Learn about ominous music’s effect on conservation efforts; why our brains constantly predict the future; and “Hydrobot.” Dive deeper into all your favorite Shark Week shows with Shark Week's Daily Bite Podcast hosted by Luke Tipple: Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shark-weeks-daily-bite/id1527053422 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dfzM1ktSB1mSKD5z4Qujm?si=R8rNBksMRS-JrgMs9JIJ5g&dl_branch=1 Learn more: https://www.discovery.com/shark-week/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-daily-bite-podcast Ominous background music in shark programming could hinder conservation efforts by Steffie Drucker Nosal, A. P., Keenan, E. A., Hastings, P. A., & Gneezy, A. (2016). The Effect of Background Music in Shark Documentaries on Viewers’ Perceptions of Sharks. PLOS ONE, 11(8), e0159279. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0159279 Sharks get bad rap when viewed with ominous background music: Researchers demonstrate that background music affects viewers’ attitudes toward sharks. (2016). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160804171639.htm Why sharks need a new soundtrack. (2018, October 24). University of California. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-shark-soundtracks-make-it-harder-live-underwater Our brains are constantly predicting the future to stay in the present by Cameron Duke Chow, D. (2013, May 8). How Your Brain Tracks Moving Objects. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/29417-how-brain-tracks-moving-objects.html eijwat. (2012). Flash-drag Effect: Optical Illusion 3D [Old title: Flash-lag Effect induced by Background 3D Motion] [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6XOIN4jaDQ Maus, Gerrit W., Fischer, J., & Whitney, D. (2013). Motion-Dependent Representation of Space in Area MT+. Neuron, 78(3), 554–562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.03.010 Murai, Y., & Murakami, I. (2016). The flash-lag effect and the flash-drag effect in the same display. Journal of Vision, 16(11), 31. https://doi.org/10.1167/16.11.31 Don’t blink: The science of a 100-mph fastball. (2017). The Seattle Times. http://projects.seattletimes.com/2017/mariners-preview/science/ "Hydrobot" is a magnetic bead that can move water around, even upside down by Briana Brownell Water droplets become hydrobots by adding magnetic beads. (2021). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210603111954.htm Si, Y., Hu, J., & Dong, Z. (2021). Bioinspired magnetically driven liquid manipulation as microrobot. Cell Reports Physical Science, 100439. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrp.2021.100439 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 ominous music’s effect on conservation efforts; why our brains constantly predict the future; and “Hydrobot.”
Dive deeper into all your favorite Shark Week shows with Shark Week's Daily Bite Podcast hosted by Luke Tipple:
Ominous background music in shark programming could hinder conservation efforts by Steffie Drucker
Our brains are constantly predicting the future to stay in the present by Cameron Duke
"Hydrobot" is a magnetic bead that can move water around, even upside down by Briana Brownell
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/scary-shark-music-your-brain-predicts-the-future-hydrobot
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. And it’s SHARK WEEK! So today, you’ll learn about how ominous background music in shark programming could hinder conservation efforts. You’ll also learn about why our brains constantly predict the future to help us stay in the present; and “Hydrobot,” a magnetic bead that can move water around — even upside down.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Generations of Americans have a fear of sharks thanks to sensationalized media like JAWS and Deep Blue Sea and, if you’re a parent, Baby Shark. But even nature documentaries meant to educate about sharks may actually be causing harm. How? Something as simple as the background music.
A Harvard marketing professor and a UC San Diego shark researcher teamed up to see how background music affected people’s perceptions of the predators. The team first measured how much participants supported protecting sharks and how much they associated the animals with words like peaceful, graceful, vicious and scary.
Next they showed half the participants a one-minute clip from the BBC’s Blue Planet docuseries. The video shows a bunch of sharks swimming. Not feeding, not appearing to charge the camera — just swimming. The clip was set to either uplifting, majestic music, menacing music or had no sound at all. The other half of participants didn’t see the video; they heard only the music or sat in silence for 60 seconds. They filled out the same surveys again afterward.
The team found that the music mattered: Those who heard the ominous music had more negative feelings about sharks than the other two groups.
This marketing problem has real effects. As Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum [DEE-oom] put it, we tend to “conserve only what we love.” That means cuter critters like gorillas and pandas. In terms of oceanic conservation, shark preservation efforts don’t get as much support as funds to save sea turtles or dolphins.
But the right music can help the sharks’ cause too. In another experiment, the team told participants at the end of the study that they’d make a donation to a non-profit dedicated to restoring the world’s oceans. They asked people to vote whether the donation should go to protecting sharks, to protecting dolphins, or to a general discretionary fund. Participants who heard the majestic music were more likely to support protecting the sharks!
So if we want to be able to enjoy Shark Week decades from now, we need to protect sharks now. And that means filmmakers should choose their background music wisely.
There are things in the world that happen faster than we can blink: a fastball hurtling from the pitcher’s mound, for instance, or a fly speeding right in the path of your fly swatter. And yet, we see them happen. But how can the information about such a speedy event make it to our brains in time for us to process it? It turns out that our brains have evolved a clever workaround. To keep us in the present, they have to predict the future.
Before our brains can “see” a baseball hurtling toward us, the eyes have to receive light reflected from the ball, convert that to a signal that the brain can interpret, and then actually translate it. All this takes roughly 100 milliseconds to happen. Yet a fastball can reach the plate in as little as 375 milliseconds. To hit the ball, a batter’s brain has to guess what’s coming next — and it’s surprisingly good at doing that.
Yours is too, and you can demonstrate this by watching an optical illusion called the “flash-drag” effect. In one version of the illusion, there are two gray boxes, one at the top of the screen and another at the bottom, aligned with the top one. At one point, a field of dots in the background starts moving back and forth behind the boxes. Finally, the bottom box starts to flash in and out of existence. Because the background is moving, each time the flashing box reappears, it looks like it’s moving with the background, even though it’s staying aligned with the top box the entire time. It’s weird! If you want to try it out for yourself, there’s a link to a video in the show notes.
To find out how this works in the brain, a group of researchers put six participants in an fMRI machine to measure their brain activity while they watched this illusion. The researchers found that the effect was centered in one area of the brain’s visual cortex, called V5. This region takes in information about an object’s motion and predicts where that object should be by the time the image is processed.
The flash-drag effect is simply an illusion: the brain sees the object, combines it with the surrounding motion, and assumes it’s moving too. What you see is your brain’s prediction based on that information. That means that what you perceive isn’t actually the world as it is — it’s just a prediction that helps you make your way through it.
Your brain, as it turns out, is always one step ahead.
How could you move a raindrop that’s landed on a surface without moving the surface? Pretty impossible, right? What if you had a tiny robot to move it for you? That’s what a group of researchers in Hong Kong and China has just invented. They call it Hydrobot.
Hydrobot is a small, 2-millimeter iron bead that can move liquids around using a magnet. Because it’s so small, it can be used in confined spaces where other robots don’t fit. And it’s fast too. At its maximum, Hydrobot can move water on a flat surface about as fast as a brisk walk. What’s even more amazing is that it can even move water up walls or upside down, completely undeterred by gravity.
The inspiration for Hydrobot came from nature. The research team observed small fish that would sometimes jump onto lotus leaves in a pond on their local campus. When a fish jumped back off the leaves, it would bring a blob of water with it. That’s because the lotus leaves were hydrophobic, or slippery to the water molecules, and the fish’s scales were hydrophilic, or sticky to the water molecules. Because of these coupled properties, the small puddle of liquid went with the fish as it jumped off the leaf.
The same principles were used in the design of Hydrobot. The iron ball is hydrophilic, and the surface it moves on is hydrophobic. So as Hydrobot moves around, the droplet of water sticks to the ball, and comes with it. As a result, the scientists can finely control how the water moves.
Hydrobot has another advantage: the materials used to make it are pretty common, which gives the team hope that they could use a swarm of the tiny bots to quickly clean a surface or move larger puddles of liquids around, drop by drop. The team used it to pick up tiny dust particles to clean off a surface, without damaging it, which suggests that Hydrobot could also be used to dust hard-to-clean equipment.
But the real benefit is in the potential applications for moving around other kinds of liquid, like in medicine or chemistry. Now, this is just a proof-of-concept, and so far Hydrobot is only useful on very hydrophobic surfaces. But in the future, smart liquid manipulation like this could apply to many different fields. Basically, I’m saying keep an eye out for robots in your raindrops.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Steffie Drucker, Cameron Duke, and Briana Brownell.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Are you staying in the present by predicting what I’m gonna say next? Wait for it… wait for it… Join us again tomorrow to learn [stupid radio voice] SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON, LEAVE US A 5-STAR REVIEW ON APPLE PODCASTS, VOTE FOR US IN THE PODCAST AWARDS, HA! And also, I guess, to something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!