Quirks And Quarks Complete Show From Cbc Radio

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

All the colours of the rainbow, plus oneResearchers have fired lasers directly into the eye to stimulate photoreceptors, and produce the perception of a colour that does not exist in nature. They describe it as a “supersaturated teal,” and hope the technique will allow them to better understand colour vision and perhaps lead to treatments for vision problems. Austin Roorda has been developing this technology using mirrors, lasers and optical devices. He is a professor of Optometry and Vision Science at University of California, Berkeley. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.Following in the footsteps of an ancient ankylosaurPaleontologists have found fossil footprints of an armoured dinosaur in the Canadian Rockies that fill in a critical gap in the fossil record. The footprints belonged to a club-tailed ankylosaur about five to six metres long, and are the first evidence of this type of dinosaur living in North America in a period known as the middle Cretaceous. The research was led by Vic

How a helpless baby bird protects itself from hungry huntersThere’s not a more vulnerable creature in nature than a baby bird. Tiny and immobile, they’re easy pickings for predators. But the chicks of the white-necked jacobin hummingbird have evolved a unique defence. They disguise themselves as poisonous caterpillars to discourage those that might eat them. Jay Falk, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado and Scott Taylor, director of the Mountain Research Station and associate professor at the University of Colorado, studied these birds in Panama. Their research was published in the journal Ecology.Seals have a sense of their oxygen levels, which makes them better diversSeals can dive at length to tremendous depth thanks to some remarkable adaptations, like the ability to collapse their lungs, and radically lower their heart rate. Chris McKnight, a senior research fellow at the University of St Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit in Scotland, led a study looking to see if tweaking oxygen and

A tree has evolved to attract lightning strikes — to eliminate the competitionScientists working in Panama noticed that a particular tropical tree species was frequently struck by lightning, but was infrequently killed by the strikes. Forest ecologist Evan Gora found that Dipteryx oleifera trees were often the last ones standing after a lightning strike, which can kill over 100 trees with a single bolt. His team discovered the giant trees were more electrically conductive than other species, which allows them to not only survive strikes, but also channel lightning into parasitic vines and competing trees around them. The research was published in the journal New Phytologist.Anti-anxiety drugs we pee out could be affecting wild salmonOur bodies only process some of the pharmaceuticals we take, which means when we pee, we’re releasing traces of drugs into the ecosystem. A study of the impact of trace amounts of anti-anxiety drugs on juvenile salmon suggests they might become too brave for their own survival. &n

An attractive new strategy for brain surgeryA Canadian team is developing minimally-invasive micro-tools for brain surgery that can be operated by magnetic fields from outside of the skull. The tools, including scalpels and forceps, will enter the cranium through small incisions, and then be controlled by focused and precise magnetic fields. Eric Diller is associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Toronto and his research was published in the journal Science Robotics.Animal tool use is fishyIn recent decades scientists have discovered animals from primates to birds and marine mammals can use tools — a capacity once thought to be exclusive to humans. Now scientists have discovered fish using hard surfaces to crack open hard-shelled prey and get at the meaty meal inside. The research, led by Juliette Tariel-Adam from Macquarie University, included recruiting divers and scientists from around the world to report any sightings of tool use, which led to 16 reports across fiv

One whale’s waste is an ocean organism’s treasureThe nutrients in the ocean are not evenly distributed. Resources tend to be rich around coastlines and near the poles, and are often poorer in the open ocean and the tropics. A new study has explored how urine from migrating baleen whales is a significant way that nitrogen and other nutrients are circulated in the oceans. Joe Roman is a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont. He led the research, published in the journal Nature Communications. The underground economy: Fungi and plants trade have a network under our feetScientists have used a custom robot to track the growth of a complex underground supply-chain network that forms between more than 80 per cent of the plant species on Earth and symbiotic fungus. This allowed them to trace the flow of carbon and nutrients across this network,  that draws about 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the soil each year. Toby Kiers, from Vrije University in Amsterdam and the Society for the Protecti