Learn about how sleep may have evolved before the brain; why airports keep birds of prey on staff; and what would happen if you stopped time.
Learn about how sleep may have evolved before the brain; why airports keep birds of prey on staff; and what would happen if you stopped time.
Sleep might have evolved before the brain by Cameron Duke
Airports Keep Birds of Prey on Staff to Protect Planes by Ashley Hamer
What Would Happen If You Stopped Time? by Ashley Hamer originally aired September 7, 2018 https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/what-would-happen-if-you-stopped-time-secret-room
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-would-happen-if-you-stopped-time
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 how sleep may have evolved before the brain; why airports keep birds of prey on staff; and what would happen if you stopped time.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Quick question for you. Why do we sleep? It seems safe to say that the answer has something to do with our brains. That’s why this next sentence is so mind-blowing: New evidence suggests sleep might have evolved before brains.
This is counterintuitive, to say the least. I mean, everybody has had those nights where you didn’t sleep well and had to fight through brain fog the next day. And the longer we go without sleep... the worse this gets. Just 24 hours of sleep deprivation is all it takes for the average human to start experiencing minor hallucinations. So even though we know sleep is good for our health because we can see the bad things that happen without it, there’s still no definitive answer as to why we do it.
But here’s the weirdest part. Researchers studying the evolution of sleep have found tiny animal cousins to jellyfish that regularly enter sleep-like states. Even though they don’t have brains. Or central nervous systems. Yet they seem to benefit from sleeping.
These tiny creatures are known as hydras — not to be confused with the mythological multi-headed serpent-like monster with the same name. In a recent study, researchers were able to observe these tiny little hydras entering a sleep-like state every four hours, where they would just sort of stop moving. The team found that they could use a flash of light to rouse the sleeping hydras, kinda like your parents would flip on the light to wake you for a pre-dawn road trip.
But the hydras didn’t just look like they were sleeping. The researchers also found they could trigger this sleep-like state by dosing the hydras with melatonin, dopamine, and at least three other chemicals our bodies use to regulate sleep. Their sleep was similar at a chemical level.
Because hydras are members of a very primitive branch of our evolutionary tree, there’s a good chance any traits we share with them are very old. So this suggests that the common ancestor of brain-having mammals and brainless hydras probably slept close to the same way we do now.
If even brainless animals sleep, then the key reason humans sleep might have more to do with the body than the brain. But for now, it’s still a mystery.
When you think about birds running into plane engines, you probably feel bad for the birds. Understandable. But that's a big problem for planes, too, since they can cause damage and force pilots to make emergency landings. To counteract this growing problem, many airports are turning to the birds' natural predator: the falcon.
If that sounds far-fetched, then maybe you should think about US Airways Flight 1549. Remember? That’s the one that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in 2009 after hitting a flock of geese — it eventually became a feature film starring Tom Hanks. Strikes like that happen thousands of times per year. The FAA reports there were more than 16,000 wildlife strikes in 2018, and more than 97 percent of those were birds. The problem is only getting worse. That’s for a lot of reasons, including the fact that planes are quieter and there are more of them in the air.
Airports have tried all sorts of things, from sirens and pyrotechnics to flapping, falcon-like drones. O'Hare International Airport here in Chicago even employs goats, sheep, and llamas to eat the plants that provide food and shelter for birds.
Birds may get used to sirens and firecrackers, but nothing strikes more fear in their hearts than a falcon. Mark Adam is the president of Falcon Environmental Services, and calls them the “great white sharks of the sky.” At the Toronto Pearson Airport, Adam's company sets falcons aloft to patrol 4,500 acres every day from before sunrise to after sunset. Of course, once you let a majestic bird free, there's no guarantee it'll come back to you. So handlers outfit the birds with radio transmitters to keep tabs on their locations and spin a hunk of delicious raw meat in the air to lure them back to home base.
According to Adam, the predators only kill another bird around one percent of the time, but it's enough to clear the air and let planes take off safely. Not a bad deal! [Although Ashley I hear sometimes the falcons have been caught snacking on avocado toast. Know what they’re called? Millennial falcon]
CODY: Sometimes during this pandemic, it’s felt like time has stopped entirely. But what if you LITERALLY stopped time? Ashley looked into this question in the early days of our podcast, and it’s probably one of my favorite stories ever. So we remastered it just for you. Take a listen.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Cameron Duke and Ashley Hamer, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to FALCON: LEARN! something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!