Learn about how the Deep Carbon Observatory is transforming the way we understand life deep inside the Earth; how gravitational lensing can make gravity act like a magnifying glass to help astronomers see further away; and what to say to a friend who’s dealing with a crisis. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: A New Discovery Points to a Surprising Amount of Life Deep Inside the Earth — https://curiosity.im/2suKkcG Gravitational Lensing Is a Magnifying Glass Made by Gravity — https://curiosity.im/2s6S6JS There's No Perfect Thing to Say In a Crisis — https://curiosity.im/2sf3Nyd If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about how the Deep Carbon Observatory is transforming the way we understand life deep inside the Earth; how gravitational lensing can make gravity act like a magnifying glass to help astronomers see further away; and what to say to a friend who’s dealing with a crisis.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-to-tell-friends-during-a-crisis-the-deep-carbon-observatory-and-gravitational-lensing
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how the Deep Carbon Observatory is transforming the way we understand life deep inside the Earth; how gravity can act like a magnifying glass to help astronomers see further away; and what to say to your friend who’s dealing with a crisis.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
A New Discovery Points to a Surprising Amount of Life Deep Inside the Earth — https://curiosity.im/2suKkcG (Cody)
CODY: Have you ever heard of the DCO? The Deep Carbon Observatory? It’s not your every-day observatory… and in fact, it’s not even a facility. It’s a group of more than a thousand scientists from 52 countries. They’re transforming our understanding of life deep inside the Earth — and maybe on other worlds. So today I’m gonna give you a primer on the DCO. As reported by Evan Gough of Universe Today -- no relation, by the way, at least as far as I know -- the DCO is coming up on the end of a 10-year project to investigate how the Deep Carbon Cycle affects Earth. See, 90 percent of Earth's carbon is inside the planet, and the DCO is our first effort to really understand it. And like I mentioned, the DCO is a global endeavor. Teams of scientists have explored some of the deepest mines on Earth, drilled deeper into the ocean floor than ever before, and scrutinized volcanoes in their efforts to understand Earth's deep carbon cycle. They're not quite finished yet, and they haven’t come up empty-handed after all this work. They've discovered a weird underground world that holds between 245 to 385 times as much carbon as all of humanity. According to the DCO, 70 percent of the Earth's bacteria and archaea live underground, and they exist in the deepest known subsurface. And some of them are zombies. Yeah, you heard me right. Some of these bacteria live in environments that are VERY low in energy and nutrients. They barely grow at all, and they spend their available resources on maintaining themselves, rather than on reproducing. These "zombie" bacteria may live for millions of years without reproducing. That’s a STUNNING discovery, with implications for the history of life on Earth and the existence of life on other worlds. You can read a full interview with a scientist from the DCO on curiosity-dot-com and on our free Curiosity app for Android and iOS if you want to dig DEEPER into this research. But a big takeaway is there are still a LOT of opportunities for making discoveries around the Earth’s carbon cycle. Crack open your textbooks, because this is exciting stuff! [ad lib maybe]
Gravitational Lensing Is a Magnifying Glass Made by Gravity — https://curiosity.im/2s6S6JS (Ashley)
Here’s something you might not know: gravity can help us see things better. I’m serious! It’s called gravitational lensing. And it’s a natural phenomenon that magnifies objects through the sheer power of gravity. As if that’s not cool enough, gravitational lensing is helping astronomers make some very big discoveries. I’ll try to explain with a little help from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. That says that matter curves the fabric of spacetime. That means that any light passing through that curve will curve, too. Picture this. Imagine a bowling ball sitting in the middle of a trampoline. In this analogy, the bowling ball is a massive object, like a galaxy, and the trampoline fabric is spacetime. Now put a golf ball on the trampoline, and imagine it’s light. If you roll that golf ball toward the bowling ball, it won't take a straight path. Instead, it'll follow the curve in the fabric and become "bent" because of that bowling ball’s weight on the trampoline, which kinda pulls down the fabric. That's what light does around massive objects: The more massive the object, the deeper the sag in the trampoline, and the more the light will bend around it. Make sense? And it just so happens that light rays do a very similar thing in a magnifying glass or a telescope: They bend with the curve in the lens, which refocuses the rays of light in a way that creates a clear picture. So the bend in spacetime from a massive object can act as a magnifying glass for objects behind it — and if those objects are too faint and far away to see normally, that can be a big benefit to astronomers studying them. Cool, right? And even today, gravitational lensing is the only evidence we have that dark matter exists. That’s because scientists noticed some of their numbers weren’t adding up, and light was bending way too drastically for the mass of the galaxy clusters that were affecting it. Who knew gravity could be so useful?
There's No Perfect Thing to Say In a Crisis — https://curiosity.im/2sf3Nyd (Cody)
When someone you care about gets fired or goes through a divorce or some other life-changing problem, what do you tell them? Do you not really know what to say? Well don’t be too hard on yourself, because according to a recent study, there IS no quote-unquote “right” thing to say. I can think of MANY wrong things to say, though. [ad lib]
CODY: This study was published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology. And in it, researchers were trying to pin down a definition for “social support.” That’s actually an important concept, because it's correlated with mental health. And they were curious: was the definition of social support more objective (so, about a given behavior), or was it more subjective (in the eye of the beholder)? To figure this out, they asked participants to rate the supportiveness of various statements. For the first phase of the study, they crunched the numbers on a pre-existing dataset from about 300 kids, all between 10 and 15 years old. In this data set, the kids agreed very little on what was and wasn't a supportive response to hypothetical problems. For the next phase of the study, they tried something new, this time with 54 undergraduate students. The researchers evaluated the students’ personalities, then had them rate 96 potentially supportive statements. And then they looked at how much a person's personality explained what they found supportive. So let’s say, after a breakup, maybe an avoidant person wanted to hear something like "Why don't you get some lunch and forget about the whole thing?" while an optimistic person wanted to hear something like, "Things have a funny way of working out for the best." But it turns out ... no! Even among avoidant and optimistic people, researchers found no consensus about what "supportive" looked like. Even a group of students, faculty, and alumni affiliated with a clinical psychology Ph.D. program couldn't reach a consensus — and it's their JOB, at least in part, to provide professional support. They were asked to rate how supportive therapists were being in assorted video clips, and again, no consensus emerged. Here’s the takeaway. When people are in crisis, they sometimes report a feeling of isolation. And that means it’s worth trying to be supportive. According to this research, it’s NOT worth being a perfectionist about it. The researchers say, quote, “mere presence and sympathy is likely enough,” unquote. [ad lib]
Read about today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com!
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