Quirks and Quarks from CBC Radio: Recent Episodes
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CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks covers the quirks of the expanding universe to the quarks within a single atom... and everything in between.
Hurricane Helene’s killed hundreds, but the true death toll could end up in the thousands
Hurricanes and tropical storms in the US kill about 24 people directly, but a new study looking at “excess deaths” suggests that in the affected areas the mortality rate is elevated for about 15 years. Rachel Young, a postdoctoral researcher from UC Berkeley, analyzed the long tail of these storms from 1930-2015. She found the true death toll ranges from 7,000 to 11,000 per storm. Her team suspects many factors feed into the excess deaths, including how rebuilding costs could impact funds for future medical care, damage to local health systems and exposure to pollution during the storm. Their study is in the journal Nature.
A new NASA mission will search for signs of life on a Jovian ice moon
Next week NASA hopes to launch a major mission to one of Jupiter’s most fascinating moons. The Europa Clipper will visit the ice moon Europa, whose icy shell is thought to cover an ocean that could contain twice the water that's in all of Earth’s oceans. The fascination with Europa is based on the idea that water is an essential ingredient for life. As a result, Europa could be one of the most promising places in our solar system for life to exist. We talk about the upcoming mission with Cynthia Phillips, the Project Staff Scientist and Planetary Geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Tarantulas’ creepy hair is likely a defence against predatory army ants
You would think that a venomous spider the size of your fist wouldn’t have too many natural enemies. But Dr. Alireza Zamani from the University of Turku, Finland says it's the arachnid's fuzz, rather than its bite, which discourages predatory army ants. A new study in the Journal of Natural History suggests the tarantula’s barbed hairs keep the ants from being able to attack the spiders, and also protects their eggs, which the arachnids coat in a generous helping of hair.
Whales use underwater bubble blowing in sophisticated ways to trap prey
Scientists have long known that humpback whales use bubbles to corral and concentrate krill and small fish to feed on. But new underwater cameras and airborne drones have provided an unprecedented view of how this is done, revealing how the whales use complex patterns of bubbles in different ways depending on the prey. Andy Szabo, a Canadian whale biologist and executive director of the Alaska Whale Foundation, said the humpbacks’ bubble-nets result in a sevenfold increase in the amount of krill they gulp up per lunge. The study was published in Royal Society Open Science.
The Bomb Doctor: after the explosion this investigator seeks out evidence in the rubble
Explosive attacks often leave behind tragedy, carnage and chaos. But in the rubble is evidence that could provide vital clues for bomb forensic investigators. Kirk Yeager, the FBI’s chief explosives scientist, describes his work at crime scenes as “walking into hell blindfolded.” In his new book, called The Bomb Doctor: A Scientist's Story of Bombers, Beakers, and Bloodhounds, he explains how he and his colleagues tease out evidence from the scorched and smouldering aftermath of an attack.
A Central American lizard creates a bubble of air underwater to breathe
Semi-aquatic lizards in the western rainforests of Central America have the ability to hide from predators underwater by breathing from a bubble of air they forms over its head. In a new study in the journal Biology Letters, ecologist Lindsey Swierk from New York State University at Binghamton, found that the lizards with this bubble-breathing trick could stay underwater for 30 per cent longer than the lizards without a bubble.
A really weird fish walks on its fingers and tastes with them too
The sea robin is a strange fish with wing-like fins and finger-like bony structures that it uses to prop itself up as it roams the ocean floor. New research from a team of scientists from Harvard and Stanford Universities, including Nick Bellono, looked at how these bizarre creatures use their legs to hone in on their prey. It turns out these funny finny fingers can also taste food in the sediment of the sea bottom. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.
We can make our food production systems more stable by reintroducing nature
A new study by a team of researchers at the University of Guelph suggests that removing large animals and destroying natural habitat is making our agricultural systems and fisheries more unstable and vulnerable to boom and bust cycles. But the study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, also suggests that restoring nature can help stabilize our food production to better feed the world’s billions.
Giant clams live off sunlight and could inspire solar power systems
Working in the protected reefs of Palau, Dr. Alison Sweeney, associate professor of physics and of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, was intrigued by the iridescence of the giant clams. Her team discovered that the giant clams tissues are optimized to channel sunlight to photosynthetic algae that live inside them. They work like solar panels, but far more efficiently than manufactured versions, providing inspiration for bio-inspired energy technology. The study was published in the journal PRX Energy.
Plastic: Understanding the problem, and the struggle for a solution
Plastic is a miracle material, and one of the most useful innovations of the modern age. But its ubiquity and the durability that makes it so useful mean it’s also becoming one of our biggest waste problems. Twenty years after he discovered microplastics on beaches around the UK, marine biologist Richard Thompson has just released a new study looking at what we’ve learned about these pervasive plastics, and urges scientists to turn their research focus towards solving the problem. We also speak with RJ Conk from the University of Berkeley about his work on vaporizing plastics down to their chemical building blocks, which could finally make real recycling a reality.
Earthquakes create a spark in quartz that can form massive gold nuggets
Scientists have figured out why up to 75 per cent of all the gold ever mined forms inside quartz in areas with a long history of earthquakes. Chris Voisey, a Canadian geologist at Monash University in Australia, said he was trying to solve how gold arose inside quartz. In his study in the journal Nature Geoscience, he found that earthquake stress on quartz crystals generates an electrical voltage that causes dissolved gold to precipitate into a solid that can grow into the largest nuggets ever found.
Ice Age Teens went through puberty just like today’s kids
A new analysis of the bones of teenagers from 25,000 years ago shows they experienced puberty in much the same way as teens today. An international team of researchers including Paleolithic archaeologist April Nowell analyzed the bones of 13 teens found across Europe, and by looking at particular markers in the bones, they were able to see which stage of puberty the teens were in when they died. The researchers could not only infer things like whether their voices were breaking, but by doing muscle analysis, they found that the teens were healthy and active, and likely involved in hunting and fishing. The research was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.
Grey sharks are abandoning warming coral reefs in the Indian Ocean
The grey shark in the Indian Ocean uses beautiful coral reefs as a home base, returning each day after a night of fishing. But lately the sharks have been staying away for longer periods of time, up to 16 months. Dr. Michael Willamson, a research scientist at the Zoological Society of London, found that climate change is stressing the reefs. The sharks seek out cooler but potentially more dangerous waters. Venturing away from the protected reef area leaves them more vulnerable to illegal shark fishing. The paper was published in the journal Communications Biology
A cosmic collision 9 billion years ago could be the origin of he supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy
Using data from The Event Horizon Telescope, Dr. Yihan Wang worked with Dr. Bing Zhang at the Nevada Institute of Astrophysics to study the origins of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. From the EHT image of the Sagittarius A* Dr. Wang and his team made an accretion model and saw that it spins very fast and that the spinning is misaligned. They believe it may have been made by merging with another supermassive black hole. about 9 billion years ago. Their paper was published in Nature Astronomy.
Astronaut Roberta Bondar gives a bird’s eye view of migration
32 years after she flew on the space shuttle, Roberta Bondar is still showing us what the Earth looks like from space — and from closer to the ground. Dr. Bondar trained as a wildlife photographer after her astronaut career. For a new project collected photos from space, from airplanes and helicopters, and from the ground, to bring a new perspective on the migration of two important bird species, the threatened lesser Flamingo and the endangered Whooping Crane. The book is called Space for Birds: Patterns and Parallels of Beauty and Flight.
Wrestling 14-foot 'dinosaurs' to figure out why they're dying
Dr. Madison Earhart, a postdoctoral fellow from the University of British Columbia, spent her summer fishing for enormous white sturgeon in the Fraser and Nechako Rivers in British Columbia. Since 2022, there have been a large number of deaths of this fish along the west coast of North America and it’s concerning when a species that’s been around for hundreds of million years suddenly starts dying off. She and her colleagues are trying to figure out what’s happening and how to conserve this important and spectacular fish.
Installing Dark Matter detectors two kilometeres underground
Dr. Madeleine Zurowski of the University of Toronto has been underground most of this past summer at SNOLAB, located in Sudbury, Ontario. She’s been helping install specially designed dark matter detectors in a project called SuperCDMS, as part of an international collaboration that is researching the nature of dark matter.
Managing Canada’s worst invasive plant with moths
As Director of the Waterloo Wetland Laboratory, Dr. Rebecca Rooney has been investigating how to stop the spread of a plant called invasive Phragmites, which chokes wetlands, ditches and many other environments. Her group has introduced European moths which eat the plant. This summer PhD student Claire Schon and lab technician Ryan Graham went into the field to collect some more data on their project.
Helicoptering in 35 tonnes of material in an attempt to restore a Sudbury peatland
Scientists are working to restore a degraded peatland damaged by contamination from mining activity in Sudbury. Colin McCarter, the project lead from Nipissing University, described how they’re trying to figure out how to best restore these toxic metal-contaminated landscapes to restore their natural capacity as wildfire-buffering, carbon-storing powerhoues.
Transatlantic balloon flight from Sweden to Nunavut
Dr Kaley Walker is an atmospheric physicist from the University of Toronto. Working with the Canadian Space Agency, this summer she was in Sweden to send a massive balloon — 30 stories tall and 800,000 cubic meters in volume — on a high-altitude transatlantic flight to Nunavut, to measure stratospheric gases.
The accidental discovery of an ancient Roman monument’s missing limb
Dr. Sarah Murray is the co-director of an archeological project on the history of Porto Rafti, Greece. While surveying for Bronze Age relics, her team discovered an enormous missing limb from a famous Roman marble statue in the area, a monument popular with tourists for centuries. This summer, they returned with drones to make 3D models of the statue, to understand how the arm was attached to the statue’s now limbless torso.
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen gets lunar geology training in Iceland
Astronauts assigned to NASA’s Artemis II mission, who’ll be heading to the moon as early as September 2025, embarked on their own field research this summer in Iceland to train as lunar geologists. CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen documented his adventure and filled us in on why this training is crucial for their upcoming mission.
Building wildfire resistant housing
After wildfires devastated Lytton, BC in 2021, the government announced that they were going to support homeowners to rebuild homes that would be resistant to wildfire. Senior Engineer Lucas Coletta of Natural Resources Canada, was part of the team that tested various fire resilient materials and construction methods this past spring and summer.
A behind-the-scenes chat about the making of the CBC Radio collaboration called "Overheated." White Coat, Black Art, What on Earth, and Quirks and Quarks are exploring how heat is affecting our health, our communities and our ecosystems. This originally broadcast on The Current.
Quirks & Quarks launches our new season with a special on urban heat. It's part of a collaboration with White Coat, Black Art and What on Earth called "Overheated."
Host Bob McDonald and Producer Amanda Buckiewicz tell the story of how a city’s design can influence the way we experience and cope with heat. Bob will cycle through the streets of Montreal with a Concordia researcher on specially-equipped bikes - these are equipped with sensors that measure how temperatures change across neighbourhoods based on their density - the amount of infrastructure coupled with mitigating cooling effects like tree cover.
He’ll also spend time with a McGill epidemiologist who will deploy hundreds of sensors that measure air temperature every 30 minutes over a month. That data will be used to determine how changing temperatures impact physical and mental health. It's vital information as heat is thought to be the most lethal kind of extreme weather.
And we'll explore some of the solutions to urban heat: How we can design buildings and urban landscapes - with a little help from nature - can make our cities cooler and more comfortable as the temperature rises.
Check out our podcast feed for shows you might have missed, or visit us online at cbc.ca/quirks to see our on-demand audio archive.
Christ Kennedy from Moncton, New Brunswick asks: If someone had the means to, how close could we bring the Moon to the Earth while still keeping it in orbit around us? And fast would a month fly by?
Answer from Brett Gladman, a professor of astronomy at the University of British Columbia,
Matoli Degroot from Manitoba asks: Do animal species in the wild get bigger over time, since the bigger males would end up mating more than the smaller ones?
Answer from Danielle Fraser, head of paleobiology at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
Bill Sullivan from Hamilton, Ontario asks: Why does the hair on my head turn grey while hair on the rest of my body does not change colour?
Answer from Frida Lona-Durazo, a postdoctoral fellow in computational genetics at the University of Montreal, who’s studied the genetics of hair colour.
Dan from Quebec City asks: We know that the Earth’s crust is built of plates that float on the molten centre of the Earth. What is the force that moves those plates?
Answer from Alexander Peace, an assistant professor in the School of Earth, Environment and Society at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
Frances Mawson from Heckmans Island in Nova Scotia asks: Prey animals like deer are intermittently forced to flee from various predators. When danger has passed, they pause for a moment and then resume browsing. How can they recover so quickly?
Answer from wildlife ecologist and Western University professor Liana Zanette.
Richard Lukes from Winnipeg asks: As a hydro generating station generates energy, what is the effect on the downstream water? Has the temperature of the water been lowered? If so, then could hydropower help to cool the oceans and combat global warming?
Answer from Jaime Wong, an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta.
Luc in Edmonton asks: With more people planting native grasses and plants around their houses and businesses in cities, will the bird population in these cities change or increase?
Answer from Sheila Colla, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change at York University and York Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Conservation Science.
John Ugyan from Kelowna, British Columbia asks: If atoms are 99.99% empty, why do our eyes see matter as if it was 100% solid?
Answer from condensed matter physicist, Cissy Suen. who’s a joint PhD student from UBC’s Quantum Matter Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany
Debbie Turner in Fenelon Falls, Ont. asks: How does climate change affect animals that hibernate?
Answer from Jeffrey Lane, an associate professor in the department of biology at the University of Saskatchewan.
Greg Hollinger from Owen Sound, Ontario asks: Since the planets orbit the sun in a plane, does their combined gravity pull on and distort the shape of the sun?
Answer from Roan Haggar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Astrophysics.
What would you do with a third thumb? Research suggests our brain can quickly adapt
Birds can dream - and even have nightmares - and now scientists are tuning in
A comprehensive new collection of medical information shows the health risks of space travel
A study in mice sheds new light on how exercise can reverse aging in the brain
Rare fossils from the ‘age of monotremes’ found in Australia
How the brain can instantly tell the difference between speech and music
PODCAST EXTRAS
Organic farms next to conventionally farmed fields leads to increased pesticide use
Orca whales hunt, play and dive – one breath at a time
The secret of the beaver’s orange teeth can help us make our teeth strong
The sun’s ramping up its activity and now we have a better idea of what’s driving it
This spring we’ve seen some spectacular displays of northern lights and we’re expecting to see more as we approach the peak of the sun’s natural cycle, the solar maximum. Every 11 years the sun cycles from having few sunspots on its surface to having many. Now according to a new study in the journal Nature, scientists have figured out what may be driving this process. Geoff Vasil, an associate professor of computational and applied mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, said instabilities in swirling magnetic systems near the sun’s surface gives rise to sunspots on its surface that can erupt and send solar storms our way.
Female otters use tools more than males – to crack open tasty treats and save their teeth
Otters are cute and clever – clever enough to be one of the few animals who use tools such as rocks, glass bottles, or even boat hulls to smash shells and access the tasty flesh inside. But researchers studying otters off the coast of California found that certain otters were using these tools more than others, and wanted to understand why. In a new study, published in the journal Science, research biologist Chris Law found that it was females that were using the tools more than the males, in order to access hard-shelled meals like clams and mussels without damaging their teeth.
The longest lasting human species (not us) were expert elephant hunters
Our cousins, Homo Erectus, inhabited Earth for nearly two million years, and they were capable hunters. An analysis of stone tool manufacturing sites, published in the journal Archaeologies, gives new insight into the high levels of organization and planning by these early humans. Tel Aviv University archeologist Meir Finkel studied the ancient stone quarries in the Hula Valley, and discovered that they were often located on elephant migration routes near water sources – so the humans didn’t have far to go to get weapons for slaying and butchering their meals. This triad of elephants, water and stone quarries is present across many Old Stone Age sites where the early humans lived, including South America, Africa and Europe.
A plastic that carries the seeds of its own destruction
Researchers have been able to integrate spores of a plastic-eating bacteria into plastic to create a material that, over time, eats itself. In a controlled study, scientists found that the bacteria can break down 90 per cent of the soft plastic in the material in about 90 days. Mohammed Arif Rahman, a senior polymer scientist and R&D director of BASF, said they’re still working on it with hopes that the bacteria embedded within it will be able to keep on consuming the remaining plastic so as not to generate any microplastics. The proof of concept study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
A new book about gravity celebrates failing and falling
When theoretical physicist Claudia de Rham didn’t quite make the cut as an astronaut candidate, she doubled down on her fascination with the phenomenon of gravity. This puts her on the path of great thinkers like Newton and Einstein who helped us to start to understand what holds the universe together. In a new book, The Beauty of Falling: A life in pursuit of gravity, she ties her personal adventures with her theoretical explorations of gravitational rainbows and the origins of dark matter, and details all the mysteries that still remain about this fundamental feature of reality.
Killer whales are likely ramming boats because they’re bored and having fun
Several years ago a small population of killer whales living off the coast of Spain began attacking boats, particularly sailboats, damaging some severely and even sinking a handful. While social media speculation has suggested whale rage as a cause, an international team of killer whale experts recently published a report suggesting the behaviour is not aggression, but is instead an example of these giant social creatures just playing and having fun with a toy. We speak with two contributors to the report: John Ford, research scientist emeritus at the Pacific Biological Station with Fisheries & Oceans Canada, and Renaud de Stephanis, the president of Spanish conservation group CIRCE.
4,000-year-old Egyptian skull shows signs of possible surgery for brain cancer
Researchers studying the history of cancer in human history recently hit the jackpot. In a collection of human remains at the University of Cambridge they found two skulls from Egypt, both thousands of years old, that show signs of advanced cancer. One of those skulls bore cut marks around the lesions. Lead study author and University of Santiago de Compostela professor Edgard Camarós said that regardless of whether these cuts were made as attempts at treatment or a post-mortem investigation, they show off the sophisticated medical knowledge of ancient Egyptians — and can also help better understand the evolution of cancer.This study was published in Frontiers in Medicine.
Gorillas’ tiny penises and low sperm count can help us understand infertility in humans
Gorillas are the biggest of the great apes, but their reproductive anatomy is diminutive. The males have small penises and testes, and low sperm quality. A new genetic analysis, published in the scientific journal eLife, identified the mutations that are responsible for male gorillas’ peculiar fertility. Vincent Lynch, an associate professor of biological sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said these findings can help us better understand the genes responsible for lower sperm quality in humans.
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Illuminating plumes of hot magma in the Earth’s mantle with earthquake seismic data
To understand the source of the magma fueling volcanic eruptions, scientists are using another significant geological event: earthquakes. The seismic waves that earthquakes send through our planet can shine a light on the chimneys of magma that connect the core of the Earth through the mantle to the surface. Karin Sigloch, a professor of geophysics at CNRS — France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, is part of an international effort to deploy seismic sensors throughout the oceans to illuminate the mantle plumes. Their research from recent observations in the Indian Ocean around Réunion Island was in Nature Geoscience.
It’s intelligence all the way down: How cells, tissues and organs have their own smarts
We tend to think of collective intelligence as something we see among animals that work cooperatively to solve problems, like in an ant colony, a school of fish or flock of birds. But biologist Michael Levin, from Harvard and Tufts’ universities, thinks collective intelligence also extends to functions within the cell, all the way up to networks of cells, tissues and even organs. He suggests evolution has granted simpler biological layers in living systems the ability to flexibly solve problems. In a recent paper in Communications Biology, he argues we can harness these lower level problem-solving capabilities to make significant advances in regenerative medicine, and treating aging and disease.
This little piggy escaped and wreaked havoc on crops and the environment
Wild pigs that have escaped or been released from farms have established self-sustaining populations in the prairies and central Canada and are wreaking havoc on farms and wilderness landscapes alike. A new study, led by Ryan Brook at the University of Saskatchewan, has tracked pigs to try to understand where, and how far, this porcine invasion can go. The research was published in the journal Biological Invasions.
Satellites and space junk burning up in the atmosphere is a new kind of pollution
Scientists doing high-altitude sampling of material deposited when meteorites burn up in the atmosphere are seeing a shift in the material they’ve been collecting. In a recent study in the journal PNAS, scientists found that increasingly the particles contain material that could have only come from vaporized space junk, such as the upper stages of rocket boosters and re-entering satellites themselves. Daniel Cziczo, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University, said they’re now trying to find out what kind of impact this in material in the stratosphere may have on things like the ozone layer and global warming.
A 200 million year old marine reptile the size of a blue whale
Hundreds of millions of years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the surface of our planet, ichthyosaurs ruled the Earth’s oceans. Analysis of bones found in a river basin in the UK suggests a new species might have been one the biggest marine animals that ever lived. Paleontologist Jimmy Waldron was part of the team, who published their research in the journal PLOS One.
Fox skulls are optimized for diving into snow
Foxes hunt in winter by listening for rodents under deep snow and then leaping and diving into the snow, plunging down to snatch their prey. A team including Sunghwan Jung, a professor of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, did a unique experiment to confirm that the pointed shape of the fox skull is better than any other shape they tested at penetrating deep into snow. The research was published in the journal PNAS.
Scientists propose a plan to study self-spreading vaccines
Researchers concerned with emerging diseases like H5N1 bird flu, which has devastated wild bird populations, are proposing a controversial way to stop the disease. Megan Griffiths, a postdoctoral researcher in viral ecology at the University of Glasgow, says transmissible vaccines would use harmless viruses to carry vaccines against pathogenic viruses. She’s the co-author of a recent study in the journal Science that presents a framework for how they could safely develop self-spreading vaccines.
The logic behind creating more dangerous viruses to understand them better
Anticipating how dangerous viruses — like avian influenza or coronaviruses — could transform from more innocuous forms into much more dangerous ones could help us prepare for future pandemics. Ron Fouchier, a molecular virologist at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Holland, says without doing “gain of function” research, like the kind he published in the journal Science in 2012, we never would have known which changes to lookout for with the current global H5N1 outbreak. Gain of function research, which involves experimenting with viruses to make them more dangerous, has become increasingly controversial, but Fouchier says with Europe’s strict regulations to ensure safety, the risk is worth the reward.
The recent solar storm scrambled undersea sensors
The solar storm that lit up the evening sky with aurora recently was also detected by Canada’s Ocean Network system of undersea oceanographic observatories off both coasts of the country and up in the Arctic. The compass instruments that normally provide the direction of ocean currents fluctuated by as much as 30 degrees at the height of the solar storm and were picked up as deep as 2.7 kilometers. Kate Moran, the CEO and President of Ocean Networks Canada, said these measurements could prove to be useful for solar scientists to understand the depth of the impact geomagnetic storms can have on our electromagnetic field.
Robots are stronger, and faster, and better – but still lose to animals
Despite being built to run, robots still can’t beat real animals in a race, says a new study published in Science Robotics. Researchers compared the physical abilities of animals to the latest generation of agile autonomous robots and showed that while they can exceed biology in strength and speed, robots still can’t match the performance of animals. Simon Fraser University professor Max Donelan explained that biology has better integrated systems, which makes animals able to respond faster to the situation at hand.
How European brown rats took over North America
The brown rat is the clear undisputed winner of the rat race, having established ecological dominance in most cities across the continent. A new study led by Eric Guiry from Trent University involved analyzing piles of rat bones from dig sites and centuries-old shipwrecks to put together a timeline of when and how brown rats took over North America. He found that brown rats came across the pond much earlier than expected, and surprisingly dominated over black rats very quickly, even though the two animals weren’t actually in competition for the same food. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
Decoding whale talk and primate calls
Scientists are turning to technology to help decode animal communication. In the Caribbean researchers sorted rhythmic sperm whale clicks into an entire alphabet, while on land, machine learning algorithms revealed a new level of complexity in the calls of orangutans in Borneo.
Eavesdropping on nature sounds to save ecosystems in US National parks
In a basement at Penn State University, researchers with the Protected Areas Research Collaborative (PARC) Lab are listening to thousands of hours of recordings from the US National Park service in order to track every single noise - whether it be natural or human-made. This data is being used to understand how to preserve natural sounds in the parks, which have been shown to be beneficial to both humans, and wildlife. Now, the team is adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence to listen to more data than ever before. We spoke with co-principal investigator Peter Newman, and co-lab manager Morgan Crump.
In a separate paper, recently published in Science Advances, researchers are calling attention to nature’s smellscapes—the various chemicals put out by trees and animals—and how they can affect humans. The multidisciplinary, international team, led by Gregory Bratman from the University of Washington, provides a conceptual framework for investigating nature’s smells, to fill in the gaps about what those scents are doing to humans, but also, to know what we’re doing to those scents.
Sabre tooth cats had baby-tooth backup
The fearsome canines of saber-toothed cats were terrific weapons for stabbing unfortunate prey, but their impressive length also made them vulnerable to breakage. A new study by University of California, Berkeley associate professor Jack Tseng suggests adolescent California saber-toothed cat kept their baby teeth to buttress the adult sabers, and reinforce them while cats learned to hunt. This research was published in The Anatomical Record.
Global warming could swallow Antarctic meteorites
Over 60 per cent of all meteorites found on Earth are discovered in Antarctica, embedded in the ice. But a new study published in Nature Climate Change cautions that the warming temperatures are causing the dark space rocks to sink below the surface before researchers can get to them. Glaciologist Veronica Tollenaar, who is the lead author of this study, says it’s important to collect as many of these meteorites as possible to avoid losing the insights they provide about the space around us.
This worm’s eyes are bigger than its — everything
A pair of high-functioning eyes is perhaps not something you would associate with the various worm species on our planet. But down in the depths of the Mediterranean sea lives a small, translucent worm with alien-looking eyes that weigh more than twenty times as much as the rest of its head. Now, a group of vision researchers have found that their size is not just for show. Their vision works about as well as that of some mammals. Michael Bok, a researcher in the Lund Vision Group at Lund University in Sweden, said they may be using it to detect prey at night. They report their findings in the journal Current Biology.
We’re breathing out an environment in which respiratory viruses may thrive
One of the questions that’s been raised by the COVID-19 pandemic is just what conditions allow viruses carried in aerosol droplets to survive and spread. A new study in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface found that a CO2 rich environment — like a crowded room with poor ventilation — makes the aerosol particles more acidic, which allows the virus to remain stable and survive longer. Allen Haddrell, a Canadian aerovirologist at the University of Bristol, said this means that CO2 levels don’t just tell you how well ventilated a room is, but it also tell how healthy the virus is in that air.
Why an essential subatomic particle plays the field
The detection of the Higgs boson particle by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 was one of the great moments for modern physics. But while many celebrated the discovery of the “God Particle,” physicist Matt Strassler was a bit frustrated by the way the particle discovery overshadowed what he said was truly important for our understanding of the universe: not the Higgs particle, but the Higgs field. In his new book called, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, he explains how the Higgs field literally makes the universe — and our place in it — what it is today.
Listener Question — Do mated animals reject others crashing their relationships?
We hear the answer from Sarah Jamieson, a behavioural ecologist and assistant professor at Trent University.
We baby talk with both dogs and kids, but our faces say something different
Dogs can use their powerful noses to sniff out PTSD
A quarter of all Labradors are hard-wired to be hungrier and burn less energy
Your pet dog may know more words than you give them credit for
Size, face shape and other factors matter when it comes to a dog’s lifespan, study shows
It’s possible – and worthwhile – to teach an old dog new tricks
What a genome reveals about an extinct species of dogs - and the Indigenous people who cared for them
Chimpanzees are being forced to eat bat feces, and the viruses in it
Researchers in Uganda have noticed a new behaviour in the wild chimps they study. The apes are browsing on bat guano, apparently to access the nutrients it contains, as their normal source for these nutrients has been destroyed by humans. Since bats are carriers of a range of diseases, from ebola to coronaviruses, this may be a new way these diseases could spread. The study was published in Communications Biology. Dr Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was part of the team.
Controversial methods are working to buy Canada’s caribou some time
Woodland caribou have been in steady decline for decades, as logging, oil and gas exploration and other disturbances compromise their western mountain habitat. Steady progress has been made to restore habitat in order to save these caribou, but since these forests will take half a century to regrow, conservationists are trying a variety of interim actions to buy the caribou some time. A new study led by Clayton Lamb from the University of British Columbia Okanagan found that these methods, including direct feeding, maternal penning, and, controversially, culling predatory wolves, have helped caribou recover to some extent, but restoration of their habitat will be necessary for full recovery. The research was published in the journal Ecological Applications.
Giant ancient Pacific salmon had tusks sticking out of its face
Millions of years ago, enormous three metre-long salmon inhabited the seas of the Pacific coast. Named Oncorhynchus rastrosus, this ancient giant was first described in the 1970s as having long front fangs, which led to it being known colloquially as a “saber-toothed salmon.” But a new study published in PLOS ONE sets the record straight: the teeth actually protruded out to the sides from the fish’s upper jaw, as tusks do. Lead study author and Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine professor Kerin Claeson says despite their menacing look, the salmon did not hunt with these tusks, since these strange fish were filter feeders.
The Gulf oil spill may have had ecological impacts we haven’t seen yet
Fourteen years ago an explosion destroyed the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and kicked off the largest oil spill in history. While commercial fisheries have largely recovered from the disaster, there are signs that rarer and more vulnerable species might have been devastated. Prosanta Chakrabarty from Louisiana State University surveyed deep sea fish catalogued in museum collections around the world and found that out of 78 endemic species found only in the Gulf, 29 of them haven’t been spotted in the years since the spill. The research was published in the Biodiversity Data Journal.
Primordial black holes may be the solution the problem of missing dark matter
The hunt for exotic black holes that Stephen Hawking first predicted back in the 1970s is now well underway. Primordial black holes behave just like any other black hole, but they would have formed in the early universe and could be any size. Many scientists are particularly interested in the primordial black holes that are the size of an atom and have the mass of an asteroid because they suspect they could be the answer for the missing dark matter in our universe.
The climate is changing. So are we. On What On Earth, you’ll explore a world of solutions with host Laura Lynch and our team of journalists. In 1970, 20 million people showed up to fight for the environment on the first Earth Day. More than five decades later, is it time for this much tamer global event to return to its radical roots?
OG organizer Denis Hayes recounts how – amidst other counterculture movements at the time – his team persuaded roughly one in ten Americans to take to the streets. As he approaches 80, Denis offers his singular piece of advice to the next generation of climate leaders. Then, environmental warriors Maria Blancas and Axcelle Campana share ideas on what a reinspired Earth Day could look like – including making it a public holiday.
More episodes of What On Earth are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/5zF03qcm
We love to hear from our listeners and regularly feature them on the show. Have a question or idea? Email Earth@cbc.ca
This researcher wants a new particle accelerator to use before she’s dead
Physicists exploring the nature of reality need ever more capable particle colliders, so they’re exploring a successor to the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. But that new machine is at least decades away. Tova Holmes, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is one of the physicists calling for a different kind of collider that can come online before the end of her career – or her life. This device would use a particle not typically used in particle accelerators: the muon.
Is venting the best way to deal with anger? The scientist says chill out.
It turns out that acting out your anger might not be the best way to get rid of it. Sophie Kjaervik, a researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., analyzed 154 studies of the different ways to deal with anger. Her results, published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review, suggest that techniques that reduce your heart rate and calm your mind are more effective than blowing off steam.
High intensity wildfires may release toxic forms of metals
Wildfire smoke might be more dangerous than you think. A recent study in the journal Nature Communications found that when wildfires pass over soils or rocks rich in a normally harmless metal called chromium, it is transformed into a toxic form. The hotter and more intense the wildfire is, the more of this metal becomes toxic. Scott Fendorf, an Earth system science professor at Stanford University, said this study shows we should factor in the type of geology wildfires pass over to provide more targeted air quality warnings about smoke risks.
AI might help solve the problem of runaway conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theories seem to have multiplied in the internet era and so far, we haven’t had much luck in debunking these beliefs. The preliminary findings of a new study on PsyArXiv, a site for psychology studies that have yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that artificial intelligence may have more success. Thomas Costello, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at MIT was the lead author on this study, and said their findings can provide a window into how to better debunk conspiracy beliefs.
An Indigenous ecologist on why we need to stop and listen to save the planet
Earth day is April 22. And Earth is not in great shape to celebrate the day. Overheated, overpopulated, overexploited – we’re not being particularly careful with our planet. We talk to Indigenous ecologist Jennifer Grenz, of the University of British Columbia, about her new book, which is part memoir, part prescription for the medicine our planet needs – a compound of science and traditional wisdom. Her book is Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A journey toward personal and ecological healing.
Old canned salmon provides a record of parasite infection
To study marine ecosystems from the past, scientists picked through canned salmon dating back more than four decades to measure levels of parasites in the fish. Natalie Mastick, a postdoctoral researcher in marine ecology at Yale University, said she found the parasite load in two species of salmon increased in their samples between 1979 - 2021. She says this suggests their ecosystems provided more of the hosts the parasites needed, including marine mammals, which could reflect an increasingly healthy ecosystem. Their study is in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
Mars has more influence on Earth than non-astrologers might have thought
Mars is, on average, about 225 million km from Earth, which would suggest that it has little impact on our planet. Which is true, but as they say a little goes a long way. In a recent study in Nature Communications, researchers studying the history of deep ocean currents found a surprising 2.4-million-year cycle where giant whirlpools form on the ocean floor, linked to cycles in the interactions of Mars and Earth orbiting the Sun. The team, including geophysicist Dietmar Müller from the University of Sydney, say this may act as a backup system to mix the oceans as the Earth warms.
Medieval English silver pennies travelled a long way
Starting in the middle of the 7th century, economic development in medieval England was spurred by the increasing use of handy silver coins that greased the wheels of trade. To date, 7000 of these silver coins have been found that date to the period between the years 660 and 750 AD, but the source of the silver has been mysterious. Using modern technology, researchers from the University of Cambridge, including historian Rory Naismith, have traced the silver right across the continent to its Byzantine source. In their study in the journal Antiquity, the researchers suggest the silver was brought to Europe a hundred years earlier in the form of silver objects, which were melted down and struck as coins in order to put more money into circulation.
Bonobos are not as nice as their reputation suggests
Bonobos are the lesser-known cousin of chimpanzees, and have a reputation for being the more peaceful ape. But a new study published in Current Biology reveals a dark side of bonobos. Anthropologist Maud Mouginot observed the behaviour of bonobos and chimpanzees in their dense tropical forest habitats in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. She was shocked to find out that male bonobos were twice as likely to be aggressive toward other males than chimpanzees. She said this suggests that we need to have a more nuanced view of aggression within and across primate species, including humans.
COVID infections are causing brain inflammation, drops in IQ, and years of brain aging
For many people COVID was more than a respiratory disease. We’re learning now just what kind of impact an infection can have on the brain. It can affect cognition – leading to the famous brain fog – and even shrink and prematurely age the brain. One of the researchers studying these effects is Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, he has found COVID patients suffering from brain fog, confusion, tingling, mini strokes, and even seizure disorders.
Listener Question – The eclipse and the moon’s temperature.
A listener posting as Jeff on X writes: “How hot did the side of the moon that faced the sun get during the eclipse?” We get the answer from Nikhil Arora, an astrophysicist from Queen’s University in Kingston.
Seeing a black hole’s magnetic personality
Scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope have produced a new image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. And this image is a little different: it captures the powerful magnetic fields that are acting as the cosmic cutlery feeding mass into the singularity. Avery Broderick is part of the Event Horizon Telescope team, he’s also a professor at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, and associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for theoretical physics.
Decoding how chickadees maintain a mental map of their food caches
Chickadees have an uncanny ability to recall thousands of secret stashes of food with a centimetre-scale precision. Salmaan Chettih, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Columbia University, investigated how chickadees encode their internal treasure maps. In his study in the journal Cell, he found the chickadee brains produce a unique pattern of activity — akin to a neural “barcode” — that marks the X on its mental treasure map.
Italians don’t just speak more with their hands, they speak differently
Researchers comparing Swedish speakers with Italian speakers have found that the gestures they commonly use to accompany spoken language are quite different in kind. Lund University scientists Maria Graziano and Marianne Gullberg recorded the hand gestures study participants used when describing a children’s cartoon to their friends. According to the results published in a Frontiers in Communication journal, Swedish speakers used gestures that concretely represented the subjects of their speech, while Italian speakers used abstract gestures more related to emphasis.
What came first, the drumstick or the omelette?
New archaeological work along the famous Silk Road trade route between Asia and Europe has added to the picture of how the chicken was brought from its southeast Asian homeland to the rest of Eurasia. An international team of researchers, including archaeobotanist Robert Spengler, analyzed tiny eggshell fragments from the soil of multiple sites in Central Asia. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that the motivation for domesticating the fowl was not the chicken, but their eggs.
LED lighting is bright, efficient, and perhaps a problem
The global transition to LED lighting seems to be having some concerning impacts on the natural world and human health. These energy efficient artificial lights produce different spectra than older incandescent technology, or the natural light of the Sun that life on Earth evolved with over billions of years. LED lighting is brighter, bluer, and more widely used than incandescent lighting.
Glen Jeffery, a professor of neuroscience from University College London, said that as a result, we may be paying the price with our health due to being oversaturated with blue light and starved of red and infrared light. In a new study in the Journal of Biophotonics, he found that exposing people to red and infrared light lowered their blood glucose levels by “charging up” our cells’ energy production.
Artificial light at night is also having “a profound impact” on our environment in how it affects plants and wildlife and the ecosystems they’re in, according to Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter. He said for nocturnal animals, the challenge they face from light pollution is the equivalent to humans losing daylight during the daytime. His review was published in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources.
Archaeologists identify a medieval war-horse graveyard near Buckingham Palace
We know knights in shining armor rode powerful horses, but remains of those horses are rare. Now, researchers studying equine remains from a site near Buckingham Palace have built a case, based on evidence from their bones, that these animals were likely used in jousting tournaments and battle. Archeologist Katherine Kanne says the bone analysis also revealed a complex, continent-crossing medieval horse trading network that supplied the British elites with sturdy stallions. This paper was published in Science Advances.
In an ice-free Arctic, Polar bears are dining on duck eggs — and gulls are taking advantage
Researchers using drones to study ground-nesting birds in the Arctic have observed entire colonies being devastated by marauding polar bears who would normally be out on the ice hunting seals – except the ice isn’t there. What’s more, now they’re enabling a second predator – hungry gulls who raid the nests in the bears’ wake. Andrew Barnas made the observations of this “gull tornado” following around polar bears in East Bay Island in Nunavut. The research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
A NASA mission might have the tools to detect life on Europa from space
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, due to launch this fall, is set to explore the jewel of our solar system: Jupiter’s moon, Europa. The mission’s focus is to determine if the icy moon, thought to harbour an ocean with more water than all of the water on Earth, is amenable to life. However, postdoctoral researcher Fabian Klenner, now at the University of Washington, led a study published in the journal Science Advances that demonstrated how the spacecraft may be able to detect fragments of bacterial life in a single grain of ice ejected from the surface of the moon.
Pollution is preventing pollinators from finding plants by scent
Our polluted air is transforming floral scents so pollinators that spread their pollen can no longer recognize them. In a new study in the journal Science, researchers found that a certain compound in air pollution reacts with the flower’s scent molecules so pollinators — like the hummingbird hawk-moths that pollinate at night — fail to recognize them. Jeremy Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Naples, said the change in scent made the flowers smell “less fruity and less fresh.”
An Australian Atlantis and underwater archeological remains in the Baltic
During the last ice age sea levels were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, which means vast tracts of what are currently coastal seafloor were dry land. Geologists and archaeologists are searching for these lost landscapes to identify places prehistoric humans might have occupied. These included a country sized area of Australia that could have been home to half a million people. Archaeologist Kasih Norman and her colleagues published their study of this now-drowned landscape in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Another example is an undersea wall off the coast of Northern Germany that preserves an underwater reindeer hunting ground, described in research led by Jacob Geersen, published in the journal PNAS.
How animals dealt with the ‘Anthropause’ during COVID lockdowns (1:04)
During the COVID lockdowns human behaviour changed dramatically, and wildlife scientists were interested in how that in turn changed the behaviour of animals in urban, rural and wilderness ecosystems. In a massive study of camera trap images, a team from the University of British Columbia has built a somewhat surprising picture of how animals responded to a human lockdown. Cole Burton, Canada Research Chair in Terrestrial Mammal Conservation at the University of British Columbia, was part of the team and their research was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution
Scientists helping maintain an essential ice road to a northern community (9:40)
The only ground connection between the community of Délı̨nę in the NWT and the rest of the country is a winter ice road that crosses Great Bear Lake. But climate warming in the north is making the season for the road shorter, and the ice on the lake less stable. A team of scientists from Wilfrid Laurier University, led by Homa Kheyrollah Pour, are supplementing traditional knowledge about the ice with drones, sensors, satellites and radar to help the community maintain a safe connection with the world.
Stars nudging the solar system’s planets leads to literal chaos (17:40)
The orbits of the planets in our solar system are in a complex dance, orchestrated by the gravitational pull from the sun but influenced by their interactions with each other. Now, due the findings of a new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, that dance is a lot harder to predict. Nathan Kaib, from the Planetary Science Institute, said the chaos that stars passing by our solar system introduces to simulations deep into the past or far into the future make our planetary promenade predictions a lot less certain.
A freaky fish, the gar, really is a living fossil because evolution has barely changed it (26:33)`
The seven species of gar fish alive today are nearly indistinguishable from their prehistoric fossilised relatives that lived millions of years ago. Now in a new study in the journal Evolution, scientists describe why these “living fossils” have barely changed and why two lineages separated by 105-million years can hybridise. Chase Brownstein, a graduate student at Yale University, discovered the gar’s genome has changed less over time than any other species we know, a finding which could hold the key to fighting human diseases like cancer.
Water, water, everywhere. But will we have enough to drink? (33:47)
To mark world water day, Quirks & Quarks producer Amanda Buckiewicz is looking at the challenges we’re facing with our global freshwater resources. It’s one of Nature’s bounties, and vital to agriculture and healthy ecosystems. But climate change and overexploitation are creating a global water crisis as glaciers melt, snowpack becomes less predictable, rainfall patterns change, and we overdraw the global groundwater bank.
We spoke with:
Miina Porkka, associate professor from the University of Eastern Finland. Related paper published in the journal Nature.
Christina Aragon, PhD student at Oregon State University. Related paper published in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.
Katrina Moser, associate professor and chair of the department of Geography and Environment at Western University.
Scott Jasechko, associate professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Related paper published in the journal Nature.
Why a detective is studying blood spatters in zero-gravity
There hasn’t been a murder on the International Space Station — yet. But Crime Scene Investigator Zack Kowalske has been studying how blood spatters in microgravity so that when someone does commit the first astro-cide, he’ll be able to use science to figure out whodunit. Kowalske sent a blood substitute for a ride on a parabolic microgravity flight to study how the absence of gravity changes how it moves, and discovered that surface tension takes over to shape how the blood splatters. The research was published in the journal Forensic Science International Reports.
Lifting the fog to let starlight shine through at the cosmic dawn
Not too long after the Big Bang, the universe went dark for many millions of years. Stars, black holes and galaxies began to form, but the universe was full of a cosmic fog in the form of light-absorbing hydrogen gas that blocked light from shining through. Hakim Atek, from the Paris Institute of Astrophysics led a group that used the James Webb Space Telescope to identify what cleared that fog: dwarf galaxies. In his new study in the journal Nature, Atek describes how young and tiny galaxies full of super-bright stars emitted enough radiation to burn through the fog and fill the universe with light.
Do whales get hot flashes? They have menopause
We don’t know if whales experience the same symptoms as human women, but in five known species of toothed whales, females do experience menopause. This is unusual as extended post-reproductive life is very rare in mammals — most of the time animals reproduce until the end of their lifespan. A new study led by Sam Ellis from the University of Exeter suggests that they have it for the same reason humans are thought to: because grandmothers are useful to have around. The research was published in the journal Nature.
Bees can learn tasks that are more complicated than they can invent
Researchers have laboriously taught bumblebees a complex, multi-step task that they never would have learned in nature, and found that once they learned it, other bumblebees could learn to do it from then. This suggests that they share with humans the ability to hold cultural knowledge that exceeds their own innovative capabilities. Behavioural scientist Alice Bridges was part of the team and the research was published in the journal Nature.
Our planet’s circulatory system depends on animals eating, excreting and expiring
Did you know our planet has a circulatory system? It moves vast amounts of nutrients over huge distances, processing them to extract energy and efficiently recycle them as well. It’s called animal life, and in a new book called Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World, biologist Joe Roman explains how it works — and how restoring wild animal populations might be the best nature-based tool we have to beat the climate crisis.
Nature’s nurturing side — disabled primates thrive in the wild with community support
Survival of the fittest for primates in the wild often includes them going out of their way to accommodate those with physical disabilities. In a study in the American Journal of Primatology, scientists reviewed 114 studies of a wide range of non-human primates that spanned more than nine decades. Brogan Stewart, a PhD candidate from Concordia was part of the team that found that more often than not, the physical disabilities arose as a result of human activities, and in the face of those pressures, primates show a remarkable resilience in how they care for those with malformations or impairments.
Beetle larvae feeding on dino feathers left signs of that relationship trapped in amber
Bits left behind from a beetle larvae feasting on dinosaur feathers shed by a theropod became trapped in tree resin that preserved evidence of this relationship for 105 million years. The beetle larvae is related to a beetle that’s known to live in birds’ nests and feed on their feathers. Ricardo Perez de la Fuente, the senior author of the study in PNAS from Oxford University Museum of Natural History, said finding dinosaur feathers is a find in itself but to find evidence of two organisms in deep time interacting is incredibly rare.
Jellyfish demonstrate how it’s possible to learn and remember even without a brain
A jellyfish the size of a pinky nail can learn to spot and dodge obstacles using their visual system with 24 eyes but no centralized brain. By simulating their natural murky mangrove environment in a lab, scientists discovered how quickly the box jellyfish learned to maneuver around roots in their path. Jan Bielecki, a biologist at Kiel University, said their findings in the journal Current Biology suggest that learning is an integral function of neurons.
Bottlenose dolphins sense their prey’s electrical fields through their whisker dimples
Dolphins were once thought to be acoustic specialists due to their hearing ability and how they detect prey through their reflected pings using echo-location. But when their next meal is hiding in the sand, bottlenose dolphins also seem to be able to hone in on their prey by sensing their electrical fields. Tim Hüttner, a biologist at Nuremberg Zoo, said dolphins likely use echo-location to detect from afar and electroreception to close in on their prey. His research was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
How documenting the disappearance of the great auk led to the discovery of extinction
Before a fateful trip in 1858 when two biologists traveled to Iceland in search of the rare penguin-like great auk, the word “extinction” had never been used to describe a species that humans wiped out of existence. After being unable to locate any living great auks, John Wolley and Alfred Newton turned their attention to documenting the demise of this flightless bird. The new book, The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson explores the case that ushered in our modern understanding of extinction.
Listener question
Chris Corbett from North Sydney asks: If we see the star Betelgeuse, that’s 642 light years from Earth, going supernova, does that mean it might have already gone supernova?
For the answer, we went to Jess McIvor, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia.
Speedy ocean predators change their skin colour to signal they’re going in for the kill (1:02)
Marlin are predatory fish that can reach tremendous speeds in pursuit of food, making collisions between them potentially deadly. A new study has shown that the fish display bright and vivid skin colours to signal to other marlin when they’re attacking prey, so as to avoid butting heads. Alicia Burns and her team from the Science of Intelligence Cluster, Humboldt University used drones to capture video footage of the marlins’ hunting behaviour.
The tiny genetic fluke that led humans — and other great apes — to lose our tails (9:15)
Back when in our evolutionary history, a fragment of genetic material accidentally found itself in in a gene long been known to be important for the development of our entire back end. The result of this mutation, according to a study in the journal Nature, was that we and our great ape ancestors lost our tails. Itai Yanai, a cancer biologist from New York University Grossman Medical School, identified the mutation and found when they duplicated it in mice, they also lost their tails.
A cannibal star shows signs of its last meal (18:06)
Astronomers have identified a nearby white dwarf star with what they are calling a ‘scar’ of material visible on its surface. This was probably an asteroid flung towards the star, ripped apart by its gravity, and its rubble drawn onto the star’s surface by its powerful magnetic field. This is the first time such a phenomenon has been seen. This study was conducted by a team including astronomer John Landstreet, a professor emeritus from the Physics and Astronomy Department at Western University.
Stone age craftsmen acted like engineers when selecting materials for their tools (26:32)
A new study of what it takes to make efficient and effective stone tools, like the ones ancient humans were producing back in the Middle Stone Age, shows how discriminating they were in the materials they selected. Patrick Schmidt, an archaeologist from University of Tübingen, published a study in the journal PNAS about a model he developed to assess how well suited the raw materials were for the type of tools they were creating. Schmidt said their findings suggest that stone age craftsmen had an engineer’s understanding of the mechanical properties of the materials they used.
Boreal forest on the move — the past, present, and potential future of the ‘lungs of the planet’ (35:39)
The boreal forest has an important role in maintaining a healthy planet, by storing carbon, purifying the air and water, and helping to regulate the climate. Researchers are using novel ways to understand how the boreal forest has changed over time, to help predict how it can change in the future.
Paleoecologist Sandra Brügger traced a detailed history of the forests in Eastern Canada over the past 850 years by studying trapped pollen found thousands of kilometers away in the Greenland ice sheet. The ice cores allowed the team to look at the shrinking and expansion of the forest since the Little Ice Age, and spot the effects of humans as they took over the landscape. The research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Then, by doing detailed analysis of trees along the Brooks mountain range in Alaska, a team of researchers including Colin Maher discovered a link between retreating sea ice and an expanding Boreal forest. When the sea ice disappears, the open water generates more snow, which not only blankets the landscape and protects the young seedlings, but it also helps the soil unlock more nutrients for the growing trees. The research was published in the journal Science.
We now know what happened to a supernova discovered by a Canadian 37 years ago (0:58)
A mystery about the ultimate fate of an exploding star has been solved. Canadian astronomer Ian Shelton discovered the new bright light in the sky back in February 1987, and recognized it as the first supernova to be visible to the naked eye in 400 years. In a new study in the journal Science, astrophysicist Claes Fransson from Stockholm University, confirmed that the remaining cinder collapsed into a super-dense neutron star.
A vibrating pill makes pigs feel full (10:30)
There’s a lot of interest in weight loss drugs right now, but a new technology could one day be able to help control appetite without pharmaceuticals. Researchers at MIT have developed a mechanical pill that, when ingested, vibrates in the gut, stimulating the nerves that signal fullness much like drinking a full glass of water before a meal. The research was led by Shriya Srinivasan, a former MIT graduate student who is now an assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard University. She says that while it hasn’t been tested in humans, pigs ate 40% less food after ingesting the pill. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
Wildebeest push Zebras out in front in the annual Serengeti migration (18:22)
Nearly two million animals — zebras, wildebeest and gazelles — migrate through Africa’s Serengeti plain every year. It was thought the Zebras led the migration. But a new large-scale study has shown that the reason the Zebras go first is that they’re being pushed ahead by the more numerous Wildebeest who eat everything in sight. Michael Anderson from Wake Forest University in North Carolina shares the new findings in this migration pattern.
Temperature and pollution are conspiring to mess up sea turtle sex ratios (26:55)
Biologists have known that higher temperatures cause endangered green sea turtle hatchlings to develop as females more often. Now a team has discovered that pollution can exacerbate this, causing sex ratios to skew even more. Arthur Barraza of the Australian Rivers Institute in the School of Environment and Science at Griffith University in Australia said this could add to the turtles’ difficulties if too few males are available for reproduction. The research was published in Frontiers in Marine Science.
How Icelanders suffer and benefit from their volcanically active home (36:14)
Scientists studying the recent volcanic activity near the town of Grindavik now have a much better understanding of what’s behind the recurring eruptions. Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, said they’ve seen pressure building up and moving underground repeatedly before erupting at the surface. Their study was published in the journal Science.
Over in the northeast region of the country, in Kafla, scientists and engineers are busy preparing to tunnel into a relatively shallow magma chamber. Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, the director of GEORG, described their plan to dig into the magma chamber that was discovered by accident for scientific research. However they are also interested in whether it can be exploited as a potential energy source ten times more powerful than current geothermal energy sources.
Atlantic ocean circulation edging closer to potentially catastrophic climate tipping point
The stability of much of the world’s climate depends on ocean currents in the Atlantic that bring warm water from the tropics north and send cool water south. New research in the journal Science Advances confirms what scientists have long feared: that we are on course to this tipping point that could cut off this important circulation pattern, with severe consequences. René van Westen from Utrecht University, said if we reach this critical threshold, it could plunge Europe into a deep freeze, disrupt rains in India, South America and Africa, and lead to even more sea level rise along the eastern North American coast — all within 100 years.
Humpback whales look for quiet corners to broadcast their breeding songs
Scientists wanted to know why the thousands of humpback whales in Hawaii for breeding season move closer to shore to sing their choruses at night. Anke Kuegler, a marine biologist at Syracuse University, tracked whales to get a better understanding of their daily movement patterns. She found that during the day, they take their songs offshore, likely to ensure potential mates or other male competitors can hear their songs in the crowded underwater environment. Their research was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
A tiny marsupial sacrifices everything — including sleep and life itself — for love
The Antechinus, a small mouse-like marsupial that is native to Australia, has a short, frenzied, three week-long annual breeding season, after which the males drop dead. A new study, led by Erika Zaid at La Trobe University, shows the males will sacrifice a significant amount of sleep to ensure they don’t miss out on their one shot at reproductive success. The researchers don't believe the sleep loss leads to their demise—in fact, they show very little signs of exhaustion despite losing out on so many zzz’s.
How to encourage climate action without bumming people out
In a global study involving almost 60,000 participants in 63 countries, behavioural psychologists compared 11 different ways of talking about climate change to see which one encouraged the most action. Madalina Vlasceanu and her team at New York University found that, unsurprisingly, the results varied widely depending on demographics. Some of the more successful interventions tested include writing a letter to future generations, showing examples of past effective collective action, and emphasizing scientific consensus on the causes of climate change.
Saturn’s ‘death star’ moon could have the water of life
Liquid water has been found in what astronomers say is the solar system’s most unlikely place
Saturn’s moon Mimas is a small body with an irregular orbit, best known for its resemblance to the Death Star in the Star Wars movies. A new study in the journal Nature, led by astronomer Valery Lainey, suggests it has a liquid layer of water beneath its frozen surface, which may mean life-sustaining water is far more common in the solar system than we thought.
Moths aren’t drawn to the flame - they’re just really confused by them
A new study suggests that insects flit around artificial light at night because they are confused, not because of a fatal attraction. Sam Fabian and Yash Sondhi used motion capture and high speed imagery to understand insects’ flight patterns, and found that they always turned their backs to the light, which leaves them trapped in a spiral around the source. This suggests the insects are mistaking the lights for the sky, which normally helps tell them which way is up.
Blue whales are genetically healthy but are breeding with fin whales, study suggests (1:03) Researchers have sequenced the genome of a blue whale that washed up in Newfoundland in 2014, and used it to do a comparative study of North Atlantic blue whales. A team led by Mark Engstrom, curator emeritus at the Royal Ontario Museum found that despite their small population, the whales are genetically diverse and connected across the north Atlantic, but that on average blue whales from this group are, genetically, about 3.5 per cent fin whale. The work was published in the journal Conservation Genetics. Sea otters’ ravenous appetite for crabs is reshaping a California coastal marshland (10:10) The return of sea otters to salt-marshes on the California coast has halted the erosion of the marshes that occurred in their absence. Without otters, crabs quickly overpopulated and made the area look like “Swiss cheese” by burrowing into the marsh sediments and eating the vegetation’s root system. Brent Hughes from Sonoma State University said their study demonstrates the importance of predators in maintaining the integrity of these vulnerable salt-marshes to boost climate change resiliency along the coast. What will become of our solar system as our sun evolves into a white dwarf star? (19:03) Over many billions of years our sun, and stars of similar size, will first swell into a red giant star, and then contract into a small, dense white dwarf star. A new study using the James Webb Space Telescope has surveyed nearby white dwarf star systems to understand the fate of their planets, and astronomer Susan Mullally says this can help predict our planet’s fate as well. Permafrost has shaped Arctic rivers — and as it melts much will change (27:23) A satellite survey of the frozen north has demonstrated how much permafrost has shaped the landscape, by limiting the number of rivers that can carve into the frozen land. Geoscientist Joanmarie Del Vecchio warns that as permafrost melts, the waters will find many more paths, and this could unleash carbon equal to the annual emissions of 35 million cars for every degree of warming. The research was published in the journal PNAS. Understanding the evolution of what came first, the chicken or the egg (35:44) While the marine ancestors of all terrestrial vertebrates laid eggs in the water, scientists long thought that the first terrestrial animals must have been laying eggs to conquer life on land. In an attempt to untangle this mystery, scientists compared extinct and living animals to trace how far back in their evolution the first egg-layers appeared. Michael Benton, from the University of Bristol, said their study didn’t discern if the first land animals were laying soft-shelled eggs or giving birth to live young, but hard-shelled eggs like modern bird eggs came much later. In the Australian Alps, egg-laying lizards from the valleys breed with live-birth bearing lizards from higher up in the mountain to create hybrids with traits across the whole spectrum in between. Katherine Elmer, from the University of Glasgow, described her study of this population that allowed them to identify the genetic differences between laying eggs and giving birth to live young.
Shark declines: finning regulations might have bitten off more than they can chewIn recent years governments around the world have attempted to slow the catastrophic decline in shark numbers with regulations, including on the practice of shark finning. But a new study led by marine biologist Boris Worm and published in the journal Science suggests that these regulations have backfired and shark mortality is still rising. The reason is that shark fishers responded by keeping all of the shark, and developing ever more markets for shark meat and oils, such as in supplements, cosmetics, and even hidden as “whitefish” or “flake” in fish and chip markets.
Dogs like TV about dogs but don’t give a rat’s about squirrelsLike a lot of us, dogs spend a certain amount of time in front of the TV. But what are they watching and what do they like? Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was interested in finding what dogs like to watch on TV so that she could develop new ways to test dog vision. Her study, recently published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, revealed that, unsurprisingly, dogs preferred to watch other dogs, and ten per cent also enjoyed watching cartoons as much as live action animals. The more unexpected finding was that the dogs were not as interested in watching humans, squirrels, or trucks.
An ancient tree’s crowning gloryPaleontologists working in Norton, New Brunswick have made an extraordinary discovery: a fully intact 350 million year old fossilized tree unlike any previously known to science. Matt Stinson, the assistant curator of geology and paleontology at the New Brunswick Museum, says it’s extremely rare in the fossil record to find a fully intact tree like this one that has its trunk, branches and leaves still attached. Olivia King, a research associate at the museum, described it as “odd and whimsical,” like the trees from Dr. Seuss’s famous book The Lorax. Their study is in the journal Current Biology.
There was an old elephant who swallowed an ant…The complex interdependence of plants and animals in an ecosystem are often hard to fathom until they go wrong. This is illustrated by a new study in Kenya showing how an invasive ant led to elephants knocking down trees, affecting how lions hunt zebras, which turned out to be bad news for buffalo. Adam Ford from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan is part of the team on this study published in Science.
Understanding when (earlier), and how (cleverly), stone-age people lived in EuropeNew technology to study fragments of bone found in a cave in Germany is leading to a rewriting of the history of how Homo sapiens established themselves in Europe, when the continent was dominated by Neanderthals. A team, led by Jean-Jacques Hublin, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, uncovered human bones dating back 46,000 years in a cave in Northern Germany, which means the Homo sapiens were living side by side much earlier with Neanderthals in a frigid ice-age climate instead of sticking to the tropics like previously believed. The research, including detailed climatic reconstructions, led to three papers published in the journal Nature.A separate find is giving new insight into their material culture as archaeologists have uncovered a subtly clever tool they think ancient humans would have used to spin rope. The team built replicas of the tool and found it worked remarkably effectively to twist plant fibres into strong rope. Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist from the University of Tübingen in Germany, was part of the team, and the work was published in Science Advances.
Oil sands produce more air pollution than industry’s required to report, study says (0:54)The volume of airborne organic carbon pollutants — some of the same pollutants that lead to smog in cities — produced by Alberta’s oil sands have been measured at levels up to 6,300 per cent higher than we thought. John Luggio, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said their cutting edge techniques in their new study picked up many pollutants industry hasn’t been required to track. Mark Cameron from Pathways Alliance, the industry group representing several oil sands companies, agreed that these findings warrant further review. Megalodon was enormous — but perhaps less husky than we’d thought (9:20) The extinct shark megalodon was likely the largest predatory shark to ever swim the oceans, but a new reconstruction suggests it was not quite the behemoth we thought it was. Scientists had assumed it was beefy and thick like a modern great white shark, but a new study says the evidence suggests it was a slim, sleek killer.Philip Sternes, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside in the department of evolution, ecology and organismal biology, worked with a team of 26 international scientists on the study featured in Palaeontologia Electronica.Astronomers find a planet with a massive, gassy tail (17:46)Observations of a large, Jupiter-sized exoplanet closely orbiting a nearby star have revealed that the planet has a huge, comet-like tail. The 560,000 kilometer-long tail seems to be a result of the powerful stellar wind from the star stripping the atmosphere away from the gaseous planet, and blowing it out into space. The find was made by a team at University of California Los Angeles, including astrophysicist Dakotah Tyler, and was published in The Astrophysical Journal.Put down your laptop, pick up your pen — writing stimulates brain connectivity (26:22)A new study looking at the activation of networks in the brain associated with learning and memory suggests that writing by hand produces much more brain connectivity than typing on a keyboard. This adds to the evidence that writing by hand is an aid to memory. Audrey van der Meer, a professor of neuropsychology and director of the Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, led the work, which was published in Frontiers in Psychology.The aftermath of a record-smashing volcano: Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai two years later (34:09)The aftermath of the record-smashing Tonga volcano that’ll rewrite textbooksRecord-smashing Tonga volcano sheds new light on how underwater volcanoes blowIn January 2022, the largest underwater volcanic eruption ever recorded devastated the seafloor of the southwestern Pacific. A tsunami washed ashore in nearby Tonga — causing significant property damage, but thankfully taking few lives. Kevin Mackay, a marine geologist from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, said this blast broke many records, including the loudest sound, highest eruption and fastest underwater avalanches ever recorded. And we’re still feeling the heating effects from it today from the water vapour it shot into the stratosphere.
A controversial fishing method may release CO2 from the sea floorBottom trawling is a widely-used fishing method that involves dragging weighted nets that scrape along the seafloor. It’s sometimes been criticized for damaging marine ecosystems. Now a new study in Frontiers in Marine Science suggests that it also can release significant amounts of carbon trapped in seafloor sediments into the atmosphere. Trisha Atwood, an associate professor at Utah State University and a marine researcher with National Geographic’s Pristine Sea Program worked with scientists at NASA and The Global Fishing Watch for this study.
Travel tales a mammoth tusk can tellResearchers have been analyzing the tusk of a woolly mammoth that died in Alaska 14,000 years ago. Using modern chemical analysis, they’ve been able to track the pachyderm’s travels through its life, and the trail it took to its final demise, likely at the hands of human hunters. Dr. Matthew Wooller at the University of Alaska Fairbanks worked with the Healy Lake Village Council, the University of Ottawa and Hendrik Poinar’s laboratory at McMaster University on this study published in Science Advances.
Common sense is not that common, but is quite widely distributedSociologists at the University of Pennsylvania have helped answer the age-old question, do most of us have common sense? Researchers including Mark Whiting explored this by asking 2000 people if they agreed with thousands of terms that had been deemed as “common sense.” In a paper published in PNAs, the team found that the larger the group, the less likely there was commonly shared knowledge, and no one age, educational or political group stood out as having more common sense than others.
Male birds who practice their songs do better with femalesA new study suggests that male songbirds who attract mates with their songs need to practice their tunes or their attractiveness suffers. The researchers found a way to harmlessly discourage the birds from singing, and found that without practice females snubbed their efforts. Iris Adam, a biologist at Southern Denmark University, was part of the team, whose research was published in Nature Communications.
Better living through pharmacology — Can drugs duplicate a healthy lifestyle?The key to good health used to be simple: eat less and exercise. But popular new weight loss drugs could soon be joined on the shelf with a new class of pharmaceuticals that duplicate the effects of a trip to the gym. We explore just how these new pharmaceuticals work and just how much they can replace a healthy lifestyle.
First developed to treat type 2 diabetes, now widely popular as weight loss drugs, GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic may in fact have benefits beyond helping with obesity and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Daniel Drucker, a senior research scientist at Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and the University of Toronto, early evidence suggests they may also work to treat kidney disease, addiction related disorders, metabolic liver disease, peripheral vascular disease, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.To counter our modern sedentary lifestyles, scientists are also looking for the equivalent of an exercise pill. Ronald Evans, a professor at the Salk Institute, has been working on drugs that control genetic “master switches” that can turn on the same network of genes — and confer many of the same benefits — as a brisk walk or a jog would do.
How history’s largest ape met its end For nearly two million years, a gigantic ape, three meters tall and weighing a quarter of a tonne, lived in what is now southern China, before mysteriously disappearing. Exactly why the Gigantopithecus Blacki went extinct has been a huge mystery for paleontologists, especially because other apes were able to thrive at the time. Now a massive study, co-led by geochronologist Kira Westaway of Macquarie University, reveals their size was a disadvantage, and left them unable to adapt to a changing climate. The research was published in the journal Nature. People with PTSD process their trauma as if it’s happening in the present Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by intrusive thoughts that cause people to relive their trauma. In a new study in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists have figured out that this is reflected in brain activity. Daniela Schiller, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said their brains respond differently with traumatic memories than with ordinary memories, causing the traumatic memories to feel as if they are happening in the present, rather than the past. Paleontologists identify animal skin 4½ times older than the last dinosaurs A fossilised skin sample discovered in an Oklahoma cave is the oldest skin sample ever identified. It belonged to a reptile species that lived nearly 300 million years ago. Ethan Mooney, a paleontology masters student at the University of Toronto, said this skin fossil gives insight into how the first vertebrate animals adapted to a more protective with the critical transition from ocean to land. Their research was published in the journal Current Biology. How an octopus told us the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsed Scientists are trying to learn when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet last collapsed, in order to learn when it might happen again. In a new study, published in the journal Science, Sally Lau at James Cook University analyzed the DNA of Turquet’s octopuses, which have been scuttling around the Antarctic sea floor for millions of years. These octopuses are today separated by massive ice sheets, but by looking at when different populations were able to breed throughout history, they could see when the ice wasn’t there. Geologic Hydrogen could be clean, green and plentiful More than a century ago we discovered that there were rich deposits of energy buried deep in Earth, and so oil and gas became the foundation of our industrial civilization. Now history might be repeating itself as scientists think there could be massive amounts of clean, green hydrogen hiding underground as well. Quirks producer Jim Lebans spoke with Geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar from the University of Toronto, and geologist Geoffrey Ellis from the United States Geological Survey to understand where this hydrogen has come from, how much there is, and what its potential could be as an energy resource.
Hurricanes carry microplastic pollution in the oceans back to landHumans communicate in several ways with birds who lead them to honeyBird brains have evolved to tolerate a high-speed impact into waterHow to make people more easy to hypnotizeUnearthing a small-brained hominid species that challenges human exceptionalism
Reindeer and arctic seals have complex nasal passages to keep them warm; Reindeer can eat and sleep at the same time; This penguin species sleeps by taking about 14,000 micronaps each day; ‘Naked’ stars are stripped by their partners before they explode; Miracle babies in bags: How close are we to an artificial womb?; Why don’t any deer's legs freeze?
How studying long-lived animals might give us the key to longer, healthier life; Looking deep inside planets, under our feet and out there in space; Honouring the overlooked legacies of women in science.
A young carnivorous dinosaur’s last meal; A robot steps forward to build the wall; Canada geese families pull closer together in tough times; The great wall of China has a ‘living skin’; You say you want a Microbial revolution?; Why doesn't the temperature in the far North go up and up and up when the Sun never sets?
Cat faces are more expressive than you think; Cats can get sick with coronaviruses – and get better with COVID-19 antivirals; Cats are built to purr; Cats can make it harder to get away with murder; Even when they're curled up in your lap, cats have "one paw in the wild".
These bats copulate for hours with enormous penises but without penetration; Jumping spiders think it matters if you’re black and white; Forewarned and three-armed; Red snow in the morning, climate scientists take warning; We need to save biodiversity to preserve billions of years of natural experiments.
Hummingbirds sidle sideways to slip through tiny gaps; Do you speak fish? A new online dictionary of fish sounds debuts; When girls are in the audience, all-boy choirs change their tune; Ancient whales - tiny and titanic - from 40 million years ago; Alien blobs lurk inside our planet, and could be feeding supervolcanoes; Quirks & Quarks Listener Question.
Edible fats and oils could be synthesized from fossil fuels; Sea stars lost their tails to get a head; Southern Right whale skin samples helps tell the story of their history and future; Music soothes physical as well as emotional pain; Does biology trump free will? A behavioural scientist argues we have no choice; Quirks listener question — Fires and oxygen.
Canadian AI researcher wins Herzberg medal, cautions world about his work; Pro football player lifespan depends on the position they play; Killer whale blubber is telling a sad story about pollution; Smart glasses help blind people see with sound; The most powerful solar storm ever struck before it could do much damage.
Reintroducing a rare butterfly to a restored ecosystem; Studying Vancouver’s bats in front of a curious audience; Investigating whether Arctic methane seeps could tell us about life on Mars; Revealing the hidden worlds in Pacific ocean depths; Plan a, forget it. Plan b, oh well. Plan c study Saskatchewan ticks; Dodging wild boars while doing archeology in southern Italy; Sidewalk gardens keep harmful chemicals out of streams.
We close out our season with another edition of our always enlightening, always intriguing listener question show. We have answers to questions like:
What would happen if a comet side-swiped our atmosphere? What determines a bird's speed of flight? Can you store light in a battery? How did large dinosaurs support their incredible bulk?
All these and much more this week on the Quirks & Quarks Question Show.
Dragging STEM forward - LGBTQ scientists perform their work for inclusion; Lucy was swole! Scientists reconstruct a 3.2 million-year-old hominid’s muscles; Canada Jay siblings fight to see who lives at home, and who moves out; Baby skateboard gives a boost to preemie development; Cockroach baits don’t just kill, they’re driving evolution of the pest’s love life.
A gene therapy for cat contraception; Octopuses edit their genetic code on the fly to adapt to changing temperatures; Termites could inspire energy efficient air conditioning; Corals may bleach because rising temperatures drive viral infections; A new book looks at the fragility and malleability of the mind.
Digital bridge for spinal cord allows paralyzed man to walk again; Warming in the arctic is disrupting the ground-squirrel’s love life; Scientists completely map the activity of serotonin in the brain of a roundworm; Medium sized black hole in our galactic neighborhood could solve an astronomical puzzle; Plastic pollution and disease — ‘Plasticosis’ is a new plague for wildlife.
Focussed ultrasound could have potential for inducing hibernation; Scientists explore what makes you attractive — to mosquitoes; Coyotes and bobcats are more vulnerable to humans when wolves and cougars are around; A Ugandan vet’s amazing story of her work to save mountain gorillas.
Giant dinosaurs found in Australia migrated through Antarctica; A map of arctic industrial pollution shows where risks might arise as permafrost melts; A new technology is showing where baby sharks are born; Polynesian tool finds support the oral histories behind Moana; Incorporating diversity of human genomes in new Pangenome; Comparing 240 mammalian genomes helps illuminate what makes us human.
Why does this shark hold its breath?; A condor nest in the Andes preserves a 2000 year record of the rare birds; Scientists figure out why deer don’t get Lyme disease from their ticks; The famous motor homunculus picture is wrong; The next pandemic will see new vaccines delivered in new ways.
20,000 deer-tooth pendant carries the DNA of the person who wore it; New AI mind-reading system could restore the voice of the voiceless; An amphibious fish can give us clues into the origins of blinking; Canada’s Eastern wolves are genetically distinct, not just wolf/coyote mutts; New satellite will be ‘an eye in the sky’ monitoring North America’s air pollution; Air pollution causes lung cancer, but not the way you might think; Question - where does moon dust come from?
How do you like them apples? A researcher breeds climate-change tolerant fruit; New documents retell the story of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to DNA science; Desert birds have special belly feathers for carrying water for their chicks; Space mice give insight into how our microbiome could protect us from bone loss; UK science star Brian Cox’s new book explores how we might live in a black hole.
The great Pacific garbage patch is crawling with coastal life; A new cosmic map shows lumpy dark matter was scaffolding for our universe to evolve; We now know why huge underwater volcanoes don’t change the climate much; Spadefoot toads decide in the egg what kind of tadpoles they need to be; Life in Antarctica survived the last ice age, but is threatened in a warming world; Antarctic seabirds’ breeding seasons are being pre-empted by unseasonal storms; Listener Question: What would happen to animals if atmospheric oxygen levels increased significantly?
A new AI can develop scientific theories like a human scientist; A Canadian Astronaut on catching a ride to the moon; Understanding the secret of bear hibernation could help humans avoid blood clots; Medieval monks watching the moon provided valuable climate data; A view on the womb - a new book looks at the neglected science of the uterus; How would the Earth be different if it had never collided with the object that created the moon?
Scientists map Earth’s ionosphere with artificial auroras; Climate change is a boon for baseball’s power hitters; Scientists identify where babies get their bacteria; When we walk through crowds, math, not intelligence, controls the flow of traffic; How stories can work with science to help us make sense of the world; The stories that books can tell — that aren’t in the words they contain
Tyrannosaurus rex had lips covering its terrifying teeth; Eagles are eating cows instead of salmon – and farmers are happy; Inspired by the High Seas treaty, scientists are calling for the protection of space; Arches, loops and whorls — how your unique fingerprints are made; Humans are fueled by food — but we run on electricity.
Oumuamua’s strange behaviour has a natural explanation, no aliens needed; Great apes spin to make themselves dizzy — apparently just for kicks; A sensor equipped surgical glove could help make delivery of babies safer; The process of elimination — how tiny insects pee 300 times their own weight every day; A new scale for atmospheric river intensity is helping us understand them; Extreme weather is increasing — so much that it’s changing earth’s gravity; Listener Question: Why do geese sometimes fly north in winter?
5,000 years ago riding left traces on the legs and butts of the earliest horsepeople; Whales use ‘vocal fry’ to echolocate at depth; Fossils suggest that if equatorial oceans get too warm, plankton may desert; Scientists have mapped the most complex animal brain yet - and it's the size of a grain of salt; A new book explores the unique biology and uncertain fate of Australia’s iconic koala.
Owls zero in on their prey under snow by eavesdropping on the sounds they make; Elephant behaviour helps to maintain healthy, carbon-rich forests; Feisty songbirds swarm their predators – but only when the time's right; The ‘sensory moustache’ that helps bats find sweet snacks; Cockatoos have a handy tool belt to fish for cashews; Seals may not tap their toes, but seals also appreciate a good musical rhythm; Listener Question: Why can’t waste plastic be dumped into volcanoes?
Male giraffes drink and savour female giraffe urine to see if she’s ready to mate; What scientists do when a volcano upsets their climate change record; Europe’s first farmers suffered more violence than their hunter-gatherer ancestors; Recycled wastewater can be cleaner than conventional sources; Don’t worry about zombie fungus. Do worry about other fungal pathogens.
Gorilla-sized penguins once roamed New Zealand; The first dedicated mission to Uranus will investigate why it’s tipped-over; Archaeologists decipher mummification secrets in embalming workshop; Engineered egg whites are the key element in a new water filter material; A new book explores 19 perspectives on the problem of consciousness.
The science behind the ‘love hormone’ may have a big problem; Could moon dust solve our global warming problem?; Canadian researchers develop a smartphone app for making memories; Orca sons are costing their mom’s a chance at more offspring; Crossing the land bridge — and back again. The travels of North America’s first settlers.
For a century dolphins and fishers have been cooperating, and the benefits are now clearArctic foxes are tremendous travellersElephant graveyard shows Neanderthals were more cooperative than we thoughtAsteroid sample shows just what we need to deflect a surprise killer impactorA new book looks at the experiments that gave us the modern picture of matter
Humans intuitively understand ape gestural communication; Wolves on an Alaskan island ate all the deer, so now are preying on sea otters; A unique mummy is digitally unwrapped to reveal historical treasures; 52 million years ago Canada’s Arctic was home to pre-primates; Black in Science: have recent years of activism made a difference?; Quirks & Quarks listener question.
An ancient sea creature sported a massive fork on its head — what for?; Echidnas blow snot bubbles to keep cool under the Australian sun; The Mars Perseverance rover is caching samples for return to Earth; Farming fish lose their fertilizer to invasive rats; How to fight an infodemic with cognitive vaccines.
ExxonMobil knew — and they knew really, really well; Dolphins yell to be heard over human noise, but the message doesn’t get across; Where’s the Kaboom? NASA’s new quiet supersonic plane is getting ready for lift off; Is climate change driving an “insectageddon”?; Canada on the moon: A Canadian-made rover will pave the way for the next astronauts.
A real viral video shows a microscopic virus attempting to infect a cell; A new study suggests scientific innovation has been stagnating; Studying the sex lives of constipated scorpions; We thought the Oort cloud threw snowballs at us — but it’s throwing rocks too; A biologist explains animal behaviour by tossing out the old nature/nurture debate; Quirks & Quarks listener question.
To finish out the year, we’ve got another edition of our ever-popular Listener Question Show, where we find the experts to answer your burning science questions.
Figuring out what reindeer can hear to understand the impact from industrial sounds; Scientists discover massive river flowing under the Antarctic Ice; A shocking solution to accidental killing of sharks in fisheries; Clawing back: How cougars and grizzlies are reintroducing themselves in Manitoba,
A Canadian astronaut explains the toll space travel takes on the human body; A neuroscientist asks: Do we long for a divine creator or do we just want our mommies?; A medical historian looks at the historical echoes of the past in the pandemic of the present.
Ankylosaurs go clubbing. Armoured dinosaurs with tail weapons fought each otherAnkylosaurs were squat, armoured living tanks with long tails tipped by a wicket bony club. And new research suggests that they used that weapon not just to defend against predators like T.rex, but to smash against each other in contests that might have been about mates, food or territory. Victoria Arbour, of the Royal BC Museum, led the work, which was published in Biology LettersFiddlesticks! Researchers find swearing sounds are shared across languagesBy comparing curses across many languages a team of researchers thinks they’ve found common ground in bad language. Universally, it seems, curse words avoid the sounds associated with the letters L, R, W and Y. Shiri Lev-Ari, who studies languages at Royal Holloway, University of London, found you can tell a swear word when you hear one from how it sounds, even if you don’t have a ‘frakking’ clue what it means. Her research was published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.DNA from two million years ago provides a picture of a unique ancient ecosystem DNA recovered from the soil in northern Greenland, which today is an arctic desert, paints a picture of a 2-million-year-old ecosystem unlike any other on Earth, rich with plant and animal life. Professor Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist from the University of Cambridge and his colleagues, collected the samples from northern Greenland back in 2006. It took years for them to figure out extract the ancient DNA from the minerals in the soil and for new methods to sequence and identify tiny bits of very badly damaged genetic material to be developed. This groundbreaking finding, was published in the journal Nature.It IS all about the bass – researchers break down what in the music moves usResearchers have found that adding inaudible bass tones to music during a concert increases how much people dance. Neuroscientist Daniel Cameron used McMaster University’s LiveLab, which is part concert hall, part laboratory, to throw a concert with the band Orphx. During the show the researchers randomly added super low frequencies throughout. When those frequencies were on, concert-goers wearing motion capture headbands would dance 12 per cent more than when the frequencies were absent. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.Is it too late for Nuclear fusion?Nuclear fusion has been touted as a potential solution to all of our energy needs for decades, but progress towards controlled, energy producing fusion power has been painfully slow. In the meantime renewable energy, particularly solar, also promises to meet our needs, and has made tremendous technical and commercial progress and growth. Freelance broadcaster Moira Donovan looks at some recent developments in fusion and solar, and tries to answer the question, is it too late for fusion power?
Bats growl like death metal singers to communicate with each other; James Webb Space Telescope sees into the atmosphere of a distant gas giant; Lab coats don’t fit and aren’t functional. This researcher wants to make them fabulous; Ants produce ‘milk’ during metamorphosis to feed the colony; Pinpointing the Anthropocene. Where is the signature of the age of humans?
Researchers spy on turtles to see how they survive winter under the ice; Myco-computing – scientists substitute fungus for circuit boards in electronics; Airplane passengers are getting extra doses of radiation — and now we know its source; Basic black looks good on wolves exposed to disease; A record-setting hailstorm in Alberta was a bonanza for scientific hail chasers; Listener question: With glaciers and ice caps melting, where’s the water going?
Octopuses throw stuff at each other. Why not with all those arms?; Mayan ruins are heavily contaminated with mercury; Climate change driving shrimp to snap; A black hole in our galactic neighborhood; The tall tale of the discovery of the T-Rex; How are loons able to see into murky water?
Proliferation of rockets raises fears that the sky is falling; Compostable plastics may not be compostable, and likely aren’t being composted; Many more animals make vocal sounds than we thought – which means its very ancient; Tracking illegal fishing by watching when ships go into stealth mode; Next week there will be 8 billion of us, and that’s already too many.
Chimps and gorillas will seek out and socialize with each other in shared territory; Skipping the “fall back” and sticking with daylight saving would reduce vehicle/deer collisions; A crater in Africa was caused by an asteroid twice the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs; A nocturnal primate from Madacascar is the world-champion nose-picker; Canada’s most prestigious science award goes to research on habitat fragmentation
On October 24, 1992 a new voice took the helm at CBC's already venerable science program. And three decades and some 7000 interviews later, Bob McDonald is ready to look back - while still looking forward. We celebrated Bob's 30th anniversary with a show recorded in front of a live audience at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, where Bob began his career as a science communicator half a century ago. The event was hosted by Tapestry's Mary Hynes, as Bob was a guest on Quirks for the first time. We looked back at Bob's career, and some of the big stories in science he covered over the years, with appearances by special guests including retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, Nobel prize winner Art McDonald, and a whole family of friends and former guests on the program. It was a great evening of reminiscences and storytelling, with one eye on the past, but, as always with Quirks & Quarks, another on the future. ** This podcast contains bonus material not included in the radio broadcast.
The high seas are beyond the reach of international law – and beyond the beat of most reporters. But Pulitzer-Prize-winner and former New York Times journalist, Ian Urbina, has sailed into uncharted territories. Urbina sets out on a years-long quest to investigate murder at sea, modern slave labour, environmental crimes and quixotic adventurers. Part travelog, part true-crime thriller, this 7-part series takes listeners to places where the laws of the land no longer exist. The Outlaw Ocean is brought to you by CBC Podcasts and the LA Times and produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project. More episodes are available at http://hyperurl.co/theoutlawocean
Brain cells play Pong; DNA shows the Black Death had a huge impact on our evolution; This penguin lays two eggs so it can throw one away; Black hole’s digestive delays; In time for a Halloween tipple? A new book about the science of spirits;
Did life on Mars exterminate itself?; Hand raised-wolves are as attached to their human caregivers as dogs; Oldest African dinosaur discovery sheds light on dinosaur origins; 100,000 years ago humans in Africa were distilling powerful glue; Neanderthal genome earns a Nobel prize; Ray Kurzweil on downloading the mind.
Nobel Prize for quantum entanglement; The mystery of the missing bear toes; Painting a picture of the Chicxulub tsunami; Ancient DNA and the roots of Anglo-Saxon England; The “Support our Science” movement pushes to boost funding for young scientists.
The DART mission – Has NASA shown it can save us from disaster?; What has the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ done to the lungs of the planet?; Birds in North America benefited from COVID lockdowns. In the UK, not so much; Megalodon was truly a monster; Indigenous Astronomy – reconciliation and the sky.
A new book lets the Milky Way speak for itself - and it’s kind of a jerk; Watch out for the quiet ones – The smartest racoons are the most docile; 375 million years ago an animal crawled out of the water - then noped right back in; Seventeen bodies found in a medieval well were likely from a 12th century hate-crime; The science of a city’s summer smells; Quirks listener question - Food caching.
Science says 10,000 steps are actually a health benefit sweet spot; What the James Webb Space Telescope really saw this summer; Garbage-picking Australian cockatoos are in an arms race with homeowners; Scientists get back to work on Canada’s Glaciers after COVID interruptions; Quirks listener question - Red sky at night?
This week we launch our season with our Summer in the Field program. For many of us, summer is the time for things like beaches, bike rides, and BBQs. For many scientists, however, summertime is also when they are at their busiest, travelling to remote locations to get up close and personal with nature.
On today’s show you’ll hear from a marine biologist studying the recovery of sea stars from a devastating wasting disease, wetland scientists working with indigenous land guardians to map landscapes for conservation, a paleontologist prospecting in the Yukon for ice-age fossils, a biologist studying the world’s most southerly polar bears, a team of scientists trying to understand the world’s foggiest place off the Atlantic coast, a team of forestry researchers looking into multi-season ‘zombie fires’ and a young academic beginning a world tour to research jellyfish.
We're on our summer break, so no new podcasts before our new season starts Sep 10. Check out our website at cbc.ca/quirks to listen to previous episodes.
We end our season with our ever-popular, always fascinating listener question show. In this show we'll answer listener questions like:
Why humans don't have a tail - even though we have a tailbone? What would happen to your body if you were to die in space? Why the immune system doesn't permanently get rid of herpes viruses? Why the Earth hasn't cooled through 4 billion years of floating in frigid space? Why we can't remember our early years of life? Why mammal poop is brown while bird poop is white?
And much, much more.
The Black Death was history’s most lethal plague. Now we know where it started; When we first kept chickens it was likely because they were pretty, not tasty; Fossil tusks tell the life story of a mastodon that died by violence; Elephant seals feel their way to prey using whiskers in the deep, dark ocean; How do birds smell? A new book says very well, and sometimes very good.
Astronomers make the music of the cosmos, by turning data into sound; Evidence suggests that humans omletted Australian Thunderbirds to extinction; New Hubble image proves there’s life in the old space telescope; Why removing invasive species can help ecosystems battle climate change; A paleontologist reconstructs what Earth sounded like through its long history.
Why wild baby parrots babble like human babies; A mysterious stone found in the Egyptian desert is made of supernova stuff; Buzzing bats mimic hornets to deter predatory owls; Scallops will ‘go into the light’; A Canadian researcher makes the case for admiring the mighty mushroom.
This salamander is an unlikely but agile, aerial amphibian; Headbutting animals can accumulate brain damage; We can use the cables that carry the internet as environmental sensors; Plants that can survive extreme conditions could help us engineer more resilient crops; What we lose as we lose most of the world’s sharks; How do marine mammals surface to breathe during storms?
Study says climate change could cause us to lose sleep – in more ways than one; Scientists successfully grow plants in moon dust; Fossil preserves critical evidence for how trilobites had sex half a billion years ago; A scientist recreates avian soundscapes so we can hear what we’re missing; How the medical system needs to – and is – engaging with its climate impacts; Quirks Question: Why does my breath feel warm when I exhale with an open mouth, and cool when I blow through tight lips?
Ridges on the surface of an icy Jupiter moon could mean water – and life; Ecotourists could be giving rare tropical iguanas diabetes; Dolphins whistle at each other to keep in touch with distant friends; Walking in the footsteps of the biggest dinosaurs; Humans have ravaged the world’s coral reefs, but some are working to fix them.
Fifteen-year-old Tai Poole won’t rest until he’s uncovered the mysteries of the universe, one probing question at a time. In Season 4 of his Webby-winning podcast, Tai talks to everyone from NASA scientists to stand-up comedians to his equally curious little brother Kien. If you’ve ever wondered if we can keep eating meat without destroying the planet or if we’re alone in the universe, Tai has you covered. More episodes are available at hyperurl.co/taiaskswhy
The first land animal to go legless three hundred million years ago; What did history smell like? New field of science aims to find out; This Canadian researcher was trapped on a Russian ship as war broke out; Sharks sleep, sometimes with their eyes wide open; A new book puts together the story of how people came to the Americas.
Plastic pollution is all over the arctic Monkeys consume fermenting fruit, likely for the extra calories from alcohol Biologists record and translate the songs of the manatee Indigenous-led conservation program saves caribou herd from extinction The Vikings might have left Greenland when it turned into brown-land Quirks Question - Do tropical trees lose their leaves?
Scientists sequence complete, gap-free human genome for the first time; Oxytocin helps aggressive rescue lions chill out in sanctuaries; Pluto’s strange landscape includes 7 km tall ice volcanoes; Deconstructing de-extinction; Giant crocodiles left trackways in northeastern BC 95 million years ago.
How do snakes breathe when eating huge meals?; A new chemistry for green fire retardants; How vampire bats had to evolve to live on blood alone; How do we build urban biodiversity as cities continue to grow?; Waste food fed to fungi is turned into faux leather.
Paleontologists identify the first sabre-toothed mammalian hypercarnivore; A rare social spider hunts in packs in order to kill large prey; The urban tree canopy is facing a worst-case scenario in the near future; How do you test how well a whale hears?; Rubber dust from car tires can poison freshwater fish; Your favourite shirt might soon be listening to your hearbeat; Canada has lithium in Northwestern, Ontario. What is being done to mine it?
Will cooperation in space with Russia survive war in Ukraine? For more than half a century, through international conflict and political turmoil, the west has cooperated on a wide range of activities in space with the Soviets and then the Russians, culminating in the International Space Station. We speak with Mac Evans, former head of the Canadian Space Agency about why the war in the Ukraine runs the risk of ending that long collaboration.
What will the new UN treaty to control plastic pollution need to achieve? On March 2, at a meeting of the United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi the world’s nations agreed to negotiate a global agreement to control plastic pollution. We speak to Max Liboiron, a plastics pollution researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland, about how the world created its plastics problem, and Tony Walker, who studies plastics pollution at Dalhousie University, on what he hopes the treaty will accomplish.
The oldest octopus ancestor ever found had ten arms. Christopher Whalen, a palaeontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York has identified the oldest vampyropod, the group that includes ancestors of the octopus. The 328 million year old fossil from Montana is in extraordinary condition and is 82 million years older than the previous oldest find. But the big surprise is that this is that this animal had ten arms. His research was published in Nature Communications.
Making medical alarms less awful – and maybe saving lives Hospitals can be pretty noisy places. Medical devices, in particular, make quite a racket. And while their alarms are essential, perhaps they don’t have to be so unpleasant. Michael Schutz, a professor of music cognition at McMaster University, believes that we can use what we know about music to improve the sonic environment in hospitals – and maybe save lives in the process.
Fear of predation all by itself can reduce the survival rate of songbirds Liana Zannette, a biology professor from Western University in London, Ontario has found that just being aware of predators, even without actually being preyed upon, can reduce the reproductive rate of songbirds, and reduce the survival rate of those offspring they do have by as much as 53 percent. The most obvious impact is that birds living in fear do not eat. Her research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Are people who get blood transfusions from vaccinated donors protected from COVID? For the answer to this Quirks listener question, we hear from Dr. Jacob Pendergrast, a director of the blood transfusion service at the University Health Network in Toronto.
IPCC report gives bleak warning about the future, but ideas on how we should prepare; Scientists discover the world’s biggest bacteria; Rare earth elements can be extracted from mining and electronic waste; Researchers watch a wandering Antarctic iceberg the size of PEI melt down; Could we be living in a computer simulation? And if we were, would there be any way to tell?
By many estimates we’re going to have 10 billion people on the planet by the year 2050. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. As it is, we have a hard time feeding the world’s current population. Many experts say that our food systems are at a breaking point, and that the way we eat - and what we eat - has to change. But there are solutions.
This week, on a special edition of Quirks & Quarks, we’ll unpack the latest science showing what the future of food should look like.
First we look at how farmers across the country are turning their fields into science experiments to help them survive climate change. Plus, we’ll look at the technologies that could help Canada grow fresh produce all year long.
Then we look at sustainable food systems that curb waste, and how people are growing food where it was never thought possible - in concrete jungles and remote northern villages.
Finally, we’re looking at the future of protein, from lab-made meat, to milk from a microbrewery, which can all be made without ever touching an animal.
Researchers reveal an ancient Roman porta-potty; A rare ‘rogue wave’ is captured by marine scientists; Dogs range in size from tiny to enormous – and the gene behind the variation comes from wolves; A 500 million year old fossil preserves the nervous system of an ancient sea creature; Marking the science and history of timekeeping, tick by tick; Quirks Listener Question. Do we sense light from other places in our body other than our eyes?
The Antarctic’s doomsday glacier is in danger of living up to its name; Why we love – A new book surveys the science of love in all its forms; Neanderthals and humans swapped a cave in France over millennia; Mosquitos see red to find humans to feed on; Astronomers are fighting back against satellite constellations.
What we know about what long COVID is doing to the brain; Seeing gravitational waves from the biggest things in the universe; Kids take note of who you kiss and who shares your ice cream; Climate change could spark fish wars around the globe; Squirrels survive hibernation by having their microbes recycle their pee.
Researchers discover 130,000 new viruses, giving us a new way to watch for emerging pathogens; Chimpanzees aren't monkeys, but they learn by monkey see, monkey do; Is the moon driving the movement of the Earth's tectonic plates?; Deer choose to return to their smoldering home in the wake of a massive wildfire; Aliens often look like us in movies — will they look like us in real life?
The Tongan volcano triggered record-breaking lightning and a never-before-seen tsunami; Whale researchers do anatomy with heavy machinery to understand why whales don't choke on their food; Darkness doomed the dinosaurs — the extinction asteroid turned out the lights on Earth; Plastic-collecting ships could use the waste for fuel while cleaning up the ocean; Regrowing knee cartilage with an electric boost; Researchers call for a new awareness of scientific colonialism; Quirks Listener Question: In which direction will the James Webb Space Telescope be looking?
Plants can’t adapt to climate change when seed-dispersing animals are lost; The Earth is at the centre of a cosmic bubble created by supernovae; Medieval knights rode pony-sized war-horses into battle; Scientists have seen new memories forming in an animal for the first time; How an important study of vaccine mixing in Canada got sabotaged by COVID chaos.
This Alberta rancher has been called a 'wolf lover' for using no-kill methods to protect cattle; Shark antibodies could be a tool to fight future coronavirus outbreaks; Sniffing out animal DNA in the air could help monitor endangered species; Tiny fish do 'the wave' to scare off predatory birds; Why does smoke disperse but clouds seem to stick together?
How close would you have to be to the source of gravitational waves to physically notice them or for them to do damage?; Where does the rubber from tires go?; Why have humans evolved handedness?; What is the evolutionary advantage of menopause?; Rabbits, mice, rats and horses don't vomit. Why is that?; What is the the environmental impact of space flight, and space tourism in particular?; Why do mammals have a body temperature of approximately 36 degrees Celsius?; Can a laser cut through a mirror?; Is scrapping an old gasoline-powered car and replacing it with a new electric one always better for the environment?; If our bodies completely change all their cells over a period of time, shouldn’t scars disappear as new cells replace damaged ones?
We interrupt your usual Quirks & Quarks podcast feed with a special bonus episode from the CBC Podcast Tai Asks Why. There's a MAJOR event happening in space science, NASA is set to launch the enormous James Webb Space Telescope. Guiding Tai on this starlit path of discovery is Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, a James Webb Space Telescope postdoctoral researcher with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Howard University. More episodes are available at http://hyperurl.co/taiaskswhy
Why humans should embrace our role as meddlers of nature — so that we can do it better; Are we getting closer to practical fusion power? A new book says … maybe; Tips and tricks for convincing a science denier to reconsider their unreasonable beliefs.
Whoops, croaks, groans and growls are the sounds of a healthy coral reef; Young blood can rejuvenate old mice — and scientists are starting to understand why; Ants share vomit to feed each other and communicate within the colony; Study finds wildlife in Fukushima’s exclusion zone show no signs of radiation damage; NASA's 10 billion dollar space telescope is finally going to launch — with CanCon; Do new forests or old ones capture more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?
Robots made from living cells have learned how to replicate themselves; Exposure to deep red light could help improve age-related vision declines; Solar wind and space dust may explain the presence of much of Earth’s water; Probing the mind-body connection to learn how the brain controls immune responses; Deaf researchers are bringing their unique perspective to the lab and the field.
Researchers studying finger snapping find it’s 20 times faster than the blink of an eye; Pregnant male seahorses grow a placenta to nurture their young; Why an ancient crater in Labrador is the perfect place for astronauts to train for a moon mission; An agile robot that can skateboard, slackline and even fly; This physicist knew years ago that infections like COVID-19 could be airborne; 700 years ago Maori land-clearing left a sooty signature in Antarctica, researchers find.
Scientists trying to understand the people COVID-19 can’t touch; Trapping light earns physicist Sajeev John Canada's most prestigious science prize; Glitter comes in many colours, but this scientists is making a green alternative; NASA is smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to test a planetary defense system; Why 'Useful Delusions' can sometimes make us vulnerable to misinformation; Why are mosquitoes larger in the spring than in the fall?
HPV vaccine works ‘remarkably well’ to prevent cancer, according to UK study; 12000 years ago an exploding comet turned part of a desert into glass; Asian honeybees sound a screamy alarm when murder hornets attack; Cane toad tadpoles in Australia are cannibalizing smaller cane toad hatchlings; 100 years of insulin: how researchers are hoping to ditch the needles, once and for all.
Baleen whales eat much more than we thought — and fertilize the oceans doing it; Understanding the most important greenhouse gas — water vapour; Fossil evidence suggests sabre-tooth cats cared for each other when injured; Deep-sea pioneer looks back on a career chasing light in the deep, dark ocean; Do plants ever mimic other plants?
Fire ordinarily helps the boreal's black spruce trees. Now it threatens them too; ‘Culturally cosmopolitan’ Bronze Age mummies found in China have surprising origins; Scientists peer into the depths of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot; Metal impregnated mandibles give these ants a razor-sharp bite; Andew Weaver, Canadian climate scientist turned-politician, on COP26.
New research shows the Vikings were in Newfoundland exactly 1000 years ago; Rocks from Chang'e 5 sample return mission reveal a younger side of the moon; Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel; Streetlights — especially new LEDs — can drastically reduce caterpillar numbers; Milk may have been the fuel that enabled a major human migration; Whoa Nelly! Modern horses come from ancestors we improved 4000 years ago; How can tiny frogs make so much noise?
A fecal transplant from young mice is like a ‘fountain of youth’ for old mice; How a trick of the light helps scientists spot the same supernova again and again; Dancing bees reveal that UK cities are packed with more accessible food than the countryside; Narwhals leave infrared ‘fluke-prints’ in the ocean that can be seen with aerial cameras; A memory researcher explores the science — and value — of forgetting.
We know humans are behind climate change, thanks to this Nobel Physics laureate’s work; New Nobel laureate in chemistry reflects on how his discovery catalyzed his field; Researchers investigate an ‘ultra-hot Jupiter’ with iron rain and calcium wind; Canadian concept to pump carbon into subsea rock could sequester gigatons of CO2; Cloud-based sunscreen could help protect the Great Barrier Reef from future heat damage; How watching water bears walk could help us make small and squishy robots.
Indigenous archeology and the search for unmarked graves at residential schools; Ice age footprints suggest North America’s first peoples were here earlier than we thought; Monkeys respond to high pressure situations by choking, just like humans do; Set weapons on sautee, as engineers learn to cook with lasers; Vampire bats share blood meals with their besties; Do spiders learn to build better webs with experience?
What if there were a pill that could add decades to your life? Would you take it? For thousands of years, people have searched for elixirs that could delay death and extend human life. Could new advances in medicine finally make this a reality? From madcap medicine to cutting-edge science, the quest to unlock the fountain of youth is teeming with dreamers, skeptics and charlatans alike. More episodes are available at: hyperurl.co/unlocking
Ancient Jordanian town destroyed by a meteor blast may have inspired Biblical stories, scientists say; Animals are shapeshifting in response to climate warming, and it could be costing them; Tiny flying microchips inspired by maple seeds could help monitor the environment; An inside scoop on how COVID vaccines are being tested on kids; Widespread vaccination should mean the impact of COVID variants ‘will be blunted’; What are the relative sources of light on a moonless night?
Canadian science suffered from COVID. After the election, how do we bring it back better?; Potty training cows to solve the problem of pee pollution; Fashion backward — Archaeologists find 120,000 year old tools for making clothes; How does a black hole eat? With its spiral arms.
Visiting ‘acid lakes’ in Ontario to investigate how they’re recovering from acid rain; Researchers take advantage of 'whale-palooza' gathering to study human-beluga interactions; Pesky bears complicate an investigation of a fast-moving glacier in northern BC; Researchers create aquariums inside wilderness lakes to safely study microplastic impacts.