Learn about one of the only silent places in the United States; why fish aren’t electrocuted during lightning storms; why an equator theme park was built in the wrong place; and why humans are symmetrical. 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: There Are Only 12 Silent Places Left in the US. Here's One of Them — https://curiosity.im/2Eg4gIl Why Aren't Fish Electrocuted During Lightning Storms? — https://curiosity.im/2EekyS3 There's an Equator Theme Park in Ecuador, But It's in the Wrong Place — https://curiosity.im/2EdM95F 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 Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about one of the only silent places in the United States; why fish aren’t electrocuted during lightning storms; why an equator theme park was built in the wrong place; and why humans are symmetrical.
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
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-humans-are-symmetrical-fish-electrocution-physics-a-misplaced-equator-theme-park-and-silent-places
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got the latest and greatest 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 about one of the only silent places in the United States, why fish aren't electrocuted during lightning storms, and why an equator theme park was built in the wrong place. We'll also answer a listener question about why humans are symmetrical.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Can you guess what's the most endangered sound on Earth? It's this. Yeah, the most endangered sound on Earth is silence. In fact, there are only 12 silent places left in the United States. Today, I'll tell you how you can get to one of them.
ASHLEY HAMER: Boy, I wish our office was one of them, if you know what I mean. I can't get no respect. [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: I do. It's because you work in a strange silent vacuum where you don't want any sounds to occur.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. Well, you have-- I was just going to talk about your headphones [INAUDIBLE].
CODY GOUGH: I have headphones on, but I have music playing from my headphones.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
CODY GOUGH: Right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. That's right.
CODY GOUGH: That's what headphones are for, Ashley.
ASHLEY HAMER: If I had noise-canceling headphones, I would leave them off. And I would just enjoy the silence.
CODY GOUGH: Mine are not noise canceling. [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: I just listen to music.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, now I know.
CODY GOUGH: It's why headphones were invented. [CHUCKLES] The headphones were, in fact, originally invented to produce sound, not to eliminate all sounds.
ASHLEY HAMER: Lies.
CODY GOUGH: Strange the way technology has gone. Well, if you want to find one of these silent places, Ashley, you need only listen to acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who came up with a project called One Square Inch of Silence. This One Square Inch of Silence leads us to Hoh River Valley, deep in Washington's Olympic National Park.
The quiet place here that I'm talking about is a 3-mile hike away from roads and visitor centers. You'll head into moss-coated hardwoods, fern-covered forest floors, and small babbling brooks. The spot you're looking for is a small pebble on top of a fallen log, and that signifies one of the quietest places in the country.
But here's the real kicker. It's only 1 square inch, hence the name One Square Inch of Silence. The project is based on the idea that if one source of noise can permeate from miles into the surrounding landscape, one black hole of silence can do the same thing, reducing noise for miles around.
Hempton picked this park because of its lack of roads and aircraft and for its diversity of natural environments. You can find everything from beaches to deep rainforest to alpine glaciers in Olympic, and that makes it a haven of natural sound. Now the spot is not designed to be completely silent, of course. The focus is on silencing unnatural sounds, like airplanes, cars, cell phones, podcasts, stuff like that. The idea is to create an environment where natural sounds don't need to compete.
In this spot, hikers are able to hear the trickle of water running into the nearby river or the flapping of a bird's wings without being interrupted by the sounds of machines, electronics, or other humans. According to Hempton, there are only between 10 and 12 places left in the United States where you can find natural silence. Aside from the Hoh Rainforest, he lists the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota and Haleakala National Park in Hawaii as two others. Hempton actually keeps the rest of the locations to himself, opting to protect their silence by protecting their identities. No word on whether he'll ever break his silence on where you can find them. Get it? [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: I get it. [CHUCKLES] Have you ever wondered why thunderstorms don't kill fish and other underwater creatures? We touched on this in an episode of a Curiosity podcast last year, but it's a thing people are curious about. So let's get into the specifics.
There are a few reasons why lightning hasn't killed all the fish in the sea, but here's the most basic. Lightning just doesn't strike the ocean that much. In 2014, the Journal of Geophysical Research published a map using five years of global lightning strike data from two weather satellites. It showed that lightning strikes over land 10 times more often than it does over oceans.
According to NASA, this makes sense because of the way lightning forms. Solid earth absorbs sunlight and heats up faster than water does. That heat causes more convection and instability in the atmosphere, which in turn causes more lightning-producing storms to form.
The lightning does strike the water sometimes, so why doesn't that kill fish by the thousands? Physics has the answer, and it comes down to water being a good conductor. Like metal, water encourages the electrical current to travel over its surface rather than delve underneath-- the same way a Faraday cage protects its contents from harmful shocks.
If a fish comes up to the surface at the wrong moment, it can certainly be hit by lightning. Luckily, most fish spend the majority of their time underwater. People, on the other hand, spend a bit less time underwater. And that is why you should immediately get out of the water if you see a storm approaching.
CODY GOUGH: Every year, half a million tourists visit Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, known in English as Middle of the World City. It's a popular theme park in Ecuador, and it's designed to mark and celebrate the equator. Sounds nice, right? People visit the theme park so they can stand at the center of the Earth. But there's one small problem with this equator theme park. It's not on the equator. Whoops.
ASHLEY HAMER: I would be super disappointed if I went to an equator theme park and I wasn't on the equator.
CODY GOUGH: I mean, it kind of defeats the purpose, [CHUCKLES] right?
ASHLEY HAMER: It kind of does.
CODY GOUGH: Well, it's got a pretty interesting story as to how this actually happened. The Middle of the World City is most famous for its 100-foot globe monuments and the yellow line painted along the ground to mark the precise center of the Earth, zero degrees latitude. Travelers from around the world flock here for photo ops and a chance to cross the whole standing on the equator thing off their bucket lists. But according to GPS, the equator is actually located about 800 feet or 243 meters away. That's about 2 and 1/2 football fields in distance, which is a pretty big discrepancy for a theme park whose entire existence is based on its location.
So here's what happens, in 1736, an expedition called the French Geodesic Mission set out to Ecuador to settle a significant debate. Is the Earth's circumference greater at the equator or at the poles? So to figure this out, they measured one degree of latitude at the equator by measuring the distance between mountaintops there and compared it to one degree of latitude further north in France. Scientists spent 10 long years perfecting their measurements to finally conclude that the Earth's circumference is, in fact, greatest at the equator.
These results proved once and for all that Isaac Newton was right. Our planet is an oblate spheroid, a sphere that's slightly flattened at its poles. 200 years later, in 1936, the French American Committee of Ecuador chose to commemorate this mission by sponsoring the construction of a tall monument at the equator. Unfortunately, GPS was decades away from being invented, so the builder's measurements slightly missed the mark.
Ecuadorian officials recently commissioned plans from a New York architect to build a new 5,000-foot-tall monument at the actual equator, but estimates for that project came in at $250 million. So for now, you'll just have to drive to a private site nearby called [INAUDIBLE], where the real equator awaits.
ASHLEY HAMER: We've got a listener question from Kim B, who asks, why are human bodies symmetric? Does symmetry serve an evolutionary purpose ? Related question, are all living things symmetric?
Great question, Kim. It turns out that scientists don't have a great answer to those first questions, but they have a lot of educated guesses. The weird thing about bilateral symmetry, which is the technical term for having two sides that match, is that it's statistically unlikely. There are infinitely more ways to assemble an asymmetrical body than a symmetrical one, and yet we have evidence of bilateral symmetry in animals that lived more than 500 million years ago. So it must serve some evolutionary purpose.
There are a lot of ideas about what that purpose might be. Maybe symmetrical arms and legs make it easier to get around. Maybe a symmetrical body is easier for your brain to keep tabs on. We definitely know that symmetry is a big deal in mate selection. Experiments with a variety of different animals, including humans, show that most prefer mates with symmetrical features.
But as for your last question, are all living things symmetrical? The answer is actually no. Here's a brief list of animals that display at least some type of asymmetry-- fiddler crabs, moose and elk, flounders, sponges, owls, sperm whales, narwhals, a bird called the crossbill and a bird called the wrybill, honey badgers, snails, cockeyed squids, hermit crabs, and oh, yeah, humans. Your internal organs aren't bilaterally symmetrical. Thanks for your question, Kim.
CODY GOUGH: Also not symmetrical, Togepi.
ASHLEY HAMER: What?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: What's that?
CODY GOUGH: Pokemon number 175.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, all right.
CODY GOUGH: [CHUCKLES] Before we wrap up, we want to give a special shout-out to one of our patrons for supporting our show. Special thanks to Dr. Mary [? Yancey ?] who gets an executive producer credit for today's episode for her patronage. We wouldn't be the same without your support, so thank you.
ASHLEY HAMER: If you're listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily, then visit patreon.com/curiosity.com, all spelled out. Join our awesome patrons, like Luke Chapman, Steve Guy, Montecito [INAUDIBLE] [? Reid, ?] and Emily, in pitching in to support the show. Thanks a lot to all of you, by the way.
CODY GOUGH: Any amount helps, even just a couple of bucks. That is considerably less than a $250 million monument on the equator. And our patrons get lots of cool incentives, like the Patreon-exclusive Curiosity podcast episode we released just last week and another one we have coming in the next few weeks. One more time, that's patreon.com/curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
NARRATOR: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.
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