Undiscovered

Are you just six handshakes away from every other person on Earth? Two mathematicians set out to prove we’re all connected.

You have probably heard the phrase “six degrees of separation,” the idea that you’re connected to everyone else on Earth by a chain of just six people. It has inspired a Broadway play, a film nerd’s game, called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”...and even a No Doubt song! But is it true? In the ‘90s, two mathematicians set out to discover just how connected we really are—and ended up launching a new field of science in the process.

Annie holds one of Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings sent to June Shields in Wichita, Kansas. Accessed at the Yale University archives.
(Credit: Elah Feder)

A version of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings. “Could you, as an active American, contact another American citizen regardless of his walk of life?” Milgram and his team wrote. They asked for recipients' help in finding out. Accessed at the Yale University archives.
(Credit: Elah Feder)

(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)

GUESTS

Duncan Watts, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age Steven Strogatz, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, author of Sync Andrew Leifer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University

FOOTNOTES

Read Duncan Watts’ and Steven Strogatz’s breakthrough 1998 Nature paper on small-world networks. Read Stanley Milgram’s 1967 article about his letter experiment in Psychology Today. Watch Duncan and Steve discuss the past and future of small-world networks at Cornell. Watch C. elegans' brain glow! And read more about the brain imaging work happening in Andrew Leifer’s lab. Browse the small-world network of C. elegans’ 302 neurons at wormweb.org. Read Facebook’s analysis of Facebook users’ “degrees of separation.” Just for funsies, a network analysis of Game of Thrones.

CREDITS

This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Additional music by Podington Bear and Lee Rosevere. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Story consulting by Ari Daniel. Engineering help from Sarah Fishman. Recording help from Alexa Lim. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.

Americans haven’t always loved whales and dolphins. In the 1950s, the average American thought of whales as the floating raw materials for margarine, animal feed, and fertilizer—if they thought about whales at all. But twenty-five years later, things had changed for cetaceans in a big way. Whales had become the poster-animal for a new environmental movement, and cries of “save the whales!” echoed from the halls of government to the whaling grounds of the Pacific. What happened? Annie and Elah meet the unconventional scientists who forever changed our view of whales by making the case that a series of surreal bleats and moans were “song.”

Deep in Antarctica, a rookie meteorite hunter helps collect a mystery rock. Could it be a little piece of Mars?

In Antarctica, the wind can tear a tent to pieces. During some storms, the gusts are so powerful, you can’t leave the safety of your shelter. It’s one of the many reasons why the alluring, icy continent of Antarctica is an unforgiving landscape for human explorers.

“It’s incredibly beautiful, but it’s also incredibly dangerous,” says geologist Nina Lanza, who conducted research in the Miller Range in the central Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica for about five weeks in December, 2015. “It’s not like Antarctica is out to get you, but it’s like you don’t matter at all. You are nothing out there.”

Yet, this landscape—unfit for human habitation—is where Lanza and the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) volunteers find themselves banded together. They are prospecting for meteorites. Embedded in the sparkling blue ice sheets of the Antarctic interior are scientifically precious stones that have fallen to Earth from space. Lanza is a rookie meteorite hunter, enduring the hostile conditions of the Antarctic for the first time—searching for little geologic fragments that reveal the history of our solar system.

While most people associate Antarctica with penguins, in the Miller Range, there are no visible signs of life. There are no trees, animals, insects, or even birds in the sky. Being that isolated and alone is strange—it’s “very alien,” says Lanza.

“You know the cold and the living outside part? That is easy compared to the mental part,” she says. “It’s almost hard to explain the level of isolation. Like we think we’ve all been isolated before, but for real, in the Miller Range, you are out there.”

The luxurious ‘poo bucket’ at ANSMET camp.
(Credit: Nina Lanza)

In this dramatic, extreme environment, Lanza finds comfort in the familiar details of everyday life at the ANSMET camp. Amid the Antarctic’s wailing winds, you can hear the recognizable hiss of a camp stove. During the holidays, Lanza got everyone singing Christmas carols. And then there’s the ‘poo bucket’—complete with a comfortable styrofoam toilet seat, scented candles, and bathroom reading reminiscent of home (including the New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly).

In the field, Nina documented these features of everyday life in detail, in pictures and voice recordings. “Everybody talks about how beautiful it is and you always see a million pictures of these grand vistas, but I’m like, ‘let’s talk about the less pretty stuff,’” says Lanza. Unless you make an effort to remind yourself, “you could almost forget that the poo bucket ever existed.”

The work isn’t easy. The ANSMET field team can spend up to nine hours a day on their skidoos (Lanza’s skidoo, “Miss Kitty,” is covered with Hello Kitty stickers) combing ice sheets and flagging potential meteorites. The never-setting sun glares intensely on the stretches of glistening, blue ice. (Old, compressed, ice appears blue.) On a clear, cloudless day out in the field, the sky and ice sheets seem to meet in one continuous field of blue, says Lanza.

“It’s almost like an artist’s conception of water rendered into glass or plastic,” she says about the ice. “It’s blue and it goes on forever.”

The meteorite hunters concentrate their searches in these shimmering, blue ice areas, because these ice fields are gold mines for meteorites. When a meteorite impacts Antarctica, it becomes buried in snow. Over time as the snow compresses, the rock gets trapped in glacial ice. If that ice doesn’t break off and fall into the sea, Antarctic winds can eventually resurface that buried treasure.

Over the last four decades, ANSMET scientists have collected over 20,000 rock specimens from the ice. And in December, 2015, Lanza thinks she may have helped strike gold in the form of a five-pound, grey rock. She and her colleagues will spend the next nine months wondering if this rock could be one of the most prized meteorites of all. Could it be a little piece of Mars?

The mysterious rock (right), numbered 23042 in the field. Could it be from Mars?
(Credit: NASA Astromaterials Curation)

Meteorite sampling procedure.
(Credit: Nina Lanza)

(Credit: Nina Lanza)

Two ANSMET scientists in the field.
(Credit: Nina Lanza)

(Credit: Nina Lanza)

Lanza and the ANSMET crew, Dec 2015-Jan 2016.
(Credit: Nina Lanza)

(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)

FOOTNOTES

Read Nina’s dispatches from the field. Hear Nina Lanza on Science Friday. Read about the Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program.

CREDITS

This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produc...

A team of social scientists stumbles onto a cache of censored Chinese social media posts—and decides to find out what the Chinese government wants wiped from the internet.

On China’s most influential microblogging platform, a wristwatch aficionado named Boss Hua accuses a government official of corruption. But, his posts aren’t censored. So what disappears into the black box of Chinese censorship...and what stays online? A team of social scientists cracked this question—by mistake—with big data.

(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)

FOOTNOTES

See the picture that got ‘Smiling Official’ Yang Dacai fired. Read Gary, Jen, and Margaret’s first study on Chinese government censorship (American Political Science Review). Read the results of Gary, Jen, and Margaret’s social media experiment (Science). Read Gary, Jen, and Margaret’s latest study, about what the Chinese government secretly posts to the internet. Hear Gary King on Science Friday.

CREDITS

This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help from Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Story consulting by Ari Daniel. Translations and voicing by Isabelle. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.

In Apartheid-era South Africa, a scientist uncovered a cracked, proto-human jawbone. That humble fossil would go on to inspire one of the most blood-spattered theories in all of paleontology: the “Killer Ape” theory.

According to the Killer Ape theory, humans are killers—unique among the apes for our capacity for bloodthirsty murder and violence. And at a particularly violent moment in U.S. history, the idea stuck! It even made its way into one of the most iconic scenes in film history. Until a female chimp named Passion showed the world that we might not be so special after all.