Ideas

Kritika Vashishtha has been pursuing a cure for jet lag and it's possible she's found the answer. The Canadian aerospace engineer recently invented a variety of light that fools human bodies into switching time zones while aboard an aircraft. She shows two IDEAS producers around her laboratory inside an airplane to explain how the process works. Kritika plans to direct her discoveries towards making space travel easier on astronauts.

*This episode is part of our series Ideas from the Trenches, which showcases fascinating new work by Canadian PhD students. It originally aired on April 29, 2024. 

If we weren't so used to having books, we would think of them as a "miracle." That's how historian Irene Vallego

views what she says is humankind's greatest and most influential invention: the book. "With their help, humanity has undergone an extraordinary acceleration of history, development, and progress," she tells host Nahlah Ayed. Vallego has traced written texts back to their earliest origins and she's written a book of her own, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World.  

When Darren Hamilton began university, he was shocked to find that there were no Black music courses and Black music professors. He grew up singing spirituals every Sunday in church. Now at the University of Toronto, Hamilton teaches Gospel Choir, U of T's first credit course in Black gospel music. Students of all backgrounds and ages come to learn and sing songs rooted in faith, freedom and joy. He says he started the course because he wanted Black music to be valued in music education, and he wanted Black students to have a music class

where they "feel they belong." *This episode originally aired Feb. 29, 2024.

If you think you've never heard Jerry Granelli play drums — you likely have. Think of a comic strip holiday special and an iconic soundtrack: A Charlie Brown Christmas. Jerry was 22 years old when he became a member of the Vince Guaraldi Trio, the jazz band behind the popular 1965 album. His long career was legendary, accompanying many of the greats like Mose Alison, Sly Stone and The Grateful Dead. Producer Mary Lynk was lucky to meet with Jerry on the eve of his 80th birthday for a wide-ranging conversation. The gifted composer and jazz giant died in Halifax in 2021. *This episode originally aired on December 21, 2020.

Handel’s Messiah is one of the best-loved pieces of Christmas music. Only it was meant for Easter. But it draws on far more from the Old Testament than the New. There are more surprising facts about this 18th-century masterpiece that IDEAS explores with Ivars Taurins, founding director of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir who has conducted Messiah over 200 times, and veteran CBC Radio broadcaster Robert Harris. In nine movements, they reveal the hidden treasures of Handel’s celebrated work. *This episode originally aired in 2015.

The nativity story that Christians believe is that God took the form of a baby named Jesus who was born to save the world and bring about an enduring peace. So what happened? Did we miss it? And what happens next? These are questions Trappist monk Thomas Merton grappled with in his own meditation on the Christmas story. His version "The Time of The End is the Time of No Room" was published in 1966. At the time he called it a sober statement about the climate of our time, a time of finality and fulfillment.

Indigenous math isn't just about numbers and equations, it involves culture, spirituality and more. Math professor Edward Doolittle, a Mohawk from Six Nations in Ontario, sees math as something embedded in Creation itself. In his Hagey Lecture at the University of Waterloo, he describes Indigenous mathematics as being grounded in cognition, emotion, the physical world and community. Indigenizing math, Doolittle hopes, will make it more approachable and meaningful to Indigenous students — show them how entwined it is with everyday life and something much bigger than ourselves.

"We are the monsters" — that's the premise for the genre of film known as body horror — movies that fixate on monstrous and grotesque changes to the body. There have been good body horror films and bad ones, but "The Fly" starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis was perhaps the most consequential. The movie captured anxieties around bodily autonomy and physical decay, just as the AIDS epidemic was becoming catastrophic. Forty years later, Body Horror is back with films like "The Substance" and "Together." Producer Matthew Lazin-Ryder examines what these films reveal about our bodies, our minds and our sense of who we are.

In 2024, 'polarization' was Merriam-Webster's word of the year. That division still grows, making it increasingly difficult to connect to one another. But there are people having important conversations and they have advice for us all. From fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Colombia, championing human rights in Southern Africa and working for a two-state solution post Oct. 7, the winners of the The Global Centre for Pluralism awards tell host Nahlah Ayed about how minds can and do change, and why we need to not only talk, but listen.

Tech billionaires are on a mission to make the stories of science fiction a reality: space colonization, human/machine bio organisms, and living forever in a state of unhindered bliss. This version of a far future utopia may come of as a "billionaire boys and their toys" but experts warn such a dismissive attitude is naïve and dangerous. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 22, 2025.