The DART mission – Has NASA shown it can save us from disaster?; What has the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ done to the lungs of the planet?; Birds in North America benefited from COVID lockdowns. In the UK, not so much; Megalodon was truly a monster; Indigenous Astronomy – reconciliation and the sky.

A new book lets the Milky Way speak for itself - and it’s kind of a jerk; Watch out for the quiet ones – The smartest racoons are the most docile; 375 million years ago an animal crawled out of the water - then noped right back in; Seventeen bodies found in a medieval well were likely from a 12th century hate-crime; The science of a city’s summer smells; Quirks listener question - Food caching.

Science says 10,000 steps are actually a health benefit sweet spot; What the James Webb Space Telescope really saw this summer; Garbage-picking Australian cockatoos are in an arms race with homeowners; Scientists get back to work on Canada’s Glaciers after COVID interruptions; Quirks listener question - Red sky at night?

This week we launch our season with our Summer in the Field program. For many of us, summer is the time for things like beaches, bike rides, and BBQs. For many scientists, however, summertime is also when they are at their busiest, travelling to remote locations to get up close and personal with nature.

On today’s show you’ll hear from a marine biologist studying the recovery of sea stars from a devastating wasting disease, wetland scientists working with indigenous land guardians to map landscapes for conservation, a paleontologist prospecting in the Yukon for ice-age fossils, a biologist studying the world’s most southerly polar bears, a team of scientists trying to understand the world’s foggiest place off the Atlantic coast, a team of forestry researchers looking into multi-season ‘zombie fires’ and a young academic beginning a world tour to research jellyfish.

We're on our summer break, so no new podcasts before our new season starts Sep 10. Check out our website at cbc.ca/quirks to listen to previous episodes.

We end our season with our ever-popular, always fascinating listener question show. In this show we'll answer listener questions like:

Why humans don't have a tail - even though we have a tailbone?

What would happen to your body if you were to die in space?

Why the immune system doesn't permanently get rid of herpes viruses?

Why the Earth hasn't cooled through 4 billion years of floating in frigid space?

Why we can't remember our early years of life?

Why mammal poop is brown while bird poop is white?

And much, much more.

The Black Death was history’s most lethal plague. Now we know where it started; When we first kept chickens it was likely because they were pretty, not tasty; Fossil tusks tell the life story of a mastodon that died by violence; Elephant seals feel their way to prey using whiskers in the deep, dark ocean; How do birds smell? A new book says very well, and sometimes very good.

Astronomers make the music of the cosmos, by turning data into sound; Evidence suggests that humans omletted Australian Thunderbirds to extinction; New Hubble image proves there’s life in the old space telescope; Why removing invasive species can help ecosystems battle climate change; A paleontologist reconstructs what Earth sounded like through its long history.

Why wild baby parrots babble like human babies; A mysterious stone found in the Egyptian desert is made of supernova stuff; Buzzing bats mimic hornets to deter predatory owls; Scallops will ‘go into the light’; A Canadian researcher makes the case for admiring the mighty mushroom.

This salamander is an unlikely but agile, aerial amphibian; Headbutting animals can accumulate brain damage; We can use the cables that carry the internet as environmental sensors; Plants that can survive extreme conditions could help us engineer more resilient crops; What we lose as we lose most of the world’s sharks; How do marine mammals surface to breathe during storms?