Fannie Farmer Created the Modern Cooking Recipe, the Shepard Scale Audio Illusion, and How Scientists Test the COVID-19 Vaccine
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2020
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn how researchers test drugs for deadly diseases like COVID-19 (without exposing participants); how Fannie Farmer transformed cooking from folk art into science; and how the Shepard scale audio illusion makes it sound like a tone is rising forever.
Safety in drug trials by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Habib)
- Q/A: How clinical trials test vaccines - News Story | VCU Health. (2020). Vcuhealth.org. https://www.vcuhealth.org/news-center/news-story?news=1654
- Office of the Commissioner. (2019). Step 3: Clinical Research. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3-clinical-research
- Researchers Debate Infecting People on Purpose to Test Coronavirus Vaccines. (2020, July 1). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/health/coronavirus-vaccine-trials.html
- Cohen, J. (2020, March 31). Speed coronavirus vaccine testing by deliberately infecting volunteers? Not so fast, some scientists warn. Science | AAAS. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/speed-coronavirus-vaccine-testing-deliberately-infecting-volunteers-not-so-fast-some
- Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. (2020, June 10). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
How Fannie Farmer transformed cooking from folk art into science by Cameron Duke
- Lewis, J. J. (2017). About Fannie Farmer, Cookbook Author and Domestic Scientist. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/fannie-farmer-biography-3528712
- Davis, S. (1984, November 25). Through the Years With The Cookbook of the Ages. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1984/11/25/through-the-years-with-the-cookbook-of-the-ages/b3fc92c1-88f6-4fc1-be36-7a1b14450a58/
- History.com Editors. (2009, November 24). Fannie Farmer opens cooking school. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fannie-farmer-opens-cooking-school
- Fannie Farmer Biography. (2020). Notablebiographies.com. https://www.notablebiographies.com/Du-Fi/Farmer-Fannie.html
- Engel, K. (2015, April 19). Fannie Farmer, the mother of level measurements | Amazing Women In History. https://amazingwomeninhistory.com/fannie-farmer/
- Fannie Merritt Farmer | American editor | Britannica. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fannie-Merritt-Farmer
- Moskin, J. (2018, June 13). Overlooked No More: Fannie Farmer, Modern Cookery’s Pioneer. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/obituaries/fannie-farmer-overlooked.html
The Shepard scale is an audio illusion that sounds like a tone is rising forever by Ashley Hamer
- Roger N. Shepard | American psychologist and cognitive scientist | Britannica. (2020). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-N-Shepard
- Shepard, R. N. (1964). Circularity in Judgments of Relative Pitch. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 36(12), 2346–2353. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1919362
- What is the Shepard’s Tone? – Do you hear what I hear? (2016, July 6). Vassar.edu. https://pages.vassar.edu/seeingvoices/2016/07/06/what-is-the-shepards-tone/
- BBC One - Bang Goes the Theory, Series 4, Episode 6, The Shepard Tone audio illusion. (2011, April 17). BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gfdg1
- Vox. (2017). The sound illusion that makes Dunkirk so intense [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWTQcZbLgY
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes. |
| 0:03.4 | With Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com, |
| 0:05.8 | I'm Cody Gough. |
| 0:06.7 | And I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:08.0 | Today, we'll answer a listener question about how researchers test drugs for |
| 0:11.7 | deadly diseases like COVID-19 without exposing people to the disease. |
| 0:17.0 | You'll also learn about why you can thank Fannie Farmer for basically every recipe you've ever cooked, and an audio illusion that sounds like a tone is rising forever. |
| 0:27.0 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:29.0 | We got a listener question from Habib, who writes, |
| 0:32.0 | I recently heard about a successful field trial on using |
| 0:35.0 | pre-exposure prophylaxis, or prep, for HIV prevention. |
| 0:39.7 | My question is, how do they do such drug trials without intentionally exposing people to HIV? |
| 0:45.1 | Well considering the fact that we're currently racing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine |
| 0:50.3 | this is a very well timed question, Habib. |
| 0:54.0 | So in a non-medical study, like say one where you're trying to determine the best rain repellent for a car windshield, |
| 1:01.0 | you'd treat the windshield with different products, then expose it to water and see which one works best. |
| 1:07.0 | But if you're developing a drug to protect humans from a potentially deadly |
| 1:10.9 | incurable disease, you can't expose them to that disease. It's just not ethical. |
| 1:16.4 | That's not to say it hasn't been done with other curable diseases. |
| 1:20.3 | Vaccines for things like cholera, typhoid, and even influenza have been tested on people who were deliberately exposed to the disease. |
| 1:28.0 | Those are what you call human challenge trials. |
| 1:31.0 | But there's no cure for HIV AIDS. You just can't do it. So instead |
... |
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