We revisit our conversations with authors of some of the year’s most fascinating science books in our annual holiday book show. Featuring:

• Questioning the purpose of whale song — for love or echolocation?
• Journeying through deep geological time to better tackle problems of the future
• Biological sex is complicated, but that's what helps animals like humans thrive

Plus, science journalist and BookLab podcast co-host Dan Falk reviews The Martians by David Baron, Dinner With King Tut by Sam Kean and The Mind Electric by Pria Anand. 

From tiny T. rexes to a car-sized sea monster, we revisit some of our favourite stories about predators in their prime, like:

• Smaller tyrannosaur solves decades-long debate about the T. rex
• Among Yellowstone’s top predators, wolves beat out cougars as the top dog
• Bears with us. Tracking grizzlies in B.C.
• Cleveland’s ancient car-sized sea monster had bony fangs made out of its skull
• Wild wolves run for their lives when they hear Big Bad Humans nearby
• Why penguin-eating pumas live closer together in Patagonia

From camping out on 'bird poop island,' chasing down wild dogs in Madagascar, or even looking for bombs in a bog in Ottawa –– no one quite does summer like scientists. This week, we revisit some of the hijinks that Canadian researchers got up to last year as they left their labs to get their hands dirty in the field.

FEATURING:

• Camping out on a remote island with thousands of screaming, pooping, barfing birds
• Dodging lions and mongooses to monitor what wild dogs are eating in Mozambique
• Saving ancient silk road graffiti from dam-inundation
• Prospecting for Second World War bombs in an Ottawa bog
• Technology allows examination of Inca mummies without disturbing them
• Eavesdropping on chatty snapping turtles in Algonquin Park

Quirks & Quarks has been taking your burning science questions for half a century. And while we thought we might have answered every question there is to answer over the years, our listeners proved there are always more fascinating head-scratchers for us to tackle.

Like:

• Are comets eternal?
• In a sauna, what am I sweating out?
• Did dinosaurs produce milk?
• If heat rises, why is there snow on the top of mountains?
• What does a black hole orbit?
• What if we had no moon?
• Why are cat and dog tongues so different?
• Why are robin eggs so blue?
• Why do some animals become mega sized?
• How do animals deal with strong bright UV light?

Some of the oceans biggest, most powerful predators, like certain sharks and tuna, are “mesothermic” or warm-bodied. Running hot allows them to rapidly convert their food to energy and heat, helping them swim faster and hunt in cold waters. But that advantage may become a disadvantage in a warming climate, meaning these fish need to find new ways of cooling off, or face a new threat to their survival.

PLUS:

• Ancient Peruvians traded parrots across deserts and mountains
• From the archive: David, Jay and Bob, and Quirks & Quarks' origin story
• Sea cucumber 'zombie tissue' straddles the line between life and death
• Dream engineering may help you solve problems in your sleep

Gold miners working in the Yukon regularly find ancient ground squirrel burrows throughout the permafrost, many containing fossilized feces. Researchers analyzing these well-preserved poop piles found they contain some of the oldest DNA ever recovered, dating from 30,000 to 700,000 years ago. Tucked inside were traces of a wide range of ancient animals, including woolly mammoths, grasshoppers, steppe bison, ancient horses, American cheetahs, as well as hundreds of plant species.

PLUS:

• ‘Super-good, ice-making microbes’ may trigger snow and rain, or help freeze food
• We’re a hotbed of mutations, and scientists are leveraging that for our health
• Going out on a limb. Animals regrow body parts, maybe we can too
• From the archives: Isaac Asimov on human creativity and robots

150 years ago, Charles Darwin noticed that birds and humans were both drawn to bright plumage and elaborate display. He called this interspecies esthetic appreciation a “shared taste for the beautiful.” Now, in a recent study, an interdisciplinary team of scientists built an online game exploring the mating calls of 16 different species and discovered, to their surprise, that humans and animals agree on which sounds are more attractive.

PLUS:

• How the brain can learn to truly multitask
• From the archives: The Russian space mirror that flashed across Canadian skies
• The Matrix is real: birds, dragonflies and dogs see the world in slow motion
• Could the next giant particle collider unlock the mysteries of the universe?

The newly described Tylosaurus rex was a violent bus-sized Komodo dragon-like creature with serrated teeth. Dubbed the ‘T. rex of the sea,’ it would have occupied the top of the food chain in the marine ecosystem over 80 million years ago.

PLUS:

• Pigeons use their livers to find their way home
• From the archives: How Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars 
• Scientists discover an underground network of lakes hidden under Arctic ice 
• New book explores the million year history of how we sleep — and why we’re doing it wrong today

Scientists recorded audio and video of 8 different kinds of rockfish living in the wild near British Columbia, and were surprised they could tell the species apart through their various grunts, pops and knocks, even though the fish are closely related.

PLUS:

• DNA identifies four Franklin Expedition sailors — and solves a 160-year-old mystery
• Immune cells that fight infection get a boost from food 
• Radio waves let us see the unseeable: black holes, pulsars and volcanoes on Venus
• From the archives: What will the Earth look like in 2050?
• Quirks Question: If chicken and fish blood is red, why are they white meats? 

In a study inspired by a field of dandelions, researchers wanted to know why, when you blow on a dandelion seed head, only the seeds closest to you take flight. They found that a dimple in the seed heads where the seed attaches is larger on one side than the other, and that the seeds consistently broke off from the smaller side of that dimple. Once they take flight, each dandelion seed uses its unique shape to catch a ride on the wind.

PLUS: 

• Infrasound, not ghosts, may be why old buildings give us the heebie-jeebies
• These arms are made for lovin'. How male octopuses find their mates
• From the archives: Donald Johanson on the discovery of 'Lucy,' our missing link
• Virtual hearts help doctors fix patients’ life-threatening irregular heart beats
• Quirks Question: What’s the benefit for trees being evergreen?