AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It's time now for our regular science news roundup with our friends at NPR's Short Wave podcast, Regina Barber and Emily Kwong. Hey to both of you.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: So you've brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
BARBER: One's about the psychology of boredom and how scrolling through social media may not be the answer.
CHANG: Darn.
KWONG: We'll also talk about a contest to help with the invasive snake problem crushing the Everglades.
CHANG: OK.
BARBER: And evidence from an Indian lunar rover about how Earth's moon may have formed.
CHANG: Whoa. All right, well, let's start with boredom and social media because it's almost a reflex for me now. As soon as I start getting really, really bored, I pull out Instagram.
KWONG: I have some research to share about that, Ailsa. OK, published this week by the American Psychological Association, it focuses on digital switching.
CHANG: Huh?
KWONG: So that is when people swipe through TikTok videos without finishing them.
CHANG: Oh.
KWONG: Yeah.
CHANG: Yeah.
KWONG: Or skip forward in, like, a Netflix show if it doesn't hook you right away.
CHANG: Oh, that is me all the time. And I can spend hours doing that.
KWONG: Yeah. And you're not alone in swiping through videos on your phone. I mean, Katy Tam, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, noticed that she was do-si-do-ing around YouTube, too.
KATY TAM: But I realized that I wasn't truly enjoying or engaging with the content. And that makes me wonder how this behavior actually affects our feelings of boredom.
BARBER: So to understand how all this skipping impacts boredom, Katie and her colleagues set up seven psychological experiments with over 1,200 total participants.
CHANG: Wow. That's a lot of participants. What did they find?
BARBER: They found that, when participants were bored, they voluntarily switched from one video to the next.
CHANG: Which makes sense. I mean, you're bored, so you keep swiping - right? - but it sounds like you're about to tell me, while you're doing this not to be bored, you're only boring yourself more?
KWONG: That's right.
CHANG: Oh, my God.
KWONG: They thought that switching would help, but actually, joke's on you. Switching made the boredom way worse.
BARBER: Yeah.
CHANG: (Laughter).
KWONG: Like, in one experiment, participants could freely switch between seven videos. And in surveys, they found that experience less satisfying, less absorbing, less meaningful than participants who watched a 10-minute video in full.
CHANG: Huh.
KWONG: Most of these participants, by the way, were university students.
CHANG: All right.
BARBER: Yeah.
CHANG: University students - classic study subjects.
BARBER: Of course.
CHANG: So how widely do these findings really apply?
KWONG: Well, Katy and her colleagues did versions of this study with online articles and non-university students. Those findings were less conclusive. But the point is, attention is powerful. I mean, attention is required to derive satisfaction from the world around us.
CHANG: Yes.
KWONG: So Ailsa, if you find yourself speed-scrolling through Instagram, Katy has a suggestion - slow down. Try to focus on the video in front of you, and watch it all the way through.
CHANG: Commit.
TAM: It's just like how we go to movie theater to watch a movie. This kind of immersive experience actually helps us to enjoy the video more, and we could implement that in our daily life.
KWONG: And it really raises the question, what other habits are meant to alleviate an emotion that actually make it worse?
CHANG: That is so interesting.
OK, well, let's move on from how boring I am making my own life to snakes because they are scary and not boring. And maybe I do need more snakes in my boring life to make it less boring. What is the deal with these invasive snakes?
BARBER: All right, Ailsa. Our story begins in the '80s with the trade of Burmese pythons as exotic pets - yeah, like Burmese pythons being these large, constrictor-like snake species. They're not venomous.
CHANG: Right, right, right. They, like, squeeze their prey to death.
BARBER: Yes. And these snakes are native to Southeast Asia, and they've become a problem here in the States. So specifically, in the Everglades, in South Florida, where they were first released decades ago into the wild, now, wildlife biologists estimate there are tens of thousands of them roaming around. And the longest one they found was 19 feet long...
CHANG: Oh, my God.
BARBER: ...And it was way longer than any snake native to Florida.
KWONG: These Burmese pythons, Ailsa - they compete with native predators, and they've proven really disruptive to the local ecosystem. Here's what McKayla Spencer told us. She works for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
MCKAYLA SPENCER: They're causing a lot of negative impacts. Direct, easiest one to measure is that they are eating our native wildlife. So they're eating mammals, native birds, even some of our native reptiles, like federally threatened and endangered species.
KWONG: Gulp.
BARBER: Oh, God.
CHANG: (Laughter).
KWONG: (Imitating gulping sound) Just like that.
BARBER: Yeah.
KWONG: All over Florida. So because of these negative impacts, for over a decade, Florida officials have been running a contest.
CHANG: Wait, wait, like, a contest for snake hunters or something?
BARBER: Yeah, it's called the Florida Python Challenge.
CHANG: Oh, my God.
BARBER: And it kicked off right after midnight, August 9. There were two divisions, novice and professional. And there's a mandatory training that, like, all participants have to pass so they actually know how to identify and humanely kill the Burmese pythons without hurting any, like, native snakes.
CHANG: I'm worried about the people in the novice category still.
BARBER: Yeah, but, you know, they're in it for the cash prize, right?
KWONG: Yeah, there are cash prizes.
CHANG: OK.
KWONG: It's suddenly a game show.
CHANG: That's right - makes it worth it.
KWONG: And there is a grand prize of $10,000 for the participant who catches the most pythons during the contest.
BARBER: And we're talking, like, hundreds of hunters, like, prowling through the Everglades for 10 days in teams of two or more, and they use snake hooks, air guns, bolt guns and hammers to really, like, take out these giant snakes.
CHANG: Bolt guns - wow.
BARBER: Yeah.
CHANG: OK. So were they successful? Like, did they fix the Python problem?
BARBER: Yeah. Sadly, Ailsa, no. They're still tabulating the results. But, like, just to give you, like, a sense, last year, they got rid of 209 pythons...
CHANG: Oh.
BARBER: ...Which is a lot less than, like, the tens of thousands estimated to live there.
CHANG: Well, from there, we're going to go to the moon...
BARBER: Yes.
CHANG: ...As we do, you know.
BARBER: Yes.
CHANG: I hear you have some news from the Indian lunar rover.
BARBER: Yeah. So this is the Pragyan rover from India's Chandrayaan-3 mission that landed on the moon almost a year ago. And Pragyan has sent back data with more evidence for this huge magma ocean hypothesis.
CHANG: Oh, that's so great 'cause I've been totally wondering about the huge magma ocean hypothesis.
KWONG: (Laughter).
BARBER: Right?
CHANG: What the heck is that (laughter)?
KWONG: Well, you should, 'cause the moon controls the tides, you know?
BARBER: Yeah.
KWONG: This is relevant. This is a hypothesis for how our moon formed. The idea is that - picture this, Ailsa - around 4.5 billion years ago, something the size of Mars smashed into proto-Earth.
CHANG: Oh.
BARBER: That's, like, when our planet was still forming.
CHANG: Ooh.
KWONG: Yeah, like - (imitating explosion) - the debris created by this impact flew into space...
BARBER: (Imitating whooshing).
KWONG: ...And eventually became the Earth's moon.
BARBER: Ding.
KWONG: And at the time, the material was really hot and molten.
CHANG: Ooh.
BARBER: Yeah. So imagine, like, seas of lava, like, covering the moon's surface as it's forming. And if this actually happened, there would be evidence of that in the rock and dust on the moon - like, traces of certain minerals that the magma ocean left behind, right? So scientists have actually seen this evidence in dust and rocks brought back by the Apollo missions in the '70s.
CHANG: Wait, wait. So there was already evidence out there for the huge magma ocean hypothesis? So wait, how does this rover fit into that?
KWONG: All right, this little rover, Pragyan, used X-rays to analyze lunar soil and found the same trace evidence of the magma ocean, which was a big deal because the Apollo missions back in the '70s really only went to the equatorial part of the moon.
BARBER: Yeah, and this rover went near the moon's south pole and still found the same evidence on a totally different part of the moon. And the researchers detailed all of this in the journal Nature this week. This area of the moon has been studied from space, like, using orbiters. But this was the first time a spacecraft had landed there and, like, done on-ground analysis. So I talked to the lead author of the study, Santosh Vadawale. He said he's already looking forward to future missions that will bring some moon soil back to Earth for further study.
CHANG: I mean, I'm with him. I love moon dirt. I want more of it.
That is Emily Kwong and Regina Barber from NPR's science podcast, Short Wave, where you can learn about new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thank you to both of you.
BARBER: Thank you.
KWONG: Thanks, Ailsa. It's always great.
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