Learn about why students with higher emotional intelligence do better in school; how scientists solved an 80-year mystery of how atoms split; and an adorable discovery that changes what we know about the canine brain. Spoiler: it involves wolf puppies.
Learn about why students with higher emotional intelligence do better in school; how scientists solved an 80-year mystery of how atoms split; and an adorable discovery that changes what we know about the canine brain. Spoiler: it involves wolf puppies.
The Academic Benefits of Emotional Intelligence by Kelsey Donk
Atoms Split in Uneven Shapes by Grant Currin
Wolf Puppies Can Play Fetch by Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-academic-benefits-of-emotional-intelligence-atoms-split-in-uneven-shapes-and-wolf-puppies-can-play-fetch
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 why students with greater emotional intelligence do better in school; how scientists solved an 80-year mystery of how atoms split; and an adorable discovery that changes what we know about the canine brain. Spoiler: it involves wolf puppies. Get ready for a cuteness overload.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
IQ isn’t everything. According to new research published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, high intelligence is great, but we absolutely have to pay attention to EQ: as in, emotional intelligence. The researchers found that students do better in school when they can understand and manage their emotions.
Emotional intelligence is relatively new to academic research. The concept was first conceived in the 1990s, and it refers to your ability to monitor and discriminate between the emotions of both yourself and others, and to use that knowledge to guide your actions. Past research suggests that people with high emotional intelligence generally perform better at their jobs and experience greater health and well-being throughout their lives. That’s why a lot of schools have started social and emotional learning programs to help develop students’ emotional intelligence, or EQ.
There’s some evidence that those programs can improve academic achievement, but this new research is the first time there’s been a comprehensive meta-analysis that really digs into the effect. The researchers looked at data from more than 160 studies, representing more than 42,000 students. And they ranged in age from elementary school to college.
They found that emotionally intelligent students get better grades and higher test scores, even when controlling for intelligence and personality. That may be because EQ helps students manage school-related feelings like test anxiety, boredom, and disappointment — so they’d avoid being thrown off-course by those challenges. That keeps kids on track for success.
Plus, if a student can figure out how to understand human motivation and emotion, they also have an advantage in subjects like history, language, and literature. You might not need to discriminate between complex emotions to understand a chemical reaction or algebraic formula, but it does help if you need to understand a great work of art or literature.
But the answer here isn’t to test emotional intelligence in schools and target kids with low emotional intelligence. The researchers say that would be a mistake, as it could stigmatize those students and make them fall behind even more. Instead, schools can work on everyone’s emotional intelligence — teachers included. That way, everyone benefits.
It turns out that when you split the atom, it doesn’t split evenly — and now scientists know why. A new discovery has solved an important mystery about how many of the elements that make up the universe came to exist. This is huge!
This all has to do with fission, which is the scientific term for splitting an atom. In fission, the protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus are split apart, which forms two smaller nuclei and releases a LOT of energy in the process. That energy is what gives nuclear reactors and atomic bombs their power.
Scientists have a pretty good idea of how fission works, but they’ve spent 80 years scratching their heads over one confusing detail. See, atomic nuclei can have different shapes, depending on how the protons and neutrons fit together. But they’re almost always symmetrical. Some nuclei are round, and some are elongated, like an American football. These configurations don’t require a lot of energy to stay together, so they’re stable.
On rarely seen occasions, fission can also produce asymmetrical nuclei that are pear-shaped. Instead of splitting into two spherical halves, the atom splits into two distorted, uneven fragments — so there’s a larger one and a smaller one. Nuclei with 50 protons, like that of tin, are super stable, so that’s what you’d expect a heavy atom to split into. But physicists have been surprised that heavy atoms tend to produce a pear-shaped nucleus with the 54 protons of xenon in experiments.
So why’s nature so into xenon? Thanks to new research, scientists might finally know.
Researchers used a supercomputer to model how quantum forces would cause protons and neutrons to rearrange themselves during the moment of fission. They discovered that the resulting large nuclei like to end up with 54 protons because of several competing forces that act on the protons and neutrons while the original atom is splitting. A force called Coulomb [COO-lome] repulsion forces the two new nuclei apart the instant fission begins. That makes it impossible for the larger fragment to take the spherical, very stable arrangement of 50 protons that researchers had expected. The pear shape is a record of the nucleus’s history!
This new information explains how some unexpected elements can form out of the nuclear fission process. And knowing how this happens helps us understand more about the ingredients that make up the universe.
It’s a pretty huge deal that scientists figured out how atoms split, but there’s something else they discovered recently that’s a bit more… adorable. And it has to do with wolf puppies. Your cuteness meter is already going off the charts, right? Well as if snuggling up with adorable wolf pups isn’t precious enough, a team of Swedish scientists recently discovered that some wolves can also play fetch. And if you can get past how delightful that is, then here’s why this matters for science: this discovery changes what we know about the canine brain.
Now, there is a TON of variation among dogs — I mean, just look at the difference between a huge Great Dane and a tiny Chihuahua, or a nearly hairless Chinese Crested and the mop-like coat of a Komondor (COMMON-dore). All of these differences are a result of domestication, which is the process by which a wild animal is adapted to live with humans.
We don’t know exactly when or where dogs were first domesticated, but our best guess is somewhere between 18,000 and 33,000 years ago. There are two leading theories about how our relationship with man’s best friend first came to be. One idea is that ancient humans took in orphaned wolf puppies, caring for the tamest and culling the ones that were too aggressive to handle. The other thought is that dogs domesticated themselves. Tame wolves who scavenged near early human settlements ate better than their wily counterparts, which meant that they were more fit, and therefore more likely to reproduce.
We’ve believed for a long time that dogs developed the cognitive abilities necessary to follow human cues after becoming domesticated. In fact, that’s the whole reason researchers at Stockholm University were using wolf puppies: they wanted to see how the cognitive abilities of domesticated and wild canines were different. They figured that if a stranger threw a tennis ball for both of them and asked them to bring it back, the dogs would retrieve the ball and the wolves wouldn’t. So they were stunned when several of the 8-week-old wolf puppies actually fetched the ball.
Looking back, the researchers admit it makes perfect sense: Pups that responded to human directions probably had an advantage in those early stages of domestication, so it’s reasonable that some wolves will still follow human cues today.
So maybe we didn’t train dogs to be our best friends as much as we think. Maybe dogs were ready to be our friends all along.
Before we recap what we learned today, we have a quick correction: 312-596-5208
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Grant Currin, and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!