Science Friday - Faraway Planets With Oceans Of Magma | The Art And Science Of Trash Talk

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Hycean planets were thought to be covered by oceans of water, but a new study suggests it could be magma instead. And, author Rafi Kohan explains the psychological and physiological responses to trash talk, ahead of Super Bowl Sunday.Faraway Planets Could Have Oceans Of MagmaFar beyond our solar system are hycean planets—planets that have hydrogen-rich atmospheres and are covered in giant oceans. Scientists have long believed that those oceans were made of water, but a new study throws a wrench in that idea, suggesting that they could actually be oceans of magma.SciFri’s John Dankosky talks with Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist based in NYC, about this and other science news of the week, including a new type of thunderstorm, how droughts are affecting the Panama Canal, inhalable nanoparticles that could carry antibiotics, which dog breeds live longest, and a fern whose dying leaves can sprout roots.The Art And Science Of Trash TalkAs frivolous as it may sound, the use of trash talk has a long, hilarious history that dates back to the Bible and the Homeric poems. Fundamentally, this insult-slinging is the presentation of a challenge, and it’s found its way into sports, politics, and even cutthroat family board game nights.But there’s a science to trash talk that explains why it’s stuck around all these millennia, the psychology behind it, and how it can either rev up or fluster an opponent.Just in time for the 2024 Super Bowl, guest host John Dankosky talks with Rafi Kohan, author of Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage.Read an excerpt from Trash Talk at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Did you know there's a science to slinging insults? So if somebody's on the receiving end of Trash Talk, you know, they may notice that their heart is beating faster, or that their palms are starting to sweat, or that their breathing is increasing. It's Friday, February 9th, happy Science Friday, y'all. I'm CyFrag producer Rasha Iridi. As silly as it might sound, the use of Trash Talk has a long, hilarious history, and it's stuck around for a long time, finding its way into sports. politics, and in my case, throw family board game nights. So for Super Bowl weekend, we are going to break down the art and science of trash talk.

But first, let's take a look at this week in science. Here's SciFri's John Dankowski. Way, way beyond our solar system, we've found evidence of Heisean planets, planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres, and covered in giant oceans. Now, scientists believed that those oceans were possibly made of Water. But a new study throws a wrench in an idea by suggesting those oceans could actually be made

of magma. Yeah, that's pretty terrifying. Here with this story and more science news of the week is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Science Scientist. She's based in New York City. Sophie, always good to talk with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, John. So tell me more about these Heisean planets and why scientists are suddenly thinking magma now in the oceans. Right. Researchers were looking at this one particular Heisean world, called K-1218B, and they realized it was very hot, so hot that if it really did have liquid oceans made of water, they would have boiled off of it. So they started thinking, what else could we be seeing here? So the reason that we think I see in worlds have these oceans in the first place

is from observing the chemistry in their atmospheres. And the researchers decided, well, what would the chemistry in the atmosphere look like if instead of liquid water oceans, we had these magma oceans, and they found out that it would pretty much look the same. So given the heat on this planet, they think maybe it's not water oceans at all. It's these magma oceans, or at least they could be the same. It's really surprising me. Why couldn't we tell the difference? There's kind of, I don't know, a big difference between magma and water covering a world. Totally. I mean, we're talking about planets that are so distant that we can't just, you know, look at them. So researchers have to take the observations they have, which are things like,

like atmospheric chemistry, and then they have to figure out what they can about the planet based on those clues. So why exactly should we care so much about these high-sean planets in the first place? So high-sean planets, partially because we think of them as having this liquid water, are great candidates for looking for alien life. Because, you know, if you're a life form, it's pretty helpful to have some of that lovely liquid water. But the idea that maybe some of them just have these magma oceans, that's not quite so friendly to critters. I was going to say, I might check that one off the list. Okay, we'll move on to the next planet.

And let's move on to the next story. There's another force of nature that's actually in the science news this week. It's a new type of thunderstorm, and that also sounds pretty scary. What's this new storm all about, Sophie? So researchers have used satellite imagery to look at these thunderstorms that are happening over the ocean. Now, they're particularly looking in the area of like the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean east of South Africa. And they've seen these storms where the lightning strikes are. are super dense. And when I say dense, I mean, you're having a ton of lightning in a very short

period of time and small place, as in eight lightning strikes per second. Eight per second. Per second. In fact, the reason they found this was because in the satellite images, it looked like there was just one long continuous flash in some cases that lasted 29 seconds. And they think that this isn't actually a continuous flash. It's lightning striking so quickly and in such quick succession that we just see it as that. So how is this different from the lightning we usually see? Obviously, it's more grouped together, but what else is different about it as far as we know? This lightning is striking more densely.

So it's happening closer together in time, closer together in space. And this would be pretty scary if you were under one of these storms. You know, thankfully so far we've been just observing them in places over the ocean where they haven't been interfering with ships or anything. But the worry is, is as the climate changes, could this type of storm, become possible over land? Could it move into more inhabited areas of the ocean? And if that's the case, that would be a problem. So it's potentially a climate change problem. It's the sort of thing that we might be seeing more of, whether it's over the oceans or over land? Well, to find that out, researchers need more observations. So far, they've just been looking at these satellite images.

But what they want to do now is to put some instruments on oil rigs and ships that might be in this area and get better observations of how these storms act and how these storms act and how they form in the first place. Okay, so another extreme weather event, a big drought that's affecting passage through the Panama Canal. Now, this is really fascinating. We hear about drought and what it does for ecosystems and environments across the world. But here's something where a drought is actually affecting the way that we get our products through the Panama Canal.

That's right. So the Panama Canal is super reliant on freshwater. Basically, it fills locks with water to move. ships around. So first the ships get lifted up above sea level as they move through the first part of the canal, then they move through the central part and then more locks lower them back down to sea level on the other side. And filling up all those locks takes a lot of water. And when you've got drought conditions, it just slows everything down. Fewer ships can get through. In some cases, the water levels in the central part of the canal are so low that certain sizes of ships

can't pass at all, or they might need to offload some of their cargo before they can go. It just creates this bottleneck that slows a lot of things down. And so in addition to some ships just just sort of waiting in line to get through the canal, we've got other ships that are trying to go around the continents instead to take different shipping routes that are longer and slower and produce more greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, I was going to say more greenhouse gas emissions. I mean, how bad is the bottleneck right now? It's as bad as it's been since the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 and the canal was closed. That's the only time it's been worse than it is now. In December, it was about 22 ships a day going through, which is very slow.

What else is causing this drought? Well, right now we're in El Nino. We've got El Nino conditions, and that's also contributing to the drought. So people are hoping that as those conditions pass, the canal will be able to sort of get back to business. But the problem is that this kind of drought just becomes more likely as climate change is changing our world. And so it's possible that we're going to have more problems like this.

And the other issue is that this freshwater, it's not just used in the canal, right? So there's millions of people who need drinking water. There's agricultural needs for freshwater, and they're going to have to compete with the canal. Yeah, it seems as though some of the systems that we've created a long time ago, maybe they're not going to exactly react this well to a changing world. We might have to think about how much fresh water we're using to get chips from one part of the world to the other. Absolutely. A lot of our infrastructure was built for.

certain conditions. It was built a long time ago. I mean, the Panama Canal was completed in 1914. And the weather conditions then were just different than they are now. And so, you know, there's a lot of other infrastructure like that. And in some cases, it's dealing with drought. In some cases, different temperatures and the higher likelihood of certain kinds of storms. And so, yeah, we're going to have to rethink a lot of our infrastructure. Okay. So we've talked about incredibly crazy storms. We've talked about magma planets. And we've talked about climate change and shipping problems. So can we get to something that's, I don't know, a little bit more optimistic here, Sophie? Scientists. Yes, let's go positive. Let's go positive here. Scientists are

developing nanoparticles that you can inhale to help treat lung disease. So tell us a little bit more about these particles and how they work. That's right. Researchers took these nanoparticles that were infused with antibiotics. And they tested them in mice that had a disease similar to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, which is a disease that affects humans. And the problem with this disease is it creates a lot of mucus in the lungs, and it's hard to deliver medication. So what these nanoparticles do is they actually move through the mucus before they release their medication. And that enables it to be delivered to the parts of the body that need it most. And in these mice that they tested, the nanoparticles really did seem to help them. It reduced the amount of bacteria

in their lungs, it reduced the amount of inflammation, and it seems that their lungs functioned better after they'd had this treatment. So this sounds remarkable, but of course, the caveat, as always is this is a mouse study. So it's going to be a long time before we see anything like this that could appear at our pharmacy. Exactly. These results seem pretty promising, which is good. But anything that you test in mice, it's not a guarantee that it's going to work in people. It's just a kind of sign that, like, hey, this kind of cool idea might have legs. Let's test it more and find out if it works for humans. Let's move on to a story about a man's best friend. I'm sort of a cat person, but a lot of people love dogs. It's a new study about how certain

breeds might live longer than others. What exactly did it find? This is a really big study. So researchers were looking at almost 600,000 dogs in the UK, about 155 different breeds, just a ton of animals, and they were looking at longevity. What they found is if you have a smaller dog with a longer nose, so think a breed like a miniature dashand or a Shiba Inu, that's going to live the longest. On the other side of the spectrum, medium-sized breeds with sort of flatter faces like English bulldogs,

they're not going to live as long. I think that a lot of this is stuff that dog owners have known for some time, right? A lot of dogs with those flat faces, little pugs, they have some trouble breathing. Is that what this is about? Yes. I mean, the problem with, if you've trouble breathing, it causes other problems. So in addition to breathing problems, flat-faced dogs tend to have digestive issues. They can have sleep problems. All of that can contribute to a shorter lifespan. So what exactly are we supposed to do with information like this? I mean, is there anything that we can do in terms of dog breeding that might change because of a study like this? Well, I guess if you're a dog breeder, you could look at the traits that contribute to longevity and you could say maybe I want to prioritize these things. And maybe I want to deprioritize these things. And maybe I want to depriorit. prioritize things like flat faces. Maybe I want to try to breed animals that don't have those traits or that have less extreme versions of those traits. But studies like this are also just interesting because they can confirm ideas that we've long held or they can show that something's a false belief. So for instance, they found that female dogs tended to live a little bit longer than male dogs. I don't think that's particularly surprising. But they also found that purebreds had a slightly greater life expectancy than crossbreeds. When I was younger, we had, my family had a dog that was part golden retriever and part poodle. And they said that this kind of dog has hybrid vigor because it's a crossbreed. But it turns out that maybe hybrid vigor isn't actually contributing to longevity. So I think that's a really interesting thing to know.

We've got time for one more story here. And this is about the plant kingdom. And it's about zombie ferns. Maybe you can explain what these zombie ferns do, Sophie. Yes, these zombie ferns have a second life. So what's really cool is the way researchers discovered them. So they totally discovered these zombie ferns by accident. I'm going to keep calling them that. Yes. Because they were on an expedition and they were trying to clear some ground in a forest in Panama. And they realized that some of the ferns they were clearing out of the way, they had these dead leaves that had drooped over onto the ground. And they were just touching the ground. So the researchers thought. But when they tried to move them out of the way, they found that these leaves had actually put down roots into the ground,

these little rootlets. And what they found was these dead leaves had actually, the ends had gone to the ground and the tips of them had sprouted rootlets. And those rootlets were able to take nutrients out of the ground and to feed it back to the plant. That's so wild. And we've never really seen this before. No, we've never seen a plant recycling its dead leaves in this way and turning them into roots, so it's very cool. That is very cool. And a good place for us to end our news round up this week. Sophie Bushwick is senior news editor and new scientist. She's based in New York City. Always great to have you, Sophie. Thank you. It's always great to be here. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm John Dankosky. Kathleen, it's Super Bowl weekend. And it looks like your Detroit Lions

aren't going to be there again. It really stings. We really did a good job, but there's always next year. And John, remind me, your beloved Pittsburgh Steelers didn't make it either. They actually kind of stink. Remind me, when was the last time that the Steelers won a playoff game? Okay, it's been a few years, Kathleen. But hold it. Wait, when was the last time the Lions actually played in the Super Bowl? Okay, minor details. We don't need to get into that. Hold it, hold it. We're friends, John. We're on public radio. Why are we trash talking on a science show? Well, it turns out there's actually some science behind the well-placed insult. And just in time for the Super Bowl, we've got a smack talk primer with the author who wrote a book about it.

Rafi Kohan is author of Trash Talk, the only book about destroying your rivals that isn't total garbage. He's based in Atlanta, Georgia. Rafi, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Scientifically speaking, Rafi, what exactly is it? So on the most basic level, Trash Talk is the present. of a challenge. And with that test, with that presentation of a challenge, it puts more pressure on a competitor's performance, right? It raises the stakes of the competition. And then the follow-up

question to that is, can you handle it? Can you handle these raised stakes? And when we talk about putting more pressure on a player's performance, we're talking quite literally in terms of the anxiety levels, the arousal levels that, you know, a performer may be experiencing. This you know, will inform whether or not that person is in a peak performance state or not, whether they're below it, they're in it, or above it. But it's important to note here that there's different ways in which can be used, right? You can use it to try to get an opponent off their game by insulting them. But it's often used, I'm thinking about in sports, but also in the military,

to try to get a teammate, someone you're working with to do a better job. So don't you kind of need to know how that person's going to respond physiologically before you, I don't know, try to trash talk them. Absolutely. And I think it's important to recognize that there are various pathways by which trash talk can actually work. What's underneath that is this idea of the individual zones of optimal functioning. It's a model in sports psychology, also known as Eyes Off.

And it speaks to this idea that every single person has a optimal level of anxiety to perform at their best. And contrary to previous belief, you know, which was sort of defined by the Yerkees-Dotson law, which stated that everybody sort of needs a kind of like moderate level of anxiety. You wanted the Goldilocks of anxiety. In the Azov model, what happens is that some folks may thrive when they're really worked up, when they're really on edge and they're just in an absolute frenzy, whereas someone else may need to be sort of more calm, more relaxed to be at their best.

What you're talking about sounds an awful lot to me like this idea of bulletin board material, right? Somebody says something negative about the other team trying to get them off their game. But what actually happens is that team puts it on the bulletin board in the locker room and says, look at how they think about us. Doesn't that get you fired up to go beat them? Yes. And there was, you know, there was a study of trash talk that actually looked at trash talk in the workplace a few years ago. And one of the things that they found, you know, within this study is what they describe as a failed mental model. And the idea was that the folks who they asked to send trash talk, messages, you know, to their rivals within this experiment, they then asked them to describe what kind of effect they thought they would have on the target's motivation. And invariably, they thought that it would decrease the motivation levels of their opponents. But in fact, what happened is that the targets of trash stock increased their motivation levels. They became more motivated to see their opponents lose. You know, it speaks to kind of, you know, to a level of pettiness that may, uh, they they be at play as well. But this idea is that when you are the target of trash talk, you are

going to be more motivated to win because that will, you know, necessitate the loss of your rival. If someone's on the receiving end of trash talk, what are some of the biological responses that they might have? So if somebody's on the receiving end of trash talk, you know, they may notice that their heart is beating faster or that their palms are starting to sweat or that their breathing is increasing, right? These are physiological arousals that speak to a heightened level of anxiety, right? And that can come from one feeling more pressure and feeling more stress, or it could come from being distracted, because when we are distracted, that also causes arousal. But also what can happen is if someone is experiencing an elevated level of arousal and they go too

far over their zone of optimal functioning, they can enter what's known as a threat state. And in a threat state, Basically, our pulmonary vascular constricts, and it sends all of the blood, that fast pumping blood, back to our body's internal organs. And what's essentially happening in that moment is that our body is preparing for damage because our brains don't distinguish between social and physical stressors. And as you might imagine, when we're in a threat state like that, it's not so great for performance. Since we're essentially talking about using words to elicit some, sort of a physiological response.

In all the research that you've done, have you learned anything about how best to brush trash talk off? If indeed what the opponent is trying to do is to get you all worked up, to get your heart rate at the wrong level, how do you brush it off? Yeah, the answer to trash talk, the response to trash talk is mental toughness. And, you know, when we say mental toughness, you know, that basically means the ability to do what's required, you know, in spite of possible distractions. or the perceived pressures.

The ingredients of mental toughness are mental skills like self-awareness and self-regulation. So you have to recognize when you've become distracted. You have to recognize when your heart rate is starting to beat a little bit too fast,

when your palms are starting to sweat. And then you also have to be aware of whether or not this is useful for you. Then you can use this to enter your optimal zone of functioning. But if you're not, then it's important to self-regulate, right?

And bring your arousal levels, your anxieties back down. So more important than whatever somebody says to you is one's response to it. And the foundation for that is understanding what is right for me in this moment. What is best for my own performance and how can I get there, regardless of what someone else might be saying to you. Thanks so much for joining us and happy Super Bowl weekend to you. Thanks for having me.

Rafi Kohan is author of Trash Talk, the only book about destroying your rivals that isn't total garbage. Read an excerpt of the book. Friday.com slash trash talk. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including Sandy Roberts, George Harper, Annie Niro, Jason Rosenberg. On Monday, we talk with Dr. Uche Blackstock about her new book, Legacy, a black physician reckons with racism in medicine. Join us. I'm SciFRI producer, Rasha Aaridi. Have a great weekend.