects. Soon enough “BL Lac” was combined with “quasar” to coin the term “blazar.”
Blazars. They’re some of the most energetic objects in the entire universe — and they’re pointed right at us.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s writers were Steffie Drucker, Cameron Duke, and Ashley Hamer, who’s also our managing editor.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!