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: For a Planet to Sustain Life, It Needs the Habitable Trinity Negative Lightning Is More Common, but Positive Lightning Is Way Worse Fake News Spreads Way Faster Than Real News Online Confirmation Bias Makes You Ignore What You Don't Agree With The Backfire Effect Says When You Hear Contradictory Evidence, Your Beliefs Get Stronger To learn more about your own biases and how to overcome them, check out "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite" by David DiSalvo. 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:
To learn more about your own biases and how to overcome them, check out "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite" by David DiSalvo.
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/why-fake-news-spreads-positive-lightning-and-the-habitable-trinity
[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 positive lightning is more rare and more deadly than your average lightning, the three things needed for a planet to sustain life, and why fake news spreads way faster than real news online.
CODY GOUGH: The last story is in response to a listener question. Michael emailed us and asked, what is the psychological fallacy that leads us, humans, to believe in bias and fake news?
ASHLEY HAMER: Great question, Michael. There's a lot to this answer, but we'll do our best to get into it at the end of today's episode. Stay tuned.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: So Cody, what does it take for a planet to sustain life?
CODY GOUGH: Krispy Kreme, Netflix, and chill.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Is that the list?
ASHLEY HAMER: That is the forward thinking way of finding aliens.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, we don't want to live on any other planet that doesn't have those things, right?
CODY GOUGH: For a second.
ASHLEY HAMER: So we might as well.
CODY GOUGH: Right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, I think the general answer is usually water.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I think water. Water does come to mind.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. And usually, that's what people are looking for. They're looking for a planet that is within the habitable zone, one of the best words to say, by the way, habitable.
CODY GOUGH: Habitable.
ASHLEY HAMER: Habitable. It's great.
CODY GOUGH: Good luck getting through the story.
ASHLEY HAMER: I know. But they usually look for a planet that has liquid water.
CODY GOUGH: Like astronomers.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, astronomers. Astronomers usually look for a planet that has liquid water. But there are some researchers that say if you want a planet to spark and sustain life, then you need more than just water. You need what's called "the get ready for it Habitable Trinity."
CODY GOUGH: You did it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. That trinity is the three elements needed for life-- an ocean, an atmosphere, and a landmass that has some continuous material circulation system, basically, plate tectonics. Why those three things? Well, 99% of life, as we know it, is made up of the same 10 elements. And those elements come from three places-- the atmosphere, the ocean, and the land.
The ocean and the atmosphere work together to keep a steady stream of carbon and nitrogen on hand. The sun warms the ocean, which evaporates into the atmosphere, which transports nutrient-rich water onto land and eventually brings it back into the ocean. But the land provides most of the nutrients that allow life to thrive, like phosphorus. And the environment gets that from plate tectonics, which also helps keep temperatures stable, so our oceans don't boil or freeze over. When it comes to looking for aliens, liquid water gets the spotlight, but plate tectonics is really the man behind the curtain.
CODY GOUGH: Or woman.
ASHLEY HAMER: Or woman. Learn more about the Habitable Trinity today on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS.
CODY GOUGH: Or keep rewinding this podcast, so you can hear Ashley say habitable.
ASHLEY HAMER: Habitable.
CODY GOUGH: Habitable.
Do you know anybody who's been struck by lightning?
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't. I also don't know anybody who's won the lottery.
[LAUGHS]
I believe that's actually more rare.
CODY GOUGH: Winning the lottery is more rare?
ASHLEY HAMER: Than being struck by lightning.
CODY GOUGH: Ah, getting hit by lightning is almost four times more likely than winning the lottery.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: In all of 2017 in the United States, only 16 people were struck by lightning. Well, today, we're going to talk about lightning because it turns out that most lightning is what you would call negative lightning. And that means there's also a thing called positive lightning, and there is a big difference that we wrote about today on curiosity.com. So get ready for some science. And this is really cool, though.
So first off, let's talk about how lightning works. Scientists are actually still debating the details of how it works. But here's the leading theory. Thunder clouds are filled with tiny bits of ice that collide and knock away each other's electrons. Some ice particles lose electrons, and others gain them, which gives them a positive or a negative charge. The positive particles then tend to gather towards the top of the cloud, and the negative ones gather at the bottom. It's easy to remember positive up, negative down.
What happens next is literally a giant burst of static electricity, just like the stuff that sparks from your fingers on a dry, cold day or any time you touch any doorknob in the wintertime if you're me. As the charge grows larger on both sides, you can count on a big exchange of energy. Eventually, a bolt of electrons leaps from the negative side. Most of the time, the lightning stays inside the cloud. It actually stays between the upper and lower parts, that's why you'll see a cloud with all that electricity in there.
When you see lightning hit the ground, the cloud is blasting its electrons towards the ground instead of shooting them up. When that negative charge goes from the cloud to the ground, it's known as negative lightning, and it makes up about 90% to 95% of all the lightning you'll see. Positive lightning, on the other hand, will often happen when there's a really strong wind to move the negative charge out of the way or when the storm is actually clearing up, and it is way stronger.
A negative bolt produces about 300 million volts and about 30,000 amps of electricity. Well, positive bolt produces about a billion volts, more than three times as much and 300,000 amps, which is about 10 times as much. Positive lightning is also a lot longer. It can strike up to 20 to 30 miles away from the storm.
So don't worry about getting hit. Like we said, only 16 people were struck by lightning in the US in all of 2017. She'll probably be fine. Just remember the next time you think a storm has passed you by, you might want to wait just a little bit longer before going back out on the golf course to swing that 9 iron straight up in the air.
ASHLEY HAMER: We got an email from Michael, who asked, what's the psychological fallacy that leads us, humans, to believe in bias and fake news? There are a lot of psychological fallacies that go into this, actually, but we'll touch on a few. Before we get into that, I want to talk for a second about a recent curiosity article titled "Fake News Spreads Way Faster Than Real News Online." You can search to find it on curiosity.com or on the Curiosity app or just find a link in today's show notes.
But we covered a study from the MIT Media Lab from earlier this year that shows that false news spreads faster and more widely over social media than real news does. The study looked at more than 10 years of tweets from 3 million users. Yes, 10 years. This is not a new phenomenon. The researchers in the study filtered out bots, but the results still showed that humans are the ones spreading fake news. The data suggested that something intrinsic to falsehoods makes fake stories spread more easily. This comes down to two major factors-- novelty and emotional charge.
Accurate news tended to inspire sadness, joy or trust while fake news inspired feelings of anger, disgust, and fear. And those charged negative emotions spread like wildfire. So that's one reason fake news spreads so quickly. But Michael asked about psychological fallacies. The thing is, there are too many to even consider.
CODY GOUGH: One of our past guests on the Curiosity Podcast suggested that the speed of information is just too much for people to handle. Here's what author David DiSalvo told us when I asked him about fake news.
DAVID DISALVO: It's a real pitfall of the age we live in that so much information is coming at us from these different sources. And not only is it cognitively challenging to have to process through all that, but you're right. It's a huge time sink, right? If we had to try to track down the source of everything that's coming at us, it's simply not possible. Nobody has a time to do that. And yet, we are saturated by this information. And so we do use these shortcuts. And the shortcuts are wired directly into these cognitive biases that we're all prone to. The one that comes up very frequently in discussion now is confirmation bias.
ASHLEY HAMER: We'll link to our full episode with David DiSalvo in today's show notes. But the gist of our conversation is that human brains are wired to take shortcuts. But we've accelerated communication and sharing and everything to a point where these biases work against us. Two big ones are confirmation bias, which makes us seek out information that we agree with. And the backfire effect, which makes us believe something more strongly when we see evidence that it's wrong. That's about as deep as we can get into it today.
But you can find our conversation with David DiSalvo and a link to his book in the show notes to learn more. Thanks for your question, Michael. Read all of today's stories and more on curiosity.com. And remember, you can get Curiosity delivered straight to your email inbox if you sign up for our newsletter. Just visit curiosity.com/email. Learn something new every day right from your inbox.
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.
SPEAKER: ON the Westwood One Podcast Network.