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Past Shows
April 22, 2006
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Slowing the Sun
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Red giant star |
In about 5 billion years the sun will expand to become a red giant star, incinerating the earth, and that will be it for any life that remains on our planet. In an attempt to get an early start on forestalling this looming tragedy, astronomer Dr. Martin Beech of Campion College at the University of Regina has spent some spare weekends contemplating what might be done. He's considered the theoretical possiblities of slowing down the burning of our sun, and making it last as much as ten times longer than it normally would. Working out the details of the process is, of course, just a job for future engineers.
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Vegetarian Salmon
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Juvenile canola-fed salmon - Courtesy, Dr. P Schulte |
Farmed Salmon are raised on feed made from smaller wild fish caught at sea, which is creating unsustainable fishing pressure on these wild fish. Dr. Patricia Schulte, a professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, and her colleagues have been experimenting with substituting canola oil for the fish oil normally used in the feed. In tests using a diet in which 75% of the oil in the diet comes from canola, the fish are apparently developing normally. The experiment hasn't reached the stage where the fish can be eaten yet, so it's not clear what the impacts of the canola will be on taste and nutritional value of the fish.
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Finch Mate Choice
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Pair of house finches - Courtesy, Alex Badyaev |
Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection has often been cited as an explanation for why flashy, but seemingly unnecessary, features such as peacocks’ tails have evolved. Females prefer showy males, since it is often a sign of genetic fitness. But what happens when those males have been chosen and paired off? How do the remaining females choose their mates? That’s what Kevin Oh, a PhD student in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, wondered. He’s been studying a population of house finches in Montana.
He found that early in the mating season, the females did indeed choose the flashiest males as partners. But later in the season, when the showy males were out of the mix, the remaining females changed their focus from choosing flashy to selecting the most genetically different males. The payoff is that the parents who weren’t closely related enjoyed a higher survival rate among their offspring.
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Hacking the Universe
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Programming the Universe, by dr. Seth Lloyd |
As computers continue to get smaller and more powerful, the components within them are also decreasing in size. Eventually they'll be so small the parts will be made of single atoms, and subject to the weird rules that apply to the quantum world. Luckily, scientists are working on this problem, and think they can make the quantum rules work in our favour. One of the leaders in this field is Dr. Seth Lloyd, from MIT. As he's worked on developing quantum computers, he's realized the biggest quantum computer is all around us. It's the universe we live in, and in his new book, Programming the Universe, Dr. Lloyd introduces us to how we can take advantage of the universe's own processing power.
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Question of the Week: From Gel to Foam
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This week, our question comes from Richard Parker of Centreville, Nova Scotia, who writes: As I shave using a gel for shaving cream, I keep wondering how the gel turns into a foam when I apply it. Can you explain the science behind this action?
For the answer, we go to Dr. Amyl Ghanem. She's an associate professor of Chemical Engineering at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
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