Learn about the “smellicopter,” a drone that can smell via a live moth antenna; why the “Dark Ages” weren’t as dark as you might think; and how simple word swaps can secretly trick your brain.
Learn about the “smellicopter,” a drone that can smell via a live moth antenna; why the “Dark Ages” weren’t as dark as you might think; and how simple word swaps can secretly trick your brain.
Introducing Smellicopter: a drone that uses a live moth antenna to smell things by Grant Currin
The Dark Ages weren't all that "dark" by Steffie Drucker
The Framing Effect Shows How Simple Word Swaps Can Secretly Trick Your Brain by Ashley Hamer
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-dark-ages-werent-really-dark
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 a drone that can smell; why we call the Dark Ages “dark”; and how simple word swaps can secretly trick your brain.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
What do you get if you cross a moth with a drone? Believe it or not, researchers at the University of Washington have spent years trying to figure out the answer. Their result: the Smellicopter.
It’s a small drone outfitted with a literal, honest-to-goodness moth antenna attached to electrical wires. Those wires transmit signals from the antenna to the drone’s on-board computer. The computer uses that data to help guide the smellicopter’s four tiny rotors as the device finds and follows a scent to its source. How snazzy is that?
The researchers behind the project decided to use a genuine moth antenna because, well, moths are really good at smelling. Sensors designed by human engineers simply can’t touch the high levels of sensitivity that moths have developed over millions of years of evolution. Moth antennae contain special cells that amplify chemical signals. Even a single scent molecule can trigger a cascade of changes in a moth’s sensory cells, all with blistering speed and efficiency.
Sensitivity is important because of the way scent spreads through time and space. The cloud of molecules we detect as a smell flows through the air in what’s called a plume. Think smoke coming off a campfire: the fire would be the source and the smoke particles would be the scent molecules. Smoke is highly concentrated close to the fire, but it disperses really quickly as it gets farther away. Some smoke particles will travel for a long time, but good luck using your nose to find a campfire that’s two miles away.
The same thing happens with all kinds of scents. Even if they’re intense at the source, the plume is quickly diluted in the air, and that leaves scent molecules scattered across a large area. That makes it hard for a human sensor to find the source of gas leaks, explosive chemicals, or disaster survivors by scent. But a moth sensor? No problem.
The team started with an open-source quadcopter designed to let users add their own sensors. Thenthey put some Manduca sexta hawkmoths in the fridge to anesthetize them before removing an antenna and attaching it to the drone. Once removed from the moth, the antenna remains usable for about 4 hours. That may not sound like much, but it’s longer than the drone’s battery lasts.
The researchers hope that in the future, scientists could use genetic engineering to design moth antennae that are specifically tuned for particular scents. So who knows — the next time there’s a disaster, Smellicopter may just save the day.
If you’ve ever described a friend that wasn’t very good with technology as “living in the dark ages,” then this story is for you. Because there’s a great big myth about the so-called “dark ages,” and that’s that they were...well, dark. Backwards. A period of intellectual decline. When, IN FACT… the dark ages weren’t really dark at all.
So, people use the terms “Dark Ages” and “Middle Ages” interchangeably, but they’re not really the same thing. The Middle Ages spanned 1,000 years, from 500-1500 CE. Historians usually divide that millennium into three periods, the “Early,” “High” and “Late” Middle Ages. The term “Dark Ages” actually refers to the Early Middle Ages, which followed the fall of the Roman Empire. At that point, various Germanic groups went to war over territory and replaced the Roman way of doing things with their own. Renaissance historians declared those years “dark” because they viewed ancient Greece and Rome as the pinnacle of human achievement. So those Germanic folks were automatically less accomplished or enlightened by comparison. That’s still what “Dark Ages” implies today; seems the Greek and Roman empires were a VERY tough act to follow.
Another reason historians deemed those years dark was because of the rise of Christianity. The Church became the most powerful force in Europe after the Roman Empire fell. Scholars believed clergy discouraged intellectual study in favor of religion. But many early Christian monks funded medieval artists and encouraged learning and literacy. Reading and writing were revolutionized under medieval emperor Charlemagne, with the invention of a standard handwriting script that had cases, punctuation, and spaces between words. And even if the Church did slow down certain areas of progress in Western Europe, the Islamic world was busy leaning into them, doing stuff like inventing Arabic numerals and algebra. Kind of a big deal!
The Early Middle Ages produced important agricultural innovations, too. Medieval farmers invented the heavy plow and horse collar, which made farming more efficient. Food surpluses allowed farmers to develop other skills, like selling goods, which led to the collapse of feudalism. That, plus the invention of the printing press in 1440, catapulted the world into the early modern period.
Historians today prefer using “Middle Ages” over “Dark Ages” but even that term isn’t perfect. A classical scholar gave it that name at the turn of the 18th century to encapsulate the timee between the classical period and when he lived. So even the term “middle ages” reduces the period to a placeholder. But hopefully now that you’ve heard about the Middle Ages’ achievements, you’ll think of it more as the “Underappreciated Age!”
Words have power. I mean, think about it: Which is worse, getting dumped or breaking up? Would you rather have a product with 95 percent effectiveness or with a 5 percent failure rate? Which is more dangerous, global warming or climate change? These are perfect demonstrations of the framing effect: the way that small word swaps can alter your decisions.
To see how this works, just take this thought experiment that was used in a 2006 study: Imagine you have just been given $50. You can either gamble that money and see what you get with it, or choose to not gamble and instead lose $30. Which would you choose? What if, instead, your options were to gamble or to keep $20?
In that study, 62 percent of participants chose to gamble with the money if the other option was to lose $30, but only 43 percent of people chose to gamble if the other option was to keep $20. That is, of course, despite the fact that in both scenarios, not gambling leaves the participant with $20. That’s the framing effect in action. Setting up a question in a way that makes someone think about losing something will bring them to a different decision than if the question made them think about keeping something.
In another study from 1981, college students had to decide what to do about a theoretical disease outbreak that was expected to kill 600 people. They were more likely to choose a treatment program that would save 200 people than one where 400 people would die. Again: same outcome, different framing.
The framing effect has real consequences in everyday life. Should a driver be punished less if their car "contacted" another car than if it "smashed" another car? Are you more likely to buy a product that costs $30 or the same product that costs $50 but comes with a $20 gift card? We make hundreds of decisions every day, and it's important to be aware of how easily those decisions are manipulated.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Grant Currin, Steffie Drucker, and Ashley Hamer, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. 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!