Learn the surprising reason why religious people tend to have more children; why sea turtles are actually pretty clumsy navigators; and where astronomers found the center of our solar system (spoiler alert: it’s not the center of our sun).
Learn the surprising reason why religious people tend to have more children; why sea turtles are actually pretty clumsy navigators; and where astronomers found the center of our solar system (spoiler alert: it’s not the center of our sun).
Evolution explains why religious people have more children by Kelsey Donk
Sea turtles are surprisingly clumsy migrators by Kelsey Donk
Astronomers have located the center of the solar system and it's not the center of the sun by Grant Currin
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-religious-people-have-more-children-sea-turtles-clumsy-navigation-skills-and-the-real-center-of-our-solar-system-isnt-the-sun
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 religious people tend to have more children; why sea turtles are actually pretty clumsy navigators; and where astronomers found the center of our solar system. Spoiler alert: it’s not the center of our sun.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you were raised in a very religious family, you probably know other families with 6, 8, or even 10 kids. It's pretty well known at this point that religious families have more children, and many of the world's biggest religions explicitly encourage that. Isn’t it the Bible that says “be fruitful and multiply?”
But new research shows that reproduction in religious communities is about more than specific orders or religious beliefs. Instead, ritual behavior like going to church or being part of a religious community is itself associated with having more children. So what’s the deal? Why do people who engage in rituals have more kids?
Historically, people had lots of kids mostly to ensure their own family’s survival, since many children didn’t survive past infancy. In modern society, though, we’ve come to see some disadvantages of having a big family. Studies have found that the more siblings a child has, the worse their mental and physical development. Children from large families also seem to have a harder time achieving socioeconomic success in adulthood.
But that’s not the case in religious families. And researchers wanted to figure out why. So they turned to the Children of the 90s Health Study, which is an ongoing study of more than 14,000 women and their families that started in 1991. These researchers used 10 years of data from that study, and found that church-going women might have more children because of the support they get from their religious communities. Religious women have stronger support networks, and that makes a difference.
The study found that mothers who received support from their religious communities ended up having more children over time — and the more support they got, the better their children developed. They also scored better on cognitive tests. So not only do religious families tend to have more children, those children are also more likely to thrive than children from large families that are non-religious.
If religious practice means more social support for women, it may enable them to have more children without sacrificing their development and success. Big religious families may, then, have less to do with religious doctrine and more to do with the social structures that surround and support them. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child.
Sea turtles are famous for their ability to journey over thousands of miles to find the exact spot where they first hatched. How do they achieve such a miraculous feat of navigation? The answer, according to a new study, is... “not very well.” Sea turtles are surprisingly clumsy migrators.
Before this study, very little was known about how turtles pulled off the impressive feat of hatching in one place, navigating across the open ocean to a specific foraging spot, and then making the journey all the way back. So a team of researchers from Australia attached satellite tags to 33 nesting green turtles to figure out how exactly the turtles navigate.
The turtles migrated across the western Indian Ocean from their nesting beach on the island of Diego Garcia to their individual foraging grounds. When researchers studied the paths the turtles took, they found that 28 of those 33 turtles didn’t stay on track very well.
Sometimes the turtles traveled several hundred kilometers out of their way, only to clumsily course-correct. They didn’t often find their destinations right away, either. Many of the turtles shot right past their foraging islands before circling around and searching for them.
The researchers were surprised. First of all, they hadn’t expected the turtles to travel so far. Some of the turtles’ foraging grounds were only tens of kilometers away, but others had to travel more than 4,000 kilometers, or 2,500 miles to forage. Researchers were also surprised that the turtles had such a hard time finding their targets. They expected the turtles to have much better navigational systems.
Still, this was enough for the scientists to reach some conclusions. They say this means that these turtles have what’s called true navigation, or the ability to home in on a location without using landmarks or directional information. To do that, they rely on a crude map sense — that’s a sense that keeps tabs on your orientation, which usually relies on some sort of cue. The researchers aren’t sure what cues they’re using — they think the Earth’s magnetic field may play a role — but judging by the turtles’ off-kilter routes, the cues don’t provide much detail.
But it’s still impressive. It’s incredible that sea turtles can re-orient themselves at all when they go off course in very deep waters in the open ocean. Somewhere deep in their shells, they know where they have to go and how to get there.
Astronomers have located the center of our solar system, and it’s not in the center of the sun. And as if that’s not weird enough, this new discovery should make the hunt for faraway black holes a little easier.
Black holes are incredibly massive. That sounds like it might make them easy to spot, but it’s actually just the opposite. See, a whole lot of mass means a whole lot of gravity, and a black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that nothing escapes — not even the electromagnetic waves you’d usually use to detect a distant object, like gamma rays or visible light.
But here’s the good news: scientists have recently figured out how to read the gravitational waves that pairs of orbiting black holes send rippling through spacetime itself. You might remember the first time scientists did this. It was back in 2015 with an instrument called LIGO, which uses lasers to detect very, very tiny changes in the shape of a very, very long detector. That length is important: the bigger the instrument, the smaller the fluctuations it can detect. And the fluctuations in spacetime that gravitational waves create are incredibly small.
So just imagine if you could create an instrument that’s light-years long. That’s what the researchers behind this new finding are trying to do: instead of using a laser to detect fluctuations in spacetime, they’re using radio waves from pulsars across the galaxy.
But they’ve run into a problem: the objects in our solar system exert a lot of gravity that can mess with those fluctuations. In order to make sense of their measurements, the black hole hunters need to know the location of our solar system’s gravitational center, which is called the barycenter. That’s the one place where the gravity from every object in the solar system balances out.
The answer might seem pretty obvious. Since all the planets, moons, and asteroids orbit the sun, then the gravitational center of the solar system must be the very center of the sun, right?
Not quite, and we can blame Jupiter for that. It turns out that Jupiter is so big that it has a pretty significant effect on the balance of gravity across the entire solar system. That means the barycenter isn’t at the center of the sun. It’s closer to the surface.
That might seem like an insignificant difference. But it’s a really big deal for astronomers measuring very small variations in the time it takes electromagnetic waves to travel through the Milky Way.
So, yeah: our solar system’s gravitational balance is a little lopsided. Nobody’s perfect!
Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!