Polymetalic Nodules Are Weird

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12:20Michael Stevens:so this question comes from mike mike asks can we train ourselves to be ambidextrous i learned to shoot a basketball with both hands but i feel like my non-dominant hand left will never be as good as my dominant right one well you can you can definitely train yourself to be ambidextrous. In fact, many left-handed people were forced to do this and to this day still train themselves away from it. It takes time. But handedness is a pretty big mystery. Still, we we have some evidence of handedness in in non-human animals, but it's not nearly as strong as it is in humans. And so the origins of handedness are kind of unknown.

13:04Michael Stevens:About 10 percent of people are left-handed. Only about 1 % of people are ambidextrous, like truly they can do fine and gross motor skills equally well with both hands. I think the less dominant hand gets a bad rap though, because maybe it's not good at certain fine motor skills, but it is a fantastic helper and follower. Like if you try to write on a sheet of paper with your non-dominant hand, which in my case is the left, not only does it have trouble forming the little letters, but my right hand has no idea what to do. I'm like, where do I put it? It's supposed to be holding the paper or moving it and I can't do it.

13:46Michael Stevens:But my left hand instinctively just is like, yep, here's where I'm going to be the dominant guy. And when it comes to throwing a ball, the left hand, in my case, again, the non-dominant hand does a lot of work in terms of balance. And I find that when I throw with my dominant hand, my left hand knows exactly where to be to balance everything out and give me really great leverage. When I throw with my left, my right arm is like, hey, I'm in the way. I don't know how to how to work them together. So really, they're like this great team. It's like a little Abbott and Costello, a little Hall and Oates, a little Simon and Garfunkel, a little peanut butter and jelly, a little.

14:26Michael Stevens:OK, I ran out of famous pairs off the top of my head. But yeah, you can train yourself and it's worth doing as a party trick. But otherwise, I don't know, it's fine to just have a dominant and a non-dominant.

14:38Hannah Fry:I do wonder whether it is better for your brain, because of course your brain is sort of cross-wired, right? Like the right hand side of your brain controls the left hand side of your body and vice versa. So I wonder about, I'm thinking about dementia here. I wonder whether if you train yourself to become ambidextrous, whether you're, I mean, in general, the more that you do to support your brain, to push it in directions that it doesn't feel comfortable in, the better that you can save off dementia.

15:03Michael Stevens:I wonder, it could be good for your brain health because it's certainly a cognitive exercise of a unique kind. Could you train yourself to be the opposite of ambidextrous? Could you train yourself to be ambasinister? That's what it's called when you're not good with either of your hands. It's not a real thing, but yes, Sinister means left and dexterous meant right. Is that a Google whack? Amber Sinister? I don't think so, but look it up. But yeah, sinister meaning left shows you historically how we have treated left-handed people. It is. It's a real word. It's a real word. Would I lie? I thought you...

15:45Hannah Fry:On this podcast? Sorry. I thought, yes, I thought you did.

15:50Michael Stevens:well i mean did you think that i made it up though it was would technically be like a word for it

15:55Hannah Fry:yeah but it is a real thing i did a program once on on left-handedness and i spoke to this neuroscientist called sophie scott who's absolutely amazing like really brilliant science communicator as well as a scientist anyway she told me this incredible story about something called left neglect have you come across this no so it's this really strange phenomenon where somebody gets a brain injury to the right hand side of their head okay to the right hemisphere and then they as a result uh just don't pay attention to essentially anything on the left hand side again in the visual field even yeah and it's not that they can't see it because if they are if they are told to look at it then they see it but they just they just don't pay attention to it so for example you get people who have left neglect shaving half of their face eating half a plate of food not noticing it I have a feeling that Dickens had this actually, or there was someone, some famous writer who had it and then talks about just not noticing that lampposts are sort of appearing on the left hand side.

16:57Hannah Fry:Anyway, Sophie was telling me about this study they were doing in hospitals in Manchester where they were following doctors who had been on extremely long shifts. Okay, so I'm talking about serious sleep deprivation. Under these conditions, you also see signs of left neglect in these doctors, but only if they are right-handed. Oh, what if they're left-handed? So you don't see it. You don't see it. You see sometimes flickers of right neglect, but it's way more transient. Oh, strange. And I think there's some idea that you have this sort of resistance to these severe spatial biases because your attention network is better distributed across the whole of your brain rather than just on one side.

17:44Hannah Fry:But it's like, yeah, I mean, active areas of research.

17:48Michael Stevens:Well, you got to give those researchers a hand. Which one? But which one? we should also look more into the origin of handedness because and until that question from mike i thought we knew what caused it and what the advantages were and i thought that it was widespread in the animal kingdom but one thing is it's hard to find the origin because although we have pretty good evidence that neanderthals exhibited handedness that'll come from things like how did they sharpen tools and how did they hold something down while they worked on it there's a way to figure it out. I know that with early humans, we find a lot of handprints, right?

18:27Michael Stevens:Where someone put their hand on a rock and then they sprayed the pigment on it to leave a negative impression of the hand. That almost all of those are left hands, which implies perhaps that more of them were right-handed because they were using the right hand to apply the pigment. But when you want to look at really ancient prehistoric people, the evidence is very conflicting. So we don't know when distinct human handedness emerged as we have it today or why we can promise you an episode on

18:57Hannah Fry:that's coming up at some point in the future here's a question from asia do taller animals get struck by lightning more often if so i guess it's dangerous to be a giraffe do you know i do know what's the answer yes yes but it's not the worst thing that can happen so so it is true it is true that giraffes do get hit more often because they are sort of poking out of the savannah quite a lot more, which is a little bit tragic. There are also actual documented cases of giraffes getting hit by direct strikes during heavy thunderstorms. Actually, I think that there was in 2020, there was an observational study, people out in South Africa, you know, watching what was going on.

19:36Hannah Fry:And two giraffes were killed by a single bolt. I think they were standing quite close to each other. So, yes, it is more dangerous to be a giraffe, essentially. Makes sense. It is, but it's not the most dangerous thing when it comes to lightning, because actually a direct hit from lightning from the sky is the least common way that electricity can kill large animals. What is way more dangerous is because it's much more likely to hit the ground. And then you have this millions of volts of electricity that are rippling outwards through the soil. and here's the thing if you're an animal who is on four legs yeah two of your legs are going to be further away from the site than the other two which means that there is going to be a differential right between those two points this is called a step voltage it's totally deadly for four-legged animals um and you know you could maybe get really lucky where you were you know standing in a way that was perfectly parallel with the rings as they emerged.

20:40Hannah Fry:But at any other angle, there's going to be this difference between your front and back legs. So current will pass through its body. Yeah. Giraffes are more prone to this as well, because obviously they're very big animals. Their front and back legs are really far apart. But this ground current effect, it was this incredible morbid mystery that sometimes you would see news reports of, you know, in history more generally, you would see i don't know like an entire herd of reindeer or like dozens of cows that are just instantly killed in a single storm and it could just take out an entire herd at the same time

21:12Michael Stevens:and it was probably because lightning hit the ground and then a difference in charge between their feet across space yeah got them all this little electrical bridge basically that their bodies their body their bodies were the shortest path between the two so if i'm stuck in a field during a lightning storm should i keep my feet together yes yeah stand on one leg or get in a car well yeah okay if i had a car then i consider myself not stuck in a field or a giraffe yeah i wouldn't get in a giraffe giraffe we've got we've got a lot of books from this country for my daughter where the rhymes don't work in my accent oh really yeah there's one about like put a scarf on a giraffe and i'm like uh marnie that's my wife you have to read this one and she's like oh put the scarf on the giraffe and i'm like okay that sounds ridiculous but it rhymes now excuse me it sounds sophisticated it sounds sophisticated and sexy actually she keeps saying that the new zealand accent was voted the sexiest accent i'm like that must be a comedian's joke because just kidding i think it's obviously true money he listens to this podcast

22:28Hannah Fry:yeah um i heard it was the irish accent are you serious wouldn't it shouldn't it should be

22:34Michael Stevens:drinking they have a new vote every year italian french not british come on yeah well come on like like a what was her name? Glamour Spice? Glamour Spice. Victoria Beckham. Posh Spice. Posh. Posh Spice.

22:51Hannah Fry:Are you joking? She's got like an Essex accent. I guess I haven't listened to her speak. Oh, maybe that's why you think she sounds great.

22:59Michael Stevens:But I would imagine Elizabeth Hurley. Yeah. Her accent is, it's sophisticated, right? That is very RP, yeah. Yeah.

23:08Hannah Fry:Yeah. I don't know. I think when people say English accent, And I just imagine people from my hometown who are like, oh, yeah, shut up, yeah. Oh, my God. I don't think that's sexy at all. But I imagine Italian people are the same. This question is from Paolo. I study statistics in Padua, Italy, which is in the middle of Pianura Padana, a region characterized by coldish, foggy winter days. I come from a city in the Alps that gets way colder than Padua. And whenever I tell my mom it was cold in Padua, she blames it on the dampness in the air, swearing that to her a humid cold feels colder than dry cold even when fully clothed.

23:44Hannah Fry:So is a 10 degrees Celsius, 80 % humidity day colder than a zero degrees, 50 % day?

23:52Michael Stevens:Well, I mean, yeah, it's colder because the temperature is lower, but it will feel different. The humidity does make a difference. Humidity makes a hot day feel hotter and a cold day feel colder because water is a much better conductor of heat. So if it's cold outside and the air is cold but really dry, you might not feel as bad because you're not losing heat as efficiently into the air. But if that air is the same temperature but much more humid, then you can have that heat taken away from you much more quickly. I remember experiencing, I think in like North Dakota, a night where it wasn't even that cold.

24:30Michael Stevens:It was like 20 Fahrenheit. You know, it was below freezing, but it felt painfully cold. And I'm like, it's been this cold in Kansas before. And someone was like, the humidity is so high. But do you have anything else to say about this? Is that true?

24:45Hannah Fry:Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. I think one of the additional weird things here, I think this strange biological quote that I can never get my head over is that humans actually can't sense wetness, right? We don't have like a wetness center. the only way that we can tell that something feels cold is if is is by the temperature differential to what we were expecting i mean you get this if you put uh veritasium did something on this recently you put your hand in a in a glove and into a glass of water and it feels like it feels

25:13Michael Stevens:wet yeah i saw that too and i've noticed that too like i will often wear gloves when i'm uh in the kitchen and then i'll wash the gloves and i'm like hey my hands got all wet and i'm like oh no they didn't but yeah it's just that temperature difference so you can tell the humidity of the air because of i mean how it's interacting with your skin and temperature change but and also how it interacts inside your body with temperature change in your lungs so but you're not actually physically feeling the wetness you're funny enough to humid air do you think that it's more or less dense than dry air i would guess more it's less no yeah because water molecules uh water vapor which is what is in air that makes it humid, is just H2O.

25:57Michael Stevens:So it's two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. That's it. And what is it replacing? It's replacing oxygen, which is two oxygen atoms, or carbon dioxide, which is carbon and two oxygen, or it's replacing nitrogen, which exists as N2. So the water vapor is replacing molecules that are much heavier. So humid air is a lot less dense, even though it feels like oppressively dense, it's not. And so there actually was a case where a baseball team got in trouble because they had an indoor baseball stadium. And whenever their opponents came up to bat, they would turn on the air conditioning to make the air thicker so that balls wouldn't go as far.

26:39Michael Stevens:Wow. Yeah. And when they were up to bat, they would let the natural humidity come back in so that the air became thinner and balls were slowed down less. That's incredible. And they were told to stop. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely. But that's really counterintuitive because humid air, you go down to like the Gulf Coast and you're just like, oh, this is so thick. The air is thick and it feels heavy, but it's actually much less dense.

27:01Hannah Fry:Well, actually, I mean, if you pause to think about it for longer, of course, humid air has to be lighter because otherwise clouds, you know, clouds wouldn't work. Clouds wouldn't be up there.

27:11Michael Stevens:They'd be down there. I guess so. Well, if they come down, also the pressure increases. and the temperature goes up so the water well yeah no i'm sure you're right yeah i don't know if clouds were really heavy and dense then they'd be let be below but clouds aren't water vapor clouds are drops of liquid water that are visible oh yeah okay i take it water vapor is completely invisible but once it condenses into droplets of water that that float because they're so small then you've got a cloud. Okay, all right, I take it back. It's kind of like a pedantic thing I get into as well. Class can stay where they are.

27:49Michael Stevens:Like when you've got your kettle on and you see the steam coming out, no, you don't. Because steam is water vapor, which is invisible. What you're seeing is water vapor, water in a gas form that has condensed into liquid droplets. And those are what you see as the white smoky steam. But that's not steam. That's just hot drops of liquid water. This is why we love you, Michael,

28:11Hannah Fry:because there are very few other people on earth who would be like, no, you're not seeing steam. You can't see steam. You can't see steam. Okay, just to round off this episode, I've actually, I've looked up the, what has been voted the sexiest accent.

28:25Michael Stevens:Okay, tell me. Okay, the... Wait, let me guess. Go on. Tell me two and three. Okay. Tell me third place, second place. I'll tell you first.

28:32Hannah Fry:They kind of, they change around a little bit depending on who's asking.

28:36Michael Stevens:I'm sure. But the top four, we got all of the top four. Okay, so the top four are French, Italian. Not French, actually, sorry. Oh, what are the top four?

28:47Hannah Fry:Italian, British, Irish, Kiwi. Number one? Yeah. So my wife is right. Yeah. In a heavily debated 2019 poll by Big 7 Travel, it took first place out of 50 accents. They described the Neuseiled accent as outrageously charming. allowing it to beat out South African accent and the Irish accent. Yeah. I stand corrected.

29:15Michael Stevens:My wife is right. There you go.

29:17Hannah Fry:Yeah. There you go.

29:18Michael Stevens:Your marriage can go on happily. I'm trying to do an impression of a New Zealand accent, but it's going to be so offensive and wrong. Go on, do it anyway. I just think it's like, this is my New Zealand accent. Oh, do you like a beer? Oh. Is that good?

29:34Hannah Fry:I'm not sure what you were saying.

29:36Michael Stevens:Go on, the dick. Like that. Go on the dick? Yeah. Oh, that sounds better. I don't know why I make it so high-pitched. I enjoyed it so much more that yours is high-pitched. I'm going to try, like, lower. I'll come out on the dick. I'll be as sweet as. That was good. That was straight out of New Zealand.

29:57Hannah Fry:I think that was undeniably sexy.

30:00Michael Stevens:How do they say hello? Hello. I'm from the South Island, eh? That was good. I felt like I was there. That was. And the North Island is more like, hey, sweet ass. Oh, give me some Milo.

30:19Hannah Fry:Yeah, it is a wonder that you didn't choose acting as your career. Isn't it? It absolutely is.

30:26Michael Stevens:I think that if you've been offended today, let us know. You can email us at the rest is science at goal hanger dot com.

30:32Hannah Fry:Send us in your questions, your ideas, things you want us to answer and any medical advice for somebody who's consumed a small amount of bellapolymer metallic nodules.

30:42Michael Stevens:Deep C lead. Or yeah, nodules. Goodness me. See you next time.