Natural Selections

(Oct 24, 2019) Aside from their properties as biological dynamos, electric eels have other peculiarities; they are not true eels, but are a kind of fish - and a kind of fish that needs to breathe air. The South American predator of river bottoms can reach 40 pounds in size and deliver a fatal shock to humans.

Curt Stager's back yard is toward the edge of the village and a big picture window gives him a close-up view of the local whitetail population. So close that he notices details of their anatomy he had never noticed before - the big whiteless "doe eyes" and the long lashes and eyebrows that protect them from twigs, the complex musculature under their facial fur, a thin white band over the bridge of the nose that signals when they are sniffing a scent. "There were all these hidden layers of things to watch in a deer," he tells Martha Foley.

(Sep 26, 2019) When infected, your tonsils may be useful to doctors to keep up their bottom line, and to Popsicle vendors to provide the means to soothe recovering children. But when healthy, they also have a use as part of the front-line in the human immune system.

Martha Foley and Dr. Curt Stager discuss an oft-removed portion of the human anatomy.

(Sep 12, 2019) Lake trout thrive in deep, cold water with lots of oxygen, and are stressed by being in warm summer shallows with lower pressure and oxygen levels. But as the climate warms, fewer Adirondacks lakes will have the right combination of factors they need.

A coral reef is kind of like Manhattan, a huge number of mouths to feed in a packed parcel of real estate. A reef doesn't have upstate farms to keep them all fed. So how do they get by?

(Aug 29, 2019) Most of the sounds in our environment are filtered out by the brain. And what we do hear can be altered in pitch and character by simply shaping the space around the ear with a hand or with a seashell. The volume and range of sounds we perceive can change dramatically, depending on whether the preceding environment was loud or quiet. And the brain is capable of generating sound where there is none.

(Aug 22, 2019) While the sub-Arctic and the Sahara are very different environments, both present extreme challenges to large mammals that live there.

Martha Foley and Curt Stager compare the camel and the caribou, which, while not closely related, have made similar evolutionary adaptations to survive in barren terrain.

(Jul 25, 2019) You can make cheese from the milk of any mammal, but who wants to go out and milk the pigs? Curt Stager came back from a trip to Italy with some Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. He shares a taste with Martha Foley while they run down different processes used to make a number of varieties of cheese from the same starting point, milk. The official National Cheese Lovers Day is not until January 20, but isn't every day, really?

(Jul 11, 2019) An article in Science magazine highlighted the work of a French scientist who was the recipient of a 2017 Ig Nobel Prize. He posited that because cats can fill up the shape of whatever container they are put in, they must be liquid.

(Jun 27, 2019) Not all evolutionary change is good. Genetic changes can be neutral or harmful, as well as beneficial. And some change can be both, conferring benefit when a single copy of a gene is present, and causing a life-threatening disease when copies are inherited from both parents. Martha Foley and Dr. Curt Stager roll the dice on evolution.