Quirks and Quarks - Cleveland’s ancient car-sized sea monster had bony fangs, and more…

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

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.

If you sold somebody a loaded gun 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.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, the cosmic collider that kicked up our moon was an inside job. Faya is not some distant interloper sent in on a trajectory from the outer solar system. Instead, it's probably an object that was born right next to the proterror. And elephant-sized prehistoric fish with bony fangs. They have these mouth parts that are full.

formed by the bones wearing against each other to form these sharpened blades made from their own jawbones. Plus, industrial chemicals are toxic for our gut, wetware computers powered with our brain cells, and inside the minds of soccer fanatics. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. There's nothing quite like the site of the full moon hovering above the horizon. It's a site that's inspired poets and astronauts alike. but while we might take the moon for granted, it hasn't always been there. Billions of years ago, not long after the Earth itself formed, our planet was moonless.

And then scientists think that a planet-sized object smashed into the Earth, kicking up debris, that in time coalesced into our moon. This idea that the moon formed as a result of a cosmic collision has been kicking around since the 1970s. Scientists have even named that body that crashed into our planet, Thaya, after the ancient Greek moon goddess. But it was never clear where Thea came from. But now, thanks to chemistry, we may finally have that answer. Dr. Seth Jacobson is an assistant professor of planetary science at Michigan State University and was part of the team that did the research.

Dr. Jacobson, welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you for having me here. Now, before your latest study, how much did we know about Thaya, the object that smashed into the Earth? Well, not very much. While we're confident that a giant impact is responsible for creating the circumplanetary disc around the Earth from which the Moon accreted, we don't know much about the impactor itself, this object called Thea. So how did chemistry help you figure out where it came from?

So one of the ways that we have to constrain or learn. about Phaa is to compare the composition of the moon and the earth. And what we did is at the laboratory at the University of Chicago is Timohap and Nikdofa measured the iron isotopic composition of both lunar rocks and terrestrial rocks. And by comparing that composition, they determined that the moon and the earth were identical, nucleosynthetically, according to the isotopes of iron, which is really incredible because when we look across other bodies in the solar system, we see a great diversity in the composition, or rather the isotopic composition of iron. Wow. So the Earth and Moon seem to be identical chemically,

but what does that tell you about where Thea came from in relation to the early Earth? Yeah, so that's a great question. We can infer that information by comparing the Earth and the Moon to all those other objects in the solar system for which we've measured their iron isotopic compositions. And these include things like Mars, many meteorites from the asteroid belt, including objects that formed near the Earth or maybe even interior to Earth, and then also meteorites that we think formed exterior of Jupiter, the carbonaceous chondrites. So what happened when you compared all of those? Yeah.

So what we found is that Earth and the Moon are much closer to the composition of, of these inner solar system meteorites and really far away from the iron composition of these outer solar system meteorites, suggesting that the moon and the earth come from the inner solar system. Ah, so it was an inside job after all. Yeah, that's correct.

So, Thaya is not some distant interloper sent in on a trajectory from the outer solar system. Instead, it's probably an object that was born right next to the proto-erone. Well, what do we know about how cosmically violent our solar system was back when Thaya smashed into the Proto Earth? That's a great question. I would say that that is perhaps one of the most actively researched questions in planetary science, particularly in the field of plant formation today. Just how violent

was the era of planet formation. How many giant impacts were there? Was the moon forming impact a unique event or actually the last of a long series of events? And I think at the moment, I can't answer you and no one could answer you with a lot of confidence. But we do know that every object in the solar system has been hit. That's how planets are made, isn't it? Is by objects coming together and sticking and building up like you make a snowman by clumping more snow onto it? That's right. So we call that process accretion. And absolutely, plants grew via accretion. But did they grow through the gentle accretion of relatively small materials? Or did they grow through the much more violent accretion of similar-sized objects.

How big was Thaya back compared to the early Earth before the collision? Right now, there are proposals that Thayer could have been perhaps not much larger than the moon itself, all the way up to being almost the same size as the Proto Earth. Wow. So what would that have looked like? If you could go back in time and see it, take me through the sequence of events as if we were just watching it happen. Yeah. So Thaya, when that... Then Thaya collides with the Earth, it's going to produce a giant disruption of the Proto Earth. This is going to push a lot of material from both the impactor from Thea and the Proto Earth into orbit.

It's also going to deform the Earth itself. This is a very bad event if one were to be alive on the surface of the Earth. However, this will produce a very large circumplanetary disk. Not so different from, say, the rings of Saturn, but a lot more massive relative. to the planet and very high temperature. Inside this disk, material will begin to cool, and in the outer parts of the disk, you'll form monotessimals, small objects, maybe a few tens of kilometers to a few hundred kilometers in size that will start to accrete and grow by collisions with each other until you've accreted something resembling our modern moon.

Wow. How big a role has the presence of our moon played in the evolution of our own planets since that cosmic collision? That's a great question. And another topic of a lot of discussion among scientists, you know, one of the original proposals, in fact, I believe Charles Darwin's proposals for the origin of life, suggested life began in tidal pools. So these are pools that are repeatedly filled and emptied by the ocean tides due to the moon.

And so in this case, the moon would have been absolutely crucial for the origin of life. Now, it's not so clear that life actually originating. that way. But the moon has been a constant companion of the Earth and these interactions between tides, drive motions in our ocean, and also have controlled the rotation of Earth over time. And finally, I guess without the moon, we wouldn't have all those great songs like, fly me to the moon, moon dance. I mean, the moon has had a huge impact on the development of humanity, having periods where the night is very dark and periods where the night is very light, probably controlled when groups went out to hunt and when groups stayed home and procreated.

And this has had big impacts on how our bodies work and how we function. And that's a relationship we have with the moon. Dr. Jacobson, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Dr. Seth Jacobson is an assistant professor of planetary science at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Hide me to the moon and let me see among the stars.

Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter in Mars. There we go. Where do you think you're going? Oh my goodness. Look at this, y'all. Big perch! A big perch is a decent catch

on Lake Erie by today's standards, but fishing in the same place around 360 million years ago, might have brought up a much more terrifying and awesome beast, the Dunkalostias Torelli. It's a type of armored fish we've known about for a while now from other fossil finds around the world. But the Duncalosteus species from around modern-day Lake Erie have largely been an anatomical mystery, until now. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has many of these Dunkolosteus-Torelli giant head fossils

on display, and Russell Engelman wanted to investigate. He's from Cleveland and has always wondered about these monsters, fish. He's a Ph.D. student in biology at Case Western Reserve University and the lead author of the study of Cleveland's famous sea monsters. Hello, and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hello. First of all, just describe what the fossils at the museum look like. So, Duncalostias is a type of fish nor is an Arthur Dyer,

and this is important to understand what they look like. So an arthur dyer is kind of like a shark in that most of their body is composed of cartilage, but then they have a layer of armor covering their head and parts of their torso. And what would happen is when these animals died, usually most of their body would rot away, but this layer of bony armor covering most of their body would preserve, and that's what we'd see in these museums. They would take these armor plates and put them back together to get an idea of what this fish looked like. Oh, so they're fish heads that you have.

There are heads, but they're also a lot of the torso. There's a pair of ball and socket joints that look like a door hinge at the back of the skull. And this is where the skull meets the spine. So there's a portion behind that that's equivalent to like chest and trunk armor. Now, what was it about these fossils that captured your attention? They're from Cleveland, so I was interested in stuff from my hometown. And I've also been very interested in the anatomy of these fish. Again, they have that very strange armored anatomy.

Their jaws are very strange. They don't necessarily have teeth in the way we think of them, but they have these mouth parts that are formed by the bones wearing against each other to form these sharpened blades made from their own jawbones, as well as these large bony fangs, which are known as odontoid. How big can these fish get? Probably you're looking at an animal that's about three and a half to four meters long. The margins of error maybe could get up to four and a half meters, but like you're talking about an animal a little bit smaller than a car.

I mean, these are big animals. No kidding. Yeah. Boy. So why did you want to take a closer look at them now if the museum has had these fossils for a while? Well, so this is a persistent, this is a problem with a lot of paleontology is you'll get these fossils that are well known, but it turns out that they're just not really well studied. These Cleveland Museum specimens were collected as part of the 1920s construction boom in Cleveland. That was when Cleveland was called the sixth city.

It was like the sixth biggest city in the U.S. So there's lots of housing going up and they'd run across these bones all the time. But what happened is the guy who oversaw the collection of it basically sat on these fossils for most of his career and they never got described. Wow. So once you started investigating this further, what did you find out about it? Well, what I found out that was kind of surprising is that there really hadn't been a lot of research that was done on the skull anatomy of this fish. There had been bits and pieces here and there. But the thing is that we, the orthodire of paleontology had advanced by leaps and bound since then.

There were several really nice monographs that really detailed how these things heads were put together. And then in like the 1960s, there was this site from Australia. these things were basically preserved right as they died, so all the bones were in place, perfectly preserved, three-dimensional, and they often preserved quite a bit of the cartilage that was left with them as well. So now we had these perfectly preserved arthritis that even in some cases had bits of the muscles still attached to them, and we understood what their jaws looked like a lot better.

But no one had really taken what we learned, and then went back and said, okay, what does Duncolosteus look like now that we know what to look for? So what did you find? Well, we found that the jaws of Duncalosteus had a lot more cartilage than had been suggested by previous authors. When people see Duncalostias, they often think the jaws are all there is, but it turns out about like half of the jaw is actually composed of cartilage. So if you look at the jaw bone, at first glance, it looks like there's no way for the jaw to actually connect to the skull. And that's because there's a cartilage on it that rarely preserves.

And that's where the actual, the joint where the skull and the jaw would connect together goes. And the same thing with the chin. They look like the jaw bones look like they don't go together at the chin, but there's actually a big fist-sized chunk of cartilage that sits in between the jaw bones and actually connects the two. What's really weird is that this big, bony lower jaw, unless you count the cartilage, it doesn't actually have any connections with any other parts of the body. What about teeth? Well, and that's, so that's what's kind of complicated, is this group that Don Colossis belongs to,

a lot of the members in it have what look like teeth, and it was debated for years whether or not these things were actually teeth. And it turns out that, yes, Don Colostias doesn't really have teeth, but it's not because they're super primitive. It's that their ancestors had teeth, and don't Colostias had little vestigial teeth in the sense like humans have a vestigial appendix. Okay, so how then do they chew?

What's the jaw do to cut into meat, for example? So in placoderms, they only have one set of teeth. And what happens is in the big ones, as the teeth wear down, the jaw bones begin to scrape against each other, and they begin to sharpen against each other. And so by the time, in Duncalostias, by the time these animals are, in fact, juveniles, the teeth are almost all gone. And the whole mouth is composed of these sharpened blades and spikes made of bone. And that's what's used to, like, bite into prey or cut into prey. Oh, wow. So just the top end of the jawbone is like a knife edge. And that's one big piece.

Yep. Why have so many of these duncalosteus fossils been found in Cleveland specifically? What was the environment like 300 million years ago? Well, so 300 million years ago, Cleveland was located about as a lot of Rio de Janeiro. It would be subtropical, you know, like the climate you'd see in Brazil. And what would happen is there is this little narrow inlet. of the ocean that extended inwards all the way up to about where Lake Ontario is today called the Cascasia Sea.

And this is a very narrow inlet of the sea, kind of like, say, the Chesapeake Bay, that was kind of off to the side. And because of that, it had a stagnant basin with the bottom layers of the water having no oxygen. And what this meant is there is no bacteria and scavengers to break down things after they died. So when these fish were swimming around, like they lived everywhere. We have done Colostius fossils from Morocco and Poland and Russia. But in Ohio, the conditions were right that when these things died, they'd fall to the bottom of the basin and their bodies would not immediately rot away or get eaten by scavengers.

And that meant they got preserved relatively well. Boy. Well, with an animal that large living in the sea back then, do you know why it went extinct? So, Duncolauscius lived during the Devonian period. At the very end of this period, we had a major mass extinction. of life. Your listeners may be familiar with the asteroid that why I've got the dinosaurs. That's one. There's the Great Dying, that's another one.

There's actually five of these in Earth's history. And the Devonian extinction is weird because it's actually a two-part extinction. And the second part, that's the grand finale to the period, is called the Hangenberger event. And in fact, in Cleveland, at the very top of the rock layers that have Duncolosteus, there's a chemical signature of the Hangenberg event.

So Duncolostias is like T-Rex, and that it lived right up to this extinction. And this extinction happened and all the placiderms wiped out. And these are, these were the dominant group of fish at the time. They all just disappear off the face of the earth. Just one last thing. What's it like for you having grown up in Cleveland to be the one who's revealed more of the face of Don Colossius? Well, so when I was younger, it always felt kind of odd because we did have some research on Dunk Colossius come out.

And I do want to put a shout to those researchers who they did very good work. I've read their papers. It's very good. My hope is just more broadly that more people are take a look into the ecology of these large Zavonian fishes because I think there's still a lot to be learned. Mr. Engelman, thank you so much for your time. Yeah. Mr. Russell Engelman is a Ph.D. student in biology at Case Western Reserve University. We are exposed to an ever-increasing amount of industrial and agricultural chemicals every day that regulators have deemed safe for humans.

These are chemicals like fire retardants to help fireproof things like our carpets, electronics, and insulation, and pesticides that help get agricultural products to our table. But we're not the only living organisms to consider when we're exposed to these chemicals. We have tens of trillions of bacteria living inside of us, largely in our guts, but they're not just passive squatters. The bacteria in our microbiome play a big role in how many. many of our systems function, like our digestion, metabolism, immune system, and even our mental health. Well, in a new study, scientists took a deep dive into how more than a thousand of these chemicals affect different bacteria in our guts, and from that, they're using a machine learning system to predict if a chemical will be toxic to our gut microbes.

Dr. Stefan Comrade is one of those scientists. He's a postdoctoral microbiome researcher at the University of Cambridge in the U.S. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, Bob. It's great to be on. First of all, tell me about the chemicals you looked at what kind of products are they in? So we're increasingly encountering chemicals everywhere, like you said in your introduction. It's hard to avoid agricultural and industrial chemicals in our daily lives. So the food we eat, fruits and vegetables specifically,

contain lots of different residues of chemicals. We have other types of chemicals, which are, found in plastics and which come into our food and water through industrial applications. So those are really the main ones we were interested in for this study. Well, how did you study the effect of all these chemicals on our microbiome? So we did something that we called an in vitro study. So we were working with individual chemicals and individual isolated bacteria, which we can grow in controlled conditions in the laboratory,

and then analyze the data using instruments and computer, code at very high efficiency. Oh, I see. So you were able to test one chemical against one microbe? So we used here over a thousand different chemicals and around 20 different microbes. So we have, yes, thousands of data points that went into this study. Boy, what did you find? So going into this, we weren't sure what to expect because these chemicals were really not previously thought of to inhibit bacteria. So a herbicide is designed and marketed and labeled as inhibiting weeds, similarly for insecticides and fungicides. So what's surprised us that actually a lot of these chemicals have what we call off-purpose activity against our gut bacteria. So they can

inhibit some or many of our gut bacteria through mechanisms we don't really understand yet at the moment. But the idea here is that if we consume them, they reach our gut and they will inhibit. the certain gut bacteria, which will then, might, of course, impair the normal function of our microbiome with all these important downstream effects that you mentioned in the introduction. How much of a warning signal do you suspect your findings may be about potential detrimental effects of these chemicals could have in our health by way of our microbiome? So this is something we definitely can't tell from our results, because we were working with individual bacteria in a very controlled environment outside the

human body. But we think that this is an important first step ensuring that these chemicals can have an effect. And what we need to do now really is to better understand of which pesticides and industrial chemicals actually reach our gut. So what is the concentration that these bacteria actually encounter and are those worrying? And really, how do they interact once we get complex mixtures of pesticides that we're encountering in a complex environment like the gut? So these are all important follow-on questions. Mixed. So can these chemicals interact with each other? Absolutely. So this is something that is very understudied.

Of course, we rarely consume just one pesticide or one chemical. Usually there's multiple pesticides in our food, and these interact with our gut and also with our health in general in ways we don't really understand because it's very difficult to capture really what the exposure is. Now, you also tested several different types of the best. bacteria that we have in our gut, did they all respond to these chemicals? So we saw actually a great specificity in the response of different bacteria. So we picked our panel of bacteria to represent different types of gut bacteria as well as

possible, for example, based on their genetic diversity. And what we saw is actually that most compounds, which we found to be inhibitory, only inhibited a single bacterium. So they definitely don't all respond in the same way. Now, you did all your work in the laboratory, so how can your findings be used to help us better make these microbiome toxicity assessments in the future? How are they going to affect our health? Yes, so obviously it's impossible to test the effects of all chemicals on all bacteria. So we really try to generalize the knowledge here using, as you mentioned, a machine learning approach.

So trying to predict from the chemical features of these compounds if they're going to be. toxic or not. And if we can learn these sort of fundamental properties, we could make safe by design chemicals, which already in the design are made in such a way that they don't negatively affect bacteria. So that's really one way we hope this will go. But in general, we just hope that in the future these toxicology assessments will factor in other factors like microbial toxicity. Well, how are you using machine learning to predict if a chemical might be toxic to our gut bacteria? Yes, so we're using an approach called chemoinformatics, which allows us to extract numerical features from the chemical structures of these molecules. And we can then use

these numerical features to train a machine learning model called a random forest, which basically predicts whether or not this compound will be toxic. Because we see great differences in toxicity across different bacterial species, we need to do this sort of separately for each species. This allows us to predict with roughly 80% accuracy if a compound will be toxic or not. Well, given what we know about how important the microbiome can be for our health, where does your concern lie when it comes to how these chemicals may be affecting us? So my concern for our planetary health is that we are increasingly polluting our planet with human-made chemicals. And there's probably almost no ecosystem left on Earth, which is unaffected by these chemicals.

We know some of them have toxic effects, but there's definitely effects. We don't even have begun to understand or to study. So we are doing irreversible damage here, especially given how long some of these chemicals take to break down. At the personal level, I think there's definitely a health concern there. And it is, even though you can try your best to avoid pesticides and other chemicals, it's something you've, really realistically can't do. So this is something where we need sort of collective action and regulation to be better.

So it's not just for our health, it's for the health of the planet. Absolutely, yes. Dr. Comrade, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me on. It's been great. Dr. Stefan Comrade is a postdoctoral microbiome researcher at the University of Cambridge in England. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 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, a computer-engineered out of brain cells is trained to recognize braille characters. Crucially, they gave us back a different pattern to what we input, which is showing that something is happening internally, right? There's some sort of processing of the information that's happening. 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 truish 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. have been living in the age of computers for some time now. You could even say we've entered a whole new era. It's hard not to be awestruck and even a little uneasy when you consider the enormous technological leaps we're taking, especially with artificial intelligence. All of the modern AI models you've heard of, like Chat GPT, Clode, and Gemini were built to mimic how toddlers learn. Here's Dr. Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, and 2024 Nobel Physics Laureate,

formerly from the University of Toronto and later Google, on the current back in 2015. One thing about how children learn about the world is they don't get given the right answer for everything. They look at images, they hear sounds, they figure out for themselves what's in those images and what those sounds mean without anybody telling them the right answer.

So one aspect of deep learning that's important is called unsupervised learning, where you just take input from the world and you figure out what's going on with nobody telling you. So it was our younger brains incredible capacity to process information and learn that inspired the AI revolution we're in. But as powerful as these systems are,

in many ways our brains' computational power still outshines them. This is why some scientists are flipping that inspiration around to build computers out of the squishy materials in our brain. brains. But instead of hardware, think of it more like wetware. This is something Dr. Benjamin Ward Sherriere has been working on. He's a senior lecturer in robotics at the University of Bristol in the UK. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hi, Bob. Nice to meet you. First of all, what is it about our brains that you think could make an exceptionally powerful computer? So as you mentioned just then, biological brains are absolutely brilliant at adapting to information and at learning

very quickly from information. So although artificial intelligence systems on computers are getting better and better at learning, they do have their limitations. And we're using more and more resources to be able to push the limits of AI. And I think biological brains give us the possibility of using much fewer resources to get really, really impressive levels of computation. Now, when you say fewer resources, are you talking about how much energy it takes for us to think compared to what a computer does? Absolutely. So the standards number that's often given is that the brain, the human brain, can operate on around 20 watts of energy.

That's essentially the energy of a light bulb. If you think about what we're able to kind of imagine, think about, compute, all that is happening with only 20 watts of energy, which is an incredible level of efficiency. Well, can you break down the components of our brains as computers compared to the type of computers we have on our desktops? Sure. So I would say the building blocks of intelligence and the brain is the neuron. So our brain is just made up of lots and lots of these neurons that are connected together and that exchange information through something called spikes, which are just little jolt of electricity that are communicating between neurons. And so, again, everything we imagine, everything we think about is just. just encoded into these really simple pulses of electricity going very, very quickly between neurons.

And so how the information is encoded in those spikes, we use things like time and space to encode the information. That's something that we're studying, that we're trying to understand, to be able to replicate it in these biological computers. Well, tell me about your biocomputer, this wetware that you're working on. Yeah, so we work with a company called Final Spark. and with collaborators around the world on these little organoids, which are very, very small versions of brains. They can be built around rat brain cells or human brain cells.

And effectively, they give us a really, really small version of a brain to work with and to try and interact with to see if we can achieve computation. So the goal really is to try and demonstrate that this small, biological brain is able to perform computation, is able to process information. Well, how do you interact with these small brain cells? Yeah, great question. So there's lots of different ways of doing it. And the main way of doing it is through electrodes, where we inject electricity through

the electrodes. Obviously, it has to be very, very small pulses of electricity to not damage the organoids, the cells. and then we record at the same time from those electrodes. And so we see, as we put in electricity, that electricity goes around the network, goes around the biological mini brain, and then comes out in a kind of a processed form.

And so we both stimulate and record from these electrodes, and we try and figure out if the organoid is able to process the information we're giving it. Wow. So it's information in, information out. You're putting information into them in some form, either electrical or light or whatever, you see how they respond to that and you record what they do in response. Is that it? That's exactly right. And one of the key things in this field is to try and show that not only can we get a difference between the information we put in and the information that comes out, but that we can change that over time. So we can show that the organoid is actually

learning something. And that's really going to be key is to show that we can teach the organoids, We can train them towards a certain direction to solve a certain task. Well, can you give me an example of something that you trained these cells to do? Absolutely. So we worked on a project where we tried to train these organoids to detect braille characters. So we have tactile sensors, artificial tactile sensors that were sliding across braille characters and sending that information across to the organoid. And based on the response of the organoid, we were able to categorize,

and we were able to see which Braille character was currently being read by the sensor. So I think saying that it could read Braille is maybe a little bit of a stretch, but certainly it was able to identify each of the Braille characters. Wow. So Braille is just a series of dots that have different patterns for different letters. You put that into these organizers. Did they give you back the same pattern? Crucially, they gave us back a different pattern to what we input, which is showing that something is happening internally, right? there's some sort of processing of the information that's happening.

Okay, so they can respond to it, but how do you know that they've actually learned something? Well, that's a really important part of this field of research. As we're feeding this information through to the organoid, there's different techniques that we can use to try and improve the response of the organoid to make it clearer every time and to make it really, really, we would say, noise-free. So we want to make it as clear as possible, the signal that comes out. And so there's different ways to do that. One way is just to repeat the signal again and again and again.

And there's a theory that applies to human brains, which is that if you just keep seeing something or keep feeling something again and again, the way the brain works is that it gets better and better at recognizing that thing. The connections in the brain actually get strengthened every time you receive that information. And so over time, if you just get exposed to something more and more, you actually get better and better at recognizing it and identifying it. One example of that would be, for example, if you were to give someone growing up lots of examples of shades of blue,

they would be much better at distinguishing those shades of blue than someone that was just exposed to one shade of blue. It sounds like what Dr. Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, is saying that it's unsupervised. learning. That's exactly what it is. Unsupervised learning. I mean, it has a specific name

within biological computing, but it's absolutely unsupervised learning that can be also applied to traditional AI. So now that you've shown that your organoids, these blobs of brain cells, can recognize Braille, where do you hope to go from here? Yeah, so we're really excited about

the next direction that we're taking which is to go beyond just recognizing patterns and trying to classify them and actually try to implement some form of behavior. And so what we want to try and do is not only feel or sense something about the world through vision or touch, but then have the organoid actually respond through actions. So what we want to do is connect a robot to the organoid so that it can not only feel what the robot is feeling, but then it can respond with actions that the robot takes in the world.

So you could imagine, for example, a little car that is able to see what's going on around it and navigate in a room. And all that processing of the information would be happening within the organoid, within the mini brain. Wow. So how far could this go? How far could these organoid computers go to try to outperform what we have today? Well, I think very far. I will say that it's a really new field, which makes it really exciting for a researcher.

But there's definitely a lot of work still to do. Well, if these are biological computers, would they be able to start thinking on their own? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the questions we sometimes get, you know, to do with sort of independent thought or consciousness. I think what I would say is that we're very far away from that. Eventually, that is an ethical concern that we will have to think about, but it's something that the systems that we're working with are so much simpler than a human or even a rat brain.

It's something that we'll have to think about probably quite far in the future. Just one last thing. What happens should these biocomputers power down? Can you reboot them? That's a good question. So biocomputers are actually made up of living cells. So they are cell cultures. They need to be maintained.

So they actually need to be fed and kept at a certain temperature. So it is a challenge on the kind of biological side to maintain these systems. And they do have a lifespan. So eventually, you know, the cells will die out. Progress that needs to be made on the biological side is finding better and better environments for these organoids to be maintained within for longer and longer, to be more and more stable over time. Dr. Bordshire, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much, Bob. Dr. Benjamin Ward Chariere is a senior lecturer in robotics at the University of Bristol in the UK.

Making computers out of our brain cells is one way scientists can leverage our brain's computational powers to build a more efficient type of computer. But if we look at just a the neural components going into it, there might be a less squishy way to accomplish this Herculean task. Neurons do the heavy lifting in our brains. Tens of billions of them work together, synchronizing like musicians in a complex orchestra. The blob of cells we heard about are made up of thousands of neurons, so that's more like a smaller string quartet. But some scientists are focusing on engineering a more robust version of a single musician. In other words, they've made an artificial neuron that runs as efficiently as the real deal in our brains.

Dr. Jin Yao led the team that built the artificial neuron. He's an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bob. Well, first of all, what would be the advantage of building an artificial neuron if we want to build a system that's more inspired by our brain? Well, compared to, for example, the bowel computer, they really require kind of, you know, extensive caring, right? But the artificial neuron essentially is an electronic device. So they can be used as the conventional computer chip, but much, much lower power and the faster speed. Well, just a general definition, what are artificial neurons? Oh, artificial neuron is

an electronic device, but it does the function like the real neuron in our brain. Well, tell me about the artificial neuron that you made. What's it made of? Our artificial neuron is made from some biomaterial, specifically it's called protein nano-wise synthesized by a type of bacteria. It's called geobacter. Now, these are very, very small nano-wines. They're 100,000 times smaller than a human

here. So we can put billions of them together. So they form a thin film. Then you can treat them as if it's a silicon membrane. And then you can make an electronic device out of it. And the beauty is that, you know, in modern computer,

you use a voltage to drive the current, which carries the signal. That voltage amplitude is about one volt. But in biological system, in our brain, the brain uses much smaller voltage amplitude. It's only about 0.1 volt to drive the electrical signal. So let me see if I got this right. You take bacteria and the bacteria manufacture these nanowires out of proteins, and these nanowires can conduct electrical signals, and they're thousands of times smaller than a human air. Is that right? Correct, correct.

So tell me your setup then. How did you test how it worked? You have a signal generator, right? You generate a spiking signal. But in this case, the spiking signal is as small as the ones the brain uses. So it's only about 0.1 volt. You input the spiking signals into the artificial neuron. Then, of course, you have a measurement system that can measure the output signal from the artificial neural. And what did you get? I get the same amplitude as spiking exactly also 0.1 volt.

So there's a signal match there. You input those ultra low amplitude signals, but at the same time, you also get the same amplitude. So your artificial neuron works pretty much the same as a natural one. Correct, correct. Wow. And did you do this study on a single artificial neuron? Currently, yes. So this is a starting point, but I think in the future, hopefully we can connect more of them to formulate a circuit. Well, how do you get from a single artificial neuron to an actual computing system that could rival our own brain? Well, I think we can look at the history, right? The modern computing system is built upon transistors.

Currently, a computer chip contains billions of transistors. We have this technology called lithography. We can put so many of them together. But I think in the 1950s, the first invention of the transistor, that was just a single one. And over the time, we developed this so-called integration or lithography method that we can put more or more together on a computer chip. So that's essentially the same methodology we're going to take it. Remember that even though we follow the material from bacteria, but in essence we can put those material together to form a thin film. That kind of synfilm is very similar to the silicon sin film we use in modern computing systems.

So in principle, we can follow the modern fabrication. lithographic fabrication to make many, many of those artificial neurons on a single computer chip. And then we connected them. It can formulate a large network. So is the object here to build a biologically inspired computer with only artificial neurons, or do you want to use them to connect to conventional computers? I think it could be done in both ways. One way is that we can totally rely on the artificial neurons, right, to form a computing system. The other is that I think there, there's chance that we can do hybrid computing.

Now, this is a beauty, right? This is the first time artificial neuron works with the same amplitude with a biological neuron, which means that they share the same language, right? So which means that in the future there's a possibility we can put the artificial neuron system with the real neuron system together so that we possibly can formulate some hybrid computing system. Dr. Yao, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you, Bob.

Thank you for the invitation. Dr. Jin Yao is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of Massachusetts in Amherst. That's the sound of legendary soccer player Wayne Rooney scoring against Manchester City back in 2011. It was a bicycle kick that came out of nowhere. Naturally, supporters of Rooney's team, Manchester United, were ecstatic. having scored against an arc rival. Absolutely incredible. But for Manchester City fans,

the goal probably, at best, felt more like a slowly deflating balloon. The highs and lows of soccer can be a real emotional roller coaster for fans. But for soccer fanatics, people who take their love of the team a bit farther, a goal like that can take a much heavier and often more destructive emotional toll. In a new study, scientists in Chile looked into the brains of soccer fanatics, compared to regular fans, to see how they reacted to victorious wins and gutting losses against their arc rival team. Dr. Francisco Zamorano is an associate professor at the Universidad San Sebastian and researcher in the Radiology Department of Clinica Alamana in Santiago, Chile.

Hello, and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hi, thank you, Bob. So what's the difference between someone who's just a serious soccer fan and a fanatic? The main difference between fan and fanatics. It is given by the tendency to violence. Fans can have a very intense attachment to his team like a fanatic, but it doesn't have this violent component in his behavior. So the fanatics are more likely to break out in like riots after a game if they lose

or try to beat up the opposition? Yes, yes, absolutely. Well, how did you go about studying what's going on in the brains of fans versus fanatics in soccer? We use an imaging technique called functional MRI that allows us to study how blood flow move in the brain so we can see in the real time which areas of the brain are getting activated and as we are in real time presenting a different kind of stimuli, some painful,

some good stimuli for a subject, we can correlate this pattern to the specific behaviors. So we can isolate in this way a component of rivalry, study the difference of the match when you have a great emotional commitment. you're playing with the arch rival, your team scored to the archival, or the arch rival scored to your team,

less the activity that when your team score to non-relevant team or when no relevant team score to your team. Okay, so you have soccer fans who go into an fMRI that scans their brain in real time, and you played them, what, videos of different scores, either with their team, that they like against an arc rival

or a team that they didn't really care as much about, what did you see going on in their brains? First, for the significant victory, we observe a high activity in the reward system. You know, that is the part of the brain

that allow you to process pressure stimuli, like food, sex, you know, social relations, everything that is good for you. And this part is activated in this case, by a social stimuli, you know, is to see your team scoring to their arrival. Okay, we all feel good, let's go party. Okay. Yes, yes. And on the other side, when they lost?

Here we discover a dual mechanism. For subject, when they're in front of a painful stimuli, the mind tried to cut the flux of information and isolate you. And you, and you, enter in a state mentalizing and trying to understand this painful stimuli. But at the same time that when the system tried to isolate from the environment, so the stimuli in this case, it turned off a very important part of the brain related to the cognitive control. And this part is called the dorsal anterior cingualic cortex that connects all that comes from the limbic system, all the pure emotions, you know, frustration, you know, all what's happened to the fanatics during the game, and connects with the frontal

cortices that command that the normative behavior. So in one way you are getting isolated from the painful stimuli, but your brain is losing their capacity to control behavior. So you are more proclive to fall in this disrupting behaviors and violence. Oh, I see. So the part of the brain that's responsible for control when you would say, well, we lost, but hey, it's just a game. I'm not going to get upset about that. That's knocked out. So there's no control, and that leads to violence. Yes, absolutely. And a key message here is that the system that control and protect you for all your adult, life is generated in the childhood. If you have a childhood with problems or insecurities or with

needs are not satisfied, your system of mentalization will not allow you to understand your feelings or the other feelings and at the same time they will not protect you against this kind of insult to your reputation or your team. Because we understand. in our study that there is some cerebral system that protect us to fall in violence and it's a rational mechanism that allow us to understand what is happening to us and it's the same system that allow us to understand what happened to other things. It's related to the empathy system. Can we extend your findings to what happens in other things? situations where we see fanatical behavior like, I don't know, political violence? Absolutely.

The systems involved in fanatics are very same circuit. But we must understand that human evolved being tribal. So you're saying that if a child grows up, not feeling part of a tribe, not feeling connected to someone, that they will latch on to a soccer team, that that's now my tribe, and I will react to that more severely. Exactly. Much of this experience generate dopamine release related to the pleasure of the bit to the arrival. And this dopamine mechanism, it also perpetrate this idea that the team is the thing that give you happiness in my life. So protect our children, give them a sense of family, a sense of

community. Yes. Yes, that's Philippine. Dr. Zamorano, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Bob. It's a pleasure. Dr. Francisco Zamorano is an associate professor at the Universidad San Sebastian and a researcher in the Radiology Department of Clinica Alemann in Santiago, Chile. Well, we asked for your science questions and boy, did you deliver. Thanks to you, we're cooking up a great holiday question show. One of our listeners even got his question answered by a former Canadian astronaut. And speaking of astronauts, we have a special treat for you next week. I sat down with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hanson in a CBC radio exclusive to talk about his historic upcoming mission around the moon in the new year. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks

this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. You can find our web page at cBC.ca.ca slash quirks, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. 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 Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Bukowitz, Livia Diring, and Dan Falk. Our senior producer is Jim Levins, and our acting senior producer is Sonia Biting. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.