While Curiosity Daily is a on a break for the holidays, we wanted to leave you with a few of our favorite episodes from 2022. Today, you’ll learn about how researchers at MIT created an incredible new type of fabric that can save thousands of lives, how sleep scientists are explaining alien abductions, and how evolution is being sped up by human beings, causing ripple effects all over the place.
Today, you’ll learn about how researchers at MIT created an incredible new type of fabric that can save thousands of lives, how sleep scientists are explaining alien abductions, and how evolution is being sped up by human beings, causing ripple effects all over the place.
Fabric with Ears
Dreaming of E.T.
Fast Evolution
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/re-release-fabric-with-ears-dreaming-of-et-fast-evolution
NATE: Hey team! Hope your holiday season is going swimmingly. Today we have another episode re-release from the vault with some great facts to impress anyone at any holiday function you find yourself at. I know I’ve got some family members that love to talk about lucid dreaming. I enjoyed learning about fabric that can generate electricity. So, I know I’ll be breaking out some of those tidbits at the New Years party. Anyway, enjoy today’s episode.
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn about how researchers at MIT created an incredible new type of fabric that can save thousands of lives, how sleep scientists are explaining alien abductions, and how evolution is being sped up by human beings, causing ripple effects all over the place.
CALLI: Without further adieu, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[WHOOSH]
NATE: Hey Calli… (Silence)… Calli!
CALLI: What?! (surprised)
NATE: I have a story you’ll want to listen to.
CALLI: Oh, sorry, my hearing has been weird ever since the Bioluminescent Rave.
NATE: Well I’ve got something that can help you. Or… more accurately… hear for you. Material scientists have created a fabric that can hear… and it might be the solution to help avoid one in four American deaths.
CALLI: Clothing with human senses? Are my boots going to be able to taste soon?
NATE: You’d have to be really careful taking the dog for a walk in those. But this technology could completely change how we monitor our health.
CALLI: You’re telling me my shirt could be my next doctor?
NATE: Not quite, but your shirt could certainly help your doctor. Researchers at MIT just made a huge leap forward in material science. But first, let me take you back. Fabric and sound are a classic combination. We’ve been using acoustic fabrics for hundreds of years.
CALLI: Aren’t those usually used to reduce sound? I mean, there are acoustic panels made of cloth in the studio I’m in right now.
NATE: Totally, so this is a big change. Rather than muffling sounds… scientists have created a fabric that can pick up sounds… just like a microphone.
CALLI: Microphones are incredible. They take sound, turn it into mechanical vibrations, and then turn those into electrical signals, right?
NATE: That's exactly right. So, scientists used a new material to create a shirt that works like a wearable microphone. The fabric will use soft and flexible cotton to keep the shirt comfortable… but it will turn sound into vibrations with the help of a stiff material called Twaron. Finally ... a thin strand of piezoelectric material will turn those vibrations into electrical signals.
CALLI: Doesn’t my clothing already make electricity? I get shocked by static whenever I do laundry.
NATE: Static electricity comes from friction when two materials rub together… but piezoelectric materials create electrical charges when they’re moved. Fold ‘em… bend ‘em… buckle ‘em… and they create voltage.
CALLI: So what happens if I’m in the middle of an epic Dungeons and Dragons game night. There’s a sneak attack. Very exciting. Am I just going to all the sudden get (electrical shock noise) *BZZZZZT*?
NATE: The roll will not be botched. The electricity made from the sound will run through a tiny circuit board to a device that can interpret them.
CALLI: What will it pick up? My huffing and puffing? The ensuing melee? Druids morphing into animals?
NATE: Researchers were successful in picking up a big range of sounds: speech… leaves rusting in the background… birds chirping. Even cooler… they could use two sections of the material spaced out across the back to tell where sounds were coming from.
CALLI: Oh that's awesome. It's just like interaural timing… that's when we can tell where a sound is coming from based on which ear it hits first.
NATE: Exactly, it’s going to really change audio tech…and could make a big difference in how we help people with hearing loss. Even more impressive, it could help people with heart issues. Because scientists discovered that they could use this tech to hear…human heartbeats.
CALLI: A stethoscope tee?! Those I “Heart” New York shirts are starting to make a little more sense.
NATE: Heart disease kills more than six hundred and fifty thousand people in the United States a year. That's one in four deaths. And if we can listen to our hearts all the time… we could monitor for issues like murmurs, or other irregularities, stuff that hints at bigger issues.
CALLI: Wearing this new fabric, we could always have that information on hand. Wow. This is seriously game changing.
NATE: And applications for this tech just keep on comin’. It could give us unbelievable information on our health in places where that information is hard to get… like on the battlefield. The US ARMY’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies helped fund the project, and for good reason. Smart fabrics could help report vitals—or a soldier’s location—back to base, or warn the wearers of danger ahead.
CALLI: Forget wearing your heart on your sleeve, now we’ll be able to hear it there.
NATE: Exactly. Celine Dion forgot two words from that famous song. It should be called “My heart will go on… a t-shirt.”
[WHOOSH]
CALLI: Okay, Nate, are you ready? Because I’m about to abduct ... your MIND.
NATE: Beam me up!
CALLI: This next story is about how we’re closer to understanding the truth behind alien abductions.
NATE: Wait… Calli… this is huge news! Any evidence that they’re real?
CALLI: They are real, Nate ... to the people who experience them. And that’s exactly the oddity of human psychology we’re going to explore today.
NATE: Right… like how sometimes I feel like my phone is vibrating.. but it’s not even in my pocket? And also… it’s not Rachel McAdams calling me?
CALLI: Sure, yeah. Or like how you might mistake a detail or feeling from a dream as something real.
NATE: (quoting Morpheus from The Matrix): “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?”
CALLI: Are you trying to do an impression of somebody?
NATE: It’s Laurence Fishburne! Morpheus! From the Matrix! I see where this is headed, Calli… and I’m into it.
CALLI: You might see where I’m headed, but you definitely don’t have the whole story. Ever since the first alien abduction that caught national attention, back in the early 1960s, psychology experts felt that the subjects were not lying. They thought they were being honest, but confusing their dreams for reality. And, in the decades since, we’ve learned enough about sleep, dreams, and the strange barrier between dreams and reality, to get even closer to the truth. Thanks to a study from The Phase Research Center, which is a private facility in Moscow, we may have solid evidence to back up those earlier theories. And it all centers around lucid dreaming.
NATE: Lucid dreaming…?
CALLI: That’s when the dreamer can consciously affect the dream because they are aware that they’re dreaming. It’s kinda the entire idea behind Inception.
NATE: I think I’ve had that happen. Or like.. once I realized I was dreaming, I woke up. Then I sit on the edge of the bed… wishing I could’ve held onto it and, like… flown around ... or met Rachel McAdams or something.
CALLI: Haven’t we all. Something interesting about lucid dreams is that they can seem very real. You can even feel real pain.
NATE: Wait, seriously?
CALLI: Yes, Nate. (clears throat, then, in a morpheus impression) “Your mind makes it real.”
NATE: (all jazzed up) Yes, Calli, yes! Morpheus says that to Neo in The Matrix! Neo comes out of a simulation with blood in his mouth... He’s confused about why he feels pain even though it’s all in his mind!
CALLI: This is a real thing, Nate! Your sensory-motor cortex is the part of the brain that perceives pain. It doesn’t know you’re not dreaming and sends your body pain signals!
NATE: Wow. Okay… so you probably remember the pain as being real, because it was! That would definitely convince me I wasn’t dreaming… no matter how weird the dream.
CALLI: Yep! Another big piece of the puzzle is something called Awareness during Sleep Paralysis, or ASP. I dunno if you know this, but you’re paraylized for part of the night, every night.
NATE: No, I’m not. What? Wait… seriously, am I? Oh, god!
CALLI: You are. We all are. During the deepest stage of sleep, our bodies become immobilized. Some folks wake up before the paralysis is over and experience ASP. It’s important to note here that seventy-five percent of people who experience ASP hallucinate at that time.
NATE: What? Like… voices in their head? This is starting to freak me out.
CALLI: It’s freaky! People have seen lights, animals and other creatures, or mysterious figures. They hear things like footsteps that aren’t there. They even feel things. A common hallucination for folks who wake up during sleep paralysis is of a demon sitting on their chest.
NATE: That’s possibly the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.
CALLI: Things like this have been documented back into the 1600s. So, put all that together, and you get to the study from The Phase Research Center. They took a hundred and fifty-two self-proclaimed lucid dreamers and asked them to dream about aliens or UFOs.
NATE: And what happened?
CALLI: Three quarters of them were successful, with the experiences taking a wide range. Many of the dreamers described their dreams as realistic. Some folks saw UFOs, others saw aliens themselves.
NATE: Little green men?
CALLI: Or blue! Some looked like humans. Some of the dreamers made it all the way onto the ships. One even described being experimented on.
NATE: That’s terrifying. And they did this kinda voluntarily!
CALLI: Yes, kinda! Lucid dreaming gives you a mix of control and normal dreaming.
NATE: So, what’s the conclusion?
CALLI: Aside from the awareness and memory the next morning that it was a dream, some of these experiences were very similar to reports of alien abductions, all the way down to the fear. And maybe alien abduction stories where people felt immobilized ...
NATE: ... like during alien experiments! ...
CALLI: ... were cases of ASP during an alien abduction lucid dream!
NATE: Wow, that definitely could be. Okay… so I see what you mean when you say they’re real, but like… not real. Which is different from one time when I got kinda confused between a dream and real life. It turned out I did go to class naked. I just WISHED it was a dream.
CALLI: Thankfully Rachel McAdams wasn’t there for that.
[WHOOSH]
NATE: Calli, we all know that evolution happens slowly… over the course of thousands of years.
CALLI: Right.
NATE: Wrong! I tricked you. Caught you in a trap! You might want to consider rapidly developing adaptations to respond to my human influence.
CALLI: What?
NATE: I’m suggesting you do what animals everywhere have been doing lately ... evolving quickly! Due to human activity like pollution, hunting, and climate change, species all over are taking evolutionary steps faster than we knew possible!
CALLI: Oh wow. ... Wait, so they’re adapting! Is that good news? Or bad news?
NATE: It’s a mixed bag! Some species are adapting! Others not so much… and some of those… are dying off. What is good is that we’re learning more thanks to the hard work of evolutionary biologists out of McGill University in Montreal. Back when Charles Darwin developed the Theory of Evolution… he thought it was always a very slow process… happening in tiny increments over many generations.
CALLI: Don’t tell me Charlie was wrong.
NATE: Not so much wrong… just not one hundred percent correct. Because almost a hundred years after his death… scientists started noticing evolution was sometimes taking place much, much faster. The idea really caught on when Andrew Hendry and Michael Kinnison wrote a paper in 1999 highlighting examples of this fast evolution. Now… over twenty years later… they’ve been able to add nearly seven THOUSAND more examples to the original dataset. All instances of evolution, observed as rapid, but lasting changes in phenotypes.
CALLI: Ah, Phenotypes! … is it like rock type, or water type?
NATE: This isn’t Pokemon, Calli. Phenotypes are the observable traits of a given species. Like… if you have freckles… or webbed toes… or how some birds fly south for the winter.
CALLI: I think I have that phenotype. I try to get out of the cold when I can. Catch some rays.
NATE: So… the biologists were focusing on how these traits change over time. And they are changing. Now… it’s important to say that we’re talking about evolutionary adaptation… which is all about heritable changes… or changes in phenotype that are passed down to future generations. Your red hair… for example… is a phenotype inherited from your ancestors.
CALLI: Thank you Grammy! Evolution at werk! You know what I mean? Werk? Like W-E-R-K, not W-O-R-K.
NATE: More like D-O-R-K.
CALLI: Alright alright. So what’s been going on? What are they seeing?
NATE: I’m not going to go into nearly every example here… but let’s talk about how animals everywhere are getting smaller. Fish… birds… insects… rodents.
CALLI: And that’s unusual?
NATE: Totally! Until recently… a theory of evolution called Cope’s Rule dominated the field.
CALLI: Tell me about Cope’s Rule!
NATE: Basically… it says that species will increase in size over time because of natural selection. Being larger tends to make it easier to find a mate… your survival rate goes up… and so… over time… you’ll have incrementally larger animals with each generation. But right now… the reverse is happening. One theory involves human hunting and harvesting. Think about it this way… you’re a fisherwoman.
CALLI: Awesome! What brand is my fishing rod?
NATE: No… you’re more of a commercial fisherwoman in this scenario.
CALLI: So I got nets… not rods. Got it. And maybe I have a silly yellow hat?
NATE: Sure… why not. Now, Calli ... do you want the fish you catch to be big… or little?
CALLI: Well, obviously I can get more money for a bigger fish. So, big!
NATE: Exactly. You’re trying to catch the biggest fish possible. That means a higher percentage of little fish survive… and pass on their little fish traits. And since it’s all part of an eco-SYSTEM… there will be ripple effects.
CALLI: Ooh! Like when a bear catches salmon, all the salmon are now smaller, so it’ll require more calories for the bear to catch the same size meal. And that will likely reduce the size of bears in that region?
NATE: Yes, exactly! And that’s just the beginning.
CALLI: Oh, wow. And this is all from climate change?
NATE: Maybe. It’s hard to separate climate change from other factors… but scientists have determined that these rapid changes are happening more often where humans affect the studied population. Pollution.. for example… affects many species. Also, poaching…
CALLI: How I cook my eggs is now a problem?!
NATE: No. Poaching, as in the illegal hunting of wild animals. This has been going on for generations and has impacted how species evolve, which impacts the environment around them, which impacts the other species in that environment. And so on and so on.
CALLI: Man, the dominos are fallin’ everywhere, huh? Sounds like the whole thing is in flux.
NATE: That’s right. All we know for sure is that things are always changing… and changing rapidly. Thankfully… now we know more about what exactly is happening and how.
CALLI: Seems like our understanding of the situation is--
NATE: Don’t you do it.
CALLI: --evolving.
NATE: And, you did it.
CALLI: It’s how our boy Charlie Darwin would have wanted it.
[WHOOSH]
CALLI: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Material scientists used a new fabric that works like a microphone to create a shirt that can “hear.” The material is so sensitive, it could even hear the wearer's heart rate, opening the door for big strides in wearable health monitoring technology.
NATE: A recent study suggests that stories of alien abductions are likely the result of lucid dreaming gone wrong. Awareness during Sleep Paralysis can be accompanied by hallucinations, leaving the dreamer confused about what’s real, and what was just a dream.
CALLI: Evolution can happen faster than we once thought, and two biologists from McGill University found that many of the changes result from human influence, like pollution, harvesting, poaching, and other disturbances to natural environments.