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Past Shows
November 7, 2009
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Disappearing Snows of Kilimanjaro
An isolated remnant of an ice spire in the crater of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. (Lonnie Thompson, Ohio State University)
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When Ernest Hemmingway wrote "The Snows Of Kilimanjaro", he could not have possibly imagined that the "snows" would become a thing of fiction themselves. According to research done by Dr. Lonnie Thompson at Ohio State University, the famous ice peaks of the iconic mountain will disappear completely in the next two decades. Since 1912, 85 percent of the ice that covered Kilimanjaro has melted. Since 2000 alone, 26 percent has gone. Ice core samples dating back over eleven thousand years reveal that what is happening on Kilimanjaro is a new phenomenon, and one related to current climate change.
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Albatross with a Plastic Wafer
Deceased albatross chick with plastic debris in its gut (PLoS)
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Albatrosses are well known for foraging over huge swaths of open ocean. However, when those swaths cover the North Pacific "garbage patch", where floating plastic has been accumulating, it's not good for the seabirds. Dr. Lindsay Young, a Canadian wildlife biologist with Pacific Rim Conservation in Hawaii, has been studying just how much plastic the birds end up ingesting on their foraging journeys. It's quite a lot, but depends somewhat strangely on where they've been foraging. She found birds foraging in the Western Pacific ingest ten times as much as those foraging in the Eastern Pacific, though she can't explain why.
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Redback Spiders - Cheatin' and Eatin'
The female Australian Redback spider is a real piece of work. She has a venomous bite and forces her potential mates to dance for hours before deigning to mate with them. If the male stops dancing too soon, she eats them before they've completed mating. If their dance pleases her, she waits until after they've mated completely before eating him. As if this wasn't bad enough for the poor males, it turns out she's fickle, too. If another male comes along while the first male is completing his pre-coital courtship dance, she'll let the new guy cut in, and he'll take advantage of the poor first male's work. Jeff Stoltz, a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, has been studying the redback mating rituals.
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New-tron Star
The supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/O. Krause)
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A supernova remnant called Cassiopeia A has been hiding a mystery - just what was left after the star went boom. When the remains of a star collapse on themselves after a supernova, they're thought to form either a black hole or a neutron star. However, observations from the Chandra X-Ray Telescope showed something that didn't really look like either. Dr. Craig Heinke, an astronomer and professor of Physics at the University of Alberta, may have solved the mystery by showing that this could be a "new" tron star with an exotic atmosphere made of ionized carbon, something that could only happen when the neutron star is young and particularly hot.
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A Gift From Space
Bob and Julie Payette
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It is, perhaps, Canada’s most exclusive club. Only 8 Canadians have had the privilege and honour to travel to space aboard one of the shuttles. And the most recent one is astronaut Julie Payette, who returned from her second space mission back in the summer, after spending more than 2 weeks on board the Space Shuttle Endeavour, and the International Space Station. She visited the Space Station while another Canadian astronaut, Bob Thirsk, was living there - marking the first time two Canadians were in space at the same time. And she brought us back a special present: a Quirks & Quarks postcard, featuring Bob McDonald, that she signed in space.
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Fact or Fiction - Knuckles and Arthritis
This is another episode of our occasional feature, Science Fact or Science Fiction. From time to time, we present a commonly held idea or popular saying - and ask a Canadian scientist to set us straight on whether we should believe it or not. Today’s adage is: cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis. To get to the truth, we've contacted Dr. Kam Shojania, the Head of the Division of Rheumatology at UBC and St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. He says it's science fiction.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein.
Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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