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Past Shows
March 8, 2008
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB).
Shock Therapy
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On the surface, electroconvulsive shock therapy looks like something to be avoided at all costs. The idea of running electrical current through your grey matter doesn't seem like the most intuitive way to treat mental illness. But despite its gruesome public image, it turns out to be the most effective treatment for suicidal depression. Dr. Edward Shorter, a medical historian with the University of Toronto, has recently co-written a history of ECT, called Shock Therapy. Dr. Shorter's book delves into the development of the technique, explores how ECT got such a bad reputation, and highlights its current comeback.
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White Shark Cafe
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Great White Shark -Courtesy TOPP project |
As nice as it is to spend some time in your neighborhood coffee shop, the cafe that Dr. Barbara Block has recently discovered might not be the safest place to hang out. Dr. Block has been tagging white sharks off the coast of California and studying their migmigration patterns. Many of them gather in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, mid-way between the California Coast and Hawaii. Dr. Block isn't sure what exactly they do there, but she expects they may be socializing and grabbing a bite to eat. She's named this mid-ocean hangout, the White Shark Cafe. The study is part of a larger project, called TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Predators), which uses electronic tagging devices to track large sea predators as they swim across the globe.
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Battling Loons
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Loon Fight - courtesy Dr. Piper |
It may come as a surprise to cottage goers and nature lovers alike, but the loon's image as a serene harbinger of tranquility has just been dealt a death blow. It turns out loons have a violent side we rarely see. Dr. Walter Piper, a biologist at Chapman University in California, has been studying the loon's territorial behaviour for the past 15 years. A recent study by Dr. Piper has exposed the dirty underbelly of loon life. Loons not only get in serious physical fights, they quite often fight to the death.
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Wolves and Coyotes
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Yellowstone wolf |
The reintroduction of the wolf to the Western USA a decade ago has led to many changes in that ecosystem, including changes in the behaviour of wolf prey, such as elk. It's also had an effect on wolf competitors, particularly the coyote, but that effect is a little surprising. While wolves do kill coyotes, it turns out that the benefits for the coyotes of being able to scavenge from wolf-kills may well outweigh the direct dangers the wolves pose. Dr. Todd Atwood, a research biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department, has been studying the wolves' interactions with the coyote.
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Make your own Event Horizon
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The laser apparatus that creates the artificial event horizon |
Dr. Ulf Leonhardt, Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his colleagues haven't exactly made their own black hole in the lab. They have, however, made an artificial event horizon - the point of no-return outside a black hole, where the powerful gravity of the singularity makes escape impossible. Their event horizon affects only light, not mass, but still should have many of the properties of a real event horizon, without the matter-swallowing drawbacks. They hope it will allow them to study exotic phenomenon that occur around a black hole, such as Hawking radiation, in which virtual particles from the quantum world are made real.
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Theme music copyright Raphaël Gluckstein. Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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