How Words Shape Your Body
3/5/202650 min
Does your native language physically sculpt your face? And could a swarm of bees be trained to run computer code?
Two of your questions answer in this Field Notes with Professor Hannah Fry and YouTube's Michael Stevens, plus Michael’s object of the week is a visualization of the Holocene Calendar. By simply adding ten thousand years to our current year, it transforms our perception of history from a brief modern blip into an unbroken, monumental narrative of human progress.
Check out the calendar here
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMichael Stevens· Host0:01
Welcome to The Rest is Science. I am Michael Stevens, and this is Field Notes. It is an exploration expedition diary where Hannah and I share cool thoughts, objects, and discoveries with each other and from you.
Hannah Fry· Host0:13
Every week, one of us is gonna bring in something to show the other, bit like a... It's a bit like The Rest of Science's version of show and tell.
Michael Stevens· Host0:19
Yeah, and together we're building up a strange and, and spectacular library of our favorite items from the world of science.
Hannah Fry· Host0:25
We also, by the way, would like to add in your questions, your theories, your thought experiments, anything you wanna send us in a mailbag. Uh, so send them in to us and, um, look, we'll dust off a shelf, a, a metaphorical shelf.
Michael Stevens· Host0:38
So later on, I am going to be showing off, um, a book and also a scarf that cannot be cut in half.
Hannah Fry· Host0:45
Oh.
Michael Stevens· Host0:46
But first, we're gonna go to your questions.
Hannah Fry· Host0:48
I mean, frankly, what are you doing cutting scarves in half anyway? Respect your wardrobe, Michael. Um, okay. Uh, [laughs] our first discovery, though, doesn't come from Michael. It's, uh, it, it comes from, it comes from you guys.
Michael Stevens· Host1:02
Here's, here's one from Brian. Okay, bees, like honeybees, can be trained to recognize simple shapes, colors, odors, and landmarks and follow instructions and perform calculations based on a given input. So can we train bees to simulate a universal Turing machine? I've also formatted this question as a limerick. [laughs] Can you see why I wanted to read this one? [laughs] I'm curious about bits in bees. I implore you to answer me, please.