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Saturday November 26, 2011

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  • The Rocky Road to Durban
  • For Dolphins, Pregnancy is a Drag
  • Jawbones and Diet
  • The Amazing Spider Mite
  • Science Fact or Science Fiction - Red wine headaches


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The Rocky Road to Durban

co2.jpg Carbon dioxide concentrations are rising in the atmosphere.  Copyright R Rhode
From November 28 to December 9 in Durban, South Africa, scientists, environmentalists, activists, bureaucrats and politicians from around the world will get together to try to solve the planet's most pressing problem: climate change. The Kyoto Protocol is due to expire at the end of next year. And that means that there will no longer be any binding limits on how much greenhouse gas the world's nations can produce - unless they can agree on a new treaty in Durban. Unfortunately, the prospects look slim.

Alanna Mitchell is one of the many people who will be in Durban, observing the negotiations. She's an award-winning Canadian science journalist, former Globe and Mail environment reporter, author of several books that deal with the impact of climate change, and a Quirks contributor. She dropped by our studio to give us an overview of the talks. She also spoke with a few Canadian experts, to get their perspective.

Dr. Andrew Weaver is Canada Research Chair in climate modeling and analysis at the University of Victoria, and co-author of several reports for the IPCC. He says Canada has failed to meet its Kyoto targets, and has been singled out as obstructionist at the climate talks. He is pessimistic about a deal in Durban, but is optimistic about humanity's ability to solve the climate crisis.

Dr. Gordon McBean is Research Chair at the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, and professor of Geography at the University of Western Ontario, the president-elect of the International Council for Science, and one of the scientists who worked on the recent IPCC report on extreme weather events. The report showed that 75% of the so-called natural disasters around the world can be attributed to climate change. He says the future of humanity is at stake in Durban.
     

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For Dolphins, Pregnancy is a Drag

dolphin_noren.gif 
Dolphins are noted for their remarkable agility and speed in the water.  However, dolphins are mammals, and, unlike other animals, mammals gestate their offspring internally until they are quite large and mature.  Dr. Shawn Noren, a research associate in the Institute of Marine Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, decided to study just how pregnancy affected the swimming abilities of dolphin females.  She found that in late pregnancy, the increased size of their bellies, and the physical restrictions of the infant within them, considerably handicapped female dolphins.  They were restricted in the movement of their tail flukes, their frontal area increased drag on their bodies by 51% and both their average and top speed in the water was reduced.
     

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Jawbones and Diet
jawbone_left.jpgThe human jawbone became shorter as our food became easier to chew.  Copyright G Maxwell
Many of the common orthodontic problems experienced by people around the world may date back to the change in lifestyle that came with the rise of agriculture, 10,000 years ago.  The softer diet and easier chewing that came as a result of the domestication of plants and animals caused the human jaw to grow too short for the number and size of our teeth.  This explains the overcrowding problem that many orthodontists have to deal with on a regular basis.  Dr. Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, an anthropologist from the University of Kent in England, compared jawbones from populations of hunter-gatherers from various places around the world, to those of agriculturalist groups.  Her new research shows that the jawbone became shorter with the less intensive chewing required for softer and processed agricultural foods.
      

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The Amazing Spider Mite

spidermite.jpgHey there, here comes the spider mite. Courtesy M. Grbić
The Spider Mite is a notorious pest, the bane of gardeners, farmers and greenhouse owners.  The tiny animal feeds on an enormous range of plants, and in doing so, manages to deal with the numerous toxic defenses plants produce.  They also have a particular talent for swiftly developing resistance to a wide range of pesticides.  Dr. Miodrag Grbić, a professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and leader of the Spider Mite Whole Genome Sequencing Project, and his colleagues, have now decoded the genome of the Spider mite in order to ferret out the secrets of how the mite so effectively deals with such a wide range of toxins.  What they found was that while the spider mite has a very compact genome, it's packed full of genes for detoxifying poisons, some of which the mite has adopted from bacteria and fungi. 


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Science Fact or Science Fiction - Red wine headaches

 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.  And today's popular belief is - "You get worse headaches from drinking red wine".

To help us un-cork the truth, we contacted Dr. Gary Pickering, a professor of Biological Sciences, Psychology and Wine Science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.  He says it is science fact.

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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein, Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0


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