Curiosity Daily Podcast: Y2K Was Actually a Success Story, Sleeping Brains Replay Waking Experience, and Plants Can Hear When They’re Being Eaten

Learn about breakthrough research into what our brains do while we sleep; how plants fight back when they hear they’re being eaten; and why the Y2K bug is actually what a well-handled crisis looks like afterward.

May 26, 2020

Episode Show Notes:

This is the first direct evidence that our brains replay waking experiences while we sleep by Cameron Duke

Plants Can Hear When They're Being Eaten — and They Fight Back by Ashley Hamer

The Y2K bug is what a well-handled crisis looks like afterward by Kelsey Donk

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

Next Up

Investigate the Mind of a Shark on 'How to Train a Great White'

See how these apex predators actually think. Will they completely transform our understanding of their intelligence?

Shark Week 2024

Shark Week hosted by John Cena was an electrifying and unforgettable experience that left fans in awe of the world beneath the waves. Check out what happened during the best week of the summer on Discovery. See the full schedule or stream Shark Week on Max!

Shipwrecked & Surrounded by Sharks

This week, we do things a little differently, as Shark Week’s Luke Tipple invites Adventure Aaron into the podcast studio to talk about his incredible near-death experience on the open water. Adventure Aaron gets into what it takes to circumnavigate the world in an ocean rowboat, what it’s like to stare eye-to-eye with an oceanic white tip that probably wants you for lunch, and everything else that happened to him when his boat was capsized, and he was lost by himself at sea.

Shark Week: The Podcast - Superstar Kesha Lifts the Gag Order on Saving Sharks

Pop superstar Kesha joins Shark Week’s Luke Tipple on the podcast to discuss her love of sharks, how her music funds her addiction to diving, and how you can find inner peace while under the water. And at the end, our researcher Sierra drops in to tell us that some sharks have teeth in their eyes.

Shark Week: The Podcast - How Shark Fishing Funds Human Trafficking

Luke Tipple is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the Outlaw Ocean Ian Urbina, who has dedicated his life to chronicling crime on the high seas. They discuss the state of our world’s oceans, how nearly 20% of your seafood was likely caught illegally, and the surprising link between modern slavery and the killing of sharks.

Shark Week: The Podcast - What is the Status of Sharks in our Oceans?

In this season’s final episode, Luke welcomes Emmy-winning filmmaker and conservationist Shawn Heinrichs to discuss the state of sharks in the ocean. They go over how both legal and illegal fishing operations are decimating the ocean’s wildlife, what it’s like to have a hit put out on you for exposing criminal enterprises to the world, and whether or not NOAA’s data on “sustainable” fishing can really be trusted.

Shark Week: The Podcast - How Did a Shark Encounter Survivor Become an Advocate for Their Protection?

Shark Week’s Luke Tipple welcomes professional photographer Mike Coots, who lost his leg to a tiger shark attack when he was only 18. But after his horrific injury, he came to love sharks, and became a lifelong advocate for their safety. Luke and Mike discuss his career, his love for photographing sharks, and how to positively approach the big life-changing moments that can happen to any of us.

Shark Week: The Podcast - Undiscovered Sharks and the State of the Ocean

Luke Tipple invites “The Lost Shark Guy,” Dr. Dave Ebert, who is personally responsible for finding dozens of shark species that were either previously unknown to science or thought to be extinct. He and Luke discuss why shark populations are a direct indicator of how healthy the ocean is, how to find undiscovered sharks, and why diversity in sharks is essential for marine life.

Shark Week: The Podcast - Why is Tagging Baby Great White Sharks So Important?

Luke Tipple speaks with Dr. Riley Elliott, a marine biologist from New Zealand who recently tagged baby great white sharks, which are rarely seen in the wild. They talk about how climate change is affecting shark pupping grounds, why fishers are wrong to think there are “too many sharks,” and about Dr. Elliott’s Great White App, which allows users to track great white sharks in the ocean.

Shark Week: The Podcast - Did Alien Tech Crash-Land into the Ocean?

Host Luke Tipple is joined this week by renowned Harvard professor, Dr. Avi Loeb, who recently led a deep-sea expedition to discover if evidence for advanced alien life crash-landed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014. They discuss the recent Congressional UFO hearings, how the last seventy years of research into extraterrestrial life has been potentially misguided, and the challenges of searching for tiny objects on the bottom of the ocean.