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Past Shows
April 2, 2005
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Seeing with Sound
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Pat Fletcher with her tiny camera hidden in her sunglasses
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Imagine being blind for 25 years, and suddenly being able to see again - using your ears. It sounds impossible, but that's exactly what happened to Pat Fletcher. For the past few years, she's been experimenting with a revolutionary new technology that allows her to see through sound. Using a simple computer program that she downloaded from the Internet, called "The vOICe", which translates visual images into soundscapes, Pat's brain is able to translate those sounds back into images.
Toronto science journalist Alison Motluk spent a day with Pat Fletcher at her home in Buffalo, New York. She plugged her recorder into Pat's computer, so we can hear what Pat hears. She also spoke with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist at Harvard University, who believes that brain cells have the latent ability to process information from a variety of senses. That means the brain can translate input from one sense into another.
Alison's documentary is called, "See, If You Can Hear This."
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Running Bats
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Running vampire bat - Courtesy Daniel Riskin
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Walking and running aren't activities that come to mind when you think of bats. But that's the form of locomotion Daniel Riskin, a graduate student at Cornell University, is interested in. Using a treadmill he tried to understand how vampire bats walk around on the forest floor, and much to his surprise he discovered they cannot only walk, but can actually run. Unlike other mammals, vampire bats use their front legs to provide most of the power for running. He says it's as if they are doing very fast pushups. Running in bats is probably a fairly recent evolutionary advance, and is an example of convergence, as they develop a skill shared by many other creatures on the planet.
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Dinosaur Soft Tissue
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Flexible, branching vessels (left) containing cell-like structures (right) in a T. Rex bone - Courtesy, Dr. Mary Schweitzer.
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The 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park portrayed a scenario where dinosaurs were brought back from extinction using DNA preserved in amber. And, while that story was complete science fiction, a new finding might bring scientists a lot closer to imagining dinosaurs, not just in the bone, but in the flesh. Dr. Mary Schweitzer, an assistant professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University, has found what appears to be soft tissue in the fossilized femur of a T. Rex. In a recent paper, she and her colleagues describe dinosaur blood vessels and cells, flexible and still intact after almost 70 million years. The discovery might help answer long-standing questions about the physiology of these prehistoric animals. But perhaps the most intriguing question is if the researchers will be able to extract protein or even DNA from the ancient tissue.
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Fake Moon Rocks
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Moonrock - Courtesy, NASA |
The astronauts of the Apollo missions brought back samples of moon rocks for us to study. Unfortunately, those supplies are running low. Which is a problem today, since current plans to return to the moon require us to test equipment here on earth first. Luckily, there are researchers interested in creating artificial moon rocks for exactly this purpose. One of them is Dr. John Spray from the Planetary and Space Science Centre and the Department of Geology at the University of New Brunswick. He's working on recreating the physical properties of moon rocks in his lab.
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