March 11, 2022

Russia and space cooperation, the UN plastic treaty, ancient 10-legged octopus, medical alarm sounds and the price of fear for prey animals.

54 minutes

Will cooperation in space with Russia survive war in Ukraine?

For more than half a century, through international conflict and political turmoil, the west has cooperated on a wide range of activities in space with the Soviets and then the Russians, culminating in the International Space Station. We speak with Mac Evans, former head of the Canadian Space Agency about why the war in the Ukraine runs the risk of ending that long collaboration.

What will the new UN treaty to control plastic pollution need to achieve?

On March 2, at a meeting of the United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi the world’s nations agreed to negotiate a global agreement to control plastic pollution. We speak to Max Liboiron, a plastics pollution researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland, about how the world created its plastics problem, and Tony Walker, who studies plastics pollution at Dalhousie University, on what he hopes the treaty will accomplish.

The oldest octopus ancestor ever found had ten arms.

Christopher Whalen, a palaeontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York has identified the oldest vampyropod, the group that includes ancestors of the octopus. The 328 million year old fossil from Montana is in extraordinary condition and is 82 million years older than the previous oldest find. But the big surprise is that this is that this animal had ten arms. His research was published in Nature Communications.

Making medical alarms less awful – and maybe saving lives

Hospitals can be pretty noisy places. Medical devices, in particular, make quite a racket. And while their alarms are essential, perhaps they don’t have to be so unpleasant. Michael Schutz, a professor of music cognition at McMaster University, believes that we can use what we know about music to improve the sonic environment in hospitals – and maybe save lives in the process.

Fear of predation all by itself can reduce the survival rate of songbirds

Liana Zannette, a biology professor from Western University in London, Ontario has found that just being aware of predators, even without actually being preyed upon, can reduce the reproductive rate of songbirds, and reduce the survival rate of those offspring they do have by as much as 53 percent. The most obvious impact is that birds living in fear do not eat. Her research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Are people who get blood transfusions from vaccinated donors protected from COVID?

For the answer to this Quirks listener question, we hear from Dr. Jacob Pendergrast, a director of the blood transfusion service at the University Health Network in Toronto.

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