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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

  Gifts mean more when they have the power to give more. They can inspire more discovery, give more confidence, and unwrap more of who you are. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box. The Dell XPS 13 Laptop. With a beautiful design and cutting-edge performance, it helps you unlock more possibilities. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet, with touchscreen, a backlit keyboard, and long-lasting battery life to power you through your day. Built with a durable aluminum chassis, weighing just 2.2 pounds, and Intel Core processors,

• 0:42Mike Carruthers?

  it's fast, reliable, and portable enough to keep up wherever you go. Visit dell.com to explore the possibilities with XPS. While shopping, you'll also find great perks like Dell Rewards, fast, free shipping, premium support, and financing with flexible payment options. Plus, you can find great deals on monitors and accessories. That means you can score a whole new setup now for less. This Black Friday sale is one you don't want to miss. Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:21Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:26Mike Carruthers?

  I imagine most of us shop for clothes online at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures, but when they arrived, eh, not so beautiful. Cheap looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice. The quality is consistently good and the prices are surprisingly reasonable.

• 3:06Mike Carruthers?

  I've bought their cashmere sweaters, which are gorgeous, and they start at just $60 for cashmere. My wife buys tons of stuff from Quince and we keep coming back. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, offering prices 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And with the holidays coming, that's a pretty compelling combination. Beautiful clothes and gifts without spending a fortune or wondering what's really going to show up at the door. I really do recommend Quince. It's one of those companies that has earned our trust. Give the gift of quality this holiday season.

• 3:46Mike Carruthers?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support the show.

• 4:22Mike 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 scents, 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.

• 5:02Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 5:46Mike Carruthers?

  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 Banacy 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.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Hi, hi. Thanks for having me.

• 6:20Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Well, the answer to that is, 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.

• 6:56Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. There's, 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, 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 wellbeing and have a kind of range of impacts just in terms of general life satisfaction.

• 7:46Mike Carruthers?

  Why do we think this is true? Why is it, what is it about touch that has these magical properties?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  One of the things with touch is that it's, it's one of the first senses that we use. It's also one of the last senses that goes. And 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.

• 8:28Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 enjoy too much touch, you know.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Occasionally, it's okay, 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.

• 10:05Mike Carruthers?

  Well, how do you figure that out?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  I think that's really comes down to communication to a large degree. You know, I think the more that we are 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 we're mindful of just how some of these things can change, you know.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  So for instance, I don't know, if you're in a long term relationship, you might think that, you know, those touch needs that that your partner had very early on, you know, maybe they you think they continue to align throughout life. Well, there's a there's a good chance they might change, you know, 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, you know, 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?

• 11:25Mike Carruthers?

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

• 11:58Speaker 01

  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, um, you know, to 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, um, perhaps that was wishful thinking because they're such a culturally important part of society. And and what they represent often is this idea about kind of reciprocation, trust.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Again, building a connection and the 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 negotiation. 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. You know, 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.

• 13:22Mike Carruthers?

  Well, and imagine if someone refuses to shake your hand. I mean, there's a message that's pretty loud.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  One of the interesting things is also about, you know, handshakes in job interviews and things like that, right? You know, if in those situations, you know, somebody went to shake a hand, but a candidate didn't shake the hand, how would that impact your perception of that person, you know, 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, one of a number, of course, of social gestures that can be very important.

• 13:55Mike Carruthers?

  Well, what did that research say? If a candidate doesn't shake an interviewer's hand, are they doomed?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Candidates who were rated as having better handshakes were more likely to get jobs than those that are 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 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.

• 14:28Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about the importance of touch, physical, human touch. And my guest is Michael Banacy, who is author of the book, Touch Matters: Handshakes, Hugs, and the New Science on How Touch Can Enhance Your Well-Being. If you listen to something you should know regularly, you know, we talk about sleep quite a bit here. And one of the things I've learned from those conversations is just how important a good night's sleep is. And I've always been someone who loves his sleep. So I was intrigued when I heard about Beam Dream. It's a delicious nighttime drink formulated to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed.

• 15:10Mike Carruthers?

  It contains ingredients like reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, epigenin, and melatonin. They have lots of great flavors. I tried the cinnamon cocoa flavor and I love the idea of having something warm and delicious as part of winding down at night. And it's less than 20 calories per serving. Dream has improved more than 30 million nights of sleep and they back it up with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you don't sleep better, you get your money back. And right now, there's a terrific offer. Go to shopbeam.com/sysk, use code S Y S K and get

• 15:50Mike Carruthers?

  50% off during Beam's Cyber Sale. Only available while flavors are in stock. With this incredible discount, that means you'll pay just 83 cents per night for the best sleep of your life. So seriously, think about it. I mean, how much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep? Beam is just 83 cents per night. So go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should

• 16:32Mike Carruthers?

  get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are, the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years. And yet there they hang, taking up space. But here's the thing. You could turn those clothes into money. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer wear and make some extra money. Listing on Vinted is so quick and simple. And when something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping

• 17:11Mike Carruthers?

  label for you. And here's what I really like. Vinted charges no seller fees. So whatever you earn from selling your clothes, you keep. Think about that. Clothes that you aren't wearing, taking up space, could be putting money back in your pocket. So here's my suggestion. Take five minutes, go look at the far ends of your closet and see what's hanging there. You might be surprised. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees. You keep every dollar you earn. That's Vinted, V I N T E D. So, Michael, I know there has been some research about sports teams and how teammates

• 17:54Mike Carruthers?

  who touch, those teams perform better. So, so can you talk about that?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was a really interesting study. It 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 behaviors 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. So there

• 18:40Speaker 01

  was a relationship between these kind of positive tactile exchanges between teammates and better team performance.

• 18:47Mike Carruthers?

  And any explanation or suspicion as to why that is?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think there was, I mean, in that particular study, they didn't get to the exact details as to why, but there, if you talk to sports, sports teams, I mean, a lot of the, the, 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,

• 19:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:49Mike Carruthers?

  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, you know, 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, but in a, what do you sense? Do you think people wish they had more? Or wish, or think they have too much? Or, I mean, where do you think we are?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the, the data on this suggests that people would don't feel, well, people don't feel they have enough touch in their life compared to what they want. And there's, 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, we launched the study in January. So partway 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, 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.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 1,500 Americans. And in that study, he asked about affection hunger. So not just touch, but just more generally, you know,

• 21:41Speaker 01

  do people feel they have enough affection in their lives? And around 75% of the people tested, you know, agreed that, you know, 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 wellbeing.

• 21:59Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would love to have an answer to that. See, that's actually one of the things that we're now trying to look at a bit more in our own, on our own research. You know, we, we kind of got, we got the figure and it's then, well, let's try to, to understand that. I mean, we do so, 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.

• 22:35Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you made the distinction a few minutes ago between touch and affection. And, and I hadn't really thought about it, but they seem very closely related, but they're not the same thing. And, and I guess people could need affection and not need touch so much, right?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And I think that's the thing we've got to keep in mind that, you know, although there's all these benefits to touch that I spoke about in terms of health, wellbeing and so forth, you know, for some people, touch isn't the way to go. It's not the, 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

• 23:37Speaker 01

  sharing affection. Yeah, depending on whether it's touch or not.

• 23:40Mike Carruthers?

  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, what is the, the chemical reaction, if there is one?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  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 so there's this effectively to a degree of kind of pleasant hormonal release when we 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.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 25:15Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, because it seems to me that if 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.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, and it's it's, you know, stress is 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 hugged 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, you know, reducing anxiety and pain and dissatisfaction. And then you've got all these things like massage, and massage has been shown to have

• 26:19Speaker 01

  huge benefits on a whole range of things like sleep, pain response, immune response. So it really cuts across a whole range of settings.

• 26:28Mike Carruthers?

  What about the touch with a pet? Is there any research about that?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so stroking animals can also kind of buffer against stress. 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.

• 26:57Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:01Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it is interesting that it is a topic that is awkward to bring up. 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.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does sound a bit weird, right? And I don't think, yeah, 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.

• 28:36Mike Carruthers?

  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 for coming on, Michael.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.

• 29:01Mike Carruthers?

  Hiring the wrong person is expensive, but it's also exhausting because now you haven't solved your problem, you've created a new one. You've spent time interviewing and training somebody, but it's the wrong person and it's just not working. So when you're hiring, you don't just need a person, you need the right person. And that is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Sponsored jobs helps you reach candidates with the skills and experience and other qualifications you're looking for and boosts your job and search results so the right people are more likely to see it.

• 29:44Mike Carruthers?

  In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. So give yourself a better shot at finding the right person. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast.

• 30:25Mike Carruthers?

  Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 30:45Mike Carruthers?

  So here's the problem with drinking water. You can't tell if it's clean just by looking at it. A glass of water can look perfectly clear and still contain things you definitely don't want to drink. In fact, 3 out of 4 US homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water. An ordinary refrigerator and pitcher filters, they do little to remove many of these contaminants. Which is why Aqua True is different. Aqua True is a countertop water purifier with a patented 4-stage reverse osmosis system. It's tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants, including chlorine, lead, forever chemicals,

• 31:29Mike Carruthers?

  and those microplastics. And there's no plumbing, no installation, you just put it on the counter and you get pure, great tasting water you can actually feel good about drinking. Aqua True was even named Best Countertop Water Filter by Good Housekeeping. Look, if you're gonna drink water every single day, and you probably should, well, why guess what's in it? Go to aquatrue.com now for 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK. Aqua True even comes with a 30-day best tasting water guarantee. That's aquatrue.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, promo code SYSK.

• 32:16Mike Carruthers?

  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. Gillian 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, Gillian. Welcome. Thanks for being on Something You Should Know.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 32:59Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 33:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:52Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Well, you shouldn't go smell it. It will kill you.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:44Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Proportionally, it is flatter than a credit card.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  So a credit card is a relatively small object, but it is much wider than it is thick.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  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 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 skip to, yeah, the proportions of it from center to edge versus from top to bottom, the Milky Way is very, very thin.

• 35:42Mike Carruthers?

  You say the universe is getting dimmer, and why? What's causing that?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  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's 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.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  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, and so the galaxy and the universe generally gets a little bit fainter over time.

• 36:54Mike Carruthers?

  But like imperceptibly to the human eye fainter.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  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, no, it's not changing. But over the last two billion years, it's changed.

• 37:34Mike Carruthers?

  And will continue to?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Very likely it will continue, yes. Because 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.

• 37:53Mike Carruthers?

  But I thought new stars were being formed all the time.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  This is true, but not as many as it as there were. So our Milky Way forms, on average, something like two to four solar masses. So stars of the equivalent mass of the sun every year. But two billion years ago, that might have been 10 times higher, five times higher. So there is still forming stars. It's just not as many.

• 38:22Mike Carruthers?

  How do we come to the conclusion that that the universe is beige? Because again, that's not my experience that it's beige. What does that mean?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  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?

• 39:17Speaker 02

  And the answer came back that on average is just a little bit to the red side of white. So it's beige colored.

• 39:26Mike Carruthers?

  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 physicist, surprised you or fascinated you so much.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  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, because the, 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

• 40:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:35Mike Carruthers?

  Really?

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was super fun to learn about.

• 40:41Mike Carruthers?

  And when was that? I mean, how long ago was the moon actively volcanic?

• 40:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:08Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  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 on other, in other places. So for the moon, it was warmer internally

• 42:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:28Mike Carruthers?

  You say the moon is wet, but see, my sense is the moon couldn't be drier. So how could, so one of us is wrong.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  The moon is a tiny bit wet.

• 42:39Mike Carruthers?

  It's a tiny bit wet?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  It's a little, there's more water than you would expect for it being the moon. So you're, 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 just, it's 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.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:52Mike Carruthers?

  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, which I don't understand. So dive into Pluto a little bit.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  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,

• 44:52Speaker 02

  the images that came back showed basically a craterless plain, which was shocking. It wasn't supposed to be craterless. And so this patch has to be really, really fresh and really, really renewed.

• 45:06Mike Carruthers?

  Meaning that the old surface went somewhere? I mean, I don't know how you have a new surface without a new planet.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:30Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  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 like rocks, but we, we do have a sense of that the ground has a smell in, on Earth anyways. We have this delightful word of petricor, 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, but the astronauts, the Apollo astronauts, when they came back in, repeatedly reported that it smelled like gunpowder in there.

• 46:26Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 46:35Speaker 02

  No idea. And it's really hard to, to know because of all of the, like 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 it's, that one's really unclear.

• 47:13Mike Carruthers?

  You say Saturn's rings are falling apart? That, I don't like the sound of that.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:39Mike Carruthers?

  What are those rings?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  They're pieces of ice in various sizes. So from tiny little flecks of ice up to things would be considered large boulders, pretty, 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.

• 48:19Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  So any sound is a pressure wave. And if you have pressure waves at very pleasing frequencies, then it's a note.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  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're 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.

• 49:21Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  This is actually one of my favorite things because I've had this fact in my brain for a while, like, oh, yeah, it might rain diamonds on Neptune. And conceptually, I knew why. It's like, okay, it's because there's 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, 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

• 50:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:52Mike Carruthers?

  But has it ever been witnessed?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:55Mike Carruthers?

  It's just a theory. I mean, it's just a-

• 50:57Speaker 02

  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

• 51:41Speaker 02

  be crushing one way or another. But we haven't like gone to collect them and that's probably not going to happen.

• 51:48Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 52:02Mike Carruthers?

  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, Gillian.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Thanks, Mike, for having me on. It was great fun.

• 52:20Mike Carruthers?

  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

• 53:03Mike Carruthers?

  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. And that is something you should know. Now, 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.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.