Dog Phonics. Italy Unzips. Words Optional.

What do a brain solving puzzles without language, a dog picking out consonants the same way you do, a mountain range slowly coming apart from below and a moon that may already be sorting samples of its own potential life all have in common? In every case, what matters most is what's happening out of sight.

In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about hidden processes and unexpected depths. MIT neuroscientists worked with two stroke patients who had lost the ability to speak or understand language and found they could solve complex logic puzzles just as well as people whose language abilities were still intact. Words may help us explain how we solved something, but they aren't needed to actually solve it. In Hungary, researchers played streams of made-up syllables to 20 dogs and 20 people and found both species responded more strongly to consonant patterns than vowel patterns, the same bias humans rely on to distinguish words. Beneath the Apennines in Italy, the lower crust is peeling away from the rock above it and sinking into the mantle. A study argues that this slow unzipping now drives much of the region's earthquake activity, and the team predicts the two plates may eventually weld back together. And on Saturn's moon Enceladus, scientists know there's a liquid ocean buried beneath miles of ice. A lab in Munich recreated what the ocean floor there might look like and then introduced microbes collected from the deep ocean floor off the coast of Japan to see what would happen. The result? The microbes thrived where life shouldn't be possible.

A brain that solves hard problems without using language, a dog that listens like a linguist, a mountain range unzipping from the inside and a moon that may be packaging traces of its own life for collection, all in under six minutes.

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