Learn about cutting-edge Shark Week tech; how birthdays impact criminal records; and the time sharks nearly went extinct. More from Joe and Lauren Romeiro and Shark Week 2021: Start your 7-day free trial of discovery+ https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity Shark Week 2021 Full Schedule https://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-newsroom/discovery-channels-shark-week-2021-swims-off-with-jawsome-lineup-featuring-more-hours-of-shark-programming-than-ever-before/ Shark Week 2021 Visual Guide https://www.discovery.com/shark-week/your-guide-to-shark-week-2021-pictures Follow @laurenromeiro333 on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/laurenromeiro333 Follow @joeromeiro333 on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/joeromeiro333/ Learn about new Eli Roth film “Fin” https://www.discovery.com/dnews/New_Eli_Roth_Film_FIN_to_Premiere_During_Shark_Week_on_discovery Learn more about “Return to Shark Vortex” https://ew.com/tv/shark-week-2021-guide-all-32-specials/?slide=3a0bc578-6635-494f-93f0-6e214e673413#3a0bc578-6635-494f-93f0-6e214e673413 Learn more about “Ninja Shark 2: Mutants Rising” https://ew.com/tv/shark-week-2021-guide-all-32-specials/?slide=c08c41fe-90dc-46b3-8ce2-92c6a3f42d47#c08c41fe-90dc-46b3-8ce2-92c6a3f42d47 Dive deeper into all your favorite Shark Week shows with Shark Week’s Daily Bite Podcast hosted by Luke Tipple: Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shark-weeks-daily-bite/id1527053422 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dfzM1ktSB1mSKD5z4Qujm?si=R8rNBksMRS-JrgMs9JIJ5g&dl_branch=1 Learn more: https://www.discovery.com/shark-week/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-daily-bite-podcast The likelihood of having a criminal record depends on when a person was born by Kelsey Donk Best predictor of arrest rates? The “birth lottery of history.” (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/hu-bpo052121.php Neil, R., & Sampson, R. J. (2021). The Birth Lottery of History: Arrest over the Life Course of Multiple Cohorts Coming of Age, 1995–2018. American Journal of Sociology, 126(5), 1127–1178. https://doi.org/10.1086/714062 19 million years ago, sharks almost disappeared by Cameron Duke Shark evolution: a 450 million year timeline. (2018). Nhm.ac.uk. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/shark-evolution-a-450-million-year-timeline.html Evidence for a previously unknown extinction event that decimated ocean shark species. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-06/aaft-efa060121.php Ryan, J. (2021, June 7). Sharks almost disappeared 19 million years ago and scientists don’t know why. CNET; CNET. https://www.cnet.com/news/sharks-almost-disappeared-19-million-years-ago-and-scientists-dont-know-why/ Sibert, E. C., & Rubin, L. D. (2021). An early Miocene extinction in pelagic sharks. Science, 372(6546), 1105–1107. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz3549 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 cutting-edge Shark Week tech; how birthdays impact criminal records; and the time sharks nearly went extinct.
More from Joe and Lauren Romeiro and Shark Week 2021:
Dive deeper into all your favorite Shark Week shows with Shark Week’s Daily Bite Podcast hosted by Luke Tipple:
The likelihood of having a criminal record depends on when a person was born by Kelsey Donk
19 million years ago, sharks almost disappeared by Cameron Duke
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/shark-week-tech-crime-birth-year-sharks-near-extinction
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 cutting-edge technology that’s helping us study sharks and other fish, with returning Shark Week guests Joe and Lauren Romeiro. You’ll also learn how the likelihood of having a criminal record depends on when a person was born; and the mystery of why sharks nearly went extinct 19 million years ago.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Yesterday, we talked to Joe and Lauren Romeiro about the challenges they face filming sharks for Shark Week. Today, they're going to tell us about some of the cutting-edge tech that helps them get those shots. Joe Romeiro is an award-winning cinematographer who's spent more than a decade filming and interacting with sharks all over the world. Lauren Romeiro is a marine scientist and a well-respected photographer and cinematographer. And we asked them: can you tell us anything about the cool tech you use to find and film these sharks?
[CLIP 3:45]
You heard it here first: There's stuff you'll see on Shark Week 2021 that no one has ever seen before. How's that for a tagline? Again that was Joe and Lauren Romeiro, underwater cinematographers who have several shows on Shark Week 2021. "Ninja Sharks: Mutants Rising" airs Friday, July 16 at 8 PM, Return to Shark Vortex premieres Saturday, July 17 at 8 PM on Discovery and Discovery+. And starting TODAY on discovery+, you can stream another special Joe and Lauren worked on: the new Eli Roth film “Fin,” which uncovers the truth behind the death of millions of sharks. You can start your 7-day free trial of discovery+ at discovery-plus-dot-com-slash-curiosity.
How much of your life is determined by who you are, and how much is determined by your circumstances? A duo of Harvard sociologists found a way to answer that question, at least when it comes to a person’s arrest record. It turns out that, all things being equal, the likelihood of having a criminal record depends on when a person was born.
For this study, the researchers took a look at the lives of more than a thousand people growing up in Chicago between 1995 and 2018. The oldest were born in the early 1980s; the youngest were born in 1995.
The world was dramatically different for kids growing up in the 80s than it was for youth in the early 2000s. Policing changed. Drug use changed. And in the mid-1990s, crime dropped to such an extent that the time period was called the great American crime decline.
So, arrest rates changed accordingly.
That kind of change over time is a big deal. Imagine two people who grow up in similar families, with similar character traits and even similar financial backgrounds. Despite those similarities, one might have a much higher chance of being arrested in their youth than the other based on the year they were born.
According to this study, people born in the 1980s experienced just that. Compared to people born in the 1990s, people born in the 80s had a 96 percent greater chance of getting arrested. Put another way, a kid who grew up watching Fraggle Rock was nearly twice as likely to be arrested as a kid who grew up watching Blues Clues. The researchers say policing accounts for half of this difference; the rest comes down to changes in the city itself and in the rise of technology like video games and the internet.
This study is a reminder of the influence that large cultural shifts and policy trends can have on the lives of young people. The researchers call it the “birth lottery of history.” Depending on your historical lottery number, your life could take a different turn. In the discussion of crime and arrest rates, that’s an important thing to remember.
Sharks are old. Like, older than the dinosaurs old. Like, they’ve been around for 450 million years, old. These ancient hunters are often referred to as “living fossils,” but recent research has discovered that they came incredibly close to becoming ancient history at one point in time.
On Earth, extinction is a part of life, and so the history of life on Earth is full of mass extinctions. Five major mass extinctions scar the fossil record so far, effectively wiping the slate of biodiversity clean and forcing life to start over from the survivors. Between these mass extinctions are tons of smaller extinction events that often escape the notice of paleontologists. One newly discovered extinction that happened roughly 19 million years ago almost left us a world without Shark Week.
This extinction event killed nine out of every ten sharks at the time. It had escaped detection because most studies focus on the fossil record preserved in shallow waters, where biodiversity is highest and the fossils are relatively simple to access. Not many studies have examined the fossil record in the open ocean.
When sharks die out at sea, they don’t fossilize as skeletons in the same way other animals might. That’s because their skeletons are made of cartilage, and cartilage doesn’t fossilize easily. But their teeth fossilize just fine. Sharks are constantly growing new teeth and dropping their old ones on the ocean floor. These teeth tend to get buried in the sediment.
To examine the toothy fossil record, researchers recently dug up and analyzed cylindrical soil cores from the ocean floor. Within these cores, they found hundreds of thousands of tooth fragments, called denticles. These can be as tiny as the width of a human hair, and each one is unique to the species that spit them out. Older tooth fragments are buried deeper than newer ones, so scientists can make inferences about both how many and how many kinds of sharks were in the ocean from these cores.
The evidence from these cores shows that for some reason, 90 percent of sharks vanished overnight, geologically speaking. This is a big deal, because sharks are expert survivors. The meteor that sent the dinosaurs packing only killed three in ten sharks, so whatever happened 19 million years ago specifically affected these fish and somehow managed to be three times worse.
The researchers argue that this decline was so severe that shark genetic diversity still hasn’t totally recovered. It was a close call: we were very close to a world without the movie Jaws.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Kelsey Donk and Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also an audio editor on today’s episode.
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!