The name of the world’s richest man isn’t uttered in this show, but the opening episode’s title, “Bread and Lottery,” is a synchronous acknowledgment that our present climate makes its fictional horrors possible.

Thanks to electroencephalography, researchers can even link slow-wave sleep to a process of synchronous changes in electrical voltages in thousands of neurons, known as up and down states.

The size of the heat dome made it particularly troubling because it resulted in what the study authors called widespread synchronous burning, with many disparate areas igniting at the same time.

The team analyzed nearly 50 hours of synchronous tag data which included 16 tags from seven distinct groups of whales.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Physical Review E, researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered how such synchronous cicada swarms can emerge despite these temperature differences.