Learn about the smallest flying structure ever made; Myers-Briggs’ big problem; and why the biggest nuts end up on top. Flying microstructure the size of a grain of sand is the smallest humans have ever made by Briana Brownell Neuman, S. (2021, September 23). Flying Microchips The Size Of A Sand Grain Could Be Used For Population Surveillance. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/23/1040035430/flying-microchip-sand-grain-northwestern-winged Winged microchip is smallest-ever human-made flying structure. (2021). Northwestern.edu. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2021/september/microflier-winged-microchip-is-smallest-ever-human-made-flying-structure/ Kim, B. H., Li, K., Kim, J.-T., Park, Y., Jang, H., Wang, X., Xie, Z., Won, S. M., Yoon, H.-J., Lee, G., Jang, W. J., Lee, K. H., Chung, T. S., Jung, Y. H., Heo, S. Y., Lee, Y., Kim, J., Cai, T., Kim, Y., & Prasopsukh, P. (2021). Three-dimensional electronic microfliers inspired by wind-dispersed seeds. Nature, 597(7877), 503–510. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03847-y Surveillance. (2019, June 27). PHCPI. https://improvingphc.org/improvement-strategies/adjustment-population-health-needs/surveillance If You Swear By Your Myers-Briggs Type, We Have Bad News by Anna Todd The Myers & Briggs Foundation. (2021). Myersbriggs.org. https://www.myersbriggs.org/ Pittenger, D. (n.d.). Measuring the MBTI... And Coming Up Short. https://jobtalk.indiana.edu/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/develop/mbti.pdf Cunningham, L. (2012, December 14). Myers-Briggs: Does it pay to know your type? Washington Post; The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-briggs-does-it-pay-to-know-your-type/2012/12/14/eaed51ae-3fcc-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_story.html Burnett, D. (2013, March 19). Nothing personal: The questionable Myers-Briggs test. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/19/myers-briggs-test-unscientific Drake Baer. (2014, June 18). Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Misleading. Business Insider; Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/myers-briggs-personality-test-is-misleading-2014-6 The Brazil Nut Effect Is The Mysterious Reason Big Nuts End Up On Top by Ashley Hamer Ouellette, J. (2016, April 14). The Brazil Nut Effect Is More Complicated Than You Think. Gizmodo; Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/the-brazil-nut-effect-is-more-complicated-than-you-thin-1770850855 Ouellette, J. (2021, April 19). Cracking the case: New study sheds more light on the “Brazil nut effect.” Ars Technica; Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/cracking-the-case-new-study-sheds-more-light-on-the-brazil-nut-effect/ Gajjar, P., Johnson, C. G., Carr, J., Chrispeels, K., Gray, J. M. N. T., & Withers, P. J. (2021). Size segregation of irregular granular materials captured by time-resolved 3D imaging. Scientific Reports, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-87280-1 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 the smallest flying structure ever made; Myers-Briggs’ big problem; and why the biggest nuts end up on top.
Flying microstructure the size of a grain of sand is the smallest humans have ever made by Briana Brownell
If You Swear By Your Myers-Briggs Type, We Have Bad News by Anna Todd
The Brazil Nut Effect Is The Mysterious Reason Big Nuts End Up On Top 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/smallest-flying-tech-myers-briggs-myth-brazil-nut-effect
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 how scientists just created the smallest flying human-made structure ever; why you probably shouldn’t swear by your Myers-Briggs results; and the mysterious reason why the biggest nuts end up on top.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
You might think the legroom on airplanes leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s downright roomy compared to the invention I’m going to tell you about. Scientists have just made a data-collecting microflier that’s 500 micrometers across, or about the size of a grain of sand. And it’s the smallest flying structure ever made.
It doesn’t fly on its own, though. The Northwestern University researchers created tiny winged microchips inspired by the design of wind-dispersed seeds. Like the seeds of maple trees, they spin like a helicopter as they fall. That slows their descent, which gives them enough time to collect data on the way down. They’re so light that wind can easily pick them up, and they can travel and collect data across great distances.
What kind of data, you might ask? We’re talking things like air pollution, atmospheric conditions, nuclear radiation, and even disease outbreaks. The team also touts the invention’s ability to do “population surveillance,” which sounds scarier than it is: it’s a term used in public health that refers to collecting and analyzing health-related data to help keep people from getting sick. No CIA spy technology here!
Anyway, by mounting microchips on these microfliers and connecting them to a network, scientists could take large-scale measurements that would be impossible any other way. Sensors, power sources, memory storage, and wireless transmitters could all be included on board, too.
Their manufacturing is a pretty cool breakthrough too. They’re made with a technique that turns a two-dimensional “precursor” into a 3D object, kind of like a children’s pop-up book. First, they build the microflier’s base as a flat plane. Next, they bonded the base to a stretched rubber substrate. When they let the rubber relax, the whole thing popped up into the 3D shape they had designed. This cool approach means the microfliers could be made with commonly available manufacturing processes. That means you could make millions of these things pretty easily.
Of course, there’s an obvious problem. Releasing tiny tech into the environment to measure pollution would itself be polluting the environment. That’s why the team is looking ahead and creating microfliers that can disintegrate, dissolve in water, and not leave any contaminants behind.
It’s early days for these microfliers, but they might soon be reporting important data near you.
If you swear by your Myers-Briggs type, you might want to sit down for this one: the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator — or MBTI — iiiiis BS. Companies have purchased this famed personality test to learn about their employees for decades, but, as it turns out, they've been sadly misguided.
For a refresher, this is a test you can take that supposedly categorizes you into 16 different personality types. If you’ve ever read someone’s dating profile and seen an abbreviation like ENTJ, ISFJ, ENTP, or ISFP, then you’ve seen a Myers-Briggs result. Each letter stands for something like introversion or extraversion, or thinking or feeling. And it ends up on dating profiles because each of the 16 types are supposedly more “compatible” with each other. If only dating was so simple!
So, where did it all go wrong? First of all, it's not based in science. The MBTI was constructed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, two housewives who had no formal education or training in psychology. While Briggs was reading new psychology books making their way from Europe, she came across the work of controversial psychologist Carl Jung. Using Jung's research as their basis, Briggs and Myers worked together to create the MBTI assessment for women entering the workforce. The mother-daughter duo hoped the test would help women find the jobs that were best suited to their unique personalities.
And it worked. The MBTI remains one of the most widely used personality assessments on the planet: Every year, roughly 2 million people discover their four-letter-type and bring in more than 20 million dollars to the company behind it.
Now, I’m not saying that housewives or anyone else without scientific training can’t make contributions to science. But the Myers-Briggs is seriously flawed. And that’s because it relies exclusively on binary choices, like choosing 100 percent introvert or 100 percent extrovert. And that gives a limited and simplified view of human personality. It also sticks to mostly positive language — a lot like horoscopes do. Researchers say that the Myers-Briggs doesn’t conform to a lot of the basic standards they expect of psychological tests.
With all of this evidence against the Myers-Briggs, why does it have such a cult following? It may be similar to the appeal of fad diets, alternative remedies, and other "quick fixes." Humans are complicated, and if a test claims to make sense of our quirks so that we become super productive and efficient, who wouldn't want that? Well, at least 89 of the Fortune 100 companies still do.
How many times has this happened to you: You open a brand-new jar of mixed nuts to find that the massive Brazil nuts are all sitting on top, while it’s nothing but peanuts way down at the bottom. This spontaneous snack sorting has a scientific explanation. It also has a name: the Brazil nut effect.
Despite the nut-centric title, any container full of particles of different sizes can fall prey to this effect when jostled enough: think granola, where the first bowl you pour gets all the delicious clusters and the last bowl gets nothing but oat dust. Or freshly ground coffee, which looks perfect when it goes into the coffee maker, but has all a bunch of big, partially ground beans at the top when it comes out.
Despite how common this is, the explanation is deceptively complex. Scientists think there are several mechanisms at work. One is called percolation. When all of the particles in a container are tossed up together and come back down, small particles move into the spaces beneath larger ones and push them upward. Another mechanism is convection. That’s the way particles in the center of a shaken pile will push upward until they get to the top, then fall down in the spaces created at the sides of a container, repeating in a swirling path.
The Brazil nut effect happens when a large particle reaches the top, then just hangs out there. Scientists aren’t sure why this happens. One reason could be that the particles are too big to fit in the available spaces on the sides of the container. Sometimes, it’s because of density — when a particle is either much more or much less dense than its fellow particles, it moves toward the surface a lot faster.
Here’s where things get mysterious: this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. That suggests that the pressure of the air between the particles has something to do with it.
This year, researchers from the University of Manchester used X-rays to discover that the Brazil nut’s shape and orientation matter, too. Most of the Brazil nuts in their experiment started lying horizontally, but as the container was shaken, they stood up in a vertical orientation. Only then did they start to rise through the other nuts. Broken or misshapen Brazil nuts didn’t reach the proper height when they went vertical, so they didn’t rise.
Scientists are still studying this phenomenon to learn more about how particles move. But either way, there is a lot going on in that jar of mixed nuts!
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Briana Brownell and Anna Todd.
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: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new IJFM in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!