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Past Shows
February 21, 2009
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB).
Animals Make Us Human
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Dr. Temple Grandin has become famous in the world of animal welfare for her ability to project herself into the minds of farm animals. Her intuition into what makes animals frightened and uncomfortable, and her designs for more humane slaughterhouses, have had remarkable influence on industry. All this is despite - or perhaps more accurately, because of - her autism, which she says helps her see the world the way animals do. In her latest book, Animals Make us Human, Dr. Grandin extends her work by exploring the emotional life and welfare of house pets and zoo animals, as well as farm animals. Dr. Grandin is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University.
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Spitting Cobras
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courtesy Dr. Bruce Young
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This is the kind of adventure that Indiana Jones might back out of: imagine wandering the wilderness of South Africa, hunting for deadly spitting cobras and then taunting them until they strike. It's all in a day's work for Dr. Bruce Young, a neurophysiologist at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He studies the fearsome spitting cobra's remarkable sharp-shooting abilities. When provoked, spitting cobras squirt a jet of venom in their attacker's eyes. And they've got remarkably good aim. Dr. Young has discovered just how spitting cobras are able to hit the bull's-eye almost every time they take a shot.
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Losers With Winners' Brains
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One of the mysteries of gambling is that even when we should know we're going to lose, we somehow think we're going to win. Dr. Luke Clark, from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, may have discovered one of the reasons why. Using MRI, he studied brain activity in people gambling, looking particularly at "near misses" in which a loss seems close to a win. He found that the brain activated the same reward system that is activated in a real win, despite the fact that people report that these near misses are unpleasant.
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Triceratops Tango
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Artist's reconstruction of Triceratops in horn-to-horn combat. Copyright Lukas Panzarin, courtesy of Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology
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Were Triceratops' spectacular horns for show or for showdowns? Darren Tanke, a paleontolgical technician at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, and his colleagues, studied the skulls of Triceratops fossils to find out. What they found were scars on the bony frills that they think could only have been caused by tussles with other Triceratops, not from tangling with Tyrannosaurs, for example.
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Arctic Turtle
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Turtle Fossil - courtesy University of Rochester
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Turtles don't belong in the Arctic. So when researchers showed the turtle fossil they'd found in the Eastern Arctic to Dr. Donald Brinkman, the directory of preservation and research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, he was a little surprised. The species was one he knew originated in Asia. So, when this turtle lived, 90 million years ago, the Arctic must have been much warmer and there might have been a land bridge right across the North Pole.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein.
Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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