Quirks and Quarks

Researchers made the surprising discovery that Alaska beluga whales have swinging sex lives — and that could be their key to survival in the warming Arctic.

Plus:

• mission to the 'doomsday' Thwaites glacier in Antarctica ends in disappointment
• near-infrared light therapy offers hope to football players with brain injuries
• with nuclear power making a comeback, what's changed since the last Atomic Age?

Scientists spent nearly 25 years studying close to 800 polar bears in the Barents Sea region and discovered that those polar bears seem to be doing just fine, even though melting sea ice is also a major issue.

PLUS:

• Sargassum seaweed is becoming such a problem, you can see it from space
• Why some people only get mild sniffles with a cold and others get sick
• A woolly rhino's DNA found in an ancient wolf’s stomach reveals their quick demise
• How to change a memory — one scientist's quest to understand memory permanence

Some dogs are more adept at learning language than others. Researchers studying these special dogs discovered that, much like toddlers, these smart furry canine companions can pick up words just by eavesdropping on their owners' conversations.

PLUS

• Tracking space debris using seismometers
• Using nitrogen to boost trees
• How Mars shapes our climate
• Extracting ice age mammoth RNA and using lichens to find dino bones

We may share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, but somewhere along the evolutionary line to us, our brains took a major detour. New research suggests that chimpanzees can rationally weigh evidence, a trait that used to be thought as uniquely human.

PLUS:

• Why penguin-eating pumas live closer together in Patagonia
• Ants sacrifice the strength of individual workers for quantity
• Mapping the landmass beneath Antarctica's massive ice sheet
• How deep sea ocean environments affect fish body shape

An unassuming fossilized slab in the basement of a museum in Brazil turned out to be 110-million-year-old dinosaur vomit, and inside that vomit were the bones of two strange, seagull-sized pterosaurs.

PLUS:

• Loss of fresh groundwater is now the leading driver of sea level rise
• How doubting your self-doubt makes you doubt less
• A huge black hole in a peculiar galaxy may date from the universe’s earliest moments 
• Shining a light on where viruses hide out in our bodies, and how they make us sick

On this week’s episode of Quirks & Quarks, it's our ever-popular and always satisfying Holiday Listener Question Show that includes: 

Why did a Canadian astronaut's eyesight change when she went to space? 

How is the dust inside our homes changing? 

Why do some professional athletes stick out their tongues when they play?

Why are most fruits round, but bananas and pineapple are not? 

What would have happened if the dino-killing asteroid never struck Earth?

We'll satisfy all these scientific curiosities and many more!

In 2000, Quirks & Quarks celebrated its 25th anniversary by travelling forward in time — to 2025 — to find out how science had changed in the years since. In this fictitious future, our present, Zargon the robot, wakes up a Bob McDonald clone from the year 2000 to speak with scientists about 25 years of science. It's a mindbending audio time-capsule with predictions that were oddly prescient, sometimes unsettling or wildly wrong.

We talk to authors of some of this year’s most fascinating science books in our annual Holiday Book Show.

INCLUDING: 

• 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
• Mini reviews of: The Martians by David Baron, Dinner With King Tut by Sam Kean and The Mind Electric by Pria Anand. 

Next stop - the moon! Jeremy Hansen stops by our studio to chat about how he’s prepping to be the first Canadian to go to the moon.

Plus:

Santa’s reindeer may be losing their antlers –– and climate change could be the culprit

Reindeer are the only animal in the deer family where the females also grow antlers, and they typically have a full rack over the wintertime and drop them in June when they give birth. University of Guelph PhD student Allegra Love was monitoring reindeer on Fogo Island in Newfoundland, when she made a surprising discovery that female reindeer are losing and growing their antlers much earlier than usual. This can put more stress on the animal during a crucial part of their pregnancy, and the researchers think this could eventually lead to the reindeer losing their antlers altogether. The work was published in the journal Ecosphere.

Pterosaur brains reveal clues about why these mighty fliers took to the skies

Flight has only evolved among vertebrates three times — in bats, birds, and first in pterosaurs. How pterosaurs first took to the skies was always a mystery to scientists, until the discovery of a fossilized 230-million year old pterosaur relative in Brazil. An international team, including Ohio University professor Lawrence Witmer, used an MRI for detailed analysis of the fossilized skull, to pinpoint the miniscule brain changes that happened as the animal developed the capacity to fly. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists are using AI to find life in 3 billion year old rocks

Earth’s earliest signs of life are often incredibly difficult to detect. An international team of researchers have developed a new tool that uses AI to find “whispers” of life locked inside ancient rocks. Using this tool, the researchers, including astrobiologist Michael Wong from Carnegie Science, were able to detect fresh chemical evidence of life in rocks that are 3.3 billion years old. This tool can not only be used to explore the origins of life here on Earth, but also on Mars and other planetary bodies. The work was published in the journal PNAS.

Scientists are shedding light on the strange, car-sized, armoured fish that lived 360 million years ago in what is now Cleveland.

Plus:

The cosmic collider that gave us our moon came from our own solar system, soccer fanatics' brains are wired differently than regular fans, industrial chemicals are hurting our microbiome, and scientists are using our brains to build a better computer.