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Past Shows
March 29, 2008
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB).
GeoEngineering & Climate Change
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NASA Image
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Our efforts to control our fossil fuel emissions have so far proved inadequate, and many scientists think we could be heading for a climate catastrophe. With this kind of disaster on the horizon, it may be time to seriously consider an extreme solution, according to Dr. David Keith, Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary. That solution might be GeoEngineering - a massive effort to engineer the planet in order to treat the greatest symptom of climate change - a warmer Earth. While there have been many proposals to do this, it's not actually a field that's been studied seriously. The basic idea would be to block some small fraction of the sunlight coming to the Earth. But while there is some reason to think we can do this, we don't really know what the cost and the side effects might be. Dr. Keith thinks it's important to put this on the research agenda, though, since we may well need to buy ourselves some time while we get our greenhouse-gas house in order.
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Gambling Apes
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Economists are increasingly realizing that humans aren't entirely rational creatures. When it comes to certain kinds of risk-taking, for example, human instincts are, at least according to mathematical models, unreasonably conservative. It turns out this may be a legacy of our ape ancestors, according to recent research by Sarah Heilbronner, a Ph.D candidate at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. In a simple gambling experiment comparing chimps and their cousins the bonobos, she found a difference in their tolerance for risk. She thinks this is probably related to the different environments the two species exist in, since the chimps' food sources are less consistent than those of the bonobo.
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Your Brain on Jazz
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Cool, baby, cool! courtesy nomo/michael hoefner |
The Bird had it, as did John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson: a genius for improvisation. The ability to take a tune and make up original riffs is the hallmark of a great jazz musician. Dr. Charles Limb, a hearing specialist with Johns Hopkins University, has used functional MRI to check out brain activity in professional jazz pianists as they improvise a piece of music. Dr. Limb, a musician himself (and a professor of music with the Peabody Conservatory), found a unique pattern of brain activation during musical improvisation, similar to the kind of brain activity that occurs during REM sleep. While improvising, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition. He says these findings help us better understand the nature of creativity. Related Links
Giant Gamma Ray Burst
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The afterglow of the gamma ray burst as seen by Swift's X-ray Telescope and Optical/Ultraviolet Telescope, courtesy NASA |
NASA's Swift satellite has been orbiting the Earth for the past four years, with its instruments pointed at the stars, looking for interstellar bursts of gamma radiation. Researchers think these gamma ray bursts are caused by supernovae, the catastrophic explosions caused by dying stars. Swift detects a few gamma ray bursts every week, but last week, it picked up what turned out to be the largest gamma burst yet discovered. Dr. Stephen Holland, a research scientists with the Goddard Space Flight Centre, says the energy released in the burst was equivalent to several million stars exploding simultaneously. It was caused by a giant star exploding, 7.5 billion light years away (half way across the universe), yet it was visible with the naked eye from Earth. Dr. Holland says the data collected by Swift will help researchers better understand exactly what happens when a star goes supernova.
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The A-Maize-ing Trace
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Today, corn, or maize as it's more properly known, plays a central role in almost all aspects of our food. From corn syrup to corn starch, it shows up in most processed food products. But as much as corn is ubiquitous today, how it originally spread across the world isn't clear. We know it was first domesticated in Mexico, but where it went from there, and when, has always been something of a mystery. Now Sonia Zarrillo, a Ph.D. student at the University of Calgary, has uncovered some of the answers. Working with clay pots from a village in Ecuador that was inhabited 6000 years ago, she's found starch granules that came from corn. This shows that the grain must have made its way out of Mexico and into South America very quickly, and was immediately adopted as a food.
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Theme music copyright Raphaël Gluckstein. Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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