Why Rainy Days Make You Sleepy, A Fix for AI’s Energy Appetite, and Solving Geology’s Mystery of the “Great Unconformity”

Learn about why rainy days make you sleepy; why the “Great Unconformity” is one of the biggest mysteries in geology; and the problematic amount of energy it takes to power AI — along with a potential solution. Plus: how do you pronounce "Colorado," anyway?

Why do rainy days make you sleepy? by Kelsey Donk

• Katherine Ellen Foley. (2016, May 29). Why does rain seem to make you sleepy? Quartz; Quartz. https://qz.com/672755/why-does-rain-seem-to-make-you-sleepy/
• Kaye, K. (2009, July 11). Feel sleepy? Here’s why stormy weather makes you want to snooze. Sun-Sentinel.com. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2009-07-11-0907100282-story.html
• Verlo Corporate. (2018, May 2). Verlo Mattress. https://verlo.com/blog/why-does-rain-make-me-sleepy/
• Castro, J. (2013, July 29). What Is Pink Noise? Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/38464-what-is-pink-noise.html

The "Great Unconformity" is one of the biggest mysteries in geology by Grant Currin

• Researchers dig into case of geologic amnesia. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/uoca-rdi042220.php
• The Great Unconformity. (2020). The UCSB Current. https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2020/019892/great-unconformity
• Flowers, R. M., Macdonald, F. A., Siddoway, C. S., & Havranek, R. (2020). Diachronous development of Great Unconformities before Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(19), 10172–10180. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1913131117

AI requires an enormous amount of energy, but we might have a fix by Grant Currin

• Artificial intelligence is energy-hungry -- new hardware could curb its appetite. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-05/pu-aii050520.php
• Zhang, H.-T., Park, T. J., Zaluzhnyy, I. A., Wang, Q., Wadekar, S. N., Manna, S., Andrawis, R., Sprau, P. O., Sun, Y., Zhang, Z., Huang, C., Zhou, H., Zhang, Z., Narayanan, B., Srinivasan, G., Hua, N., Nazaretski, E., Huang, X., Yan, H., … Ramanathan, S. (2020). Perovskite neural trees. Nature Communications, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16105-y
• Knight, W. (2020, January 21). AI Can Do Great Things—if It Doesn’t Burn the Planet. Wired; WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-great-things-burn-planet/

Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-rainy-days-make-you-sleepy-a-fix-for-ais-energy-appetite-and-solving-geologys-mystery-of-the-great-unconformity

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.