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Past Shows
April 26, 2008
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB).
Pulling the plug on a Carbon Sink
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Mountain Pine Beetle, courtesy Doug Linton, Natural Resources Canada
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Over the last decade, the lodgepole pine forests of British Columbia have been devastated by the mountain pine beetle. Trees covering an area twice the size of New Brunswick have been killed by an unprecedented insect outbreak, driven by higher than normal temperatures and a forest made vulnerable by fire suppression. It's been a catastrophe for the ecosystem, but perhaps more serious is what's going to happen to the forest's carbon. Normally, living forests absorb carbon dioxide and store it in plant matter like wood. However, these dead trees will, through fire and decomposition, emit their vast store of carbon - nearly a billion tons of carbon dioxide - by 2020, according to Dr. Werner Kurz, a senior scientist with the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada, and his colleagues. The forest will eventually regenerate and begin to absorb more carbon than it emits again, but that process could take a generation.
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Diet and Baby Gender
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Every woman knows how important it is to eat the right things during pregnancy, but it turns out that what you eat as you're trying to conceive can have some pretty big consequences, too. Dr. Fiona Mathews, a biologist at the University of Exeter in England, has recently found that the amount of food a woman eats at the time of conception can affect the sex of her baby
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The Disappearing Bumblebee
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Bombus ternarius, courtesy S. Colla |
With the continued collapse of honey bee numbers around the world, their cousin, the bumblebee, is being increasingly recognized as an important insect. But internationally, bumblebee numbers also seem to be in decline. Sheila Colla, a Ph. D. candidate at York University, wanted to know if the general picture of declining bees was true in Ontario as well. So, for the past three years, she's been counting and classifying bumblebees. Her results aren't encouraging: 3 species formerly found in Ontario have completely disappeared, including one that used to be extremely common. Ms. Colla thinks disease, pesticides and loss of habitat could be behind the wild bees' decline, and if losses continue, it could have a serious impact on the native plants and animals of our countryside that depend on bee pollination.
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The Hot Topic
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The Hot Topic is, of course, climate change, but it's also the title of a new book by two high-profile voices in the science community. Sir David King was Chief Scientific Advisor to the government of the United Kingdom from 2000 to 2007, and is now the director of the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University in England. His co-author, Dr. Gabrielle Walker, has been the Climate Change Editor at the eminent science journal, Nature, and is now a contributing editor to New Scientist magazine. Together, they've taken a comprehensive look, not just at the problem of global warming, but at what we must do to solve it, with technology to restructure our energy use and political negotiations to get the world's nations working together. They both think dangerous climate change is increasingly inevitable, and that we need to act quickly to reduce its worst effects.
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Argus: Spy in the Sky
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The Argus Instrument |
There is increasing pressure on the world’s governments to limit and reduce their carbon emissions. But one problem has been how to measure those greenhouse gases and pinpoint exactly where they are coming from. Well, that’s where Canadian scientists come in. We’re sending up a satellite to measure those carbon emissions from space. But in a typically modest Canadian fashion, we’re using a micro-satellite, equipped with experiments that can fit in your pocket. One of those experiments is the Argus spectrometer, and it will fly with a number of other Canadian experiments next week onboard the CanX-2 micro-satellite. The CanX-2 is only the size of a milk carton, while the Argus instrument onboard is the size of a matchbox. It provides measurements of airborne greenhouse gases to support the goals of the Kyoto protocol. Dr. Brendan Quine is the lead investigator of the Argus experiment, and Director of Space Engineering at York University in Toronto.
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Theme music copyright Raphaël Gluckstein. Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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