Learn about how clocks and lightbulbs changed human health, with author and materials scientist Ainissa Ramirez. Plus: learn about that time a bunch of birds became milk bottle thieves and whether you should put one or two spaces after a period.
Learn about how clocks and lightbulbs changed human health, with author and materials scientist Ainissa Ramirez. Plus: learn about that time a bunch of birds became milk bottle thieves and whether you should put one or two spaces after a period.
The time a bunch of birds became milk bottle thieves by Cameron Duke
Should You Put One or Two Spaces After a Period? by Cody Gough
More from Ainissa Ramirez:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-science-says-about-putting-2-spaces-after-a-period
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 that time a bunch of birds became milk bottle thieves; and whether you should put one or two spaces after a period. You’ll also learn about how clocks and lightbulbs changed human health, with award-winning author and materials scientist Ainissa Ramirez.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Birds are fantastic learners. With some species, information can spread virally from one bird to another, like a meme on Twitter. One such “bird-meme” spread like wildfire through Europe a hundred years ago, and it taught us a ton about how birds learn. I’m talking… about the case of the missing milk bottles.
Yes, in 1921, a case of milk-bottle vandalism swept through the village of Swaythling in England. This was back when people would have milk delivered to their homes. People would receive the milk bottles only to find that the foil caps on top had been pierced — and the cream from the milk had been stolen. The culprit? Birds. Specifically, birds known as great tits. Yep, that’s the name of an actual bird. These birds had learned to steal cream from milk bottles. But the most amazing part was that within a few years, great tits all over Europe had copied this behavior.
We didn’t always know how smart these birds are. The phrase “bird-brained” had to come from somewhere, right? But recent experiments have shown that Great tits learn from each other very easily. One of the best demonstrations of their talents came from an experiment by researchers in 2015. They captured great tits from eight distinct populations in an English forest and trained them to open puzzle boxes with mealworms inside. The puzzle boxes could be solved in two distinct, but equivalent ways. Half of the birds were trained to solve the puzzle by sliding the door to the right, and the other half were trained to slide the door to the left. Before releasing the trained birds into their home populations, they stocked the woods with these puzzle boxes.
In the end, populations containing trained birds learned how to open the puzzle boxes within a few days, while control populations took much longer. The most interesting thing is that the birds adopted the method they were taught, so there were whole populations that slid the door to the left and other populations that slid the door to the right. Clearly, these trained birds were showing their untrained friends how to open the boxes.
Phenomena like this are interesting because they show that birds are capable of social transmission. That’s a feat of the mind that’s considered to be a characteristic of intelligent mammals like chimps or dolphins. Birds are descended from reptiles, so they had to evolve intelligence totally independently of mammals. Because of that, studying bird intelligence gives us a way to look at the evolution of intelligence overall, not just the mammalian way of thinking.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: maybe “bird-brained” isn’t such an insult after all?
Alright, my fellow grammar nerds: let’s settle the most epic debate of the 21st century: should you put one or two spaces after a period? It’s the eternal question, one that dates back to before the advent of the typewriter. Lucky for us, science has stepped into the debate.
So, officially, the most common rule is to put one space after a period. Official rules for writing are contained in style guides, and there are more than a dozen style guides in the U.S. alone. The AP Stylebook, The Elements of Style, The Chicago Manual of Style, and the MLA Handbook all either recommend or require one space after a period. Pretty cut-and-dried win for the single spacers of the world, right?
Weeeeeell, according to psychology researchers from Skidmore College, the answer isn’t that simple. When they looked for research that argued for one space or two and came up empty, they performed their own study to get to the bottom of the question.
They had 60 students perform a typing task to see how they used spacing, then used eye-tracking software to measure how spacing affected the students’ reading performance. The eye-tracking software recorded where the students looked while they read paragraphs written in various single-spaced and double-spaced styles. And, the results? Putting two spaces after a period made reading faster. PERIOD.
Unfortunately, it didn’t put an end to the argument. For one, the study used Courier New, which is a monospace font mostly used in programming — these days, you don’t see it very much on stuff designed for reading. But the researchers say this font is pretty standard for eye-tracking studies. For another thing, the difference in reading speed was...underwhelming. We’re talking between 1 and 3 percent, or about nine words per minute. The rebuttal there was that the major reason to use two spaces was to make the reading process smoother, not faster.
Still, if double spacing can save even a small amount of time, that could add up to a big benefit. Either way, it looks like science has ensured that this debate will rage for another period of human history ... or two.
Last week, Ainissa Ramirez told us how copper changed the way we speak. This week, she's back to explain the surprising ways the clock and the lightbulb changed our sleep, our health — and our height. Ainissa Ramirez is an award-winning scientist and science communicator, and author of the book "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another." Here's Ainissa.
[CLIP 2:23]
Again, that was Ainissa Ramirez, an award-winning scientist and science communicator, and author of the book "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another." You can find a link to pick it up in today's show notes. Ainissa will be back next week to tell us the strange ways a lack of diversity can make technology miss the mark.
Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Cameron Duke and Cody Gough (that’s me), 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: Get some sleep! All you have to do is turn out the lights, TURN OUT THE LIGHTS. Then, join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!