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Past Shows
May 3, 2008
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB).
T. rex: Nothing to Sniff at.
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Tyrannosaurus rex, courtesy Royal Tyrrell Museum
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For most of the last decade, there's been a debate in the palaeontology community about Tyrannosaurus rex and how good it was at smelling. After examining a T. rex skull in Chicago, a group of researchers had claimed the part of the brain responsible for smell, the olfactory bulb, was larger than the rest of the brain combined. That's a state we don't see in any living animals. Dr. Francois Therrien, from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, and his colleagues, disagreed with this conclusion. They went back to examine crocodiles and birds, the closest living relatives of T. rex, to figure out where these creatures' olfactory bulbs are located. Based on what they found, the researchers think T. rex really had quite a small olfactory bulb, and maybe wasn't such a super-sniffer after all.
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Babbling Baby Birds
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We take it for granted that songbirds know how to sing. But just how they learn to do this is a question that's been puzzling Dr. Michale Fee, a neuroscientist at MIT. Dr. Fee has been studying zebra finches, which babble as young birds but then develop adult songs as they get older. Researchers have known about a brain centre that's responsible for adult songs, but Dr. Fee recently discovered the brain centre responsible for song bird babble. He says the two centres work together to help the young birds learn a tune.
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Spin Science
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Two examples of vortices found in nature, courtesy Concordia University |
Back in the 19th century, many of the world's leading physicists became extremely interested in vortices. Everyone's seen a vortex. It's the centre of a hurricane, or the whirlpool that forms in the centre of your coffee cup when you stir. But to the physicists of the 19th century, the vortex held the key to the mysteries of the atom. Complex equations were developed to describe the vortex and what happens when the speed of rotation was increased. However, for all the equations, no one actually looked at a vortex to see if the theory matched reality. That is, until Dr. Georgios Vatistas came along. He's a professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University, and in his lab, he's been able to prove that the equations of the 19th century perfectly describe what happens in a vortex. This knowledge will help explain everything from the structure of the universe to how to quiet the rotors of a helicopter.
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A Dummy's Guide to Intelligence
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It's hard to think of an area of science that has caused as much debate as intelligence research. Just what it is and how to measure it has intrigued, puzzled and vexed researchers for well over a century. There are those who stick to classic IQ tests, arguing that, despite their substantial pitfalls, they're the best way of measuring someone's capacity for logic and reasoning. Other researchers feel that IQ tests paint only part of the picture and that, in order to really understand intelligence, we have to take into account things like social skills and emotional competence. And then there are the researchers pushing intelligence testing in a new and potentially even more controversial direction - scientists who want to use brain-imaging techniques to try to measure intelligence from the inside out.
Dr. Linda Gottfredson, a Professor of Education at the University of Delaware, argues that IQ tests are a valid and useful way of measuring intelligence. They're by far the most common tool we have for the task and they're decent predictors of academic success. Dr. Gottfredson is representative of researchers who believe that differences in IQ scores are caused by a difference in inherent mental capacity, or general intelligence.
Dr. James Flynn, Professor Emeritus at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand, argues that IQ tests tend to measure mental abilities that are shaped primarily by experience and cultural norms. Dr. Flynn has uncovered one of the most intriguing phenomenons in modern psychology, the Flynn Effect: the fact that, over the past 100 years, IQ scores have been going up with each generation. He argues these IQ gains have happened too quickly to have a biological explanation and, therefore, must be the result of cultural evolution.
Several researchers feel that the definition of intelligence that IQ operates under is too narrow. Dr. Mindy Kornhaber is an Associate Professor in Education at Pennsylvania State University and an advocate of Multiple Intelligences Theory. Dr. Kornhaber suggests that the kind of intelligence IQ tests measure is one among many, including musical intelligence, social intelligence and kinesthetic intelligence.
Along the same lines of thought, Dr. James Parker, a psychology Professor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, suggests that we put too much stress on measuring cognitive skills and not enough on emotional skills. Dr. Parker has conducted studies that suggest the best way of predicting the academic success of first-year university students is to measure their emotional intelligence, not their IQ.
Dr. Richard Haier is forging ahead in a different direction, using functional MRI scans to visualize what's happening inside the brain when people take IQ tests. Dr. Haier is a professor of neurology at University of California, Irvine. Dr. Haier has found that people with higher IQs tend to have less brain activity than people with lower IQs. But he's also found that you can train the brain to be a more efficient solving problem machine.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein. Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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