Learn about whether animals can predict earthquakes, why younger folks experience déjà vu more often, and how software that helped us reach the moon was literally woven by hand.
Learn about whether animals can predict earthquakes, why younger folks experience déjà vu more often, and how software that helped us reach the moon was literally woven by hand.
Can Animals Really Sense an Earthquake Coming? A New Study Says Yes by Grant Currin
Why Do Young People Experience More Déjà Vu? By Ashley Hamer
The Apollo Missions Used Guidance Software That Was Literally Woven by Hand by Ashley Hamer
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-do-young-people-have-more-deja-vu
ASHLEY HAMER: Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn about whether barnyard animals or house dinosaurs, in my case, can sense an earthquake before it hits, why young folks are more prone to deja vu, and how the software that helped us reach the moon was literally woven by hand.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's weave some curiosity. It's really hard to predict an earthquake. We humans still have basically no idea at all how to do it. But people have long noticed that some animals seem to act differently in the days and hours leading up to a tremor. So a team of scientists recently came up with a way to use relatively new technology to see if a few barnyard test subjects did indeed behave differently before the ground started to shake.
The results are weak but promising. That whole business of not being able to predict earthquakes makes them a hard phenomenon to study. But luckily for researchers, an earthquake is usually followed by several additional rounds of seismic activity. That's why when a powerful earthquake shook central Italy in October 2016, the scientists behind this study hightailed it to the region. They brought a set of instruments called biologgers that contained sensors that detect and record movement.
They arrived less than a day after the earthquake and attached the biologgers to several farm animals, and then they waited. The trip turned out to be worth their while. There were more than 18,000 tremors and another significant quake in the months that followed. After crunching all that data and comparing the animal's movement patterns to the timing of the quakes and tremors, the researchers reported a small but noticeable pattern. The animals consistently moved in an unusual way before rumbling began but only if they are housed in a stable, and only if the researchers took all of their activity into account.
You wouldn't be able to predict an earthquake on, say, one cow's behavior. Still, they say that the results are reliable enough that future researchers might be able to make short term earthquake predictions by continuously tracking the movement of groups of animals. Not all scientists are convinced though. Skeptics say the behavior of a few animals after one set of events in one location isn't enough evidence to support the claims. The researchers themselves admit that their study suffered from typical barnyard attrition-- neither the chickens nor the turkeys survived the holiday season.
But this may be an important first step toward larger, better controlled studies in the future. When it comes to predicting earthquakes, maybe animals hold the key. Or in Natalia's case, house dinosaurs? Do your chickens actually predict earthquakes, Natalia?
NATALIA REAGAN: Well, considering I live in Brooklyn, New York, they haven't yet. However, since you and I both are from California and I actually might move back there and bring my house dinosaurs, maybe we can do our own little small, sample-size study of whether Carol and Janette can actually predict a trembler.
ASHLEY HAMER: I love it. I think you need science chickens. That's what you need. It's great.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right? And I also thought it was funny when their unusual behavior-- I mean, were they interpretive dancing? Were they just-- I don't know. What constitutes unusual barnyard animal behavior?
ASHLEY HAMER: That is a very good question.
[LAUGHTER]
NATALIA REAGAN: You've probably experienced deja vu at some point in your life. That feeling where an experience feels more familiar than it should. 70% of people have experienced this feeling. But it turns out, most are between 15 and 25 years old. The reason why is mysterious, but it could shed some light on why deja vu happens in the first place.
Oh, and before we continue, deja vu literally means "already seen" in French. Oh, la la. Deja vu is incredibly complex, and we still can't fully explain it. Scientists noticed that feelings of deja vu often occur right before someone has a temporal lobe seizure, which could be a clue as to where it's happening in the brain. Others think it has to do with wish fulfillment or past life experience.
Answers are murky at best. Scientists may not be able to explain its cause but they can describe its frequency. And that frequency is highest in young people. Various studies have found that the percentage of people who report experiencing deja vu, hovers around 70% to 80% for people in their teens and 20s, but drops to 50% to 60% in people beyond that age. And that frequency is highest in young people.
Various studies have found that the percentage of people who report experiencing deja vu hovers around 70% to 80% of people in their teens and 20s, but drops to 50% to 60% in people beyond that age. So does that mean there are babies out there with an eerie feeling that they've ate these exact same mashed carrots? Probably not. Researchers think that the human brain isn't mature enough to make it happen until a person is eight or nine years old. It's possible this higher incidence of deja vu in younger people might be an artifact of culture rather than biology.
Studies show that the total number of people who believe in deja vu has increased over decades. So the fact that older people are less likely to report deja vu experiences could just be because they believe in it less. Still, if it is biological, why would young people have more experiences of deja vu than older people? After all, older people have more memories that can go on the fritz. It may mean that deja vu is actually the sign of a healthy mind, not an unhealthy one.
The difference between a real memory and deja vu is that moment when you realize you shouldn't be having this feeling of recognition. That realization may be the thing that older brains lose. Maybe older people have deja vu just as much as younger people but they're worse at spotting the difference between a real memory and a mind glitch. I almost got deja vu reading that.
[LAUGHTER]
No, it's interesting though. I wonder if we could go back and do this study again 20 years from now, how those people in their 20s experience deja vu then.
ASHLEY HAMER: Totally. Oh, man, I hope they do that study.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah, do you ever get deja vu?
ASHLEY HAMER: All the time. I-- yeah. I mean-- but I think I got it a lot more when I was younger. I'm in my mid 30s at this point and yeah, I don't get it as much.
NATALIA REAGAN: I wonder if we don't get it so much as we get older just because it's like, we just assume, oh, I've probably done this before. Because you've done everything.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. Totally. You've probably heard that the first moon landing was achieved with the computing power of a calculator. But what you may not know is how those computers were programmed. The guidance software on the Apollo missions was literally woven by hand.
It was called core rope memory, and it's going to blow your mind. In the 1960s and '70s, computers were big. Think massive, heavy tape drives or devices that relied on rows upon rows of paper punch cards. Considering that every extra gram adds expense to a space launch, computers like this weren't going to work for the Apollo missions. The technology they needed would have to be not only lightweight enough to avoid weighing down the spacecraft, but also robust enough to avoid being destroyed by extreme temperatures or power failures.
The solution? Core rope memory. A form of memory made by hand-weaving wires through tiny magnetic rings. All computer programs are basically a series of ones and zeros known as binary. The workers who wove core rope memory encoded ones by passing a wire through a magnetic ring and zeros by passing the wire around it.
Since they literally encoded each one and zero by hand, the manufacturing process was slow, tedious, and prone to error. But in the end, this woven memory helped humans finally reach the moon. NASA engineers would sometimes refer to this memory as LOL memory for Little Old Lady. Whether they were actually old or not is unclear, but the workers responsible for the software were mostly women. As was their leader, the now legendary computer scientist, Margaret Hamilton.
Hamilton's contributions to the Apollo software may have saved missions. In fact, it was her idea to program in emergency warnings and error correction in case of a computer malfunction. That came in handy during Apollo 11, which was the first flight to land humans on the moon. It might have aborted the landing if Hamilton's programming and a handwoven bundle of software hadn't saved the day.
NATALIA REAGAN: Man, that's one hell of a quilt.
[LAUGHTER]
So let's recap what we learned today. First, we learned that barnyard animals might actually sense earthquakes based on their distinct movements preceding a trembler. But it sounds like more research is needed since many of their tasty subjects didn't survive the holidays. You know, I might have to do this with Carol and Janette like I mentioned. But fortunately, I haven't eaten chicken since 1995, so they'll survive the winter.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, wow.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's a long time.
NATALIA REAGAN: I always tell them, you never know though. At any given moment, they better watch their butts. Just kidding, I'm not going to eat them. They're more than just nuggets to me.
ASHLEY HAMER: Aww. And we learned that younger people are more likely to experience deja vu. Though it's unclear if it's biological, or if it's cultural, or if older brains are just unable to detect that those familiar feelings aren't actually real memories. I feel like this isn't common knowledge that younger people experience deja vu more than older people, and it's kind of amazing to me.
NATALIA REAGAN: I think-- so growing up, I had a lot of friends that were into tarot. And in fact, my great aunts in Scotland, they lived before I was born, but they were actually ran out of the country for being mediums. Yeah, yeah. So I remember hearing a lot that children are more perceptive. They're the ones that always-- The Sixth Sense.
It was Haley Joel Osment that was seeing dead people. It's always the kids that are touched with this sort of connection to the either afterlife or past lives. So even as a scientist, I can relate to that idea that kids are a little bit more open to perceiving certain feelings. And as we get older, we become more cynical and critical-thinking adults.
ASHLEY HAMER: Totally possible. I love seeing parents on Twitter share the weird things that their kids say, and sometimes they'll talk about the future as if it's the past. Or they'll talk about people they've never met but act like they're just buddies. And it can get creepy, I will say.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, yeah. I remember a good friend of mine, her mother passed away six months after her first son was born, but he would have conversations with his grandma all the time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
NATALIA REAGAN: And it gives you goosebumps because you're like, oh, OK. And they would wave and say hi. And who are you waving to? Grandma.
[LAUGHTER]
It's beautiful because I think she was striving for that connection to her mother, and I don't blame her for leaning into it and wanting to experience it. And even, again, as a scientist, I do find-- there are certain things that are not explained. Finally, we heard about how handwoven software helped get astronauts to the moon, which is very impressive knitting. I've never knitted a thing. And imagine being that person that was like, oh, yeah, I knit, got people to the moon.
Boom. Like how cool are they in their knitting club?
ASHLEY HAMER: Seriously. Man, this is one of the most amazing things I've ever learned about the Apollo missions. I cannot believe that this stuff was woven by hand. It's just-- ugh, it's incredible. Totally blows my mind.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah, and early computers and just all the things that went into it. I mean, they were building these things from scratch. This is how it all started. And I think, oftentimes, you hear people dismissing women's work as being just sort of an afterthought, and like, well, the men's work are real work. And it's like, I'm sorry things.
Things like knitting, which provides warmth for everyone, but also the software to get people to the moon. Whoo, that's huge.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, the engineers called it Little Old Lady memory. They knew what they were doing.
[LAUGHTER]
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer and Grant Currin and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Natalia Reagan. Our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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