Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about the weird link between music listening trends and epidemiology

and how losing jungles contributes to climate change

with archaeologist Patrick Roberts.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

A good song can be infectious, but can it spread like a disease?

Recently a group of mathematicians set out to see whether songs travel through a population the way an epidemic might.

And it turns out that earworms spread a lot like disease? These researchers were

all mathematicians at McMaster University and they obtained a huge data

set of music downloaded to old Nokia phones in the UK between the years of 2007 and 2014.

I know that sounds like pretty narrow criteria, but just remember that the first

smartphone didn't come out until 2007, and the Nokia was the best-selling

mobile device of its day.

So yeah, this data set is huge.

It contains information on more than 1.4 billion song

downloads, including how many times particular songs were downloaded and when.

Then the mathematicians acted like epidemiologists. They applied a mathematical

model called SIR to each song in the database. You might not have heard of the SIR model, but you've probably seen its results.

It's one of many models used by epidemiologists to describe those disease outbreak curves we so desperately wanted to flatten.

The model is a differential equation that uses the numbers of infected people in a

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