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: Trees May Have a "Heartbeat" If It Weren't For Samuel Morse's Grief, Long-Distance Communication Might Not Exist An Advanced Civilization Could Have Ruled Earth Millions of Years Ago, Says the Silurian Hypothesis 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:
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/tree-heartbeats-morse-code-and-the-silurian-hypothesis-of-ancient-earth
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. 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 trees might have a heartbeat, why long distance communication might exist because of grief, and a hypothesis that an advanced civilization could have ruled earth millions of years ago.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Ashley, whatever happened to the Entwives?
ASHLEY HAMER: I have no idea what you're talking about.
CODY GOUGH: Seriously?
ASHLEY HAMER: Maybe Ents. Oh, from Lord of the Rings.
CODY GOUGH: Lord of the Rings.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK. Entwives?
CODY GOUGH: I'm in a Lord of the Rings book club right now. And Entwives are like--
ASHLEY HAMER: Are they the wives of the Ents?
CODY GOUGH: Yes. But they mysteriously disappeared and no one knows where they went.
ASHLEY HAMER: So the Ents don't have wives anymore?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: What does this have to do with science?
[LAUGHTER]
Keep going I love it.
CODY GOUGH: That's a great question. Well, today we wrote about a new study that has shown that at least some trees seem to have a heart beat. And that might provide a new explanation for plant physiology. And I thought I would have a brilliant segue into this story by talking about the Entwives.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I just ruined it for you.
CODY GOUGH: Which is the greatest unsolved mystery of all Lord of the Rings. I'm following somebody famous on Twitter, and they tweeted about it. So anyway, I hope the Lord of the Rings fans enjoy that.
Entwives aside, this new study, again, has shown that some trees have a heartbeat. Researchers looked at 22 different species of trees in conditions where there was no wind or sun. And they found that the branches would move on their own over the course of several hours. And that's too slow for us to really notice. But that's a lot faster than any other biological process we've seen in trees, who tend to be on the slower side of things. The bad news is that we don't really know exactly how that works.
One possibility is that it's part of the mechanism that squeezes water up of the trunk of the tree. I don't know if you knew about this. Researchers have measured tree trunks in the past and found them shrinking up to half a millimeter over the course of a day. So maybe this movement is part of that process?
There's more work to be done. And you might expect to hear more in the future from the study's lead author, Andras Zlinszky. A couple of years ago, he discovered that trees droop overnight, which he suggests might be a result of trees relaxing at night. And if trees are stiffening their branches to catch more sun during the day, then maybe they release tension overnight to recover? Then it's time to stretch again in the morning. Who knows?
We'll follow this very closely. And you can read our full coverage of this research today on curiosity. com or on the Curiosity app for Android or iOS. Now let's all do the tree pose.
ASHLEY HAMER: Aah.
CODY GOUGH: And then figure out where the Entwives went. I know I'm not the only person wondering this.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, do you know what today is?
CODY GOUGH: No.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's the anniversary of the first telegram ever sent.
CODY GOUGH: First telegram?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I don't know anything about-- I know it was a thing a couple hundred years ago. But I don't really know much about telegrams.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, on May 24 of 1844, that first telegram was sent. And the phrase that was transmitted was, "what hath God wrought."
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: That's intense.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's pretty good for a new technology, right? And it was transmitted by Samuel Morse. Morse code, got it? Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: I get that, yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: So today we have a story about how Morse's grief might be responsible for long distance communication. It's dark, obviously. But it's an important part of history.
Morse was originally a portrait painter. He set up an art studio in Boston in 1815 and got married soon after. But in 1825, his wife died giving birth to their third child. He was away working on a painting commission when she got sick. And by the time he got word about her condition and got back home, she had already been buried. The next year, Morse's father died. And three years after that, his mother died. I told you the story is dark.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, you can probably see where this is going. Morse and some of his inventor friends started thinking about telegraphs. Because if he'd heard about his wife getting sick sooner, then he might have made it back in time before she passed away.
The telegraph had already been invented in 1774, but it used 26 bulky wires to transmit messages. Morse came up with a way to send messages over a single wire using a new language, a system of long and short signals, Morse code.
He received a patent for his telegraph invention in 1844 and secured funding from Congress to build wires across the US. Morse sent that message, "what hath God wrought" on May 24 of that year. And later, President Lincoln received battle reports during the Civil War using the same system.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: One man's loss is society's gain, I guess.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's for sure, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Bittersweet but they used Morse code in Star Trek V, the Final Frontier.
ASHLEY HAMER: Did they really?
CODY GOUGH: They did. I know you're really happy that you know that now.
ASHLEY HAMER: Changes my life.
[CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: I'm really showing my nerd colors today.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, have you ever seen Battlestar Galactica?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, I have.
CODY GOUGH: All right. We're on the same page. I'm bringing it up because-- and I won't spoil anything. But the premise of the show basically, is that the human race is on another planet. They get driven away. They have to find a new home. And that home is called Earth.
But does it take place during our modern day? Or does it take place millions of years ago? Or does it take place millions of years in the future? Nobody knows until the last episode, which I recommend seeing.
Well, anyway, I'm bringing this up because we love cutting-edge scientific ideas here at Curiosity. And today, you can learn about a new hypothesis that says an advanced civilization could have ruled the earth millions of years ago, as if Battlestar Galactica landed on our planet several million years ago, and they took it over. But there's no way we would know it.
ASHLEY HAMER: But that's a different franchise than this one is even named after. So this is double nerd.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, we're going just full nerd today. This hypothesis was co-authored by NASA's scientist, Gavin A. Schmidt, and University of Rochester professor, Adam Frank. They recently published the idea in the International Journal of Astrobiology, and it's called the Silurian hypothesis, which is from--
ASHLEY HAMER: Doctor Who.
CODY GOUGH: Which you also are a fan of.
ASHLEY HAMER: I am.
CODY GOUGH: Excellent. Well, yes, it is named after a fictional race of reptile-like humanoids from the British science fiction series, Doctor Who. And there's an actual reason scientists came up with this. This isn't some crazy, oh man, what if we used to be ruled by crazy aliens, man. It's not like that. Their goal is to figure out how we might find signs of ancient civilizations on other planets.
We have dinosaur fossils for millions of years ago. So of course, we would see signs of a civilization from that long ago. Well, not necessarily, because dinosaurs were around for more than 150 million years. They were chilling for a while. And that's a big deal because it's not just about how old ruins of a hypothetical civilization might be. It's also about how long they were around.
Humans, it only took us about 100,000 years to spread across the earth. So if another species did the same thing so quickly, then our chances of spotting them in the geological record would be a lot smaller.
So the whole point of this new hypothesis is to figure out how we might spot deep-time civilizations. You can read all the details on curiosity.com. But the main takeaway is, that to find ancient civilizations, we should look for periods of heightened carbon in the atmosphere.
For example right now, earth is in the Anthropocene period, characterized by the widespread dominance of human beings. And in this period we're in right now, there's a remarkably high number of carbons in the air compared to in other periods in history. So to look for ancient civilizations, we can comb through ice cores for signs of carbon dioxide in short, sharp bursts, like what we're experiencing today.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. You can actually see evidence of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations in Greenland sea ice right now because they mined and smelted lead. And that put carbon up into the atmosphere. And now it's in our ice.
CODY GOUGH: That's really crazy.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. So if a civilization lived millions of years ago, maybe they'd leave a trace.
CODY GOUGH: Exactly. So keep an eye on the carbon.
ASHLEY HAMER: Again, you can find the details of everything we talked about today, and more, on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS, or on 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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