Something You Should Know - Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

Who doesn’t love the smell of freshly cut grass? While there may be some people who don’t like that smell, it seems most people do. Why is it so universally liked? This episode starts with an explanation and reveals why that scent may actually be good for you. https://www.prevention.com/life/a20432070/spending-time-outside-relieves-stress/ Something special happens when people touch each other. It could be a handshake a passionate embrace or a welcome hug – something magical occurs. What is that magic? Why does it seem that we crave physical human contact? You have probably heard that physical touch is good for you but how exactly? Joining me to explain the interesting science on the importance and the magic of physical touch is Michael Banissy. He is an award-winning professor and author of the book Touch Matters: Handshakes, Hugs, and the New Science on How Touch Can Enhance Your Well-Being (https://amzn.to/40HlNjl). Did you know that Saturn’s rings are vanishing? Or that it is raining diamonds on Neptune or that black holes can sing? Or that our galaxy smells like rum and raspberries? Listen and you will hear these and other fascinating facts explained by my guest Dr. Jillian Scudder. She is an assistant professor of physics & astronomy at Oberlin College and author of the book The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries: …And Other Amazing Cosmic Facts (https://amzn.to/3GmAm3E). One of the leading causes of house fires is kitchen stoves. And a lot of people don’t know what to do if you stove or oven catches fire. Listen to the recommended protocol if your conventional oven or microwave ever catches fire. https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/cooking_fire_safety_flyer.pdf PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure!  Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! SHOPIFY:  Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History. And every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we reexamine well known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas sharing the truth behind their legends. Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook. If you can hear my cat purring, she is often on the podcast as well. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, why you and most other people probably enjoy the smell

of cut grass. Then we'll explore the power of human touch from a warm embrace to a simple handshake. Some research showed that just simply getting people to engage in handshakes before they engage in things like negotiations sees people lean in more they cooperate more and they try to get more kind of joint negotiation outcomes so outcomes that can be beneficial for both parties. Then would you know what to do if your oven caught fire? And what you never knew about outer space, like it's raining diamonds on Neptune? It is a theory.

It's a very plausible theory because Neptune has a lot of methane in it. It's very high pressure. Methane has a lot of carbon in it. If you crush things that have lots of carbon in it, you might make diamonds and it might fall as rain. All this today on Something You Should Know. We talked quite a bit about health on this podcast and I can tell you I try to take care of myself. I mean, I work at it. And for a while now, I've been taking this supplement called Mitopur. And I can tell you, I feel stronger when I exercise, I recover faster. What Mitopur is, is a precise dose of something called Urolithin A. I've read a lot about it.

It's a natural compound that's produced by gut bacteria. And Mitopur is this precise dose that encourages cellular renewal. Mitopure is the only Urolithin A supplement on the market clinically proven to target the effects of age-related cellular decline. And that's the thing, see it works on the cellular level. And with regular use you'll see and feel the difference in the form of improved energy levels, more endurance, and when you exercise you'll recover faster. As you get older, you probably know that you lose muscle strength. So this is important. Mitopure is shown to deliver double-digit increases in muscle strength and endurance without a change in exercise. So awaken the

strength, power, and resilience already in you with the first and only supplement clinically proven to rejuvenate health at the cellular level. I encourage you to read more about it on their website. Timeline is offering 10% off your order of mitopure. Go to timeline.com slash something. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash something that's T I M E L I N E dot com slash something Something you should know fascinating Intel the world's top experts and Practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with Mike Carruthers Hi, welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know.

I appreciate you taking the time to join me. One of the best things about the weather warming up to me is you start to smell that smell of freshly cut grass. If I had to pick my top sense, freshly cut grass would be right up there near the top or maybe at the top. And interestingly in an Australian survey, women chose the smell of freshly cut grass as the happiest smell over every other scent. Why do you suppose that is? Well there is scientific data that helps to explain that phenomenon.

Inhaling the smell of freshly cut grass can actually make you feel happier by halting the brain's production of the stress hormone cortisol. For me, it just somehow sends me right back to my childhood. It's just a very relaxing and calming smell. And interestingly, the actual purpose of the smell is that it's part of a defense process.

The grass has been damaged by your lawnmower and it goes through this process to defend and restore itself. And the smell is part of that process. And that is something you should know. The Power of Human Touch, physical human contact. You've likely heard that it is good for you, and it certainly can feel good when you get a hug or a massage. Touch feels nice, but how is it actually good for you?

Is more touch better? And are you getting enough of it? That's what Michael Banasy is here to talk about. Michael is an award-winning professor and author of a book called Touch Matters, Handshakes, Hugs, and the New Science of How Touch Can Enhance Your Well-Being. Hi, Michael, welcome. Hi, hi, thanks for having me.

So based on the title of your book, I'm sure the answer is going to be yes, but in addition to touch feeling good, does it really do anything for your health or well-being? Well, the answer to that is yes, it does. There's a lot of work that's been shown for a whole range of different types of tactile experiences. Take hugging as an example, showing that these kind of experiences can have stress buffering effects, they can change how we respond to experiences like painful events, they can make us feel less pain and they can even impact

on things like our immune system as well. Well that's pretty impressive and I guess one of the ways you would determine how good touch is for you is to look at people who don't get touched, who don't or don't get enough touch to see how bad that is. Yeah, no, absolutely. There's something which has been really demonstrated by a number of researchers in the US actually. So people like Corey Floyd and Tiffany Field, they've spoken for a while about something called touch hunger. And touch hunger is the situation where people don't get enough touch in their life or don't get, you know, the right amount of touch for what they

crave. People who are more touch hungry can be more lonely, it can exert negative effects on things like their stress and their well-being, and have a kind of range of impacts just in terms of general life satisfaction. Why do we think this is true? What is it about touch that has these magical properties? One of the things with touch is that it's one of the first senses that we use. It's also one of the last senses that goes. It's an incredibly important sense in helping us form and build connections

with others. So those kind of social connections and those social connections and bonds that we have are incredibly important for our health and our wellbeing. In that regard, you know, one of the reasons why we think touch is so important is that it just plays this key role, almost acting a bit like a social glue that helps us to form and maintain bonds that are important throughout our lives. So how much touch is enough? Because it seems there's a big range. There are some people who are, you know, very touchy feely and like to hug everybody and just seem to crave that. And there are other people who are more standoffish and really don't like a lot of physical contact, particularly with strangers and maybe for fear of germs.

So there seems to be a big range. So how do you know what's enough? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I really wish I could tell you there was a magic number of the right amount of touch. The key really is that we all know touch varies from one person to another. And it's about trying to find the amount of touch that aligns to an individual's desire.

So when we talk about touch hunger, what we're talking about there is when people aren't getting the amount of touch that they desire in their life. And that is going to vary from one person to another. But even people that don't desire a great amount of touch, when they get, you know, touch in their life, it can still be beneficial. So there are some people, for instance, who are potentially have these what we might call more avoidant touch personas. So these might be people that try to kind of, you know, they don't they don't enjoy too much touch, you know, occasionally it's OK, but they prefer not to have too much. But in those situations, you know, still having, you know, supportive hug or supportive interactions, supportive tactile interactions can bring benefits to their wellness. But the key is that it's about not doing too much there, right? It's the quality of the touch rather than the quantity, because, you know, it's not necessarily a case that more is always better.

It's really about aligning the amount of touch that the person receives to the amount that they individually desire. Well, how do you figure that out? I think that really comes down to communication to a large degree. I think the more that we're able to be open and discuss our needs and our preferences for touch, the better. It can be very easy sometimes when we think about others to automatically put our preferences onto them. There's a general bias that we know about from the psychological science literature that shows this. And so we've got to be really careful to avoid automatically mapping our own preferences onto others and actually trying to engage in more kind of open conversations with one another about, you

know, what amount of touch is right for you, what amount of touch is right for me. And in that context as well, it's really important that we're mindful of just how some of these things can change. So for instance, I don't know, if you're in a long-term relationship, you might think that those touch needs that your partner had very early on,

maybe you think they continue to align throughout life. Well, there's a good chance they might change. They may change from one situation to another, for instance. So we just want to make sure we're having these open conversations with one another during our relationships to try to better understand, with the people we're interacting with, what does touch mean to them? Are they getting the right amount of touch they need? Are we providing that support in a way that is beneficial or not?

I'd like to talk for a moment about the touching that happens when you first meet someone. And I remember when during the pandemic, when people were saying, the handshake is over, that no one will do that anymore. And boy, that came back faster than lightning, because I don't think we would know what to do without it. And it does seem that handshakes and those initial touches

that we have with people set a tone and they do something. I just don't know what. When we talk about touch, there's those supportive touches like hugs, but then there's those more everyday exchanges like a handshake, a fist bump, a high five. And these touches can sometimes be really brief but they can exert an incredible powerful effect on our behavior. I mean handshakes have been around for a long time, you know, there's evidence going back to the ancient Romans, you know, to point to the

role of handshakes and evidence of it. So when people were talking about this idea that handshakes might disappear post the pandemic, I suppose if you don't like handshakes, perhaps that was wishful thinking, because they're such a culturally important part of society. And what they represent often is this idea about kind of reciprocation, trust, again, building a connection.

And there's studies that back this up. So for instance, some research that came out of work from UC Berkeley showed that just simply getting people to engage in handshakes before they engage in things like negotiations and so forth, sees people lean in more, they engage more with their partner, they cooperate more, and they try to get more kind of joint negotiation outcomes,

so outcomes that can be beneficial for both parties, sometimes when it might even be at the detriment of one of those individuals. The key is that things like handshakes, they're a culturally important part of our exchanges, and they can have these quite powerful effects on how we interact with one another. Well, and imagine if someone refuses to shake your hand.

I mean, there's a message that's pretty loud. One of the interesting things is also about handshakes in job interviews and things like that, right? If in those situations, somebody went to shake a hand, but a candidate didn't shake the hand, how would that impact your perception of that person if you're on that panel?

We place quite a large amount of weight on these social gestures. And in that context, handshakes are just one of a number, of course, of social gestures that can be very important. Well, what did that research say? If a candidate doesn't shake an interviewer's hand, are they doomed?

Candidates who are rated as having better handshakes were more likely to get jobs than those that were rated as having poorer handshakes. And of course, what is a good handshake, what is a poor handshake? We might all have some subjective views on that. But in that research, they had trained handshake assessors who effectively were trained to kind of judge things like the grip strength, how long was the handshake. They looked at all these different factors.

We're talking about the importance of touch, physical human touch. And my guest is Michael Banasy, who is author of the book Touch Matters, Handshakes, Hugs, and the New Science on How Touch Can Enhance Your Well-Being. This episode is brought to you by FX's Dying for Sex on Disney+. touch can enhance your wellbeing. leave her unhappy marriage to explore her sexuality with some encouragement from her best friend Nikki. FX is dying for sex, now streaming only on Disney+. Sign up now at DisneyPlus.com. Okay, Martin, let's try one. Remember, big.

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with $27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal Event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or ford.ca today. So Michael, I know there has been some research about sports teams and how teammates who touch those teams perform better. So can you talk about that? Yeah, so there was a really interesting study was actually conducted on the NBA and effectively they were in this particular work, they were looking at how things like fist bumps, high fives and these kind of, I suppose, what we might call positive

tactile behaviours between teammates, how the number of those, the frequency of those in the preseason and early season games, they wanted to see whether they were predictive of individual performance in a team and also team performance later on. And what they found in these professional basketball teams was that the teams that shared more of these positive touches in early season, they tended on to go on to win more games as the season

progressed. There was a relationship between these kind of positive tactile exchanges between teammates and better team performance. And any explanation or suspicion as to why that is? Well, I think there was, I mean, in that particular study, they didn't get to the exact details as to why, but if you talk to sports teams,

I mean, a lot of the teams, not necessarily those NBA teams, but other work that's been done since with, for instance, women's basketball, and also in other sports like lacrosse, there's a lot of prominence placed on touch between teammates in terms of building trust and building cooperation, people feeling a greater sense of psychological safety with their coaches, for instance, in teams who share more of these kind of positive tactile behaviors. And the important word there is positive because it relies on the members of the team perceiving that touch to be positive, right? And if you perceive a fist bump to not be positive, then maybe it won't have this effect. And this

idea about feeling more trust, more of a sense of belonging with your teammates that you could see how that might then confer and play out into better performance in the team as they move forward. If you were to just randomly stop people on the street and ask them, and there's a bias in the way you ask it, I guess, but do you get enough as much touch in your life as you want, which kind of implies you don't. So I guess you would be, the answers might be skewed. But what do you sense?

Do you think people wish they had more or think they have too much? Or where do you think we are? Yeah, well, the data on this suggests that people don't feel they have enough touch in their life compared to what they want. And there's a few different data points to speak to this. So we did a study in 2020.

Obviously, COVID started early 2020. So we launched the study in January. So part way through, there was a COVID lockdown. But when we were asking people this question then, we had about 54% of a world sample saying that they didn't get enough touch in their life. Whereas in contrast, only 4% of people reported having too much touch in their lives. This naturally changed across world regions. So somewhere like North America, it was close to 72% of people said they were getting too little touch.

And we weren't alone in this. Studies that came out later in that year, so as things like pandemic restrictions came into place, where people maybe couldn't go out and touch, we're getting closer to 80% of people reporting they weren't getting enough touch in their lives. And you might think that's pandemic related. But it's important to know that even before the pandemic, there was data like this. So in 2015, Corey Floyd, who's a researcher at the University of Arizona, he conducted a study that was surveying around 1500 Americans. And in that study, he asked about affection hunger.

So not just touch, but just more generally, you know, to people feel they have enough affection in their lives. And around 75 percent of the people tested, you know, agreed that, you know, Americans in their mind were in a state of affection tested agreed that Americans, in their mind, were in a state of affection hunger at that time, which is quite alarming when we consider just how important and powerful things like touch and affection can be for our health and well-being.

I want to find out about that 4% who say they have too much touch. Now, what does that look like? Who's touching them so much? Yeah, I would love to have an answer to that. That's actually one of the things that we're now trying to look at a bit more in our own research. We got the figure and it's then, well, let's try to understand that. I mean, although we don't have that specific answer,

I mean, we do know going back to this idea about touch personas and that we might have different approaches to touch, that there are some people that prefer touch more than others. Well, you made the distinction a few minutes ago between touch and affection and and hadn't really thought about it, but they seem very closely related, but they're not the same thing. And I guess people could need affection and not need touch so much, right? Yeah, for sure. And I think that's the thing we got to keep in mind that, you know, although there's all these benefits to touch that I spoke about in terms of health, well-being, and so forth, you know, for some people, touch isn't the way to go. It's not the source of affection they need. And affection can come in a whole range of ways, right? That could be

not the source of affection they need. And affection can come in a whole range of ways, right? That could be somebody giving you a hug, sure, that's tactile, but that could also be somebody making you a coffee in the morning, right? Somebody doing that gesture for you, sending a message. There's a whole range of ways that you can get affection. And I think that's the nice thing about this relationship between affection and health is, you know, touch is one of the most powerful sources we have for that, a really great demonstration from day to day. But there are other ways. So we can bring some of those benefits into our life through other sources, just generally

sharing affection, depending on whether it's touch or not. Is there research that helps to explain that if someone is touching you, if you're in an affectionate embrace, what happens in your brain that makes that so satisfying what is the the chemical reaction if there is one yeah so when we when we perceive kind of pleasant touch or supportive or effective touch we see a release of a hormone called oxytocin, and oxytocin is a hormone that's involved in calmness and relaxation. It's also involved in building bonds and building trust.

So there's this effectively, to a degree, a kind of pleasant hormonal release when we have these experiences. One of the reasons why it's pleasant and beneficial is oxytocin helps to modulate our parasympathetic nervous system. So in our body, we have a nervous system that might respond to fight or flight. So when we're in a stressful situation, it might kick in. That's typically our autonomic nervous system. And this system, you know, obviously if we have a stressful event, we need to somehow get it back to baseline. And getting back to baseline is what our parasympathetic nervous system does predominantly. And so the fact that when we have these affectionate embraces, when we have positive tactile experiences,

we lead to these release of hormones like oxytocin, that provides a way to relax our body, bring it back to this kind of state of balance. And that's one way that supportive touch and affection exchanges can be positive for things like buffering against stress. Yeah, because it seems to me that if you have a lot of affection and touch in your life, it affects your behavior. I mean, as you say, it probably lowers your stress and makes you calmer and easier to get along with and you're not so grumpy. Like it has a lot of cascading benefits. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, and it's, you know, stress is one of the examples that's

been shown in several studies. Actually, there's work now showing that even self-touch can help to reduce stress for individuals as well. So there was a study recently showing that when people effectively hug themselves it led to a lowering of their stress hormones after stressful events in a similar way to receiving touch from others. But there's other ways as well. So people have shown for instance that you know holding hands can have these benefits to things like reducing anxiety and pain and dissatisfaction. And then you've got all these things like massage. And massage has been shown to have huge benefits

on a whole range of things like sleep, pain response, immune response. So it really cuts across a whole range of settings. What about the touch with a pet? Is there any research about that? Yeah. So stroking animals can also kind of buffer against stress, which I can imagine a lot of us can understand that anecdotally.

You know, those of us that might sit there with our dogs in the evening, if you're a dog person like me and stroke your pet, it does have these effects on things like cortisol release. So cortisol is a major stress hormone. So petting animals can do that. There's something I've noticed about touch and I'm sure other people have noticed this too, that yes, touch is a thing in and of itself, but it's also like a, I don't know, like an accent. Like it adds a little something to a conversation that makes it more impactful or more memorable when people touch during that conversation. Has there been any research into like, what I'm

talking about? There was one study that came out in 2021 that basically simply had couples just sitting together having a conversation basically. And during that conversation, some of those couples touched, some of them didn't. And then later on, they were just asked about, you know, how much positive time they'd had together and things like that. And those couples that were encouraged to touch more had more

kind of positive interpretation of their time together. And the amazing thing was even a week later that was still playing out. So touch can promote kind of this feeling of closeness and connection between couples and carry benefits in that way. Well, it is interesting that it is a topic that is awkward to bring up. Like it's like, it's just not something people tend to talk about. It touches just something you either do or you don't do.

But you don't really sit around and talk about your touch needs. Sounds a little weird. Yeah, it does sound a bit weird. And I don't think it's amazing. We don't often stop and think about it. I think touch is one of these experiences we just go through day to day. And we don't often stop and think about just how powerful and important it is but it is so important to building and maintaining our social bonds. Well it's certainly an important topic that we probably need to pay more attention

to and I guess we just did. Michael Banacy has been my guest. He is an award-winning professor and author of the book Touch Matters Handshakes,, hugs and the new science on how touch can enhance your well-being. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for coming on, Michael. Thanks so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And we would like to tell you about the new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. We're going to have a planet of Jupiter versus Saturn. It's very well done that because in the script

it does say wrestling voice. After all of that, it's going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice. And also in this series, we're discussing history of music recording with Brian Eno and looking at nature's shapes. So listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Rachel Feldman, and I host a podcast from Popular Science called The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. Every other week, I circle up with guests like Bill Nye, Josh Gondelman, Mary Roach and many more to prove that the lofty and noble pursuit of science can also be profoundly weird. From flying Ford Pintos to the world's most illegal cheese, the weirdest thing I learned this week is the ultimate source for all things interesting,

informative, and most importantly, fricking weird. Check out the weirdest thing I learned this week, wherever you get your podcasts. Come on over whenever you're ready to get weird. Look out your window and up in the sky, there is space. Outer space. More space than you can imagine. And of course, scientists have been researching and exploring space for a long time now. But there are some things about space that you will find fascinating that you probably

never knew. But you're about to. As you listen to my guest, Dr. Jillian Scudder. She is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Oberlin College in Ohio, and she's author of a book called The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries and Other Amazing Cosmic Facts. Hi, Jillian. Welcome. Thanks for being on Something You Should Know. Hi, Jillian, welcome.

Thanks for being on Something You Should Know. Thanks very much for having me. So let's start with why you decided to look at some of these unusual sort of oddball questions about space that most of us didn't read about or study in high school science class. Where does this all come from? I think it comes from the fact that I teach a lot of classes

to students who don't have a lot of space background. And people who don't have a big background in the field wind up accidentally asking truly fascinating questions. And they're things that I would never have thought of. And then when I go try and figure out what the answers are, sometimes it's really complicated. And so I wind up getting into all those weird stuff that otherwise I would have no excuse to go look into.

And then I start going, well, that's cool. I didn't know that. And there's lots of it, because space is weird. Well, since it is the title, let's find out why the Milky Way smells of rum and raspberries. Because first of all, how would you even know that, and where do you go smell that? Well, you shouldn't go smell it.

It will kill you. So in the very center of the Milky Way, there is a big gas cloud that we've been observing for a long time. And it's one of these places that people have been searching for fancy molecules. And one of the molecules that was found in that cloud of gas is responsible on Earth in other contexts for the smell of rum

and the flavor of raspberries. Also in that cloud is a whole bunch of stuff that is terrible for you. So there's methanol. There's a form of cyanide, there's a whole bunch of other really nasty things. So do not go smell it. So wouldn't you say the galaxy is flatter than a credit card?

I don't get that, because that's not my experience. I'm in the galaxy and I'm not flatter than a credit card. So what do you mean? Proportionally, it is flatter than a credit card. So what do you mean? Proportionally, it is flatter than a credit card. So a credit card is a relatively small object, but it is much wider than it is thick. And so if you were to take a credit card and scale it up to the size of the Milky Way,

then the Milky Way, then the Milky Way would be thinner than that credit card is. So it's really to do with how thick it is versus how wide it is, more than the actual physical size. Because yes, you are not thinner than a credit card, neither am I. And the Milky Way is very large. But to skit to, yeah, the proportions of it from center to edge versus from top to bottom,

the Milky Way is very, very thin. You say the universe is getting dimmer. And why? What's causing that? It's running out of gas. So the light in the universe comes from stars. Stars form out of clouds of gas. And a lot of the clouds of gas that existed in the earlier

universe have already been turned into stars. And so there is less now to work with. And so the stars that remain, we have a lot of stars that are left over, but a lot of those stars are relatively faint and dim now. The ones that last a long time are really, really dark red and don't produce a lot of light. The ones that form quickly are very bright. They also die quickly. So as we form stars, some fraction of them make bright stars

and some fraction of them make these really, really dim stars that live forever. And those little dim stars basically lock up more and more gas as time goes on into the galaxy and the universe generally gets a little bit fainter over time. But like imperceptibly to the human eye fainter? Well, we to the human eye are really only going to catch on to things that are happening in the Milky Way.

All the stars that we see in the night sky are in our own galaxy. This is really comparing how have galaxies changed over time. And galaxies have gotten dimmer over time. But the human experience is looking at such a tiny fraction of this cosmic time scale that, yeah, to the human experience, now it's not changing. But over the last 2 billion years, it's changed. And will continue to. Very likely it will continue.

Yes, as there is the reasons for which the everything is getting fainter will not change. Those are going to stay in place. And so, yeah, it should just get fainter and fainter as we go on into the future. But I thought new stars were being formed all the time. This is true, but not as many as there were. So our Milky Way forms on average something like two to four solar masses,

so stars the equivalent mass of the sun every year. But 2 billion years ago, that might've been 10 times higher, five times higher. So there is still forming stars. It's just not as many. How do we come to the conclusion that the universe is beige? Because again, that's not my experience that it's beige. What does that mean?

It's a very heavy averaging job is what that means. So in specific, the universe is very colorful. If you look at any particular part of the sky or the world around you, we have lots of things happening that are all sorts of different colors. You look at the images that come back from Hubble, and they come in all sorts of very vivid, beautiful colors. But if you average all of that together,

you're combining red light and blue light and green light and yellow light and all of these other colors. And so the question was, if we average the light from nearby galaxies, is it blue-ish, red-ish, white-ish? And the answer came back that on average is just a little bit to the red side of white. So it's beige colored. So there are a lot of interesting and unusual and things I never knew kind of facts about space in your book. So pick one that you found, even you, as someone who is an astronomer and a physicist, surprised you or fascinated you so much. I was surprisingly fascinated

by learning about the volcanoes on the moon. I knew that there were volcanoes on the moon, but I didn't have a lot of information about that. And it took me a surprisingly long time to wrap my head around it. But it was really fun once I started to get a sense of what was happening, partially just because I was learning about something that

was such a dramatic event, because the way the volcanoes worked on the moon is that they exploded into space. So just the worst volcanic eruption you can imagine. That explains why there's little glass pellets all over the moon. Because back when the moon was volcanically active, it was just exploding rock into the void of

space and raining down tiny glass pellets all over the place. Really? Yeah. It was super fun to learn about. And when was that? I mean, how long ago was the moon actively volcanic? Most of it was happening, I think, about one to two billion years ago, but there was a long tail. So there's active research actually trying to figure out when volcanic activity on the moon stopped. And it may have been as recent as like 100 million years ago, but most of it was earlier. And volcanic activity, well, I guess what causes a volcano? It seems like that you would need some things that are particularly Earth like to have a volcano.

But I guess I don't know. There are volcanoes in a surprisingly large number of places in the solar system, and almost none of them happen in those places for the same reasons that they happen on Earth, which is also just fascinating. So on Earth, we have the tectonic activity. The other way you can make a volcano is much more like what we get under Hawaii, where you just have some upwelling of warmth, extra warmth from the interior of our planet, and it comes up to the surface because it's buoyant

and then it cracks through and it makes a volcano. And that's generally how it works in other places. So for the moon, it was warmer internally in the past than it currently is. And so it had the ability to have these little plumes of warm material rise to the surface. And it came out through cracks in impact craters

and other low-lying areas. And then that is what filled in the mare that we see as dark spots on the moon. You say the moon is wet, but my sense is the moon couldn't be drier. So how could one of us is wrong. The moon is a tiny bit wet. It's a tiny bit wet?

There's more water than you would expect for it being the moon. So you're correct that the moon, in general, is very dry. It is also not completely dry. And this is also expected because there are places on the moon where they are in permanent shadow. So they're usually craters near the north or south pole of the moon.

And they're so at the edges of where sunlight reaches that it's in shadow all the time. Because it's in shadow all the time, it's really cold in shadow all the time. Because it's in shadow all the time, it's really cold in there all the time. And so the water that exists there just won't evaporate. It'll stay as super frozen ice. And so we knew, and there is water there in those places. And we have seen that before.

What was the surprise? There seems to be water outside of the polar areas in more places than we were expecting. Not a lot, but a little. And it hides in the other shadows. So anytime you have a shadow on the moon, you can get really cold really quickly. And it seems like there's just little bits of water hiding out in all the shadows. Can you talk about Pluto? Because Pluto, we used to think of it as a planet, but now I guess it's not. And you say that Pluto's surface is young. I don't understand. So

dive into Pluto a little bit. Absolutely. So Pluto was considered a major planet and is now considered a minor planet or a dwarf planet. And it is the prototype of its kind, the plutoids. So it has still a very respected position within their solar system, even though it is no longer considered a major planet. And the surface is young. And the way that we age surfaces in the solar system is by looking at how many things have hit it. If you have a very fresh, clean surface, that can't be very old, or random rocks would have hit it and caused a whole bunch of impact craters all across it. When we went to see Pluto with New Horizons, the images that came back showed basically

a craterless plane, which was shocking. It wasn't supposed to be craterless. And so this patch has to be really, really fresh and really, really renewed. Meaning that the old surface went somewhere? I mean, I don't know how you have a new surface without a new planet. The new surface, the old surface melted, or was subsumed, or disappeared, or was covered. So it's resurfacing itself. It's creating new ice.

And then the new ice hasn't had time to be hit yet, so it can stay craterless. Well, since we started talking about how things smell, you say the moon smells of gunpowder, which I would think the moon would smell of almost nothing. Yeah, this is a weird and interesting fact. And we only know that because we've sent humans to the moon. It's really hard to predict smells, especially

from rocks. But we do have a sense that the ground has a smell on earth anyways. We have this delightful word of petrichor, which is the smell of when after it's rained. And if you go into a new like a pine forest or someplace, you can smell the sharpness of that. And so our noses are pick out interesting things. I don't think anyone predicted that the moon was going to smell of gunpowder, of that. And so our noses are pick out interesting things. I don't think anyone predicted that the moon was going to smell of gunpowder, but the astronauts, the Apollo astronauts when they came back in, repeatedly reported that it smelled like

gunpowder in there. But it most likely isn't gunpowder. It's hard to imagine there's gunpowder lying around the moon. So what is it that's simulating the smell of gunpowder? No idea. And it's really hard to know because of all of the, they took lots of capsules of dust and stuff to bring back to earth and analyze in lab at home.

And if we'd been able to keep them completely sealed all the way back, we might've been able to figure out what was volatile that was smellable. But the rocks were so sharp that it sliced open a lot of those packaging materials that they were using. And so all of them had been, had air get into them before they got home. So that one's really unclear. You say Saturn's rings are falling apart? I don't like the sound of that.

Yes, I did say that. Yeah, they seem to be falling into Saturn at the moment. This is weird. It does imply that Saturn's rings would have been brighter and bigger in the past. It's unclear why this is happening or how long it will continue happening for. What are those rings? They're pieces of ice in various sizes. So from tiny little flecks of ice up to things would be considered large boulders, very large

boulders and they just collectively orbit Saturn. So it's a whole bunch of tiny little particles and big sized chunks of ice that are all very cleanly spinning around Saturn. And some of them are falling straight into the atmosphere. And that's what we were observing was the rain of the rings onto Saturn. I think people have somewhat of a sense of what black holes are now. And you say that black holes can sing,

so I can't possibly imagine what that means. So please explain. So any sound is a pressure wave and if you have pressure waves at very pleasing frequencies then it's a note and generally the human ear has a limited range of which frequency range it can hear and that declines with age unfortunately but if you extend beyond what the human ear can hear, you can still assign notes to specific frequencies. They just sort of go down the octave,

and then go down the octave again, and then you're off the keyboard, but you can keep going. So this particular supermassive black hole seems to be creating a pressure wave in its general environment. And the frequency of that pressure wave is such that it is, in fact, a note.

It's way too low for the human ear to hear, but it is a note. Here's something that you talk about, you write about, that I would have thought I would have heard of this before. You say that it rains diamonds on Neptune, and it seems like that would be something people would have been talking about. This is actually one of my favorite things because I've had this fact in my brain for a while. I'm like, oh, yeah, it might rain diamonds on Neptune.

And conceptually, I knew why. It's like, OK, it's because Neptune has a lot of methane in it. It's very high pressure. Methane has a lot of carbon in it. Same kind of thing as the exoplanet. So if you crush things that have lots of carbon in it, it's very high pressure, methane has a lot of carbon in it, same kind of thing as the exoplanet. So if you crush things that have lots of carbon in it, you might make diamonds and it might

fall as rain because it's now a heavy chunk of rock. What I didn't know is how we know that works, which is an experiment that was done by firing a high-powered laser at Styrofoam, which is just the most fantastic way of doing exoplanet science or planetary science that I have encountered in a long time. So Styrofoam also, it's not exactly methane, but it is a complex molecule that has a lot of carbon in it and then a bunch of hydrogens attached. And it turns out that if you fire a laser at it, you make a small explosion. And the small explosion makes a very tiny pressure wave,

which then pretends to be the inside of Neptune for a minute. And then diamonds fall out of the styrofoam. And so if it can happen with a laser on styrofoam, it can probably happen on Neptune. But has it ever been witnessed? No. It's just a theory. I mean, it's just a...

It is a theory. It's a very plausible theory because the ingredients are there, the pressure is there, the molecules are there. But we have not gone... We've only been past Neptune once. And it was the Voyager 2 spacecraft went by. And I think Neptune was visited in 1989. That is the last time we have been by Neptune. And it didn't orbit.

It just swung past. So we don't have a lot of information about the inner workings of the atmosphere of Neptune. We've never dropped anything into it to see what it's like in there. But from what Voyager told us, it sounds terrible. It's got really, really high winds and it certainly is made out of methane.

So, and the interior is going to be crushing one way or another, but we haven't gone to collect them and that's probably not going to happen. Well, this has been a fun and interesting tour of the solar system. I appreciate you taking the time. I've been talking to Dr. Jillian Scudder, who is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Oberlin College.

And the name of her book is The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries and Other Amazing Cosmic Facts. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Jillian. Thanks Mike for having me on. It was great fun. The oven in your kitchen gets hot, and it's greasy, probably has some debris in there. And all of that is a perfect recipe for a fire. In fact, cooking fires are the number one cause

of home fires and home fire injuries. Oven fires happen to even the most careful cooks and how you handle it can make all the difference. Here is the best oven fire protocol. First turn off the oven, close the door and allow the fire to burn itself out. If it does not go out, leave the house and call 911. If it does go out, open your windows first before you open the oven. Carefully open the oven door and allow the smoke to clear before trying to figure out what caused it. And have the oven checked before you use it again.

Microwaves are also prone to oven fires. Follow the same steps as you would for a conventional oven, and never open the door if you see flames. That is something you should know. Word of mouth is the primary way this audience grows. It really helps us if you would tell someone you know who you think would enjoy listening to listen to this podcast. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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It is. Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must season and case you miss them. We're talking Parasite the Home Alone. From Grease to the Dark Knight, we've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look, and we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of like Ganja and Hess, so if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure, listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to hit the follow button.

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