IFLScience - We Have Questions

Can You Learn To Roll Your Rs? | IFLScience We Have Questions

My name is Laura, and I have a confession to make: I cannot roll my Rs. Now, as a native speaker of English, you might not think this would majorly impact my life. But I’ve also been a student of Spanish since the age of 12, and the rolled R sound? Well, it comes up a lot.

After all these years, I’d basically written off my chances of learning to produce this elusive sound, but a chance conversation fanned the flames of curiosity once again. So, I spoke to Dr Helen Nuttall, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience and head of the Neuroscience of Speech and Action Lab at Lancaster University, to talk all things speech production – and just maybe, keep my dreams of Spanish mastery alive.

Why Is Modern Life So Exhausting? How Metrics Kill The Thrill Of Winning

Modern life is exhausting. If you’re not behind on your emails, then there’s the endless calls that could’ve been an email. Reminders that you haven’t reached this quota, or that element X of your job is slipping behind on its KPIs or rankings.

It feels as if the ways we have to lose are endless in a world obsessed with metrics, and yet have you noticed that keeping score is so much fun in games? To understand why point scoring in life can be so draining versus scoring wins in games, I sat down with C Thi Nguyen, philosophy professor at the University of Utah and author of The Score: How To Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game.

We dive into how the gamification of life has fundamentally captured our value systems, turning personal life choices into numerical data, and how to return to what’s truly meaningful over what’s easily measured.

Join us as we explore all of this and more in this special bumper episode of We Have Questions.

Which Animals Have The Worst Table Manners?

Imagine yourself in a restaurant like no other: at the table beside you, two owls are on a date. There’s an anteater dining solo over in the corner, and a family of leeches sitting around a table just behind you. There’s a lot on the menu, but some of the dining etiquette might just put you off your food. 

This is the imaginary scenario we put to Chester Zoo’s Assistant Manager for Visitor Engagement, Ashleigh Marshall, when we invited her to discuss: Which animal has the worst table manners? Of course, animals have no need for etiquette, and they have all evolved these feeding strategies for a reason, but indulge us as we get a bit silver service about it all. There’s some seriously questionable eating going on in the animal kingdom. 

What Do Other Worlds Smell Like?

IFLScience visited the Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London, recently and we were curious to come across opportunities to take in the scents of asteroid Bennu, Mars, and even Saturn’s moon Titan. We understand that space smells, in an abstract way, we’ve even covered it before, but being able to get an actual whiff sparked many questions. Who created these smells, based on what, and how?  

Enter Marina Barcenilla, astrobiologist and fragrance designer – and now major exhibition contributor – with her own artisan perfumery AromAtom, where she uses chemistry to create the smells of cosmic environments from the surfaces of planets to distant nebulae. So, we asked Barcenilla: How does one become a perfumer for the stars? 

How Can Swimming For 37 Hours Help Tackle Ocean Plastic?

In 2022, a new world record was set in the waters off Grand Cayman in the western Caribbean Sea. I, a once avid collector of the Guinness World Records annual album, was most excited by the prospect, but ask environmentalist Oly Rush about it, and he’d sooner talk to you about plastic. 

You see, this wasn’t just any swim. This was a 36-hour-and-59-minute test of endurance to raise awareness of one of the greatest plights currently threatening marine species. The Grand Swim, as it would become known in a subsequent documentary about the grueling achievement, details what led Rush and Project Planet Earth to embark on such a perilous adventure. We, however, needed more deets on what wildlife you faceplant along the way. 

You can listen to this episode and subscribe to the podcast on all your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Amazon Music, and more. 

This interview first appeared in Issue 37 of our digital magazine CURIOUS.

How Did Frogs Become A Pregnancy Test For Humans?

People were finding out they were pregnant via frogs until the 1960s.

We all know that many of the tools in human life have been inspired by nature’s creations, but how often do you stop and really think about where these products come from? A new gallery at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is encouraging visitors to think more about their impact on the planet, as well as showcasing the inspiring work that demonstrates that however doom and gloom the news might be, hope is not lost.

Among its many intriguing displays, we stumbled upon something curious: a frog pregnancy test. We had questions and needed to know more about this item, and we were surprised to find these frogs had a lot to say about women’s access to healthcare in the not-so-distant past. Here’s what we learned from Dr Isabel Davis, Research Leader in Collections and Culture at the NHM.

This interview first appeared in Issue 36 of our digital magazine CURIOUS.

Can Sheep Livers Predict The Future?

Is it possible to predict the future by slicing open a farm animal and peering inside its liver? Scientists of the 21st century would surely be skeptical about approaching this question, but for the curious minds of ancient times, it was a tried and tested method for looking ahead and foreseeing what the gods had in store for you, your family, or your world.

 

Known today as liver divination, this mysterious art was mastered by the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, two mighty civilizations that flourished in Mesopotamia and carved their names into the bedrock of history. 

 

We spoke to Dr Selena Wisnom, author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History, who believes liver divination is a surprisingly insightful window into this world and the emergence of science. After all, it did manage to predict the election of Trump…

 

Burying Scientists Alive in the Snow

Polar Bears International (PBI) is serious about protecting bears, and in the pursuit of reliable data have gone to some extremes in the past. From burying scientists alive out in the snow to novel collar-camera setups that have enabled them to predict when polar bear moms and their new cubs are going to emerge from their dens.

In an era of “drill, baby, drill,” now is a tougher time for polar bears than ever before. An essential step towards getting them the protection they require centers around demystifying their denning habits and what young bears need to survive, so we caught up with Dr Louise Archer, PBI’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough, to find out what she’s been working on with a team in Svalbard, Norway.