In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: The Coldest Volcano in the World Erupts Black Lava How a Few Lucky Civil War Soldiers Started Glowing and Healed Faster "Norman" Is MIT's New Psychopathic AI 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.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
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.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/psychopathic-ai-glowing-civil-war-soldiers-and-black-lava
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiosity.com 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 a new psychopathic AI, why the coldest volcano in the world erupts black lava, and the fascinating story of glowing Civil War soldiers.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, have you ever been to a volcano?
CODY GOUGH: I actually hiked up the side of a volcano, the Colima Volcano near Manzanillo, Mexico. I was there for a short vacation in November 2014. It's technically two volcanoes. It erupted January 2015, so just a couple of months after I was there.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: That's out of the news. And I was like, oh, yeah. I was on that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, my gosh.
CODY GOUGH: It wasn't like a volcano volcano. It just felt like we were on a really tall hill with lots of fog. Yeah. It was really cloudy the whole time. There was no visibility. And it's not like you were up and there was like magma or anything. It wasn't active at the time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Sure.
CODY GOUGH: But in retrospect, it was wild. Have you ever been to a volcano?
ASHLEY HAMER: I never have. But I really want to visit this one. It sounds super interesting. It's the coldest volcano in the world. We're going to explain why this thing erupts black lava.
CODY GOUGH: Black lava?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. So it's an active volcano in Tanzania called Ol Doinyo Lengai, which translates to "Mountain of God" in the Maasai language. It's still pretty hot at about 950 degrees Fahrenheit. But that's just about half as hot as the melting point of most lava, which is about 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, an explorer slipped and fell into an active lava flow there about 10 years ago, and he lived. He's the only person known to have survived falling into lava.
Anyway, why is the lava black? And why is it so cold? Well, blame chemistry. Most of the lava in your typical volcano is formed from basalt. But the magma rocks of Ol Doinyo are carbonatite, which is made of calcium, sodium, and dissolved carbon dioxide.
Carbonatite has a way lower melting point than basalt. And that's also why the lava never gets hot enough to gain a reddish glow. And don't let its lower temperature fool you. It's actually more dangerous than hotter volcanoes in certain ways because Ol Doinyo's lava can move as fast as water because of its chemical makeup. Glowing red lava usually tops at 6 miles an hour, but this stuff just like rushes down the mountain.
CODY GOUGH: That's not fun.
ASHLEY HAMER: No.
CODY GOUGH: And you want to visit?
ASHLEY HAMER: I do want to, I mean, from a safe distance.
(TOGETHER) [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: You always say you're not that well-traveled, and now you want to go to a volcano.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, see, I'm not well-traveled, so I want to go everywhere.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, OK.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right.
CODY GOUGH: There we go.
ASHLEY HAMER: Especially this place.
CODY GOUGH: [CHUCKLES] Do you know a lot about the Civil War?
ASHLEY HAMER: I read Gone with the Wind when I was in fourth grade because I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was smart. That's all I know.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. That's the book you picked?
ASHLEY HAMER: That's the book. That's like a thousand pages. And I was like, this is a long book. I'm going to read it.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: OK. Well, if it was that long now, I get it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It was specifically 1,024 pages. I remember. That's how long it was.
CODY GOUGH: Because you were counting down the entire time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow. Well, today we have possibly the weirdest Civil War story you've never heard, and it involves glowing soldiers.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, my gosh.
CODY GOUGH: Literally. This is not science fiction. You might have heard of the Battle of Shiloh. It was one of the first major battles of the American Civil War, and it was super deadly, with more than 3,000 casualties and more than 16,000 wounded.
But remember, in the Civil War, infection was a really big problem after battles. Sometimes medicine was limited, and there weren't any doctors near the battlegrounds. Well, as night fell after the Battle of Shiloh, some of the wounded soldiers noticed a strange glow emanating from their wounds.
ASHLEY HAMER: Aliens.
CODY GOUGH: [CHUCKLES] Not aliens this time.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right.
CODY GOUGH: But they called it Angel's Glow, and it actually lived up to its nickname in terms of the angel part because when they were healthy enough to be moved to the field hospital, the soldiers with Angel's Glow recovered better and faster, with cleaner wounds and a better survival rate than the other wounded soldiers. And nobody knew why for nearly 139 years. And don't worry. This story continues to get weird.
ASHLEY HAMER: I was worried.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I know. It was normal up till now. The mystery was solved in 2001 by a 17-year-old high school student named Bill Martin. He was visiting the battlefield of Shiloh with his mom, Phyllis Martin, and she was a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service.
So Bill is on the battlefield, learns about these glowing soldiers. And he remembers a story his mom had told him about a bioluminescent bacteria called P. luminescens that glows with a pale blue light. So he and his friend did some experiments. And they figured out the bacteria would have survived in the mud at Shiloh, so it could have been around. But the inside of the human body was too hot because it only survives in colder temperatures.
But since the soldiers would have been in cold Tennessee weather in mud puddles in the pouring rain, they might have had hypothermia, which would lower their temperatures enough for the bacteria to survive.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: And get this. Part of the way P. luminescens survives is by clearing up all the bacteria in its way. It's like a super bacteria. It doesn't deal with other bacteria.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: So that's why the soldiers healed faster. This bacteria cleaned up those wounds. And P. luminescens isn't especially infectious to humans since it's usually no match for our immune systems. But in this case, these soldiers were exactly in the right place at the right time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, the mud must have been glowing.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: That would have been cool too. But man, your wound glowing would be weird.
CODY GOUGH: Right. A weird "glow in the dark" battlefield.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: It's a very specific time and place and application. So I don't know that it's going to be the next big over-the-counter drug or anything. Put this "glow in the dark" bacteria in you but--
ASHLEY HAMER: Civil War recreations where you just have to have glowing battlefields now.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, the re-enactors.
ASHLEY HAMER: They are pretty sweet.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, start to put, like, glow in the dark.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It'd be like laser tag.
(TOGETHER) [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: Civil War style.
CODY GOUGH: Civil War re-enacted laser tag. Sign me up.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK. Today we're going to calmly explain-- don't make any sudden movements-- why MIT created the world's first psychopathic artificial intelligence.
CODY GOUGH: Hello, Dave.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: I can't let you do that, Dave.
ASHLEY HAMER: Exactly. It's going to be fine. We're going to get through this. So a team at MIT created an AI named Norman. Of course, they called it Norman.
CODY GOUGH: [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: It doesn't control nuclear launch codes or anything. It's just an image captioning algorithm, and they built it to make a point about how an AI's environment shapes its thinking. Norman was exposed to some of the darkest corners of Reddit where people share disturbing images of death, violence, and gore. We should mention that Reddit has thousands of communities, and a lot of them are perfectly harmless. There are cute puppies and science news and TV show and video games specific subreddits. Also, shout out to r/xxfitness. But yeah. There's some dark stuff on there.
Anyway, Norman looked at all this dark stuff, and then was given a Rorschach test. Literally, it was shown inkblots just like the test psychologists use. And the results were creepy.
So a standard AI saw one picture as a close-up of a face with flowers. Norman, on the other hand, said, quote, "a man is shot dead." The standard AI saw another photo as a black-and-white photo of a baseball glove, but Norman saw a man is murdered by machine gun in broad daylight. And the list goes on.
In photos where a normal AI saw a wedding cake, an umbrella, and an airplane, Norman saw men being hit by a car, electrocuted, and shot respectively. But again, the point of the test was to show that as AI becomes more essential to governments and businesses, it's essential that their human handlers learn how to curate or manage the data they process. Imagine if a system meant to recommend prison sentences or hiring practices developed bias patterns after interacting with biased people online. It's not too far fetched, and it actually might be happening right now. Read the full story of Norman and everything else we talked about today on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS.
CODY GOUGH: Keep all AI off Twitter. 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.
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