Quirks And Quarks Complete Show From Cbc Radio

On this week's spooktacular episode: Wolves are afraid of the big bad human, methane spewing from Montreal’s largest snow dump, screaming babies make us hot to get our attention, baby pterosaurs died in a torrential storm and mind-controlling parasites turn bugs into zombies.

Nobel in Medicine for a leash on our immune systemOur immune system has enormous power to defend us against the wide range of pathogens and invaders that nature sends at us. But it’s a double-edged sword, and can target its powerful weapons against us as well. This year’s Nobel prize in Medicine or Physiology went to a group who discovered a critical mechanism that keeps the immune system in check, under normal circumstances, giving them new insights into the diseases that occur when it goes wrong.Yogurt with a creepy-crawly secret ingredientA team of researchers has duplicated an ancient recipe for yogurt that uses a unique ingredient to initiate fermentation: ants. They added squished ants to fresh milk, buried it in an anthill to incubate it, and enjoyed zesty yogurt soon after. A microbiological analysis showed that the ants contributed a bacteria to the yogurt that is also present in sourdough starter.An ancestor of the largest dinosaurs was a dog-sized bipedResearchers have discovered a 230 million year

On October 9, 1975, CBC listeners across the country heard David Suzuki introduce the very first episode of Quirks & Quarks. 50 years and thousands of interviews later, Quirks is still going strong, bringing wonders from the world of science to listeners, old and new.On October 7, 2025 we celebrated with an anniversary show in front of a live audience at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. We had guests from a range of scientific disciplines looking at what we’ve learned in the last 50 years, and hazarding some risky predictions about what the next half century could hold. Our panelists were:Evan Fraser, Director of Arrell Food Institute and Professor of Geography at the University of Guelph, co-chair of the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council, a fellow of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau foundation, and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.Katie Mack, Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.Lu

Remembering Jane: a conversation with Jane Goodall on her storied careerScience lost a unique pioneering figure this week. Jane Goodall — primatologist, conservationist and activist — died at the age of 91. In 2002, she visited the Quirks & Quarks studio to talk with Bob McDonald ahead of the Canadian launch of her IMAX film Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees. Bob and Jane spoke about how a girl growing up in urban England developed a love for animals, why scientists critical of her work were wrong, and how she was able to get close to the wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park. Scientists can predict what colour a person is looking at based on brain activityScientists can predict what colour a person is looking at based on brain activityDo you see what I see? New research says you do. Using brain imaging technology, scientists were able to predict what colour a person was looking at by reading their brain activity. This suggests that everyone responds essentially the same way to certain colours

Let’s go, Grue Jays!New kinds of birds are not usually discovered while browsing Facebook, but an ornithologist spotted something he’d never seen before in a photo, and tracked down the strange bird. Brian Stokes, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered it was actually a previously unknown hybrid of the familiar blue jay and a green jay, better known from southern parts of North America. Climate change likely played a part in bringing the two species together. Their research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. Chimpanzees’ taste for ripe fruit is equivalent to two drinks a dayChimpanzees in the wild can eat about 10 per cent of their body weight worth of fruit each day, and all of that fruit contains small amounts of alcohol. A team of scientists, including Aleksey Maro from the University of California Berkeley, wanted to understand just how much alcohol the chimps were getting from all this fruit. Three different methods of analysis over three years revealed the

Dust from car tires can be bad for fish — what might it do to us?As car tires wear, they shed billions of ultrafine particles of rubber that contain a complex mix of chemicals, including one called 6PPD-Quinone that’s been linked to mass die-offs of migrating salmon. Now researchers are sounding the alarm that this chemical is accumulating in humans, and we have no clear understanding of its toxicity. An international team of scientists, including Rachel Scholes from the University of British Columbia, are calling for more scrutiny of the chemicals that go into car tires, since so much ends up in our environment. Their paper was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.Fecal Transplants seem to have lasting metabolic effectsTransplanting the gut microbiome has been held out as a hope for a range of disorders, from obesity to mental health issues. A study that followed obese adolescents four years after receiving a fecal microbiota transplant from healthy individuals has shown po

10 years ago we first saw gravitational waves — what we’ve seen sinceIn September 2015, LIGO—or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—captured the ripples in spacetime produced by the cataclysmic merger of two black holes, from over a billion light years away. This discovery confirmed Einstein’s hypothesis about gravitational waves and gave astronomers a new way to explore the cosmos. In the decade since, LIGO’s scientific team, including physicist Nergis Mavalvala, has been busy, including new results announced this week confirming a 50-year-old prediction by Stephen Hawking about how black holes merge. Mavalvala is the dean of the school of science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The latest discovery was reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.What wild killer whales sharing food with humans says about their intelligenceAfter an experience of being offered a recently killed seabird by an Orca, cetologist Jared Towers

Every summer, Canadian scientists leave their labs and classrooms and fan out across the planet to do research in the field. This week, we’re sharing some of their adventures.Camping out on a remote island with thousands of screaming, pooping, barfing birdsAbby Eaton and Flynn O’Dacre spent their summer on Middleton Island, a remote, uninhabited island that lies 130 kilometers off the coast of Alaska. They were there to study seabirds, in particular the rhinoceros auklet and the black-legged kittiwake, as a part of a long-term research project that monitors the health of the birds to help understand the health of the world’s oceans. Eaton and O’Dacre are graduate students working under Emily Choy at McMaster University in Hamilton, OntarioDodging lions and mongooses to monitor what wild dogs are eating in MozambiquePhD student Nick Wright spent his summer in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. After a brutal civil war wiped out 95 per cent of the large mammals in the park, much work has been done to bring

We're on hiatus for the summer, but we'll return with new episodes on September 6. In the meantime visit our website at cbc.ca/quirks to browse our archives. Have a great summer!

Politically-driven chaos is disrupting U.S. scientific institutions and creating challenges for science in Canada. Science is a global endeavour and collaborations with the U.S. are routine. In this special episode of Quirks & Quarks, we explore what Canadian scientists are doing to preserve their work to assert scientific sovereignty in the face of this unprecedented destabilization. Canadian climate scientists brace for cuts to climate science infrastructure and data U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science are putting our Earth observing systems, in the oceans and in orbit, at risk. Canadian scientists who rely on U.S. led climate data infrastructure worry about losing long-term data that would affect our ability to understand our changing climate. With: Kate Moran, the president and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada and Emeritus Professor of Oceanography at the University of Victoria Debra Wunch, Physicist at the University of TorontoChris Fletcher, Department

Have you ever wondered how particle accelerators work? Or what microwaves really do to food? Have you spent time pondering the mystery of how ice ages changed the Earth’s rotation or why whales haven’t figured out how to breathe underwater? Well you’ll find out all this and more on our Quirks & Quarks listener question show!

Energy with a grain of saltResearchers have developed a new sodium metal powered fuel cell with up to triple the output for its weight of a lithium-ion battery. The team from  MIT, including Yet-Ming Chiang, think these fuel cells could have enormous potential for electric vehicles — including flight. They say sodium can be electrically produced from salt on a large scale to facilitate this technology. The research was published in the journal Joule.Plants hear their pollinators, and produce sweet nectar in responseA new study has found that plants can respond to the distinctive vibrations of pollinating insects by activating sugar-producing genes to produce rich nectar. In contrast they respond to the sound of nectar-stealing non-pollinators by cutting back on sugar. Francesca Barbero, from the University of Turin in Italy, presented this work at a recent joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and 25th International Congress on Acoustics.Penguin poop helps create the cooling clouds over Anta

<p><strong>Mutant super-powers give Korean sea women diving abilities</strong></p><p>The Haenyeo, or sea women, of the Korean island of Jeju have been celebrated historically for their remarkable diving abilities. For hour after hour they dive in frigid waters harvesting sea-life, through pregnancy and into old age. A new study has shown they are able to do this because of specific genetic adaptations that appeared in their ancestors more than a thousand years ago. These genes make them more tolerant to the cold, and decrease diastolic blood pressure. The women also spend a lifetime training, beginning to dive at age 15 and continuing on until their 80s or even 90s. Melissa Ilardo of Utah University and her team published their findings in the journal Cell Reports.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>This dessert is automatic and autonomous&nbsp;</strong></p><p>Care for a slice of robo-cake? Scientists in Europe have baked up a cake

Chimpanzees lay down mad beats to communicateApart from their rich vocal palette, chimpanzees drum on trees to communicate over long distances. A new interdisciplinary study, led in part by PhD student Vesta Eleuteri and primatologist Cat Hobaiter from the University of St. Andrews, has explored the details of the rhythms they used, and found that different populations drum with rhythms which are similar to the beats in human music. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.An exciting new fossil of an early ancestor of modern birds gives insight into evolutionArchaeopteryx, a 150 million year-old bird-like dinosaur, is known from about a dozen fossils found in Germany. A new one that has been studied at Chicago’s Field Museum may be the best preserved yet, and is giving researchers like paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor new insights into how the ancient animal moved around the Jurassic landscape. The research was published in the journal Nature.A house with good bones — in more ways than oneIns

Chimpanzees use medicinal plants for first aid and hygieneResearchers have observed wild chimpanzees seeking out particular plants, including ones known to have medicinal value, and using them to treat wounds on themselves and others. They also used plants to clean themselves after sex and defecation. Elodie Freymann from Oxford University lived with the chimpanzees in Uganda over eight months and published this research in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.Why this evolutionary dead end makes understanding extinction even more difficult540 million years ago, there was an explosion of animal diversity called the Cambrian explosion, when nature experimented with, and winnowed many animal forms into just a few. A new discovery of one of the unlucky ones that didn’t make it has deepened the mystery of why some went extinct, because despite its strangeness, it shows adaptations common to many of the survivors. Joseph Moysiuk, curator of paleontology and geology at the Manitoba Museum helped identify

The beginnings of our end — where the anus came from Our distant evolutionary ancestors had no anuses. Their waste was excreted from the same orifice they used to ingest food, much like jellyfish do today. Now a new study on bioRxiv that has yet to be peer-reviewed, scientists think they’ve found the evolutionary link in a worm with only a single digestive hole. Andreas Hejnol, from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, said he found genes we now associate with the anus being expressed in the worms in the opening where its sperm comes out, suggesting that in our evolutionary history a similar orifice was co-opted as a butt hole. Deepfake videos are becoming so real, spotting them is becoming increasingly diceyDetecting deepfake videos generated by artificial intelligence is a problem that’s getting progressively worse as the technology continues to improve. One way we used to be able to tell the difference between a fake and real video is that subtle signals revealing a person’s heart rate don’t exist

The ‘bone collector’ caterpillar covers itself with body partsIt’s like something from a horror movie. A creeping, carnivorous creature that in a macabre attempt at disguise and protection, covers itself with the dismembered remains of dead insects. This super-rare caterpillar is one of the strangest insects in the world. It lives on spider webs inside of trees and rock crevices in a 15 square kilometre radius on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu. Daniel Rubinoff, from the University of Hawaii Insect Museum, found about 62 of these caterpillars over the past 20 years. Their research was published in the journal Science. If a dolphin pees in the water, does anybody know it?Researchers observing river dolphins in Brazil were first surprised to see the animals turning on their backs and urinating into the air, and then further amazed to see other dolphins sampling the falling stream. The Canadian and Brazilian team, led by Claryana Araújo-Wang from the CetAsia Research Group, believe this aerial urination may be