What can I say? Even a global pandemic couldn’t stop the GBH faithful from being curious about things big and small in the world around them in 2021. And I’m grateful to each and every person who reached out to share their questions with me this year via email, Twitter and our online form.
We answered as many questions as we could on the radio and online, and this year we added a new dimension: a video series. This enabled us to take on new kinds of questions and bring our stories to new places, including our YouTube channel and local TV screens. We plan to keep at it in 2022, so keep those questions coming!
In the meantime, here are just a few of the many stories we took on this year that continue to resonate with me as 2021 draws to an end.
Computers gave us the word multitasking, but can we actually do it?
One of the things I love about this job: when something in the news rings that old Curiosity Desk tuning fork, and I get to dig into some ancillary detail of a story that’s resonating with the public. That happened early in the year, when Vice President Kamala Harris made an offhanded comment about the word “multitasking” in an NPR interview.
The word multitasking comes from the world of computing. Though many computer terms were already in our common lexicon before being adopted or adapted to describe computer functions, the word multitasking had the opposite journey: It was invented to define something computers do, and later embraced to describe human behavior. That fact naturally leads you to the big question: Can humans actually do it?
Can we make oxygen out of thin (Martian) air? MIT's Michael Hecht has the MOXIE to try
2021 will likely be long remembered as year two of the global COVID-19 pandemic. When a story is that dominant, it’s pretty easy to forget that other events continue to happen — even historic ones. Back in the early days of NASA, before Houston was settled on as the city that would house Mission Control, Boston was a serious contender. Even all these years later, it’s easy to see why. MIT, Harvard, Boston University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute continue to churn out scientists who break new ground in the vast expanse beyond our humble planet.
In April, a small instrument aboard the Perseverance rover on the surface of the Mars, invented and operated by an MIT-based team, pulled off the extraordinary feat of converting Martian air into breathable oxygen. If humans someday step foot on Mars, this will be one of the crucial steps that got us there. And the fact that they named their instrument Moxie, in part after New England’s favorite old sweet/bitter carbonated beverage, is a delightful local nod.
Who decides if you can or can't turn right on red while driving?
I love this story because the answer — for my money — was significantly more interesting than I thought it would be when I started. I figured that I would talk with some municipal officials and they would share some pretty pedestrian (pun intended) reasons why they decide to post “no turn on red signs” at traffic signals in their towns. And while that did turn out to be the case, answers to this question also touch on geopolitics in the 1970s and the carrot-and-stick strategies the federal government uses with the states. It was a genuine surprise. Plus, there is that fantastic fact that Massachusetts was the very last state in the union to allow right turns on red, which is just so Massachusetts.
Why do all microwaves have the same 'beep'?
As I mentioned to some friends shortly after putting this story together, any time you find yourself wandering around the halls of your workplace, stealing microwaves and then arranging them like a small orchestra — all while on the clock — it is important to take a moment and be grateful for how lucky you are. But in all seriousness, I really liked this story for a few reasons. For starters, it was a question inspired by Zoom meetings, which is very 2021. I love that it came my way on social media and, for some reason, I also found the answer unexpectedly satisfying.
It’s also one of those wonderful stories that left me wanting to learn more about some aspect of it. In this case, it’s the “Barium Titanate Application Research Committee,” which was the initiative in 1950s Japan that helped launch the piezoelectric buzzer. It was, apparently, a consortium of manufacturers who aimed to foster an environment where they could both cooperate and compete. Fascinating! What else did they come up with? How long did it last? Is there something like it anywhere today? Perhaps questions for a future Curiosity Desk story...
Are the daily bugle calls heard from Hanscom AFB live or recorded?
I've never been enlisted in the military, but I nevertheless woke up to the sound of "Reveille" each Monday through Friday for decades. In my school-age years, my father would climb the stairs of our Frackville, Pennsylvania, house each morning whistling the familiar wake-up tune at the top of his ... lungs? lips? ... well, incredibly loud, to say the least. In fact, I'm not sure I ever even used an alarm clock until I went off to college. I imagine he got the idea from my grandfather — Edgar B. Herwick, the original — who was in the Army during World War II and, I suspect, brought this little morning ritual to the Herwick family.
That’s just one of the reasons I jumped at the chance to do this story when I saw the question come in from Maria Cue. I also loved the fact that, as Maria told us, hers was the kind of question that Google simply could not help answer. And I couldn't pass up a chance to offer folks a glimpse inside life at Hanscom AFB, a place many area residents surely know about, but few get the opportunity to see.
