Learn about how mice seem to feel each other’s pain; why our known solar system just got a little bigger thanks to “Farfarout” 2018 AG37; and the history of quinine, the malaria cure that eventually led to the gin and tonic.
Learn about how mice seem to feel each other’s pain; why our known solar system just got a little bigger thanks to “Farfarout” 2018 AG37; and the history of quinine, the malaria cure that eventually led to the gin and tonic.
Mice seem to feel each other's pain by Steffie Drucker
Our known solar system just got a little bigger by Cameron Duke
Here's How a Malaria Cure Turned Into Your Gin and Tonic originally aired December 18, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/voice-changes-when-you-re-charmed-work-motivation
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-known-solar-system-just-got-bigger
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 how mice seem to feel each other’s pain; why our known solar system just got a little bigger; and how a malaria cure turned into your gin and tonic.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Empathy is what lets you feel a loved one’s pain. Mice can feel each other’s pain too — and for the first time, researchers have shown that they can also feel each other’s pain relief. And understanding why can help scientists learn more about how empathy works in humans.
For this study, Stanford scientists did several experiments on pairs of mice. In one instance, one mouse got an arthritis-inducing shot in its back paw. The other mouse was untouched. But after hanging out together for an hour, the bystander mouse acted like it got a shot too. The injured mice showed extra tenderness in the leg that got injected when scientists poked at it — not surprising. But when researchers poked at the bystander mouse, it acted like it was in just as much pain, and in more places.
In a different experiment, both mice got a pain-inducing shot. But one lucky mouse also got a soothing dose of morphine. And again, the mouse that didn’t get the morphine acted pain-free after spending a few hours with his morphine-soothed buddy. And this wasn’t just a result of comfort and consolation: In a control group where both mice got shots but no morphine, neither had any pain relief no matter how long they spent together.
Next, the researchers took a closer look at which brain regions activated while the mice mingled. They saw heightened activity in an area that’s important for empathy in humans. That activity linked to another area involving motivation and social behavior. When scientists disrupted the connection between the two, the animals no longer showed empathy for either pain or comfort.
In a third experiment involving a fearsome electric shock, the scientists detected activity in the fear-centric amygdala. That could be because different parts of the brain are responsible for different types of empathy, but this could also come down to the different ways mice detect these emotions. We told you last year that scientists discovered mice visually express fear with their faces. But it’s likely they pick up pain through smell.
These structures in the mice’s brains are similar to ours, so this research suggests that empathy began far back in our evolutionary past. If scientists can home in on the chemicals involved in these connections, they may be able to develop treatments for disorders that cause empathy to go haywire, like it does with psychopathy.
So next time someone tells you they “can feel your pain,” you’d better believe it!
Recently, a team of astronomers announced the finding of a new planetoid that holds the title of “farthest known object in the solar system.” While it’s no Planet 9, it does represent a major step forward in our understanding of what lies in the outer reaches of our solar system.
The lonely planetoid’s official name is 2018 AG37, but we’ll call it by its nickname, Farfarout. Why Farfarout? Well, because the name Farout was already taken. For real.
Farfarout was first spotted by a team of astronomers in 2018. Initially, the team knew it was far from the sun, but it took nearly two years of observation to figure out exactly how far, far out Farfarout actually is. It’s so distant and moving so slowly that it took that long just to gather enough data to chart its orbit. And it’s a big orbit. It’s so big that it takes Farfarout 798 Earth-years to complete just one circle around the sun.
Currently, Farfarout is 132 Astronomical Units from the sun — that is, 132 times the distance between Earth and the sun. That’s four times farther away than Pluto. But it’s not always that far away. That’s because Farfarout is on a highly elliptical, or oval-shaped, orbital path that takes it from 172 Astronomical Units at its farthest to 27 Astronomical Units at its closest — that’s just within Neptune’s orbit. Scientists think Neptune’s gravity might be one of the reasons Farfarout is on such an extreme path. It’s possible that Farfarout encountered Neptune sometime in the distant past, and since Neptune is much larger, it threw the little guy off course..
At the moment, scientists don’t know much about Farfarout other than its orbit. Their current size estimate for Farfarout is based on its brightness, which seems to indicate that it’s roughly 250 miles or 400 kilometers wide. That’s just barely big enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. There are some serious error bars around that estimate, though, because it assumes the object is covered in ice. That could change as scientists learn more about it.
The team doesn’t expect Farfarout to be alone in the distant solar system. They estimate that as our optical technology improves, thousands of faint objects out there will be revealed. Farfarout is just the farthest one we’ve seen so far.
And that means we’ve got a lot of naming to do. Evenfartherout, superfaraway, fartherandfartherstill...I’ll work on it.
You might associate the gin and tonic with England, but there’s a whole international history you might not know about. In case you missed it the first time around, here’s a pretty fun story from 2018 that we’ve refreshed — all about this refreshment
Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Steffie Drucker and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow — it’s not that far-far off — to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!