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: People Around the World Hardly Ever Say "Thank You" and That's Good News Science Has Determined That This Is the Cutest Kind of Puppy People Who Live in Small or Rural Towns Are the Happiest, According to Research Sources for “A Sprinkle of Curiosity” here: The Ancient and Best Way to Brew Loose-Leaf Tea (The Atlantic) Why Do Your Tea Leaves Move To The Middle Of The Cup? (io9) The Strange Physics of Tea Leaves Floating Upstream (Nautilus) 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:
Sources for “A Sprinkle of Curiosity” here:
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/the-cutest-kind-of-puppy-rural-happiness-and-the-science-of-thank-you
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Happy Sunday. 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 why it's good that people around the world hardly ever say thank you, the cutest kind of puppy according to science, and a new working paper that says that people who live in smaller rural towns are the happiest.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Before we get into today's stories, we have a listener question. We asked you to write in your questions, and you delivered. Thanks to Steven, Dorothy Parth, and everybody else who wrote in with questions. And please keep them coming. This week's question is from--
ASHLEY HAMER: --Victoria. Victoria wants to know why tea leaves sink. She writes, quote, "When hot water is poured on a tea leaf, doesn't it heat up and expand? So there should be more surface area, making it float. Plus, it's diffusing out flavor and aroma into the tea. So shouldn't it be even lighter than before?" And then in all caps, "But it magically sinks. Why?" Stay tuned, and I'll answer the question at the end of today's episode.
CODY GOUGH: She also suggested the segment title, a sprinkle of curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES] She did.
CODY GOUGH: Because it's on our Sunday episode.
ASHLEY HAMER: Sunday like ice cream.
CODY GOUGH: But sprinkles on Sundays. That's the most curiosity thing ever. I love it. So we'll sprinkle in some curiosity later.
ASHLEY HAMER: Perfect.
CODY GOUGH: Now let's satisfy some other curiosity. All right, Ashley. What's more rude? When someone doesn't do something you ask them to do? Or when they do it, and you don't say thank you?
ASHLEY HAMER: I feel like, really, you're kind of expected to do things that you're asked. That's probably the ruder thing, not to do it.
CODY GOUGH: Just to not do it altogether.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Well, a new study bears this out and agrees with you. So a new study shows that people around the world hardly ever say thank you, and that's actually good news. Researchers looked at conversation samples in eight languages across five continents. And they found that when a person helps somebody out with something, they only got a thank you, or a similar verbal expression, 5% of the time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow. That's rare.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. And the crazy thing is that's actually OK because you've got to look at it this way. In some cultures, especially English-speaking ones, we are taught to follow a certain script in social situations. And that script includes saying thank you. And that's our model. The norm around the world though is for people to just comply with the request at a rate of 7 to 1.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait. Like out of eight times, seven of those times someone will comply with the requests that you make?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. So doing what people ask you to do is expected. Those missing thank yous don't mean we don't appreciate each other. They just mean that we're so wired to help each other out that saying thanks doesn't actually feel necessary. So try not to get too offended if you're traveling this summer and you don't hear "thanks." Just be grateful that the chances are, you're probably going to get help with whatever you need.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, that's nice.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Are you going to thank me for the story or?
ASHLEY HAMER: Thank you, Cody.
CODY GOUGH: [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES] Cody, you're a dog person, right?
CODY GOUGH: What is that? So I had this conversation the other day. All right. I don't want to own a dog because I don't want to clean up after it and have to pay for all those things. But if a dog jumps to my lap, of course, I'm going to pet it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, sure.
CODY GOUGH: So does that make me a dog person? Because then I'm also a cat person. If a cute animal is next to me, I'm going to pet it.
ASHLEY HAMER: You're an equal opportunity pet petter.
CODY GOUGH: Right. But again, am I not a dog person because I can't imagine taking care of one? I'm not enough of a dog person to buy a dog.
ASHLEY HAMER: Sure. I mean, I think that's fine. I'm definitely not a dog person. I like dogs. I will pet dogs. I don't know really how to pet dogs. Dogs don't really like me that much. They would much rather deal with someone else. So I'm definitely not a dog person.
CODY GOUGH: OK.
ASHLEY HAMER: But I do love cute dogs. I do love puppies-- puppies and kittens. And I mean, everybody does. But what are the cutest puppies? We can't say for sure, but science can.
[CHUCKLES]
Yay, science.
CODY GOUGH: That's the best introduction to a study we've ever had.
ASHLEY HAMER: So a new study has figured out how old the cutest puppies are, like what age a puppy needs to be to reach optimal cuteness. Researchers at the University of Florida had participants gave cuteness scores to pictures of puppies, with lots of different breeds. Oh, man. What a study.
CODY GOUGH: I want to be in that study.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Whether they were looking at Jack Russell Terriers, Cane Corsos, or White Shepherds, they rated the cutest puppies as the ones that were about eight weeks old. The least cute puppies were newborn dogs, which kind of makes sense. And they got cuter until they hit the sweet spot, at about a couple of months old. Then cuteness goes down a bit, then levels out into adulthood.
So this study sounds really silly, right? But it actually supports another hypothesis that the researchers actually had. It proved that a puppy's optimal cuteness is tied to the age that their mothers start to kick them out of the den.
So yeah. When puppies are the cutest, that's when their moms start feeling like they should leave the nest. And that tells us about canine evolution. Researchers think that this is actually a result of the domestication process. Wolves keep their pups around for closer to two years, while your pet dog breeds are way shorter at about two months.
And especially in the early days of humans keeping dogs as pets, they would have probably been more likely to pick the cutest puppies for breeding. So the pups that reached peak cuteness right when they were ready to leave mom and go to puppy training school were more likely to get picked up by a human and therefore likely to breed later in life and therefore produce more eight-week cuties.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. Cause and effect.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely.
CODY GOUGH: Ashley, I know you grew up in California. But was it a small town?
ASHLEY HAMER: It was a town of about 30,000 people, which doesn't sound small, but it was also 300 miles from any other civilization. So it was rural, but larger. It's kind of weird.
CODY GOUGH: 30,000 sounds pretty small to me.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is small, but some people-- I went to school in Texas, and some of the people there come from villages of like 500.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I'm from Rockford, which is about 150,000. And to me, that still felt kind of small. It felt like a community. It has a very small town feel.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: And a new study says that small towns and rural areas are home to the happiest people, at least in Canada, which is not where I grew up. But hear me out. A team of happiness researchers at the Vancouver School of Economics and McGill University released a working paper last month. And it concluded that, quote, "Life is significantly less happy in urban areas," unquote.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oof.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: The team got their data from 400,000 responses to a pair of national surveys, and it looked at self-reported well-being. And the main takeaway was that happiness looked like it had a strong correlation with population density. So why is this?
They found a few other correlations with happiness. Here they are-- shorter commute times, less likely to spend more than 30% of their income on housing, more likely to have lived in the area for more than five years, more likely to attend church, and more likely to feel a sense of belonging in the neighborhood. Those are correlations with happiness. And the happiest people in urban areas were also more likely to check those boxes. So a shorter commute and cheaper rent and all those things makes everybody happy no matter where you live.
You know what didn't affect happiness? Income, employment, and education. Money really can't buy happiness, and neither can a swanky job or a fancy degree.
One other thing though. The happiest people in urban communities were almost as happy as the happiest people in rural communities. It's just that when people are unhappy, then they're really unhappy in urban areas. At least happy people in urban areas were way less happy than the least happy people in rural areas.
Anyway, like we said, the research looked at Canadians, but there's this thing called the rural urban happiness gradient in the US. And that says that the farther away from cities people live, the happier they tend to be. And there's been a lot of research into this. You can find links to that research by reading more today on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. And we'll also put a link to this article in the show notes of this episode. But I kind of feel like I should move back home now.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm so excited to say that I've got an answer for Victoria.
CODY GOUGH: Yes, a sprinkle of curiosity as it were.
ASHLEY HAMER: A sprinkle of curiosity. You remember that Victoria wanted to know why tea leaves float. I love this question because it led me down a rabbit hole about the bizarre physics of tea leaves. This morning, Cody was probably hearing me go, oh, my gosh. There's so much cool stuff about tea leaf.
CODY GOUGH: You were so into this.
ASHLEY HAMER: I was so into it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Why do tea leaves sink? Victoria rightly pointed out that hot water makes the tea leaves expand, which increases their surface area and spreads their weight over a larger space which should make them float. At the same time, they're leaching that teatastic flavor into the water, which should reduce that weight.
Well, the answer is actually pretty simple. They get waterlogged. Dry tea leaves do take a while to become so full of water that they sink though. And before that happens, they're lighter than water for the reasons Victoria mentioned, and they do float. Eventually, enough water invades all the tiny spaces in each leaf, and they become heavier than the surrounding water, which makes them sink to the bottom of the cup.
CODY GOUGH: Got it. So over time, they absorb water, get heavier, and then sink.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: OK.
ASHLEY HAMER: But now for that rabbit hole.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, did you know that Albert Einstein published a paper about tea leaves?
CODY GOUGH: I did not know that. Did you know that?
ASHLEY HAMER: I didn't know that. But in 1926, his article entitled, quote, "The Cause of the Formation of Meanders in the Courses of Rivers and of the So-Called Baer's Law" explained the so-called tea leaf paradox. Why when you stir a teacup, water rushes to the outside but tea leaves collect in the middle?
It's basically because fast-moving water on the outer edge of the mug creates a zone of high pressure, so tea leaves tend to collect in the spots where there's less pressure, like the middle. Also, last thing, I promise. There's this wild phenomenon that makes it so tea leaves can actually travel up the water being poured into the cup and end up in the kettle.
CODY GOUGH: Wait. What?
ASHLEY HAMER: So you're pouring the water in. The tea leaves travel up the water that's being poured into the kettle from out of the cup.
CODY GOUGH: How?
ASHLEY HAMER: It's a thing called the Marangoni effect. And I don't have time to explain it, but we have links to all of this in the show notes. So thanks for your question, Victoria. And again, if you have a question you'd like me to answer, send it in to podcast@curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: 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.
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.
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