Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about why blinking communicates a lot more than you probably thought, why

astronomers think Uranus is tipped over, and the story of a female murderer

who may have inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula.

But to inspire some curiosity.

A recent study found that blinking is important when it comes to nonverbal communication.

And when we're talking to someone, we subtly and subconsciously respond to the length of their blinks.

Now we've known for a while that humans blink the most during face-to-face conversation.

The previous research has found that blinking is not completely random. You blink subconsciously, sure, but you tend to do it toward the end of a conversation partner's turn in a chat.

Researchers think it's part of lots of gestures, like nodding that you use to signal that you understand what someone is telling you.

Blinking is like nonverbal shorthand for got it.

But researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics had an idea.

Maybe not all blinks are created equal.

As in maybe short blinks and long blinks signal something different.

So to test this theory, they had 35 people have a conversation with a digital avatar

that was projected on a screen. The female figure would ask open-ended questions like how is her weekend and then she would signal her listening by nodding and by blinking.

Now both of the avatars blinks lasted for less than a second, but the short blink was 2008 milliseconds and the

long blink was 607 milliseconds.

Of course, there's a very slight difference, which participants said they didn't notice, but the length of the blinks actually had a measurable effect on the conversations.

Short blinks led to longer, more detailed answers, and long blanks led to longer, more detailed answers and long blanks prompted subjects to

...