As delegates prepare for the Rio +20 summit next week, we'll speak with Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who was an advisor to the Canadian delegation at the first Rio summit back in 1992. Then later in the program, I'll chat with former Quirks host Jay Ingram, whose new book looks at the strange and perplexing world of fatal prion diseases like Mad Cow disease. Also we'll learn about the latest NASA mission that is searching for black holes; and we'll hear how a giant phytoplankton bloom under the Arctic ice has scientists worried.
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Rio +/- 20
On June 20, delegates from the world's nations will meet in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The conference is being nicknamed "Rio +20", since it was 20 years ago that the world's nations met at the famous 1992 Rio "Earth Summit," in an attempt to engage global environmental issues, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and sustainable development. The original Earth Summit was a landmark event, but for many it marked the high point in an environmental project that has stalled or regressed since. Elizabeth May, who is currently the Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands, and leader of the federal Green Party, was an adviser to the Canadian Delegation to the 1992 Earth Summit. She recalls the heady atmosphere of the Summit, the context that led to important agreements at the meeting, and why some of its ambitious goals were not successfully attained.
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The Secret Arctic Garden
Phytoplankton blooms are known to occur in Arctic waters each summer, but only after the ice has melted. But a team of scientists, including
Dr. Kent Moore, a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, recently made a startling discovery. While on an ice-breaker studying the continental shelf in the Chukchi Sea between Siberia and Alaska, they found a massive phytoplankton bloom beneath the one-metre-thick ice. The bloom was at least 100 kilometres long, possibly just as wide, and reached depths of more than 50 metres. Two second-order effects of climate change are thought to be responsible for this bloom. One is that melt ponds on top of the already thinner ice act as 'windows' that allow sunlight to pass through. The other is related to a change in wind direction. Winds that now blow predominantly from the east stir up more nutrients from the ocean floor that, in turn, feed the phytoplankton. As a result, blooms of this size may be on the rise in the Arctic.
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A NuSTAR in the Sky
 NuSTAR, courtesy NASA
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NASA's latest X-ray telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, was launched on Wednesday. NuSTAR is optimized to detect the highest energy X-rays in space, produced by the debris from supermassive black holes and in the aftermath of supernovae, when new elements are formed.
Dr. Fiona Harrison, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, and the Principle Investigator on the NuSTAR mission, discusses NuSTAR's intriguing design - it's a telescope that telescopes - and explains how it was "dropped" into space.
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Fatal Flaws
In the late 1980s, a new disease emerged in British cattle - a strange syndrome called Mad Cow Disease. To control the epidemic, millions of cows were slaughtered. But even more terrifyingly, it became clear in the 90's that this new disease could be communicated to humans as well, and it has, to date, claimed more than 170 lives. The vector for this disease proved to be not a virus or bacteria, but a misfolded protein called a prion, which came as a huge surprise to many scientists who never suspected that a simple protein could cause disease in this way. In a new book, science writer and broadcaster and former host of Quirks & Quarks, Jay Ingram, recounts the story of the prion, and the diseases it causes, and looks to how understanding it might lead to not just preventing prion disease, but other human diseases as well. The book is called Fatal Flaws - How a Misfolded Protein Baffled Scientists and Changed the Way We Look at the Brain.
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Science Fact, or Science Fiction: Dogs & Danger
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 we look at the oft-considered question of whether 'dogs can sense danger.' To help us with this issue, we contacted Dr. Jim Berry, the Vice-President of the Canadian Veterinary Association and a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at The Douglas Animal Hospital in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He says it is science fact - but not a "sixth sense".
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein, Creative Commons License by-nc-nd-2.0
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We're coming to Halifax in early June for our annual Quirks Question Roadshow, and we want to see you there. Stay tuned to this space for details.
Saturdays at noon, Mondays at 11:00 p.m., Wednesdays at 3:00 p.m. and Fridays at 5:00 a.m. (ET)
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