Scientists can hear Saturn roar in space — and you can listen, too
Plus: A possible connection between diet and cancer
Here’s a theory for your consideration: There are two types of Star Wars fans. One is the Star Wars fan who loves the din of pew-pew-pews, whirring TIE fighters, exploding ships, and various other cacophonous sounds made in a heated space battle. The other type is the Star Wars fan who hates it every time they hear so much as a laser ring out through space. Which one are you?
It is true that in the void of the cosmos, no one can hear you scream — but NASA can eavesdrop on you, and then play the sounds back here on Earth. How they do this is through a clever trick of physics, and it is also the focus of our lead story today.
I’m Claire Cameron, the managing editor at Inverse, filling in for Nick Lucchesi. We have a new story for you today about intergalactic soundscapes, the keto diet, and much more.
A technical note before we get started — Thank you to everybody who has written about their trouble with the streak feature (our counter that tracks consecutive opens). We are working on a solution!
This is an adapted version of the Inverse Daily newsletter for Monday, October 25, 2021. Subscribe for free and earn rewards for reading every day in your inbox. ✉️
Look up!
Venus in October 2021: How to see the most dazzling planet — Venus will shine extra bright at its greatest elongation in the night sky for the rest of October. But the best night to see Venus is right before Halloween weekend.
Venus will be at its greatest eastern elongation on October 29, shinning low on the horizon and twinkling like a bright star in the night sky.
Due to its orbit around the Sun, Venus only reaches this position once or twice, sometimes zero times, during a year. Read on as we break down how to catch this rare celestial opportunity.
Go deeper: Look: New NASA image shows what Jupiter looks like from the Moon
Get your shoes on.
Does sprint training increase strength? What weight lifters need to know — Sprinting does more than just build up speed. It can be viewed as a type of strength training.
Putting a barbell on our back, swinging a kettlebell, and hanging from a bar form the traditional roads to muscle growth. But might a different path — going as fast as we can — work just as well? Can running short, all-out sprints regularly help build up our strength and our size?
Speed training, or sprint training for this column’s purpose, is loosely defined as practicing all-out effort runs and working on getting faster. Training varies, but generally comprises runs done all-out, or at about 85 to 90 percent of your best effort, with plenty of rest between sets. Such work has been shown to build muscles, improve cardiovascular health and increase muscular capacity and short-term muscular endurance.
And while it’s good to be able to run very fast — we should be able to, just for our own sake — sprinting does more than just build up speed. It can be viewed as a type of strength training.
Go deeper: Exercises for better posture: 2 hacks lifters should try now
Saturn is definitely heavy metal.
Listen: Nine incredible sounds from space — From Saturn’s roar to solar energy plunking on Earth's atmosphere, the universe is full of odd noises — the strangest part being that they’re not actually there.
If you were floating through the vastness of space right now, you wouldn’t be able to hear anything. That’s because the sounds we hear on Earth are simply the product of vibrating air molecules. Since space has no air, there’s no noise.
But some spacecraft have the ability to capture electromagnetic waves. Researchers back on Earth can convert these frequencies into sound waves to help them learn more about the Solar System’s movements.
And you can listen to these sounds, too.
Go deeper: What a bright flash in the sky reveals about humanity’s space future
Not difficult to eat at all.
Keto diet: Study finds two nutrients may influence cancer growth — In a new study on mice, scientists evaluated what happened to pancreatic cancer tumors when a mouse is fed the keto diet or a caloric-restricted diet.
Past research suggests both the ketogenic diet and calorie restriction appear to stunt tumor growth by lowering blood glucose and insulin levels since both diets are very low in sugar. But new research suggests sugar isn’t the only nutrient that may predict tumor growth.
“When we compared tumor growth in a mouse model, we got different effects with different diets even though they were both low in glucose, which meant another factor must be at play,” lead author Matthew Vander Heiden, Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, tells Inverse.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Vander Heiden and his team found that pancreatic tumor growth slowed in mice following a caloric-restricted diet, but did not in mice following a keto diet. They attributed this to an imbalance in saturated and unsaturated fats caused by a low-fat, low-sugar diet.
Go deeper: Keto diet: 5 essential reasons why you need to avoid it
Happy birthday, Pablo.
- About the newsletter: Do you think it can be improved? Have a story idea? Want to share a story about the time you met an astronaut? Send those thoughts and more to newsletter@inverse.com.
- On this day: Eighty-one years ago, Benjamin Oliver Davis Sr. became the first African American General in the United States Army.
- Song of the Day: “Pablo Picasso,” by the Modern Lovers.
