Learn about why younger kids don’t understand sarcasm; a 24,000 year old living worm; and Betelgeuse’s “Great Dimming.” Kids don't get sarcasm until around age 7 because of the kind of thinking it requires by Kelsey Donk Pexman, P. (2021, June 8). Why it’s difficult for children to understand sarcasm. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/why-its-difficult-for-children-to-understand-sarcasm-160915 Do young children understand irony? (2007, January 25). Research Digest. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2007/01/25/do-young-children-understand-irony/ An Acquired Taste: Children’s Perceptions of Humor and Teasing in Verbal Irony. (2021). Discourse Processes. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326950dp4003_5 Pexman, P. M., & Glenwright, M. (2007). How do typically developing children grasp the meaning of verbal irony? Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20(2), 178–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2006.06.001 A 24,000 year old worm was discovered in Siberia, alive and kicking by Cameron Duke Grover, N. (2021, June 7). 24,000-year-old organisms found frozen in Siberia can still reproduce. Theguardian.com; The Guardian. https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/07/24000-year-old-organisms-found-frozen-in-siberia-can-still-reproduce Shmakova, L., Malavin, S., Iakovenko, N., Vishnivetskaya, T., Shain, D., Plewka, M., & Rivkina, E. (2021). A living bdelloid rotifer from 24,000-year-old Arctic permafrost. Current Biology, 31(11), R712–R713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.04.077 Remember when Betelgeuse was acting weird? Turns out it was just a dust cloud by Steffie Drucker Original Betelgeuse episode: https://www.curiositydaily.com/live-longer-by-appreciating-art-betelgeuse-might-go-supernova-and-birds-freaky-fast-vision/ Mystery solved: Dust cloud led to Betelgeuse’s “Great Dimming.” (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-06/hcfa-msd061221.php Plait, P. (2021, June 16). We may finally know why Betelgeuse dimmed so much. Bonus: No supernova. Yet. SYFY WIRE; SYFY WIRE. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/we-may-finally-know-why-betelgeuse-dimmed-so-much-bonus-no-supernova-yet Betelgeuse Merely Burped, Astronomers Conclude. (2021). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/science/betelgeuse-montarges-star-supernova.html Castelvecchi, D. (2021). Why the supergiant star Betelgeuse went mysteriously dim last year. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01633-4 Montargès, M., et. al. (2021). A dusty veil shading Betelgeuse during its Great Dimming. Nature, 594(7863), 365–368. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03546-8 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 younger kids don’t understand sarcasm; a 24,000 year old living worm; and Betelgeuse’s “Great Dimming.”
Kids don't get sarcasm until around age 7 because of the kind of thinking it requires by Kelsey Donk
A 24,000 year old worm was discovered in Siberia, alive and kicking by Cameron Duke
Remember when Betelgeuse was acting weird? Turns out it was just a dust cloud by Steffie Drucker
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/kids-v-sarcasm-24-000-year-old-worm-why-betelgeuse-dimmed
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 kids don’t understand sarcasm until they’re about 7 years old; the discovery of a 24,000 year old worm that’s STILL ALIVE; and the explanation for why the star Betelgeuse was acting weird back in 2020.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Make a sarcastic joke to a small child and you’ll figure out pretty quickly that they just don’t… get it. And sure, you might expect kids not to understand your meme references or political jokes, but sarcasm? That seems kinda basic. Well, according to some psychological studies, sarcasm actually takes some advanced thinking, so kids don't get sarcasm until around age 7.
To understand why, we have to do that thing where you explain what makes jokes funny — rendering them absolutely unfunny in the process.
So here’s the deal. Imagine you’ve just finished your entire plate at a restaurant, and when the server asks how the food was, you reply “It was terrible.” It’s a joke that relies on the gap between what you’ve said and what you actually mean. You’ve said the food was terrible, but you mean the server to understand that it was delicious — otherwise, you wouldn’t have eaten it all.
Sarcasm is a challenging type of humor because it plays on conflict between ideas. There’s both a positive and a negative meaning to think about. And sarcastic jokes are both critical and funny.
Sometimes that’s a challenging concept for adults — especially online — but it’s especially hard for small children. Kids’ brains aren’t able to hold two contradictory ideas or emotions until around the age of 7 to 10. So that’s when they might start to use sarcasm or genuinely laugh at it.
Studies have shown that kids can detect sarcasm at the age of 5 or 6, but the ability to appreciate it comes later. In the in-between, when they know a joke is happening but they can’t understand it, one study showed that kids tend to identify with the target of sarcasm. They don’t imagine themselves making the joke, and they don’t see themselves on the side of the speaker. Instead, they identify with the person who’s being teased, so they find the joke to be less funny.
Another reason studies have shown kids don’t get sarcasm: they can’t use relationship information to understand jokes. So they don’t know that a mean thing is funny if two very close friends are the ones talking and laughing. They only hear the mean thing and think it’s mean!
The good news: social experience can help children understand sarcasm better. So the more you explain sarcasm to a child, the sooner they’ll understand it.
Every human eventually has to deal with the fact that they won’t stay young forever. Aging a defining part of our human experience. But not every animal is so unlucky. Scientists recently discovered a worm that has lived for 24,000 years and hasn’t aged a day.
This worm is a member of a group of species that already have a laundry list of amazing achievements. They are resistant to radiation damage, drying, freezing, a lack of oxygen — you name it. Heck, if they looked like tiny teddy bears, they might even be a household name. But sadly they do not. Instead, picture a microscopic slug, and you basically get the idea.
These humble soil worms are known as bdelloid rotifers [DELL-oyd ROW-tih-fers]. Scientists have long considered them to be a quote-unquote “evolutionary scandal” because they’ve existed and evolved for millions of years under our feet, even though they only reproduce asexually. Their real superpower, though, is cryptobiosis. This means “hidden life,” and it’s the term scientists use to describe the ability some animals have to completely stop their metabolisms when the going gets tough. If you’re familiar with tardigrades, you’re familiar with cryptobiosis.
Until recently, it wasn’t clear how long these worms could stay that way. When researchers thawed a sample of permafrost in a soil biology lab in Russia, they found little bdelloid rotifers milling around in the muck. These types of worms are common in soils all over the world, so the fact they were there wasn’t a surprise. But the fact that they had been frozen solid for 24,000 years was.
These worms froze way back when wooly mammoths still existed and didn’t thaw out until 2021. And yet, these newly unfrozen organisms pretty much went about their business as if they were barely inconvenienced. These worms were even able to reproduce.
Scientists study cryptobiotic creatures like these to better understand how tissues can be preserved long-term. Unlocking those secrets might help scientists better understand how to preserve organs for transplants. Right now, the idea of cryonically freezing a person and waking them up later is pure science fiction. But the fact that evolution figured it out long ago suggests it might not be impossible after all.
Remember last year when the star called Betelgeuse was acting weird? Well, now we know why — and the short answer is that it burped.
We brought you that story waaaay back in January 2020. We’ve all lived an entire lifetime since then, so let’s have a quick refresher: Betelgeuse is one of the brightest objects that can be seen from Earth with the naked eye. You can spot it by looking for Orion the hunter...then finding his left armpit. That’s Betelgeuse. In late 2019, the star mysteriously dimmed to a tenth of its usual brightness, and scientists weren’t sure why.
One thing they did know was that Betelgeuse would eventually explode in a supernova. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, which is the final stage in a star’s life before it goes supernova, so scientists thought the dimming might signal that its days were numbered.
But now we know it was a false alarm. Last spring, while we were all, uh, distracted by things here on Earth, Betelgeuse brightened back up as quickly as it dimmed. Supernova? Psych!
Astronomers aren’t necessarily surprised — they’d floated several theories for the star’s sudden fade, including a temperature drop or a cloud of dust. We now know it was a little of both, thanks to some incredibly sharp images taken with the SPHERE and GRAVITY cameras on the 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope in Chile.
Researchers say Betelgeuse belched out a cloud of gas some time before it started fading. That gas hung around the star and would have stayed there if not for a patch of the star’s surface cooling off. At that point, the gas condensed into solid dust — literally, stardust. That dust cloud then blocked the star’s light, which led to the dimming.
The cloud was big, too. Betelgeuse is 887 times as large as our sun, and scientists think the cloud had to have been from 600 million to a billion kilometers wide. That’s between 370 and 622 million miles, or nearly the distance from the Sun to Saturn! [Distance from Sun to Saturn is ~1.4 billion km per NASA / Steffie note]
But eventually, Betelgeuse heated back up, which destroyed the dust molecules and brought the star back to full brightness.
So that mystery is solved, but the question of when Betelgeuse will explode is still anyone’s guess — we just know it’ll be within the next 100,000 years. So scientists had better keep their eyes on the skies!
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Kelsey Donk, Cameron Duke, and Steffie Drucker.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: DON’T Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes… NOT!
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!