Quirks and Quarks

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. Michael Bannert, a postdoctoral student at Tuebingen University in Germany, led the research published in the Journal of Neuroscience.A Mars rover spots strong evidence of ancient life on the red planetEarlier this month, NASA revealed that their Perseverance rover gathered what could be the strongest evidence yet that life may have existed on Mars. Using the rover's scientific instruments, scientists identified two minerals in an ancient river that they say are most often found as a result of microbial life here on Earth. They also set aside a sample for a future return mission. Joel Hurowitz, a geologist at Stony Brook University, says he can't wait to get the sample back to Earth to find out if it truly is a sign of life. It was published in the journal Nature.Life at the limits: searching for 'Intraterrestrial' life deep within the Earth’s crustA new book explores the latest research into the search for life deep inside the Earth, where the sun doesn't shine and oxygen doesn't reach. Scientists travel to some of the most geologically dangerous regions of our planet to understand how life forms in extreme environments, and answer deep questions like the origin of life on Earth and what life might be like off of our planet. Karen Lloyd, a subsurface biogeochemist from the University of Southern California, is the author of Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life On Earth.

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 chimps were consuming the equivalent of two standard drinks a day. This suggests an evolutionary explanation for the human taste for ethanol. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.Sea life says make homes, not bombsAfter the defeat of Germany in 1945, an estimated 1.6 million tons of munitions were dumped into the Baltic sea off the German coast. A team of researchers, including marine biologist Andrey Vedenin from the Senckenberg Research Institute, wanted to understand how this potentially toxic legacy had affected sea life. They were stunned to discover thousands of animals surviving on the abandoned weapons despite the toxic burden they carried. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.Structure of social media sites 'inherently lead to something problematic'Our experience of social media sites is that they often descend into extremism, divisiveness and conflict, but this may be a feature, not a bug. In a pre-print study on arXiv, scientists simulated social media interactions between AI-generated participants to test various interventions to see how they'd impact the problems that emerge, such as the rise of echo chambers, the concentration of influence and the amplification of polarized voices. Petter Törnberg, a University of Amsterdam computational social scientist, said he was disappointed to learn that none of the interventions worked.Your brain’s two halves hand off perception like a baton in a relay raceWhen something passes from one side of your visual field to the other, something amazing happens, according to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Matthew Broschart, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, tracked how the visual parts of each half of the brain, connected to each eye, do a coordinated dance to create a unified visual perception in primates. The bear necessities of tracking B.C. grizzlies with machine learning softwareScientists and guardians from five First Nations of the Nanwakolas Council are working together to track individual grizzlies across the southern Great Bear Rainforest  in B.C.. Using camera traps and machine learning techniques, they've developed an automated system through the BearID Project to identify individual bears and track them over the landscape. We spoke with conservation scientist and director of the BearID Project, Melanie Clapham, and Tashina James-Matilpi, from the Tlowitsis First Nation, the project's guardian logistics coordinator for the Nanwakolas Council.

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 positive impacts on the recipients' weight and metabolic health. Dr. Wayne Cutfield, a pediatrician and professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said they also found after all this time that the donor bacteria have remained established in the recipients' gut microbiome. The study is in the journal Nature Communications. An ant queen clones sexual slaves of another species for her daughtersIn a truly bizarre tale from the animal world, researchers have discovered a species of ant where the queen gives birth to males of two totally different species. Somewhere along their evolutionary path, these Messor ibericus queen ants in southern Europe developed an ability to clone male Messor structor ants for her daughters to mate with and to produce a hybrid working class. Jonathan Romiguier, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Montpellier in France, said these M. ibericus ants essentially domesticated ants of another species. The study was published in the journal Nature. Why other apes can’t walk a mile in our shoesA feature that distinguishes humans from other primates is the ability to walk upright. The major evolutionary change in the structure of our pelvis that allows for our bipedalism has now been traced genetically and developmentally. Human pelvic blades initially form in the embryo like other primates, but then flip their growth from vertical to horizontal, to give the human pelvis its unique basin shape. This new research led by Terence Capellini, Chair of the human evolutionary biology department at Harvard University and postdoctoral student Gayani Senevirathne, was published in the journal Nature.Women glow. So do men. Understanding our 'inner light'You might have been told by an admirer that you have a unique glow. In two groundbreaking studies, researchers have demonstrated the reality of that poetic compliment. Using ultra-sensitive instruments capable of detecting individual photons, Canadian researchers have imaged a biological source of incredibly faint light, known as Ultraweak Photon Emissions (UPE), that has potential as a future non-invasive diagnostic imaging tool. Daniel Oblak, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary, oversaw a study where they unequivocally demonstrated that living things, like mice, give off an extremely faint glow that dims when they die. His study was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. In a separate study, Nirosha Murugan, — an assistant professor of tissue biophysics at Wilfred Laurier University — discovered that these UPEs can also detect different mental states in the brain. That study was published in the journal iScience.

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 decided to document other instances of killer whales approaching humans to share a snack. Towers, the executive director of the marine research nonprofit Bay Cetology, found dozens of examples of this behaviour. It’s a perhaps unique example of a wild creature sharing food with humans for its own diversion and curiosity. The research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.Sweat science — This research really was 90% perspirationWhile the biology of perspiration is relatively well understood, the physical process by which water excreted from our skin cools us is not. This motivated engineer Konrad Rykaczewski to strap himself into a specialized full-body, tube-filled suit to observe how water emerges from sweat glands over the skin. Rykaczewski, a thermal and materials engineer at Arizona State University, found that sweat rises out of sweat glands in pools, eventually spilling out and soaking the top layer of the skin. The research was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.What came first, the tomato or the potato?As it turns out, the potato came from the tomato. By tracking their genetic lineage, an international team of researchers, including University of British Columbia botanist Loren Rieseberg, have found that the noble potato actually resulted from the tomato naturally cross-breeding with another unrelated species, more than eight million years ago. The research was published in the journal Cell.Bringing science education to the incarceratedWe speak with a scientist who spent much of his summer working in Canadian prisons doing brief, but intense, science education courses. Phil Heron created the Think Like a Scientist program to teach critical thinking skills to those who may have had negative experiences with education. He believes that the scientific method will help people understand how failure in life, as in science, can be a pathway to success.We spoke to:Phil Heron, assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Scarborough campus, in the department of physical and environmental sciences and founder of the Think Like a Scientist program.Dalton Harrison, founder of Standfast Productions and former program participant finishing a masters degree in criminal justice and criminology.Phoenix Griffin, university student in criminal justice and criminology and former program participant.Jamie Williams, a director with Spectrum First Education and a co-facilitator of Think Like a Scientist.

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 back a healthy wildlife population, to mixed success. Nick was monitoring wild dogs this summer to learn what they’re eating, and what effects their recent re-introduction has had on the other animals. Wright is in the Gaynor lab at the University of British Columbia.Saving ancient silk road graffiti from dam-inundationThe legendary silk road is a network of trade routes stretching from Eastern China to Europe and Africa, used by traders from the second century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Travelers often left their marks, in the form of graffiti and other markings on stone surfaces along the route. Construction of a dam in Pakistan is threatening some of these petroglyphs, and an international team is working to document them online while there is still time. Jason Neelis, of the Religion and Culture Department, and Ali Zaidi, from the Department of Global Studies, both at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, are part of the team.Prospecting for World War II bombs in an Ottawa bogPablo Arzate's tests of sensor-equipped drones developed for mining uncovered 80-year-old relics leftover from World War II bomber pilot training in the Mer Bleue bog southeast of Ottawa. Arzate, the founder of 3XMAG Technologies from Carleton University, says his newly-developed technology revealed a trove of unexploded ordnance lurking beneath the bog’s surface. Technology allows examination of Inca mummies without disturbing themAndrew Nelson and his team spent the summer in Peru devising new methods of non-invasively scanning Peruvian mummies dating to the Inca period – so they can study them without unwrapping them. In Peru, ancient human remains were wrapped in large bundles along with other objects.  Nelson is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Western University in London, Ontario. This work is done in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture of Peru.Eavesdropping on chatty snapping turtles in Algonquin ParkSince 1972, scientists have been spending their summers at the Algonquin Park research station to monitor the turtles living in the area. In recent years, the researchers discovered that these turtles vocalise –– both as adults, and as hatchlings still in the egg. So this summer, Njal Rollinson and his students set out to record these vocalisations to try and understand what the turtles are saying. Rollinson is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto.

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 of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of WaterlooU.S. cuts to Great Lakes science and monitoring threaten our shared freshwater resourceU.S. budget and staffing cuts are jeopardizing the long-standing collaboration with our southern neighbour to maintain the health of the Great Lakes, our shared resource and the largest freshwater system in the world. With: Jérôme Marty, executive director of the International Association for Great Lakes Research and part-time professor at the University of OttawaGreg McClinchey, policy and legislative director with the Great Lakes Fishery CommissionMichael Wilkie, Biologist at Wilfred Laurier UniversityBrittney Borowiec, research associate in the Wilkie Lab at Wilfred Laurier UniversityAaron Fisk, Ecologist and Canada Research Chair at the University of WindsorUnexpected ways U.S. culture war policies are affecting Canadian scientists One of the first things President Trump did after taking office was to sign an executive order eliminating all DEI policies in the federal government. This is having far-reaching consequences for Canadian scientists as they navigate the new reality of our frequent research partner’s hostility against so-called “woke science.”With:Dr. Sofia Ahmed, Clinician scientist, and academic lead for the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute at the University of Alberta Angela Kaida, professor of health sciences and Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University in VancouverDawn Bowdish, professor of immunology, the executive director of the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health and Canada Research Chair at McMaster UniversityKevin Zhao, MD/PhD student in immunology in the Bowdish Lab at McMaster UniversityJérôme Marty, executive director of the International Association for Great Lakes ResearchCanada has a ‘responsibility’ to step up and assert scientific sovereigntyA 2023 report on how to strengthen our federal research support system could be our roadmap to more robust scientific sovereignty. The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System made recommendations to the federal government for how we could reform our funding landscape. The intent was to allow us to quickly respond to national research priorities and to make Canada a more enticing research partner in world science. With: Frédéric Bouchard, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of philosophy of science at the Université de Montreal. Chair of the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System.

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 Antarctica Penguin guano is rich in ammonia, and when it accumulates in penguin rookeries in Antarctica, that ammonia is released into the atmosphere, encouraging cloud production. Those clouds reflect sunlight into space, but can also trap sunlight reflected from the ice, so have complex climate interactions. This connection was discovered by University of Helsinki researcher Matthew Boyer, and was published in the journal Nature.Giant sloth family tree suggests trees are just a recent part of itSloths used to be giants the size of bears and even elephants before disappearing around 12,000 years ago. An international group of paleontologists including University of Toronto’s Gerry De Iuliis have assembled a comprehensive family tree of the sloth to understand how a group that used to dominate the landscape was winnowed away to only a handful of relatively small, tree dwelling species. The research was published in the journal Science.Eradicating diseases — Can we wipe out ancient and modern plagues forever?In 1980 the World Health Organization declared Smallpox officially eradicated, meaning that for the first time, a plague that killed hundreds of millions of people had been eliminated by human ingenuity. It opened the question of whether we could do this for other lethal threats? We look at efforts to eradicate Polio, an ancient plague, and HIV, a more modern epidemic, to understand how researchers are trying to eradicate these diseases , how close they’ve come, and what’s preventing their final victory.Quirks spoke to Stan Houston, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine and public health at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He’s worked on treating HIV and tuberculosis in places such as Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Ecuador and Alberta.Catherine Hankins was the chief scientific adviser for the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS in Geneva, Switzerland. And in 2013, she was named to the Order of Canada and in 2023 was inducted in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. She is currently an adjunct professor at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University and a senior fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development.

Mutant super-powers give Korean sea women diving abilitiesThe 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.This dessert is automatic and autonomous Care for a slice of robo-cake? Scientists in Europe have baked up a cake with pneumatically powered animated gummy bears, and candles lit by chocolate batteries. They think their edible robotics could develop in the future to food that could bring itself to the hungry and medicine could deliver itself to the sick. Mario Caironi of the Italian Institute of Technology and his colleagues presented their creation at Expo 2025 Osaka.Shrinking Nemo — heat is causing clownfish to downsizeScientists have found that clownfish, made famous by the Disney movie Finding Nemo, have an ability never seen before in fish in the coral reefs. When the water they live in gets warmer, they are able to shrink their bodies — becoming a few per cent of their body length shorter — to cope with the stress of the heat. Melissa Versteeg of Newcastle University says the size of the clown anemonefish is important for their survival and their ranking within their hierarchical society. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.When the music moves you — the brain science of grooveYou know that groove feeling you get when you listen to certain music that compels you to shake your bootie? Scientists in France investigated how our brains experience groovy music to better understand how we anticipate rhythms in time. They discovered that we perceive time in the motor region that controls movement. Benjamin Morillion from Aix Marseille Université said they also found a specific rhythm in the brain that helps us process information in time, that could predict if a person thought the music was groovy. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.Scientists hope a new storm lab will help us understand destructive weatherExtreme weather is far less predictable than it used to be, and now a new research centre at Western University wants to transform our understanding of Canada’s unique weather systems. The Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory will collect nation-wide data on extreme weather, including hailstorms, tornadoes, and flash flooding, and look for patterns to help predict where they’ll be hitting and how to prevent the most damage. Producer Amanda Buckiewicz spoke with:Greg Kopp, ImpactWX Chair in Severe Storms Engineering and CSSL founding director at Western UniversityHarold Brooks, senior research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms LaboratoryJohn Allen, associate professor of meteorology at Central Michigan UniversityPaul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at Western University.Tanya Brown-Giammanco, director of Disaster and Failure Studies at NIST