Learn about how archaeologists are solving a prehistoric poop problem; what leads people to be “cultural omnivores”; and an easy trick for telling stars and planets apart when you’re stargazing.
Learn about how archaeologists are solving a prehistoric poop problem; what leads people to be “cultural omnivores”; and an easy trick for telling stars and planets apart when you’re stargazing.
What can we learn from prehistoric poop? by Cameron Duke
Research uncovers what leads people to be "cultural omnivores" — and it's not nice by Kelsey Donk
There's an Easy Trick to Telling Stars and Planets Apart in the Sky by Cody Gough
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-makes-people-cultural-omnivores-archaeologists-prehistoric-poop-problem-and-how-to-tell-stars-and-planets-apart-in-the-sky
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 archaeologists are solving a prehistoric poop problem; what leads people to be “cultural omnivores”; and an easy trick for telling stars and planets apart when you’re stargazing.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
The archaeological record holds the clues to humanity’s past, and every day archaeologists work to piece those clues together into a clearer picture. Archaeology may not involve as much boulder-dodging and Nazi-fighting as the movies would have you believe, but there are still plenty of unexpected things to encounter out there. Like prehistoric poop. Which researchers keep finding. EVERYWHERE. The archaeological record is completely covered in it. And that’s a problem, for reasons I’ll get into a minute.
As for what it actually looks like, it can exist in various stages of decay, from a little dried out to almost completely fossilized. Scientists call fossilized poops coprolites, and there’s a lot we can learn from them. Scientists can use them to investigate our ancestors’ diets! Or shed light on the evolution of the human digestive system. Or study parasite evolution and the history of the human gut microbiome.
Scientists have known for a long time that decrepit dung is a goldmine of information, but it can be challenging to study. That’s not because poop is hard to find — like I said, it’s everywhere — but because it’s hard to know what animal produced it. You can generally tell the source of fresh poop by its size and shape, but ancient poop has transformed so much over the millennia that that kind of identification is impossible. And considering how long humans have been living with dogs — and how long we haven’t been picking up our dogs’ poop — it’s important to know whose is whose.
Unfortunately, telling the difference between human poop and dog droppings after three thousand years can be difficult. The poop tends to have a similar composition because dogs often ate the same food as their human companions. That uncertainty makes studying these turds pretty time-consuming. But a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History is taking an innovative approach to solving this problem. They’re using machine learning to help discern the difference between dungs. Basically, they’ve trained a machine-learning algorithm to compare the DNA within fecal samples found at archaeological sites against DNA from known human and dog feces. Importantly, they’re not just looking at the DNA of who dealt it, if you know what I mean. They’re also checking the DNA of any gut microbes along for the ride, which are different in dogs and humans.
Being able to rapidly and accurately identify ancient human poop will enable an in-depth investigation of the evolution of the human diet and gut microbiome through time. For one thing, researchers may be able to learn more about the history of human farming, migration patterns, and even food intolerances. Who knew ancient excrement could hold so many secrets?
Researchers have uncovered what leads people to be “cultural omnivores.” And it’s not exactly nice.
By “cultural omnivore,” I mean someone who’s a fan of both high culture, like fine wine and classical music, and popular culture, like craft beer and hip-hop. Centuries ago, that was nearly impossible since those without the means didn’t really have access to things like fine art and gourmet dining. Today, though, we’ve got the internet. It’s possible to love cartoons, street fashion, and the opera — all at once.
Some researchers recently noticed something else that’s increased with the rise of social media: narcissism and insecurity. Since elites have historically consumed the finer things as a way to set themselves apart from the masses, the team wondered if having more eclectic cultural tastes today was the modern snob’s way of setting oneself apart. Could personality factors like narcissism, self-esteem, and feelings of authenticity play a part in a person’s desire to be a cultural omnivore?
To find out, the researchers performed two experiments. First, they measured participants’ self-esteem, their desire to stand out, and their levels of narcissism. Then the team asked them about how much they liked to do what the researchers called low- and highbrow activities. For lowbrow activities, the researchers gave an example like “going to pop concerts.” Highbrow activities included things like “visiting art galleries.”
What they found doesn’t paint a very flattering picture. As it turns out, it takes a certain combination of narcissism and low self-esteem to make a cultural omnivore. The people that researchers dubbed “insecure narcissists” were the ones most interested in consuming both the highbrow and the lowbrow.
Why? Just as the team suspected, these individuals are mostly interested in what can best set them apart from others.
In the second experiment, researchers measured the same personality traits in a new group, then had them look at paintings paired with what they said were the artists’ biographies. The biography either said that the artist was world-famous, making the art highbrow, or that their paintings had been kept by a family, making it lowbrow.
When participants thought the paintings were highbrow, they wanted to see them for status reasons. When they understood the paintings to be lowbrow, however, they wanted to go to the gallery to show off their self-integrity and authenticity.
Researchers say this is an important first step to understanding the psychological motivations behind how we consume culture. And if you’re a cultural omnivore? Well, welcome to the club.
In this age of social distancing, there’s still one thing everyone can do: look up at the stars.
Sure, here in Chicago we can pretty much only see the brightest stars and planets up there, but the point still stands! Anyway, today I’m going to share an easy trick for the next time you’re wondering whether that glowing light is a star or a planet. Here’s a clue. There’s a reason we don’t sing “twinkle, twinkle, little planet.”
So, stars are so far away from Earth that we see them as single points of light — shapes with almost zero diameter. As their light travels through our atmosphere, it gets knocked around, or refracted, by the various differences in temperature and air density. The refraction is greater than the star's tiny diameter, so it's easy to see — and to us, it looks like twinkling. The scientific term for this is astronomical scintillation.
The planets in our solar system are a lot closer to us than the rest of the stars in the sky. Earth's atmosphere refracts light from those, too. But since they're a lot closer to us, they appear to have a larger diameter than those faraway stars. This makes them look more like tiny disks than pinpoints, and that produces a steady shine that doesn't twinkle like a little star.
But even experienced stargazers can be fooled. Sometimes planets twinkle too. If they’re spotted low in the sky, their light has to travel through more atmosphere to reach your eyes. That causes more refraction, which means more twinkling.
But if you ever get a chance to visit outer space, you can expect to see a distinct lack of twinkling to go along with that distinct lack of atmosphere. That lack of light refraction is why we put telescopes up in space, after all. But that's not the only difference you’d see. NASA astronauts have actually reported seeing some of the stars in different colors. Those colors are real — we just don't see them here on the ground because they’re filtered out by our atmosphere.
There’s one other thing that might make a star twinkle differently to you than to your stargazing companions: the lens of your eye. All lenses have slight imperfections, whether you’re talking about a telescope or an eyeball. And those imperfections bend the light into a different shape. Since the lenses in everyone’s eyes are slightly different, they’ll see stars in a slightly different shape, too.
All this to make the stars twinkle. Now who says science isn’t magical?
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: Today’s stories were written by Cameron Duke, Kelsey Donk, and Cody Gough. Scriptwriting by Sonja Hodgen, and by Cody Gough, who produced and edited today’s episode.
CODY: Today’s stories were edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily. Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!