Learn about why children write letters backward; how dogs know when you’re lying to them; and mountains on neutron stars. Children write letters backward because they haven't unlearned the rules of reality by Steffie Drucker Sigman, M. (2017, August 8). The fascinating reason that children write letters backwards. Ideas.ted.com. https://ideas.ted.com/the-fascinating-reason-that-children-write-letters-backwards/ Vox. (2020). Why kids write letters backward [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1iYSsFqVG4 Why Do Young Children Write Letters Backward? (2016). Wonderopolis.org. https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/Why-Do-Young-Children-Write-Letters-Backward Dogs know when you are lying to them by Cameron Duke Riddle, T. (2012, July 24). Liars: It Takes One to Know One. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/liars-it-takes-one-to-know-one/ Lonardo, L., Völter, C. J., Lamm, C., & Huber, L. (2021). Dogs follow human misleading suggestions more often when the informant has a false belief. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288(1955), 20210906. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0906 Yirka, B. (2021, July 27). Dogs can tell when people are lying to them, study finds. Phys.org; Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-07-dogs-people-lying.html The tallest mountains on neutron stars may be less than a millimeter high by Briana Brownell A bug’s life: millimetre-tall mountains on neutron stars. (2021). The Royal Astronomical Society. https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/bugs-life-millimetre-tall-mountains-neutron-stars https://www.facebook.com/spacecom. (2009, May 18). Neutron Star Crust Is Stronger than Steel. Space.com; Space. https://www.space.com/6682-neutron-star-crust-stronger-steel.html Baker, H. (2021, July 21). Neutron star “mountains” may be blocking our view of mysterious gravitational waves. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/millimeter-tall-neutron-star-mountains.html Gittins, F., Andersson, N., & Jones, D. I. (2020). Modelling neutron star mountains. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 500(4), 5570–5582. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa3635 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about why children write letters backward; how dogs know when you’re lying to them; and mountains on neutron stars.
Children write letters backward because they haven't unlearned the rules of reality by Steffie Drucker
Dogs know when you are lying to them by Cameron Duke
The tallest mountains on neutron stars may be less than a millimeter high by Briana Brownell
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/backward-letters-dogs-detect-lies-neutron-star-mountains
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why children write letters backward; how dogs know when you’re lying to them; and why the tallest mountains on neutron stars may be less than a millimeter high.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
When kids first learn to write, sometimes their letters come out backwards. That can be troubling for their parents, who might worry it’s a warning sign for a learning disorder. But in fact, their brains are just working the way they evolved to. Learning to write may mean unlearning a basic fact about reality.
Trying to write backward as an adult is really difficult. Yet, it’s super common for kids under six to write letters, or even whole words, backwards. So common, in fact, that there’s a name for it: mirror writing. We don’t teach kids to do this, so how do they just do it on their own?
The leading theory has to do with how our brains are wired to store images. That comes down to a visual process called “mirror generalization.” It means our brains put more emphasis on remembering an object’s shape than which way it’s facing. Like, imagine a teapot. Maybe you pictured it with the spout pointing left, or maybe you pictured it pointing right. You could have even pictured a top-down view. However you imagined it, you’d know it’s a teapot. Its orientation doesn’t really matter.
But now, think about the Statue of Liberty. You probably know what color she is, what she’s wearing, and roughly how big she is. But which hand is she using to hold the torch? If you can’t remember, that’s mirror generalization in action: your brain prioritizes the 360-degree view over its memory of which side is which. (It’s her right hand, by the way.)
This way of perceiving the world helped our ancestors survive: I mean, no matter which way your eyes view a tiger, your brain knows it’s a tiger — and more importantly, it knows that it’s time to run! And this process works extremely well. There is almost nothing in the natural world that needs to stay in one orientation to be identified.
Except for written language. Written language came much later in our evolutionary history, and our brains haven’t had time to catch up. For writing, the letter’s orientation matters. Flip a lowercase “p” and it becomes a “q”; flip it vertically and it becomes a “b”; flip it again and it’s a “d” — and all four of those letters make very different sounds. When we teach kids to write, we’re training their brains to go against the mirror generalization process.
The key to mastering that pesky letter “p” is practice, practice, practice.
Dogs seem to have complete trust in humans, or at least in their owners. But new research suggests that dogs aren’t always as gullible as they appear. As in: they can tell when they are being lied to.
The ability to detect a lie relies on something called theory of mind: basically, being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they’re thinking. A classic study of theory of mind in children involved chocolate. A child would watch as one person hid chocolate in a cupboard, then that person left the room. Next, the chocolate was moved to another cupboard and the child had to say where the original person would think the chocolate was when they came back. Only children aged four or older correctly said that he’d think it was in the original cupboard — younger children assumed the absent person had the same information they did. Similar experiments have been done with several primate species, with mixed results.
So it’s only natural that scientists would want to try the same thing on dogs. Researchers at the University of Vienna recruited 260 dogs for an experiment that went like this: First, a human placed a treat in one of two opaque buckets as the dog watched. A second human would then enter the room and switch the treat from one bucket to the other, with the dog still watching. The first person would then point to the empty treat bucket, giving false information.
In half of the trials, the person giving bad information was out of the room when the treat was switched. In these trials, the dog knew that person hadn’t seen the switch. In the other half of the trials, the person was in the room as the switch happened.
The scientists thought that if the dogs had theory of mind, they would be less likely to choose the empty bucket indicated by the absent person than by the person who saw the switch. They’d know they had more information than the absent person, so they’d choose the correct bucket in that scenario. But that’s not what happened.
Instead, the dogs would follow the bad advice of the human as long as the dog knew that they didn’t know any better. But when the person who saw the switch indicated the empty bucket, the dogs refused. It was as if they were happy to go along with a mistake made in good will, but not if they were actively being deceived.
In the end, dogs might be loveable and gullible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t able to catch you in a lie.
If you’re an adventure seeker you might dream of scaling the tallest mountain on Earth. But what if you scaled a mountain on… a Neutron star?
You’d be in for a very different sort of adventure.
Neutron stars are one of the most extreme objects in the universe. They have as much mass as our sun. But while our sun is over 100 times the diameter of Earth, neutron stars pack all that mass into a sphere roughly the size of San Francisco. If you stood on a neutron star, you’d be immediately pulled apart from the extreme gravity.
But as it turns out, neutron stars do have a few familiar qualities. They have a similar structure to our planet: there’s a solid crust, just like on Earth. That crust surrounds a dense neutron soup that moves like a liquid. Not only that, but it’s geologically active too. Sometimes there are even starquakes on neutron stars.
But that’s where the similarities stop. The crust of a neutron star is about 10 billion times stronger than steel, and much thinner than Earth’s crust.
That crust does form mountains, thanks to gravity crushing and stretching it into shape. But these are no ordinary mountains.
Because we’re talking about such a massive object, it might be tempting to think that any mountains on it could be pretty extreme too, right? Well, it’s exactly the opposite. Since all that gravity squishes a neutron star into an almost-perfect sphere, mountains there would be teeny-tiny.
How tiny? A research team from the UK has recently given an estimate using complex computer simulations…. And it’s even tinier than scientists thought.
Imagine you were as tall as an ant. Scientists used to think that a neutron star mountain would be about a hundred times your height: a few centimeters high. Not exactly Everest, but still a pretty decent sized hill to an ant.
But this new research suggests that the tallest mountain on a neutron star would be less than a millimeter high. If you were an ant-sized observer, it wouldn’t even reach your knee. Definitely a beginner summit — if you can survive the crushing gravity.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Steffie Drucker, Cameron Duke, and Briana Brownell.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!