Quirks and Quarks - A CN Tower-sized mega tsunami, and more…

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

On the morning of August 10, 2025, a landslide in a fjord along the southern Alaskan coast triggered a mega tsunami. It generated the second highest wave ever recorded that reached up to 481 metres above sea level. A new study suggests that catastrophic events like this are more likely to occur as our climate warms and glaciers melt.PLUS:The hantavirus at the centre of the outbreak struck Argentina in 2018. What did we learn?Raccoons enjoy solving puzzles, just for the fun of itWhat animal parents and distant humans can teach us about caregivingFrom the archives: face to face with the man who killed PlutoQuirks Question: why do my car windows make a ‘wha wha wha’ sound?

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quirks and Quarks. On this week's show, a monster tsunami rips through an Alaskan Fjord, and scientists say there may be more to come. It's hard to believe that a wave could reach nearly 500 meters above the sea, just astonishing.

And raccoons want to share your Sudoku, not for food, just for fun. We're sort of intrinsically motivated to solve those puzzles. And we think the same or similar things might be happening with the raccoons as well. Plus, understanding the Andes-Hanta virus, what creatures can tell us about caretaking, an archival interview with the man who killed Pluto, and a curious question about car window, Wawa. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. Health officials around the world remain on high alert

as the fast-moving situation with the Hanta virus from the Dutch cruise ship continues to develop. The World Health Organization says a KLM flight attendant has tested negative for hantavirus. The woman had been in hospital in Amsterdam after coming into contact with a passenger from the Dutch cruise ship at the center of a deadly outbreak. That passenger later died.

Meanwhile, three people with links to the vessel are in isolation in Ontario and Quebec. Hanta viruses are a group of viruses, typically carried by rodents that can be deadly for humans. Usually they spread through contact with infected rodents, but the hantavirus in this outbreak, the Andes hantavirus that was originally discovered in Argentina in 1995, is the only species known to transmit from person to person. We had a similar situation in Argentina in 2018 to 2019 when a symptomatic individual attended a social gathering. So that led to a lot of people getting infected. So we are in a similar situation right now, a cluster in a confined space with close contact.

So what lessons can we take from the Argentinian outbreak? Well, a 2020 study detailed how the virus spread and was eventually contained. Dr. Gustavo Palacios was in charge of the team that did that research. He's an Argentinian professor of microbiology at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and we spoke with him on Thursday afternoon. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, Bob. Nice to be here. First of all, based on your work with the previous outbreak of this antivirus species, how serious is the situation that we're seeing today on the cruise ship?

So there are two levels of, to that question. One, you know, is the risk for a pandemic situation or an epidemic situation that I think that is, that risk is low. On the other hand, this is a pathogen with a high case fatality rate. I mean, unfortunately, after the experience with other viral and marine fevers like Ebola and West Africa and obviously the COVID pandemic, we are comparing. everything to that. And on that scale, this is not at that scale. Well, take me back to 2018, 2019 about the outbreak that you documented in Argentina. How did that one get started? The first event was, you know, a social gathering, a party that was attended by the index case. The patient stayed at the gathering only for a very brief period of time because actually he was feeling sick. He stayed at the party for around one hour. This was a big gathering of 100 guests. And as you can see in the publication, essentially we have a very nice map that actually

demonstrate that of all of the people present at the different tables, a big majority of the infected or resulted in fact that secondary cases are surrounding the site of the index case. How widely did the virus spread in that outbreak? So the wave of infections started with the birthday party, when one patient essentially connected with five individuals. So among the five patients, one of the people that got infected, when she becomes sick, she was visited by family and friends. And essentially, that's how a lot of people got infected. And the third situation was on awake where one of the very close contact from one of the symptomatic individuals attended the funeral, where one of those individuals transmitted the virus to a number of the attendees.

So in the end, how many people became infected and died in that outbreak? So there were a total of 34 patients with 11 deaths. How did it spread? The way of transmission, the secondary transmission, it's yet unclear. Obviously, it's you need close contact. You know, the virus is present in multiple fluids, including saliva, including blood, obviously, including semen, and all of those could be potentially ways for the transmission of the virus. But we posit that in some of the cases in the party, for example, you know, the connection is probably not related with such exchange, right? I mean, among the people in the party, you know,

the index case transmit the virus to five people. Now, of those five individuals, four were seated in the same table that the index patient. The fifth actually was not, and it's seated in a separate table that was more distant. But the epidemiological investigation reconstruct the fact that both patients had contact in the way to a restaurant. So at least in that situation, it's evident that there was no exchange of fluids in that contact and that the time of that contact was very brief, was just in passing. Well, we showed the layout of that birthday party to one of the top scientists in the world who studies airborne virus transmission. Here's what Dr. Lindsay Marr from Virginia Tech said. It's strongly suggestive that airborne transmission is happening. And it doesn't mean that it's

long distance. Obviously, not everyone became infected here. But, you know, there's always heterogeneity. Some people are more susceptible than others. So based on what you learn from the Argentinian outbreak, how likely do you think this anti-hantavirus may be spreading through airborne transmission today? The respiratory secretions, I believe that they are involved, at least as I told you, I mean, this connection that, you know, sharing of the space in passing to the restroom, I mean, I think that the only type of infectious material that could be exchanged in those conditions could be respiratory secretions. Now, one of the things that is noticeable is that the three individuals that actually have shed the virus to multiple people. Those three individuals have certain characteristics that make the case that they

have a higher vital load than the non-spreaders. They have a higher impact in tissues, you know, liver, insum, and kidney failure signs demonstrate that they have an impact of the infection at the time of sampling that was higher than in the non-spreaders. All of those, you know, if you own, clinical values, they correlate with the fact that probably a higher viral load will result in a higher shedding, at least at the time of the infection, and that higher shedding is what can facilitate the secondary transmission. Those things are unique for Andes virus. It might be one of the reasons why it's more transmissible. Well, what do we know about how the virus might have spread in this current outbreak on the cruise ship? Based on what we saw in the 2018 outbreak, we saw that the window

of infectiousness in that setting was essentially 48 hours before the onset of symptoms and 48 hours after the onset of symptoms. So in that period of four days, when you are doing contact tracing and you are trying to define what are the high-risk contacts that need to be set, in more detail. Well, how important is it for public health officials to figure out exactly how it's being transmitted? I think that it's very, very important right now, maybe less honestly for the patients right now and for the people in the ship, but for the future until we do not understand exactly what

are the conditions that favor human-to-human transmission. we are not going to be able to have good ways to handle these type of situations. So what measures did public health officials put in place to contain the spread of the earlier one that you studied? How was it eventually contained? I'm not sure if there is a cause-consequence effect, but it is true that after self-isolation notices were shared with the public, and the public understood that, well, if you are feeling sick or you are a contact of a case, please stay home and do not go to any social gatherings. Well, after that, essentially, the outbreak stopped.

Dr. Palacios, thank you so much for your time. Okay, thank you, Bob. Dr. Gustavo Palacios is a professor of microbiology at the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. In the early hours of August 10th, 2025 in southern Alaska, a massive landslide collapsed from the top of a sheer cliff in the narrow valley of a fjord into the ocean below. The resulting tsunami was monstrous. The wave ran up to 481 meters above sea level, almost as high as the CN Tower, and the second highest wave ever recorded on the planet. A tsunami like this could have easily been a mass casualty event, especially since this area is a popular spot for ecotourism. But fortunately, the landslide happened just after 5 in the morning,

so the daily cruise ship traffic hadn't ventured up into the fjord yet. But the effects were felt by people over 70 kilometers away, like sailor Christine Smith. I laughed at my husband when he noticed that there was a, unusual surge coming into our anchorage. He said, hey, Christine, have a look. Have you seen this before? And I looked over and saw that there was about a 10-foot surge. And it was all like foamy water, kind of like a river. After 20 years of anchoring in this area, we'd never seen anything like it before. Christine and other witnesses in the area quickly got in contact with scientists to figure out where

this strange surge of water came from. Well, we now finally have. some answers in new research that came out last week. It seems melting glaciers in our warming climate are making catastrophic events like this more likely. Dr. Dan Sugar led the study. He's an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment at the University of Calgary. Hello and welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Thanks very much. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. What was your reaction when you first heard about this mega tsunami? A surprise, I think, was probably the biggest one. I mean, it's hard to believe that a wave could reach, you know, nearly 500 meters above the sea. Just astonishing. How did you first find out about it? I found out, I think, from two sources more or less at the same time. One was on social media and the other was an email from a colleague in New York who uses the global seismometer network to track landslides.

Wow. So it showed up globally. That's right. Yeah, the seismic energy from the landslide itself was equivalent to about a magnitude 5.4 earthquake, so quite large. Wow. Well, take me through how you went together, piecing together, what actually happened up there. Together with a group of colleagues, about 20 of us from across North America and Europe, we started piecing things together from satellite imagery as well as seismometer data and numerical models. as well as those eyewitness reports. So how are you able to tell how high the tsunami wave actually was? By comparing satellite imagery from just before the event and just after the event, we were able to see this so-called trim line,

like a bathtub ring around the fjord, that showed where the forest had essentially been clear-cut, like with a gigantic lawnmower. And so we could map this line in the forest out and then figure out what the elevations, of those points were. And then that was confirmed by a helicopter overflight by the United States Geological Survey in the days afterwards. And they got a very, very similar number to what we were getting from the satellite imagery. Boy. So once the tsunami formed, what happened to the

wave? How long did it take to settle down? Well, the wave itself was traveling, you know, over 100 kilometers an hour out the fjord or the front of the wave. But if you're a wave, but if you're Of course, much of it was sloshing back and forth. Sort of like if you fill up a pot of water, you know, at the kitchen sink and bring it to the stove and you trip a little bit and that water is sort of bouncing around, spilling over the edge. But in the case of the Tracy Arm landslide and tsunami, that sloshing back and forth was actually occurring for many hours after the event. That sloshing itself generated enough seismic energy to be measured around the world for 36 hours. So imagine, you know, that pot of water that you bring into the stove, but it just keeps on bouncing back and forth, back and forth for a day and a half. Holy smokes. What was it that made this particular landslide and tsunami so big?

That's a good question. If a landslide occurs on an island out in the middle of the ocean, the wave will behave quite differently because that water can move out in all directions, you know, more or less evenly. In the case of fjords, though, remember, these are very narrow, tight valleys. And that wave, as it's moving away from the landslide area itself, it hits the far wall within a few seconds, a minute or so, and just rises up the wall up to 481 meters because it has nowhere else to go. Well, how is this landslide connected to melting glaciers? South Sawyer Glacier, which is at the head of the fjord there, is a tidewater glacier. So, in other words, it ends in the water. and these tidewater glaciers, like most other glaciers in the world, many of them are retreating at very rapid rates. And this particular one had been retreating, you know, doing its thing for a few decades prior.

And then early spring of 2025, the glaciers terminus, the snout, was right at the base of what eventually failed in August. And over the next, you know, six weeks or so prior to the landslide, that glacier, retreated another, I think it was about 500 meters or so. And so right at the spot that failed, that glacier retreated. And so understanding how glacier retreat, as well as thinning, impacts slope stability and ultimately the risk that landslides pose to downstream people or cruise ships or pipelines or whatever, that's a definitely active area of science. But in this case, the glaciers retreat right at the base of the slope that did fail does seem rather suspect. So you're saying that the glacier was kind of holding the land back

and then it was almost a case like a dam breaking when the land just fell in? Yeah, a little bit. I have kids at home and I think of it like, you know, when they claim to have cleaned their room, but really all they've done and threw everything into the closet and slam the door. You know, as soon as you open the door, all of the teddy bears and jigsaw puzzles and whatever else is in there come tumbling out. Now, this happened close to the Canadian border, so could this also happen further south along the BC coast?

Absolutely. We have lots of fjords on the BC coast. None of them, though, have tidewater glaciers at the end of them. You know, they used to have tidewater glaciers, but those have all retreated back substantially over the last 15,000 years or so. But we still have those very steep landscapes, and the federal government has been mapping those fjords for quite a few years now, uncovering dozens, even hundreds of landslide deposits in the bottom of those fjords, many of which would have triggered tsunamis, probably not as 500 meters tall, but some of them would have been quite large. We have also a potential risk from landslide tsunamis in lakes, you know, in the mountain west, where we have steep bedrock mountains that can landslide into those lakes. And then, of course, in the north as well, as

the Northwest Passage opens. The coast of Baffan Island, for example, has lots of fjords, many of the Arctic islands that could be susceptible to similar landslide tsunamis. Dr. Sugar, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. Dr. Dan Sugar is an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment at the University of Calgary. Whether you're into jigsaw, crossword, or Sudoku, if you like puzzles, chances are you've heard that they're good for our brains. They help develop our spatial memory, sharpen our pattern recognition skills, and lower our stress levels by releasing dopamine in our brains. It's a win, win, win situation. But we don't really think about those benefits when we're working on a puzzle, because we do it simply for the

enjoyment of puzzling. Well, it turns out we're not alone. A recent study involving raccoons has shown that they too enjoy solving puzzles just for the fun of it. Hannah Gribling led this study. She's a PhD candidate in the Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab in the Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Stewardship at the University of British Columbia. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Before your study, what did we know about raccoons and their problem-solving skills? We knew that raccoons were innovative from several studies that were done before, where we give animals a puzzle box, and that box has multiple solutions to solve. Once they find and solve one of those solutions, we lock it. And that essentially asks the question to the animal,

can you find a new way into this puzzle to access a food reward? Well, I think anyone who's had raccoons opening up their garbage cans or rustling around in their backyards know they're pretty creative at solving puzzles, at least opening cans, right? Definitely. Yeah. And we think that might be one reason why they are. so good at living alongside of us, those cognitive traits that enable problem solving and innovation and repeated innovation could be really important for adapting to urban environments.

We do think that that might be one reason why they are so successful in cities when maybe other species are less so. Well, tell me about the puzzles that you gave them. What were they like? For this study, we asked them a pretty simple question, which was what would happen if we gave them a puzzle box that had three solutions on it that all led to one food reward. And we just left those problems open for them to solve. So we didn't lock any of the solutions on that. So we gave the raccoons a multi-solution puzzle box. We designed three solutions that we

thought would be easy for them to solve, three that were at a medium difficulty level, and then three that we thought would be the most difficult. So they were allowed to kind of explore the puzzle box and solve as many of those solutions within each difficulty. So they got the three easy solutions all at the same time, and then the three medium, and then the three hard. Well, what do the puzzle box actually look like? Yeah, so it's a plexiglass box. So it is clear or transparent so they could see the food reward inside. And then it has removable panels on it that have doors on them or access points. One was just like a simple door. One was a latch that they had to slide to the side in order to unlatch it. And then they could pull open the door. We had a hook and

eye latch, which you'll see on like a lot of gates. The hardest solutions were the most complex. So they had a door knob that they had to turn and simultaneously pull the door open. And then the last one we had at our most difficult was a draw catch latch. So that's the kind of latch you might see on like a briefcase. So again, a multi-step problem for them to solve. Wow. So what happened when you gave the raccoons the puzzles? So I gave it to them with just one food reward inside. And they surprised me by within those 20 minutes, they were opening sometimes all three solutions. Actually, a lot of time, they were opening all three solutions, even after they opened one and got the food reward out, which was, for most of the raccoons, was a marshmallow, was their preferred food reward. So that was really surprising to me. When I was designing this experiment, I anticipated that, you know, they would open one of the solutions, get the marshmallow out, and then kind of ignore the box for the rest of the time. And I would take it away and reload it with a new marshmallow. And then maybe they would go around and solve the, other solutions that were on the box. But that's not what happened. They were really keen to

open all of those doors every single time I gave it to them, which was really interesting to us. Wow. Okay, I got my reward. Now, let's see how this thing works, just for the heck of it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Now, how did the level of difficulty in the puzzle affect how they approach them? Yeah, so the other question that we asked here was how their problem solving strategy and their decision-making would change as those problems got more difficult. So what we found was that at the easiest solutions compared to the most difficult solutions, they were more likely to both find and solve more solutions on the box. So they were more likely to open all three of those easy solutions.

And we know that wasn't just because the hard solutions were more difficult, because multiple raccoons were opening all three hard solutions. We also found that they were changing the order that they opened the easy solution. So they weren't always going back to one solution to open first, you know, open the door first, then the latch second, then the window. They weren't doing that in the same order every time. So the what we called sequence complexity. So the complexity of the sequence that they were opening those solutions was also higher.

at that easiest difficulty compared to the hardest difficulty. And so we also found that the rate at which they would sort of hone in on one of those solutions to open first was happening a lot faster at those most difficult solutions. Well, why do you think the raccoons kept opening the other parts of the puzzle even after they got their food reward? Yeah, yeah. We think that they may be intrinsically motivated. to engage in what we are calling in this paper.

We're calling information foraging. So in humans, that's certainly a feeling that we're all familiar with, you know, like you talked about in your introduction, solving a crossword or beating a new video game level, or if, you know, you're going to a restaurant and maybe trying a different meal on the menu, that sort of thing. We find that very satisfying, and we're sort of intrinsically motivated to solve those puzzles.

And we think the same or similar things might be happening with the raccoons as well. And that is likely to benefit them in areas like cities where a lot of their resources are sort of, you know, locked or behind problems that they have to solve, like opening garbage bins or getting into takeout containers, things like that, that require them to solve problems in order to access resources. So the more problems that they learn to solve, then potentially the more resources they can gain in those types of environments. And so that may be super beneficial for them to survive and thrive in cities and urban environments. Ms. Gribling, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for having me. Ms. Hannah Gribling is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Stewardship in the Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab at the University of British Columbia.

I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio One and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, Happy Mother's Day. We take a look at caretaking across the animal kingdom. Yes, I do not envy the spider moms in certain species who get eaten alive by their hatchlings. It's a little ungrateful, I think, a little rude. If you sold somebody a loaded... who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves.

I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Parenthood can be a confusing and complicated role to navigate.

From surviving the sleepless nights to deciphering the mystery cries or navigating various feeding issues, it's almost mind-boggling that something so integral to our survival can just seem so, well, hard. Science journalist Elizabeth Preston was also caught up in the chaos when she became a mom, but that led her to wonder about how different creatures and even our distant human relatives managed to take care of each other without the help of parenting podcasts and guidebooks. This curiosity led to her new book where she dives into the evolutionary history of caregiving, both in humans and across the animal kingdom, and explores how the ways we take care of one another are rooted in our DNA.

Ms. Preston is a freelance science journalist out of Bob. Austin and the author of The Creatures Guide to Caring, how animal parents teach us that humans were born to care. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, thank you very much for having me. What made you want to write a book about caretaking like this? I have two kids of my own, and when I came into that world of parenthood, I realized there's so, so much parenting media out there.

There's infinite books already and podcasts and everything else. but they all seem to focus on human parenting as this isolated thing, like we invented it almost. And I wanted to know what happens when you look at human parents as animals, because we are animals, after all, as much as we sometimes like to deny it to ourselves. If we ask, how did we get here evolutionarily? How did our journey compare to all the other animals on Earth who are also caring for their own young? What does that tell us about ourselves and what we're doing? Well, as you say, we are animals, and your book is about animals. So why that focus? What can they teach us? Can you give me an example of one animal that we can really learn from? Yeah, one animal I talked about in the book is the poison frog. There are a lot of poison frog species. And what's really interesting about them from a caretaking perspective is that they need to care for their young, which we probably don't think about with frogs as caretakers. But because the poison frogs live in the rainforest and the parents live in the trees, this means when they lay their eggs and the eggs hatch, the tadpoles are at risk of drying out. So a parent has to transfer them.

support the tadpoles to a pool of water because a tadpole is essentially a fish, right? So often this job falls to the father. He'll kind of crouch down in the middle of the tadpoles and let them wriggle up onto his back. And then he piggybacks them and he hops all around the rainforest until he finds a pool of water that satisfies him. And then he wipes off the babies with his back leg if they don't want to climb off. And then sometimes he will continue to hop around and check on those pools where his babies are developing. And if he sees that they seem hungry, he will call to his mate and she will hop over and she might lay an unfertilized egg into the pool for the babies to eat. So it's this really amazing form of caretaking. And what researchers see when they look at the brains of these

frogs is activity in a certain hypothalamus area called the MPOA, which also is involved in caretaking in mammals. So by looking at these really distantly related species, like an amphibian even, we can see that there's this really ancient, conserved architecture that's being called on by all kinds of caretaking animals. Now, of course, there are also some extreme examples of caretaking that I think we do not want to emulate, and I'm thinking of the insect world, like spiders being eaten alive by their young. Yes. Yes, I do not envy the spider moms in certain species who get eaten alive by their hatchlings. There's one where they wait a few days and then all the hatchlings jump on her at the same time and they bite her and kill her with their venom and then they eat her.

Well, I mean, she's done her job, right? I guess so. It's a little ungrateful, I think, a little rude. Now, another animal that I was surprised by in your book was the naked mole rat. What makes them unique caretakers in the animal kingdom? The naked mole rats are so fun. And what's unique about them is that they're, according to, to some scientists, the only use social mammals.

And use social means they're really the most social kind of creature. So this is the same kind of system you would see in something like a honeybee or an aunt, where they have a queen, they have workers who don't reproduce and just work together to help the queen and raise the queen's babies. And they function kind of as a super organism, their whole colony together. And it's not something you see in mammals except for these naked mole rats. They live in these large colonies in Africa. They dig tunnels underground.

There's a queen who births piles and piles of baby mole rats. And then the workers help to raise them. They groom them. They feed them. They all team up to care for the babies. And I met some naked mole rats in the lab. And they're very, very odd animals. They love to sit all together in a big pile, no matter how much space researchers give them.

They just are so social and so attached to each. other, they just will pile up all the time as much as they can. And they even feel a little bit cool to the touch if you hold them because they rely on that cuddling to help regulate their body temperature. Well, what would be the advantage of this cooperative style of caretaking in the mole rats? There have been some studies to suggest that it's more likely for animals to involve these more cooperative modes of caretaking in environments where it's a little harder to survive, where there's fewer resources or less predictable rainfall, maybe. And there was even a study among naked mole rats and their relatives, and they found that

the harsher environments made them more likely to evolve this more cooperative lifestyle. Safety in numbers. Exactly. Yeah. Teaming up, it seems like, can help you survive when there's a lot of uncertainty around you. Well, we humans are social animals. So let's move on to us. What do we know about how our early ancestors to care of their young and how that compares to what we do today. So if you look at our closest animal relatives, so your chimpanzees, your bonobos, your gorillas, your orangutans, what you see is these very lovely attentive mothers, but they get really almost no help from anyone in their social group, if they even have a social group. The mothers have to do all the work themselves. The baby will cling to her fur, she'll carry it

around, she nurses it, it's very intensive for her. And what that means is that she can't afford to have another kid while she has one who's still dependent. So they have to space out their babies by several years. If you look at humans without birth control, you see that we are able to have our kids closer together than these other animals. And scientists think that that is one clue that somewhere after we diverged from the other great apes, we started using this cooperative care to help us raise our kids. And because mothers had more people helping them to feed and care for their babies, that let them use their resources to have more than one dependent kid at a time. There's that phrase, it takes a village to raise a child. Exactly. It's a cliche now,

but it also seems to be true. So what? affected that have in terms of how we evolved as a species and I guess as a society? Because we have this history of caring cooperatively for children, we all have this capacity in our brains to care for young. And you can see that in studies of dads, for example, where neuroscientists have seen that mothers and fathers use the same parts of their brain when they're caring for an infant, say. There's not a unique. maternal or paternal brain. There's just kind of a caretaking brain. And there's hints that this caretaking brain is activated in a mother as she is pregnant and giving birth. A lot of stuff is

happening hormonally. Her brain is preparing for this baby. But the same structure, the same system seems to be activated in the father, kind of from the outside in. So from being around a baby, he turns on this circuitry in his brain that helps him care for it. So that's a hint of how we evolved so that anybody who's around who sees the cues of this meaty child can switch into that caretaking mode. Yeah, it's the switch where you go from being annoyed by a baby's cry to paying attention to it because the baby needs something, right? Exactly, yeah. Now, in your book, you also debunk the idea of mom brain. We can definitely feel like mom brain is a thing.

You know, we can feel incapacitated as mothers. But the research suggests that it's not really so simple. You know, certainly being sleep deprived can make you a little fuzzy-headed, whether you are a mom or a dad or anybody else. And sleep deprivation is a real problem when you have a baby. But aside from that, there doesn't seem to be a real deficit in the brain of a mom. And in fact, they've found that as you age, there seems to be a protective effect. to the brain of having children. When you look at the brain structures of mothers later in life, you see that the brains of women

who have children compared to women who never have children, they look just a little bit younger. There seems to be this slight anti-aging effect to having children. And the same thing even appears to a lesser degree in fathers. And researchers think this might be because having kids around is this constant stimulation, this constant enrichment. And we have to keep learning new things all the time to take care of our kids. And when you learn, it builds neural connections and keeps your brain strong. So if it changes the brains of the caretakers of the parents and the group, what about the offspring?

What does taking care of them do to their brains? Yeah, that's a great question. There's been some really interesting research. A lot of it happened in rats. There's these classic studies in rats with mothers and pups. Rat mothers have a spectrum of caretaking styles, and some of them are more or less attentive to their young. And when you compare the mother rats who are more attentive, meaning they do more grooming of

their pups, more licking, more, I don't know, cuddling them, and you compare them to the less attentive moms. You find that the pups of the more attentive moms grow up to be better moms themselves, and their pups also grew up to be more attentive moms. So the grandchildren, the grandpups of the original extra licking and grooming, extra attentive mothers. It's this intergenerational effect. But it's not just a question of something inborn. It's not just in their DNA. And we know this because you can take the pups from the more caring and the less carry mothers and you can swap them. You can have them foster pups who aren't related. And what matters to their caretaking when they grow up,

up is just how they were raised. What's in their DNA doesn't matter. So it seems like the caring that a pup receives kind of wires it to know how to care itself when it grows up. So you can see how care begets care over generations. So you become wired to care. Yes, it's thought that the effect is what's called epigenetic, meaning above the genetics. So we have these marks or annotations on our DNA that it's a way to respond to the environment. So we tell our bodies to kind of dial up or dial down the activity of our genes just to help us respond to whatever is going on around us. This is normal and how we survive. And it seems like the mothers who are more attentive when they care for their pups, they create these epigenetic changes to the pups so that

their genes are prepared for this extra caretaking. And then that's what causes them to act that way when they have their own pups. Well, aside from epigenetics, did it change how the babies interact with the world at all? Yeah. When you look at the babies, it's interesting because caring and cooperative caretaking, it's not only about what the adults do, it's also about the babies. So human babies had to evolve to be really cute and really intriguing for adults to see. and human babies babble, which might be a way to attract attention from adults who are nearby.

If you look at something like a gorilla baby, it doesn't really cry, it doesn't make noise because it doesn't have to. It's always attached to its mother. Whereas a human baby, because it would get passed around between these different cooperative caretakers, it needs to cry if it needs something because it has to let people know, hey, I'm over here. You forgot about me. it's time to send me back to my mom for some milk or I'm cold. And so the babies also were evolving to be able to signal to the adults what they needed. And we had to learn to judge as babies or toddlers what adults are good adults to trust.

You know, we had to learn to assess other people's emotions and how well they were going to take care of us. It's interesting that today we have an opposite of that phenomenon from the village. It takes a village to raise a child to parents becoming the classic helicopter parents where they want to do everything at home. Don't go out. The world's a scary place. I'm going to do everything for you. What effect do you think that's happening? Right.

It can feel in the modern Western world like parenting is very isolated. You know, like we're adhering to this model of the quote unquote nuclear phase. family where the mom and dad are the only ones responsible. And that can feel kind of crazy making, you know, speaking personally. But on the other hand, I think we do call on our roots as cooperative caretakers more than we realize, you know, anytime you send your kid to school, the teacher is a kind of other caretaker, another parent. Anytime you let your kid play with older kids in the neighborhood or send them to piano lessons, you know, these are all kinds of cooperative caretaker. that we do rely on even if we don't think about it.

So what's your takeaway message here? What are you hoping readers will take from the book? One thing I'm hoping readers will realize is that we're not alone. You know, if you're a human parent, you're part of a whole universe of caring animals who all are facing the same challenges in trying to keep their kids alive and keep them thriving. And you're also not alone as a human, that all these other humans are all. also struggling with the same challenges and that we get through it by leaning on each other. And also that people who have kids and people who don't have kids aren't really separate kinds of people.

That we all have this caretaking capacity and we're all part of a community. Ms. Preston, thank you so much for the book and thank you for your time. Thank you so much for having me. Ms. Elizabeth Preston is a science journalist based in Boston and the author of The Creatures Guide to caring, how animal parents teach us that humans were born to care. Now, in honor of our 50th and cracks. Now, in honor of our 50th anniversary, let's take another spin through our archives. And this week, we want to bring back the fiery debate, is Pluto a planet or not?

You might remember in 2006, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto to a dwarf planet, shrinking our solar system from nine planets to eight. But recently, NASA chief, Jared Isaacman, has reopened the debate, saying that he'll fight to make Pluto a planet again. Well, back in 2010, I interviewed the scientist whose research led, to Pluto's demise. Dr. Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, wasn't trying to get rid of Pluto at the time. Quite the opposite.

In fact, he was looking for additional planets to add to our solar system, the so-called 10th planet, or planet X. And while he did find other objects that were similar in size to Pluto, they weren't planets. And that's why he got to be known as the man who killed Pluto. Here's Dr. Mike Brown from our episode that aired on December 18th, 2010. Believe it or not, I actually like Pluto. You do? But it had it coming. There was really nothing I could do.

It wasn't my fault. Why do you mean it had it coming? If you look at Pluto in the context of the solar system, if you look at Pluto in the context of all the new discoveries we've made, we've learned so much more than we knew back in 1930 that it's very, very clear that we made a mistake, a very reasonable mistake at the time, but we made a mistake putting Pluto in the class of the planets. Pluto, I think, is much happier being out there in the Khyber Belt with all the other things like it than lumped in with these big eight things

that it never really had much in common with. Well, your book was a wonderful read, and it was very entertaining to how you told the story of how you actually came to the dream of finding a new planet. Tell me how that all came to you. Yeah, I really, I never set out to go. destroy Pluto. My real goal was to find a 10th planet. And it started back in the earliest part of my career when this Kuiper Belt, the first new object out beyond Neptune was discovered, and then a second and then a third. And you could start to look and realize that there are a lot of things going to be found out there. And it was pretty clear to me that there had to be something larger than Pluto out there. And it was obvious.

that if you found something larger than Pluto, it was certainly going to be the 10th planet, and I wanted to find that 10th planet. Well, tell me then about the first time when you really realized that you did have something out there that was in the Pluto range or beyond Pluto. So that first three years of photographic survey, I found absolutely nothing. After those three years, when any rational human being would have given up and said, I need to go do something else with my life, I was hooked. I really wanted to find these things out past. Neptune, and it was just at the stage when digital cameras were getting almost big enough that you could imagine doing something with digital cameras. So we slapped together a system

of a couple of different digital cameras stuck together, put them on the back of the telescope, and started once again scanning across the skies. And the very first one that we found that was big, we were absolutely convinced it was bigger than Pluto. And it goes now by the name of Quarwar. Quarwar is the creation force of the local Tongva Native American tribe here, that are native to the Los Angeles basin here. We didn't know for sure how big it was, but it was bright, and we were pretty sure it was going to be bigger than Pluto. And so we jumped up and down and got all excited, got some time scheduled on the Hubble Space Telescope to make a map of it because it was going to be so big,

and realized when we finally saw it that it was really quite small, less than half the size of Pluto. And this is a story that continued through our discoveries. We would find something, think it was bigger than Pluto. find something, think he was bigger than Pluto. And the reason we kept on being fooled is because these things that we were finding had such icy surfaces. They looked bright, even though they were quite small. But finally, just about six years ago now, finally, there was one morning when I was sitting here in my office and flipping through the pictures. It was the same process. The computer

would do the first cut, and I would flip through more pictures looking at what the computer had picked out. And there on the screen was this thing that was, so bright and so far away that finally I knew that that one, there was no way to fool us. That one was at least the size of Pluto and maybe even much, much bigger. Of course, it turned out to be the size of Pluto, not much, much bigger, but at the time, we didn't even know how big it could be. So what was it? This is ERIS. Eris is the one that really led to the demotion of Pluto, because before there's something bigger than Pluto, astronomers could sort of sweep the planet question under the rug and just say, you know, this doesn't matter.

We don't have to answer this question. There's nine planets. Sure, Pluto kind of looks like a Kuiper belt object, but who cares? We'll just leave it there. But if you find something bigger than Pluto, you have to answer the question. What is this thing? Forget about Pluto for a minute. What is this thing?

Is this a planet? Did you find the 10th planet? Or really, are you going to call this thing not a planet and get rid of Pluto and anything else out there, too? Now that you've talked yourself out of being the discoverer of the 10th planet, because what you discovered is not a planet, are you still hoping to find that 10th planet? Oh, yeah.

My daughter has told me this now. I was convinced that she would grow up, never even knowing that Pluto was a planet and not caring, but she actually, she has realized that I did something wrong. I killed Pluto, and she knows that killing is a bad thing. So she's a little mad at me about that. But the other day, she gave me an out. She said, it's okay that I killed Pluto

as long as I promise to go find another planet and name it Pluto. That was planetary astronomer Dr. Mike Brown on our episode from December 18th, 2010. By science. Question, question, question, west. Well, we're gearing up for another listener question show, so keep sending us your science questions at quirks at cbc.ca, and we'll do what we can to find you some answers. We love questions that are a little bit out of the ordinary. Like this one from longtime listener David Docherty in Waterloo,

Ontario. When we are in the car with our dogs, they like the back windows down. If we leave the front windows up, we experience a pounding or ww, want, want, sound and noise. However, if we leave the rear windows up and lower the front windows, no such noise or pounding occurs. Why is that? Well, David, here's your answer. My name's Chris Machiefski. I'm Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Queen's University in Kingston. Many of us will have experience. the same thing. That is, you put down the back window to let your dog have a bit of fresh air and you get this booming sensation or pressure fluttering sensation. That's caused by what's referred to as the Helmholtz effect. And the frequency that you hear is the natural frequency or the resonant frequency, also known as the Helmholt's resonance frequency. The cabin of the car then acts as the same as the air inside a wine bottle. That's the spring component.

And the air that's in the window or where the window would have been before it's lowered is the air that would be in the neck of the bottle and acting as the mass. And when you're traveling at road speed, the turbulence that exists, around the back windows, but is largely absent around the front windows, causes an excitation of that air in the window space, causes it to oscillate, and the air that's in the cabin acts as the spring to keep that oscillation going back and forth. And the sound that you hear, the booming sound, is the same sound that you would hear if you blow across the top of of a pop bottle. The only difference is that the frequency is quite low. It's actually at or below

the lowest frequency that most people can hear. So rather than hearing it as a tone, you hear it as a booming or a fluttering or you might actually feel it rather than hear it because of the very low frequency response. Dr. Chris Machiefsky is a professor emeritus in the Department and mechanical and materials engineering at Queen's University in Kingston. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email once again is Quarks at cbc.ca. Our web page is cbc.ca.ca slash quirks,

where you can check out our past episodes and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Sonia Biting and Rosie Fernandez. Our intern is Sarah Hamilton. Special thanks to CBC Radio Archives, Patrick Mooney, Russ Talley, and Zoe Barraclough.

Our acting senior producer is Amanda Buckowitz, and our new senior producer is Hannah Hoag. Welcome to the team, Hannah. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com. slash podcasts.