Why Rainy Days Make You Sleepy, A Fix for AI’s Energy Appetite, and Solving Geology’s Mystery of the “Great Unconformity”
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2020
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from |
| 0:05.2 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about |
| 0:09.7 | why rainy days make you sleepy, why the great unconformity is one of the biggest |
| 0:14.4 | mysteries in geology, and the enormous amount of energy that it takes to power |
| 0:19.2 | AI, along with a potential solution. |
| 0:21.6 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:24.0 | All right, so let's say you got a good night of sleep |
| 0:26.0 | and you haven't done anything too taxing, |
| 0:29.0 | but it's raining outside. |
| 0:31.0 | And so all you really want to do is go back to bed. |
| 0:34.1 | Look, we've all been there, but why does this happen? Why do rainy days make you sleepy? |
| 0:40.1 | Well, the truth is that we don't know for sure but it probably has something to do with the light, sound, and oxygen levels in the air. |
| 0:50.0 | So first of all, just look outside on a rainy day. |
| 0:53.0 | The clouds gather and everything looks dark and hazy. |
| 0:56.4 | On clear days, the sunlight tells you that it's daytime. |
| 0:59.8 | And that triggers your brain to stop making the sleep-producing hormone melatonin so you're more |
| 1:04.8 | alert. But on cloudy and rainy days the sun doesn't really come out in the morning. |
| 1:09.8 | With less sun exposure to tell your brain to stop producing melatonin, |
| 1:14.0 | the body might not know it's time to wake up. |
| 1:17.0 | And then there's the sound of falling rain, which is the best. |
| 1:21.0 | It's not a mystery why so many people play rain sounds to help them sleep. |
| 1:25.3 | The sound of rain is comforting. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Warner Bros. Discovery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Warner Bros. Discovery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.