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Past Shows
April 19, 2008
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB).
Kluge: the haphazard construction of the human mind
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Humans are the only species capable of logical reasoning, abstract thought and complex language. So you might think it forgivable that we sell ourselves as a superiour species. But if you stop to think about it, if we're so darned clever, why can't we find our car keys, stick to a diet or remember what we ate for breakfast two days ago? Dr. Gary Marcus, a cognitive neuroscientist at New York University, says it has to do with the fact that our brain is far from the biological super-computer we like to think it is. His new book, Kluge, the hapharzard construction of the human mind, argues that the brain is poorly-cobbled construction, built by imperfect evolutionary engineering.
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Neander-talk
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You may have thought Latin and Aramaic were dead languages, but they're nothing compared to the ancient language Neanderthals spoke. Their tongue died out 30, 000 years ago when the last of the species became extinct. But recently, Dr. Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist with Florida Atlantic University, has brought Neanderthal speech back from the dead. Using computer models based on the fossil evidence of their vocal tract, Dr. McCarthy has reconstructed what Neanderthal speech may have sounded like - or at least what a single vowel may have sounded like. He presented his findings at this month's meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
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The Tale of the Tower Lions
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Barbary Lion Skull, credit: Natural History Museum |
Back in 1937, a surprise discovery was made at the Tower of London. Two skulls were found during the excavation of the moat: the skulls of lions. Not much was done with the skulls until a few years ago, when Richard Sabin, the Curator of Mammals from the Natural History Museum, decided to take a look at them. Along with colleagues, he discovered that the skulls dated from the fourteenth and fifteenth century and were probably from the Royal Menagerie, which existed at the Tower to hold all the animals given as gifts to the royalty through this period. Mr. Sabin's latest work has shown that not only were these lions from long ago, but they were also examples of Barbary lions, a subspecies that went extinct in the wild about 80 years ago.
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Draining the Lake
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A recently drained Greenland lake, courtesy S. Das |
Each summer on the ice sheets of Greenland, large lakes form from the melting snow and ice. These lakes sit on the surface of the ice, and thanks to satellite data, we know they seem to suddenly disappear as the summer goes on. Dr. Sarah Das, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, decided to see what was happening to these lakes. In the summer of 2006, she took a team up to Greenland and set up monitoring stations around two large lakes. When she came back in 2007, she was stunned to discover that the lakes had drained very rapidly - completely emptying in less than 2 hours. The water was draining through long fissures that formed along the bottom of the lake, and Dr. Das estimates the flow was faster than water flowing over Niagara Falls, but going down more than one kilometer. The water settled under the glacier, where it forced the ice up, and sped up its movement toward the shore. While this melt cycle has probably been going on for thousands of years, with concerns over global climate change, its impact may increase.
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Breaking the Ice
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A crack on the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, credit: Derek Mueller |
Climate warming is drastically changing the Arctic environment, and no part of it more quickly than the ice shelves on northern Ellesmere Island. These shelves are more than 30 meters thick, and hundreds of square kilometers in area. They've filled bays and fjords for thousands of years, but have been shrinking for most of the last 100 years. In the last few years, however, they've not just been shrinking - they've been literally falling apart. Dr. Derek Mueller, the Roberta Bondar Fellow in Northern and Polar Studies at Trent University, has just returned from a survey of the ice shelves, and has found that the largest of them, Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, is on the point of completely disintegrating.
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Theme music copyright Raphaël Gluckstein. Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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