Exploradio Origins: Recent Episodes
Kellen McGee
Exploradio Origins ponders the biggest questions in the universe in 90 seconds. Each episode highlights the work of one of the more than 200 fellows at the Institute for the Science of Origins at Case Western Reserve University. Their research examines the origins of life, the universe, and the strands that connect all of science.Exploradio Origins is a collaboration between WKSU and the Institute for the Science of Origins.
You may know semiconductors from computers: they’re a material somewhere between an electrical conductor and an electrical insulator that can be used as an extremely fast switch. However, semiconductors are also what we have to thank for the revolution in energy-efficient LED lighting technology.
"There are technologies that we can use now like next generation sequencing where it allows us to take a really teeny tiny piece of DNA or RNA and generate thousands if not millions of measurements. And then we sort of look at each other like, now what do we do?"
“It's known that the universe is expanding; of course it's been known since the 1920s. The surprise we were hit with in the 1990s is that the expansion is accelerating, and so it's a big mystery, what causes that to happen,” Harsh Mathur said.
The fishermen of Iceland became concerned around a decade ago. The capelin, a small fish that’s a staple catch, and a crucial link in the ocean ecosystem, stopped migrating like they used to. To whom did they turn? A team of mathematicians.
Some of you may have heard of SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The idea is that if there's an advanced alien civilization, they’d try to contact us using radio. So we should look for radio signals from space that look like messages.
A research group at Case Western Reserve University, led by professor of biomedical engineering Dustin Tyler, works with neural implants in people who’ve lost limbs to restore not only motion with prosthetics, but also the sense of touch.
"If we find life on another planet, it's likely going to be microbial," said Ashley Manning-Berg, assistant professor in geology at The University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.
Epilepsy is a condition that we usually think of as being in the brain. Doctors typically identify it by measuring brain activity. However, new evidence has emerged showing that the brain may not be the only place we can see epilepsy.
In the early 20th century, physicists discovered cosmic rays- energetic particles zooming through deep space.
“Cultural geology in my eye is the interface of geology and human culture,” Joe Hannibal said.
When we think about it, we usually remember to breathe when we’re awake. But who’s at the controls when we’re sleeping?
To live and function, we know cells have to eat and reproduce. But, they also have to take out the trash. What seems like a simple chore to us is actually a matter of life or death for the cell, and drug designers are finding this useful in the fight against disease.
Mathematics and biology sound like pretty distant relatives, but for Wanda Strychalski, an assistant professor of mathematics at Case Western Reserve University, they’re a perfect match.
Humans have had to live with malaria for a long time. So long, in fact, that we even see changes in our genome that protect us from the disease.
It seems our brains are never truly quiet. We dream when we are asleep, and in sensory deprivation experiments, participants start hallucinating within 15 minutes. Where does this spontaneous activity in our brains come from?
When we cool things down, classically, we can think of the atoms moving around inside the material getting slower and slower until they stop moving. That should make really cold things really boring, right?
“People always want to know where they came from, right? They get excited by new discoveries of dinosaurs, but they become curious by the discovery of early human fossils.”
Each time our cells grow and divide, they have to perfectly copy out almost a billion elements of genetic code. Of course, perfect almost never happens. So as soon as there was a genetic code, life had to evolve a way to fix DNA mismatches. But sometimes people inherit mutations in those DNA mismatch repair genes, and then you have really challenging cancers. But, at the bottom of this, there lies some hope in our own immune systems.
In order to function, the cells in our bodies need to coordinate and pass information, say, if we need a burst of energy to flee a threat. But, without eyes, ears, or even radios, how do they signal this information reliably?
Scientists have spent centuries studying how matter works. They’ve boiled it, they’ve frozen it, and they’ve even thrown it into particle colliders and smashed it up. They’ve learned a lot about what matter does in these conditions, but--that’s just what we can do on Earth.