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Past Shows
June 24, 2006
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB) (available Saturday, two hours after broadcast).
The Rise and Fall of William Shockley
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Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, by Joel Shurkin |
William Shockley was once one of the most highly-respected scientists in the world. His research into solid-state physics lead to the development of the transistor, earned him a Nobel Prize, and ushered in the electronic age. Shockley also started the first semiconductor company in Santa Clara, California; he was, by all rights, the founder of modern-day Silicon Valley. Yet, Shockley’s life was, in many ways, a tragic failure. His intelligence was matched only by his aggressive competitiveness and, later in life, by severe paranoia. Alienating his family, friends and colleagues, he finally turned his back on physics only to become an eccentric firebrand - a scientific pariah who tried to use his credentials as a Nobel Laureate in order to promulgate racist theories of population control and eugenics. Joel Shurkin is a Pulitzer prize-winning science writer who's written a biography on Shockley, called Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley.
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Seeing in Stereo
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Coronal Mass Ejection - Courtesy, NASA |
Later this summer NASA's newest eyes on the sun will be launched. The mission is called Stereo, and involves two nearly-identical satellites which will orbit the sun so they can get a 3-D look at solar phenomena. NASA scientists, like Dr. Terry Kucera, the deputy project scientist for the Stereo mission at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are most interested in coronal mass ejections, which send a billion tonnes of matter out from the sun at a million kilometres an hour.
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Sick Lobsters
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Caribbean spiny lobster infected with PaV1 virus - Courtesy, Don Behringer |
When you’ve been studying spiny lobsters for 20 years, you notice when something’s not right. So when Dr. Mark Butler’s team observed that some, which were showing signs of a viral infection, were hanging out alone, the scientists wondered what was up. Usually, the lobsters are social and often gather together by the hundreds under rocks to protect themselves from predators. What the biologist from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia discovered is that healthy lobsters can tell when a neighbour is sick and they avoid the sickly ones. His studies suggest that the healthy lobsters avoid a lobster infected with the virus even before that animal shows symptoms -- two to four weeks before they’re even contagious. Now, Dr. Butler and his team are trying to figure out how the healthy ones detect a sick one in their midst.
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Question of the Week, Part One: Animal Eyesight
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This week we have a question from Francesca Wei Wu, who wrote to us from Edmonton. She asks: Do animals have the visual defects of myopia – nearsightedness, or hyperopia – farsightedness - like human beings?
For the answer, we focused on Dr. Elizabeth Stone, Dean of the Ontario Veterinary College, at the University of Guelph.
Touchy-Feely Robots
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Image produced by Dr. Saraf's sensor |
Dr. Ravi Saraf, from the department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has developed a new kind of touch sensor that could give robots as fine a tactile sense as humans. The sensor is constructed of layers of nanoparticles trapped between plastic and electrodes. When the film is touched, a current flows through it, stimulating the nanoparticles to emit light. It has tactile resolution comparable to human fingers. Apart from use in robots, Dr. Saraf thinks it might help give surgeons doing remote operations, a kind of sense of touch inside the human body.
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Question of the Week, Part Two: Curly Hair and Humidity
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Since this is our last show of the season, we thought we’d throw in a bonus question.
And this one comes to us from Francis Comeau in Benoit, New Brunswick, who writes: I have a co-worker who has long blonde curly hair. She often says humidity makes her hair unmanageable – it curls up madly. I have heard this from many curly-haired people. Why would humidity curl hair?
We combed the country for the hair-raising answer and found Dr. Amyl Ghanem, associate professor of chemical engineering, at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
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