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Past Shows
December 9, 2006
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB) (available Saturday, two hours after broadcast).
How a Bat Holds its Licker
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Gene Simmons of the bat world, photograph by Murray Cooper |
There are several species of nectar-eating bats in Ecuador that have developed unusually long tongues to slurp up the sweet goodness of tropical flowers. The flowers supply the nectar generously because the bats spread their pollen. Nathan Muchhala, a Ph.D. candidate in the Biology department at the University of Miami, has discovered the champion tongue among bats. He discovered that a 60-mm-long bat called Anoura fistulata has a tongue 50 per cent longer than its body, specifically adapted for reaching deep into flowers for nectar. The tongue is so long that to retract it, the bat has to pull it back all the way down into its throat.
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Forest Fires and Mercury
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Moab Lake after the fire - Courtesy, E. Kelly |
Serendipity can make for the best science discoveries. Erin Kelly can attest to that. Ms. Kelly, a doctoral biology student at the University of Alberta, was measuring mercury levels in lakes at different elevations in the Canadian Rockies, when one of the lakes she was looking at was suddenly encased in a forest fire. With archived samples of fish from the lake available from Environment Canada, she could compare post-fire mercury levels to pre-fire levels. The differences were dramatic, with mercury levels being as much as five times higher after the fire, raising concerns for the health of the fish, and the health of those who might eat them. While forest fires are part of a natural, cyclical process, prescribed burns have been suggested as a means of curbing the destructive spread of the mountain pine beetle. This new research suggests that deliberately increasing the number of forest fires could have implications for animal and human health that need to be taken into consideration.
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Magic and the Mind
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It's not that easy to call a magician's bluff |
We all know that magic is just someone playing mind tricks. But simple as that sounds, being able to call the magician on his bluff is a different matter. That’s why Dr. Gustav Kuhn, who’s both a magician, and a psychology research fellow at the University of Durham, decided to do a study on visual perception and magic tricks. He has demonstrated how the key to a magic trick is to manipulate what the audience is expecting to see, and how that expectation of seeing can override the actual visual input. Take, for example, the trick commonly known as the "vanishing ball". The magician pretends to throw a ball up in the air, and fools the audience into thinking the ball was actually thrown, by the magician looking in the direction the ball would have gone. This kind of trick shows that vision for perception and vision for action can be dissociated in the brain. This is the same phenomenon that's at the core of the debate over the reliability of eyewitness accounts.
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Brotherly Love among Crayfish
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The Red Swamp Crayfish - Courtesy, Donald Edwards |
The life of the Red Swamp Crayfish is a complicated one. Living in the streams and swamps of the Southern United States, these lobster-like creatures are always in close contact with their neighbours. So, a hierarchy of who's who is very important. If you're much bigger than the crayfish next door, you're the boss. But, if your neighbour is about your size, you're going to have to compete to figure out who's in charge. Most of the time, this is going to involve fighting, but some male crayfish have a different strategy. They prefer to make love, not war, literally. Dr. Donald Edwards, a Regents' professor of biology and physics at Georgia State University, studies these animals and has discovered that one form of conflict resolution is through what he calls pseudo-copulation. The activity resembles what happens when a male and female crayfish couple, including the depositing of sperm by the dominant animal. Dr. Edwards believes this developed as a safe alternative these crustaceans use to sort out their social ranking.
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This is Your Brain on Music
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This is Your Brain on Music, by Dr. Daniel Levitin |
Dr. Daniel Levitin has gone from being a session musician and music producer working with world-famous recording artists to an academic career in neuroscience. The connection between the two is his fascination with the way that music works in the brain. In his new book, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, he explores how humans seem to be adapted specifically for music. Music activates the pleasure centres in ways similar to drugs, food and sex. The patterns and features of music are also perceived in special ways by our brains, distinct from ordinary sounds. This explains some of what we find attractive in things like the patterns of notes in an octave, musical harmony and complex rhythm. Dr. Daniel Levitin is a professor in the department of Psychology, and Bell chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication at McGill University.
Dr. Levitin used examples from the following recordings:
- Sly & Family Stone, Hot Fun in the Summertime from Sly and the Family Stone: Greatest Hits
- Maurice Ravel - Bolero, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner cond.
- Sergei Prokofief - Peter & the Wolf, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink cond. Alec McCowen narraror.
- Chuck Berry - Rock & Roll Music, from Chuck Berry: Anthology
- Stevie Wonder - Superstition, from Stevie Wonder: The Definitive Collection
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Water On Mars: Bob's Essay
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Running water has almost been spotted running on Mars. Images from the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting the planet for a decade, show white streaks on the side of a hill that look remarkably like water seepage out of the side of a cliff. Features like this have been seen before on Mars, but these particular marks could have formed as recently as last year. This could be the closest we've come to finding the holy grail of Mars exploration: running water on the Red Planet. Or Mars might have pulled a fast one on us - again.
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