Exploradio Origins

Scientists talk a lot about dark matter. It sounds exciting, but what does it do for us? "If the dark matter wasn't there, the galaxy should fly apart," Case Western Reserve University physics professor Glenn Starkman said. Starkman chases dark matter for a living. Scientists started thinking about dark matter in the middle of the last century, when they looked at galaxies and saw something wasn't quite right. "Really the galaxy should be spinning much, much more slowly in order for it to not

Patricia Princehouse , director of the evolutionary biology program at Case Western Reserve University, wants to know how we got man’s best friend, dogs, from wolves. “ There is an extraordinary amount of variation present in, you know, Canis domesticus. You don’t find that in any other domesticated breed, so it’s not just something that we’ve brought to dogs, ” Princehouse says. “ There’s something about the genome of dogs. ” Most dog breeds are descended from the gray wolf, whom humans met

Gold’s gleam has fascinated humans for millennia. Giuseppe Strangi, professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University, wants to use gold’s special relationship with light in the fight against cancer. It started centuries ago, when people melted gold into stained glass. Strangi describes the unexpected discovery. "If you go in France and look at the cathedrals, you see that this color is not coming from any pigment, but is coming from gold, coming from the fact that gold is absorbing light

In 1916, Einstein made a bold prediction-- that gravity actually travels in waves. These “gravitational waves” would be ripples in the fabric of space a bit like ripples on a pond, and would slightly stretch and squash the distances between things as they passed. "Einstein himself who came up with the theory didn't think that would ever really be detected," says Leslie Wade , assistant professor of Physics at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Anything with mass can make gravitational waves by

"For a long time, all the work on how people adapt to high altitude involved Europeans going to high altitude," said Cynthia Beall , a professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University . "In the 70s, anthropologists started asking 'does everyone in the world adapt in the same way?' Early work showed, no, they don’t." Beall found that, while natives of the Andes mountains have elevated levels of hemoglobin - the oxygen-carrying molecule - natives of the Tibetan Himalayas don’t. They

"We started out with a planet that was just rocks and water and gasses," says Professor Nita Sahai. "How do you go from that to something that is basically covered with life in every possible environmental niche that you look?" Professor Sahai is a geochemist at the University of Akron . Geochemists usually study the makeup of Earth’s rocks and minerals, but Professor Sahai is in pursuit of the origins of life. To make a cell, you first need a membrane. Professor Sahai is researching how

"Meteorites are delivered to us free of charge," says Ralph Harvey , a professor in the department of Earth, environmental, and planetary science at Case Western Reserve University . "Yes, they’re delivered randomly. Yes we have to go pick them up in weird places, but the value of them as specimens is not diminished," says Harvey. Harvey uses meteorites, rocks that have fallen to earth from space, to study the small, seriously weird asteroids they came from. "We really don’t know how sticky that