Saturday January 10, 2009
Alex & Me, Revealing Racism, Galactic Centre Stars, What Does the Milky Weigh?, Stem Cells and Cancer
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GUEST HOST: ALISON MOTLUK
Alex & Me
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If you think that "Polly Wants a Cracker" is the pinnacle of parrot parlance, then you never met Alex the African Grey. Over the course of his thirty years, Alex learned to add, sound out words, understand complex concepts such as bigger and smaller, more and none - and generally change our entire understanding of what a bird brain truly is. Alex's owner, trainer, collaborator and friend was Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a lecturer and research associate at Harvard University and an adjunct professor at Brandeis University. She's just written a touching new memoir of their time together, called Alex & Me.
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Revealing Racism
Institutionalized Racism in the US, during the 1930s
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It's a hard pill to swallow when someone points out our inherent faults, but Dr. Kerry Kawakami's recent study is a particularly bitter one. Dr. Kawakami, an Associate Professor of Psychology at York University, studies the psychology of racism and she has revealed a disheartening finding: despite the fact we tend to predict we'll feel bad witnessing a racist act, we in fact tend to feel indifferent. What's more, Dr. Kawakami found that when asked to chose between a white person who uttered a racist comment or the black person to whom the comment was directed (in order to work on a problem-solving task) subjects tended to choose the racist white person over the innocent black person. Dr. Kawakami says her study reveals people's deep emotional biases -- specifically towards blacks -- despite their stated belief that they are not racist.
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Galactic Centre Stars
An artist's conception of new star forming at the centre of the Milky Way, NASA, ESA and A. Schaller
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The centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a pretty rough place: smack dab in the middle is a super-massive black hole, several million times the mass of the sun. Surrounding that, a thick cloud of interstellar dust, super-heated and emitting walloping amounts of radiation. But, despite the harsh environment, astronomers have observed stars orbiting within only a few light years of the galactic core. One of the intriguing questions is whether these stars were pulled into the centre by the powerful gravitational pull of the black hole or whether they may have actually formed in this environment. Now, Dr. Liz Humphreys, a radio astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has found evidence that the centre of Milky Way is, in part, a star nursery. Dr. Humphreys and her colleagues have found two proto-stars forming in the midst of our galaxy's violent core.
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Press Release from the Center for AstrophysicsThe Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for AstrophysicsDr. Humphreys' web pageWhat Does the Milky Weigh?
Artist's conception of the Milky Way, courtesy NASA
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More than anyone thought, as it turns out. Dr. Mark Reid, a senior radio astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and his colleagues, have discovered that our galaxy, the Milky Way, weighs 50% more than we thought it did. By taking the most accurate measurements to date on the speed and distances of stars within the Milky Way, using a giant radio telescope called the Very Long Baseline Array, they determined that the galaxy was rotating about 15% faster than had previously been thought, which means it must have a great deal more mass than had we believed it did. The bad news, however, is that this means our galaxy's anticipated collision with the nearby Andromeda galaxy will happen far sooner than expected - perhaps in only two billion years.
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Stem Cells and Cancer
Dr. Bhatia
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Stem cells have held out much hope for a revolution in medical treatment. Because these cells can theoretically grow into any kind of cell in the body, if properly encouraged, they may be able to help with many kinds of disease or degeneration. However, there's also been a concern that some stem cells may cause cancers. Dr. Mick Bhatia, the scientific director of the McMaster University Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute, and his colleagues, have developed a method to distinguish stem cells that might cause cancer from those that should be safe. Dr. Bhatia thinks not only will this be useful in development of safe stem cell therapies, but it also may provide some valuable insights in cancer research.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein.
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