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Past Shows
June 12, 2004
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Journey to the Ice Age
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Archeologist Dr. Peter Storck doesn't live in the same world we do.
When he looks out on the landscape he doesn't see fields and forests, he
sees glaciers and ice age lakes. For the last thirty years he's been
trying to reconstruct the landscape of central Canada as it existed
right after the end of the last ice age. His goal has been to try and
figure out just where the very first people to move into Canada after the
ice age lived, and search those places for any archological traces. In
his new book, Journey to the Ice Age: Discovering an Ancient World,
Dr. Storck describes his explorations and his discoveries - largely the
fragments of stone tools left behind by these first people. From the
fragmentary evidence he's found, he's built up a picture of who these
people were and how and where they lived. Dr. Storck is a curator
emeritus at the Royal Ontario Museum.
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Smoking Your Brains Out
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Addiction for the young |
It's long been known that children of women who smoke are more likely to take up the habit themselves when they grow up. But aside from the influence from the environment, Dr. Theodore Slotkin thinks there are other factors at play as well. Dr. Slotkin is a professor of pharmacology, psychiatry and neurobiology at Duke University Medical Centre, and his work with rats suggests fetuses that are exposed to nicotine grow up with a nicotine addiction. Also, when the kids hit their teens and begin experimenting with tobacco, their brains will recognize the stimulus and want more.
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Transgenic Salmon don't play nice with others.
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GM Salmon gobbling a smaller fish - courtesy PNAS |
Genetically modified salmon which can grow faster, and reach full size
ten times as quick as wild salmon, could be a boon to salmon farmers.
What they might do if they escaped from these farms, and entered the
natural environment, however, is a major safety concern for biologists.
Dr. Bob Devlin, a research scientist with the Department of Fisheries
and Oceans in West Vancourver, has now done the first experiments
looking at how transgenic and normal salmon might co-exist, and the news is
not reassuring. In his lab experiment, transgenic animals quickly
outgrew and even ate the smaller fish they lived with. Then, having eaten
beyond available food resources, they died off themselves. Wild
conditions are likely to be much different than the lab, but it underscores
the need to find a way to control these fish from escaping and spreading
their genes into the wild before they're allowed to be raised in fish
farms.
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Calcium in the Cambrian
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Shells make the animal |
530 million years ago, in an event known as the Cambrian explosion,
life went from simple and small to large and complex, and the animals that
are ancestors to most creatures on earth suddenly appeared. Dr. Tim
Lowenstein, a professor of Geology at Binghamton University in New York
State has evidence for what might have happened. By analyzing salt
crystals that contain tiny droplets of water from ancient seas, he's
found that the explosion of life corresponded to an increase in calcium in
the sea. Animals used this extra calcium to build hard shells and
structures that allowed them to get larger, and become more resistant to
predators.
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Flying Whales
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Dr. Howle's Model, courtesy Dr. L. Howle |
If they weren’t so large, heavy and lacking in wings, Humpback whales might make pretty decent flyers. These cetaceans turn out to have highly aerodynamic flippers. Which is what makes them good swimmers. Dr. Laurens Howle from Duke University has studied the flipper of the Humpback whale, and discovered it has a unique surface structure. Now he’s working out how to apply it to human aviation.
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