Quirks and Quarks - Dogs have been by our side for 16,000 years, and more...

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

New research confirms that dogs were the first animal to form a domestic relationship with humans, dating back to the end of the last Ice Age almost 16,000 years ago.PLUS:Constructing shelters out of Martian soil may be possible with bacterial helpMale-on-male cricket 'twerking' and 'booty bumping' is not a case of mistaken identityNarrowing down potential alien signals from 12 billion to 100, thanks to SETI Researchers find a brain switch in mice to turn a deadbeat dad into a doting one

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, male-on-male cricket booty bumping. They slowly back their abdomens together and push them together quite forcefully for sometimes up to a minute. And where we are with our official search for extraterrestrial intelligence. If you see something at one spot on the sky and you come back, say, a year later and look at the same spot on the sky and you see the same signal. That starts to get you excited.

Plus, humans' oldest animal BFFs, microbes to help build Martian structures, and a genetic switch for paternal care. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. Are you ready? There's an old saying how dogs are man's best friend. Who's got it? Well, now new research confirms they're also our oldest friend. Going back even long than we ever suspected. Good dog, baby. Their research was one of two new studies to fill in some early details

about the oldest dogs in Europe. The studies confirmed that dogs were the first animal to form a domestic relationship with humans, making them are true animal BFFs. Dr. Anders Bergstrom led the study. He's an evolutionary geneticist at the University of East Anglia

and the Francis Crick Institute in the UK. Hello and welcome to a our program. Hello. Thank you for having me. Well, tell me about the bones that you sampled in this study. What made you suspect that they came from dogs and not wolves? So actually, the approach we took in this study was to basically sample everything we could. So without any kind of prior guessing going on as to whether something is a dog or a wolf, we would rather just let the DNA do the talking. And sometimes you just have a tiny little bone fragment and you just cannot tell it all. And then

genetics is really your only way to determine if something's a dog or a wolf. Well, how are you actually able to salvage DNA from these samples? Ancient DNA technology has really matured over the last kind of 10, 15 years. And so basically it involves first drilling a tiny little hole into some piece of skeletal remains to obtain a tiny amount of bone powder from which you can then extract DNA and then use modern DNA sequencing techniques. to determine the sequence of what are often tiny little DNA fragments, so the DNA is always degraded and damaged in these ancient remains.

But if we're lucky, there's still enough in there that we can analyze it and understand the genetic relationships of that individual to others in the species and so on. So you have to kind of fish out the either dog or wolf DNA from all the other stuff that's around it. That's right. So often in these samples, there might just be a tiny, bit of dog or wolf DNA and the rest is just bacteria or other microbes that have contaminated the sample after the death of the individual. So sometimes we just sequence everything and then in the computer fish out the dog and wolf DNA from the rest. But in this study, we also developed a new

approach that is known as capture. So we designed little DNA probes, chemically synthesize DNA probes that we use to fish out dog and wolf specifically from the sample. And therefore, we can basically enrich for what we're looking for and get less of this microbial stuff that we're not so interested in. You're kind of using it like bait to fish. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, out of the 216 bone samples that you studied, how many were wolves and how many were dogs? We were able to make this call for about two thirds of them, so about 141. For the remaining third, there just wasn't enough DNA to to say whether it was a dog or a wolf. We found about, I think, 46 dogs and 95 wolves.

Oh, wow. Well, what was the oldest dog that you found? So the oldest dog that we found is 14.2,000 years old, and it comes from a cave in Switzerland called the Kesslerloch Cave. Well, it was quite striking because we tested about 60 or so samples from this cave, and all of them turned out to be a wolf. except a single dog. So there was a single dog among this very large group of wolves. Basically, as the Ice Age is finishing up in Europe,

and several thousand years before agriculture is invented. Well, how different are dogs from wolves from a genetic point of view? So not very different in an absolute sense. So we think they diverged genetically from dogs maybe 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. that's really very recent in an evolutionary time frame. So in most other contexts, you wouldn't consider those different species. And of course, dogs and wolves can interbreed without problems. And dogs have changed quite a bit during their evolution,

but that's probably driven by very kind of strong human selection for particular traits. So they look very different from wolves often. But genetically, they're not actually that. diverged from their wolf relatives. Well, how do your findings fit in with the second study that was also about ancient dogs in Europe? That's right. So there's a second study that also studies some very early remains in Europe and in Turkey, finding two additional dogs from this time period. And so together, these dogs across the two papers give us a first look at these essentially ice age dogs. It's really an exciting step forward

in this field. What was the oldest dog that was found in Turkey? So that one is about 15.8,000 years old. And so that is now the oldest dog known to science. Boy, what would these ancient dogs have looked like? So we know generally that dogs early on in their domestication, they become a bit smaller than wolves. So they were probably a bit smaller than a wolf. But beyond that, we can't say very much. I think it's reasonable to assume that they would have looked like kind of street dogs that you find in many parts of the world. Okay, so these ancient dogs didn't look like chihuahuas or labradoodles or anything like that? Yeah, yeah, probably not. What do all these findings reveal about the people who kept these dogs 14 or 15,000 years ago? This period, 14, 15,000, 16,000 years ago,

this is several thousand years before agriculture. Everyone is still a hunter-gad. at this point. We know that hunter-gatherer groups are often quite small. It's kind of hard to explain how dogs could spread so widely. So we have them not just in Europe, but probably also in Asia, and they probably also cross the Bering Strait into the Americas with the first people about 15,000 years ago. So they're kind of all over the place with all these different groups of humans. And we don't really know of any kind of far-ranging human migration that could have brought dogs all over the place. So it appears to be. be the case that many different human groups at this time acquired dogs, even though the humans

didn't necessarily seem to be mixing with each other. So perhaps dogs were being traded between groups or somehow in one way or another they managed to reach all these different human cultures. That perhaps tells us that everyone wanted to get dogs once they were available. Well, why would they want to do that? Why would they want to keep dogs as pets? One possibility is that they could have helped with hunting. It could be useful to have dogs with you as hunting companions. Perhaps they can also protect against predators around the kind of settlement or camps.

And perhaps they're also used to some extent providing companionship. I mean, I think dogs are kind of unusual among domesticated animals in that they don't always have a clearly defined purpose to a human society, but they often have diverse roles and perhaps sometimes they're just kind of hanging around

to provide companionship. And 15,000 years ago, that was still during the Ice Age, was it not? so maybe they were also used to keep them warm at night. Yeah, that's a possibility as well. Dr. Bergstrom, thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure to talking to you. Dr. Anders Bergstrom is an evolutionary geneticist

at the University of East Anglia and the Francis Crick Institute in the UK. NASA is gearing up for a launch next week on April 1st. The Artemis 2 mission plans to send a group of four astronauts around the moon and back without landing. NASA estimates a mission will last around 10 days. We're also hearing about some big plans the space agency has. The agency says it wants to establish a permanent base on the moon, so there's always a human presence on the lunar surface.

There's a lot of excitement about space exploration in the air. With NASA's moon base announcement, they also announced their plans to get a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars. We will launch the first of its kind interplanetary mission named SR1 Freedom before the end of 2028. It's going to take a lot of ingenuity for humans, to eventually build a colony on Mars. Two, one.

Because launch payload restrictions means future colonists are going to have to pack lightly. We have liftoff. But they'll need to build structures when they get there. So somehow or another, future Martian settlers will have to source or produce what they need from what's available on Mars. Well, in a new study, scientists have proposed a potential solution

that they think could allow colonists to use Martian soil to 3D print the solid structures they need. It relies on the transformative power of biominerization. Dr. Shiva Hochtenak led the study. She's a post-doctoral research fellow in material engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Hello and welcome to our program. Hello, thank you for having me.

First of all, what is biomineralization? Well, biominerization is a natural phenomenon that happens every day. If you look at the corals, when you go to the seaside, the corals are made by biominerization. There are kind of bacteria that during their metabolic process, they use the nutrition and they kind of sweat. The material that is in their sweat is practically binding the soil and the sand and it creates a much more stiffer material. And over time, you see the growing of corals. Oh, I see. So it relies on bacteria, and the products that the bacteria come up with act like kind of a glue to hold things together. Yes, it's not just bacterial, so microalgae, and as well as some fungus can do that. Okay. So that's the natural process. When it comes to, you know, building things, we're pretty good at making things out of concrete here on Earth. Why can't we just keep doing that on Mars? If we want to make things on Mars with concrete, we have one option. We have

to transport everything. You have gravels, sand, water, and cement. If you want to transport all the material from Earth per each kilo, you have to spend a lot of money. What we were thinking in this research was to, instead of taking the cement to Mars, because we can use the soil of Mars as part of the smaller and bigger sands inside the concrete, then the water can be extracted from the ice on Mars, but the cement, which is the glue, we wanted to use some kind of bacteria that creates cement at room temperature. So all you have to do then is just bring the bacteria to Mars? Bacteria and the food for bacteria.

Okay. So how would it work? Practically, you have to mix the bacteria with the soil, with water, with the food for bacteria together, and let it work. But the problem is that the environment of Mars is not very hospitable. It can kill

the bacteria and you have to make sure the type of the bacteria that you are using is correct and can survive the hard Martian environment. So what kind of bacteria would you use? We are going to use two kinds of bacterias. One, that is a cyanobacteria, that is practically you find it in the middle of deserts on Earth.

So it means that it can survive in a very cold and in a very hot environment during day and night in desert. It can survive dehydration in very dry environment, very similar to Martian conditions. And the important thing about this bacteria is that it creates oxygen. And we know that the surface of Mars does not have oxygen is full of carbon dioxide. But the other bacteria is for Sassanapasteuri is aerobic. It means that it needs oxygen to survive. So if we put these two bacteria together, one bacteria can prepare an environment that is favorable for the other.

They are working like a team together. One creates oxygen. Also, the cyanobacteria creates a kind of membrane around it. You can imagine it as a kind of tent that shields itself from the UV of Mars. So it can shield the other bacteria from the UV of Mars. So one bacteria practically has the responsibility of shelter and protection. and the other bacteria has the responsibility of creating cement. Wow, that's amazing.

So they work together, one providing protection, the other one to provide the cement-like mineralization. That's astounding. Have you tried this in your lab? Unfortunately, at the moment, no, we didn't have the possibility to do that in our lab, but there are a lot of studies in astrobiology that shows that the cyanobacteria that I was mentioning that is in the desert, have been exposed to lower orbit to an equivalent amount of UV radiation of Mars, and it helps survive other bacteria

that were in the same culture with it. So, yeah, we are hoping to do that as soon as possible. Now, would it even be wise to bring Earth microorganisms to Mars? I mean, shouldn't we be concerned about contaminating another planet? Yeah, of course, that is a very good question and a very valid question. But about four billion years ago that the Earth was practically a desert like Mars, this kind of bacteria were the first components that helped grow our planet nowadays. It's like that we go back to the history, to the ancient history, and try to replicate what happened to Earth on Mars.

Of course, now we have much more information. and much more technology to test that before contaminating. But that we can do when we arrive to Mars in a very close environment to see what is the outcome of exposing this bacteria to a Marshall environment. If this works, how long would it take these bacteria to grow a shelter? Well, it depends. The bacteria, the spursa, pastura, would live on earth in an optimal condition, which it needs a specific pH between 5 and 10

and a temperature that is at the room temperature can solidify this soil in 14 hours. But the thing is that you cannot build the whole house in 14 hours. You need to have a solidified base and then go layer by layer. So you have to count for two or three weeks if you're going to solidify each layer, perhaps 10 centimeters or 20 centimeters per day. Also, the bacteria that is doing biosimmentation, as a byproduct, it creates ammonia. It can help to the green house gas, and then also it can be used for fertilizer or even preparing fuel for coming back home.

So what is the plan from this point to test this concept of biominerization to build a colony on Mars? Well, the first step will be try to put these two bacteria together. Because these bacteria, although they show that they thrive with other bacteria in a culture, we don't know what will happen if they are exactly together. if one of this is going to create a condition that could be not very much favorable to the other. Imagine that you have one person with the nut allergy and the other person that is eating knots in front of that person. So it can be something that is not very favorable to both of them, and we have to verify that first. But there are a lot of bacteria that they can go together and create a culture,

have to see which one is the best option. That's interesting because there's a lot of talk about how people going to Mars have to get along with each other. Now you're working with bacteria that need to get along with each other. Yeah. Yes. Dr. Horsternat, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. Dr. Shiva Horstinat is a postdoctoral material engineer research fellow at the Polytechnic University of Milan. When Canadian researcher Dr. Kevin Judge decided to study the evolution of weaponry in field crickets.

He did what many scientists would do. The biologist from McEwen University in Edmonton started filming crickets, hoping to capture some of their violent displays. All you have to do for a field cricket to get them to be aggressive is to essentially put them in a small arena with another male cricket and then press record. In all, he filmed over 900 videos of eight different kids, cricket species and ended up capturing a lot more than just aggression in the videos.

He also documented courtship displays between the males. Part of the recordings that I did for that, I noticed that males sometimes courted each other. They displayed same-sex sexual behavior. But it was something that happened a non-trivial amount of times in these experiments, and it was really puzzling. Now, same-sex behavior is pretty common in the animal kingdom. It's been observed in almost a thousand species, over 100 of which are insects. But with them, it was always thought to be more a case of mistaken identity than anything else. So, Dr. Judge reached out to a research group at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland,

who he knew studied same-sex behavior in animals, to see if that's what was going on in his videos. Dr. Thomas Green is the behavioral economy. and sexologist who took this research project on as part of his PhD work in the Department of Biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Hello and welcome to our program. Hello, thank you for having me. Tell me about these 900 cricket videos. What did you see the crickets doing that could be interpreted as same-sex behavior?

So a lot of the behaviors that we saw that were interpreted as same-sex sexual behavior were behaviors that were classified as courtship, when we see them between males and females. This involves things like courtship song, which is different from aggressive song because it is softer. The wings are lower when they are singing. Crickets use their wings to sing, and the pattern of the song is different as well.

And we could tell that it was courtship song by using these traits. We also noticed courtship posturing, which I like to call cricket twerking because the males will direct the end of their abdomen towards the female and kind of rock back and forth while lifting up the tip of the abdomen to entice the female to mount because in field crickets the females are the individuals who mount. And so we saw these between males and there were clearly courtship behaviors.

We've never seen any other contexts that these behaviors happened in. And we also identified another behavior that was called booty bumping. They slowly back their abdomens together and push them together quite force. fully for sometimes up to a minute. When I was younger, there was a dance called The Bump, and that's who we did on the dance where you, bump your booty together, right? Exactly. Well, how likely is it that these male crickets were just mistaking a male for a female?

Not likely at all. Crickets are a useful species to study for this specific thing because the male crickets sing and the females don't. And so if an individual quartz another individual who they have heard singing, they have received social information that indicates that they are courting a male. And we recorded several instances of these crickets continuing to court after having heard the other individual sing. Well, how do these displays that you saw, the bumping, the softer sound, compare when crickets are being aggressive with each other? So, aggression in male crickets is characterized

as by a aggression song, which is typically quite louder. The wings are positioned higher. And again, it has a different cadence than the courtship song or the calling song. And there's also other behaviors such as antenna fencing where they take their antenna and kind of just whack each other in the head with it. They also will try to bite each other in the like face area and they will use a successful bite to flip the other one, where they just kind of throw the other individual sometimes fully across the setup that we had. It sounds like the difference between, hey, you want to fight or, hey, you want to dance? Exactly, yes.

If you know cricket behaviors, it was pretty clear, although it takes some time to learn the intricacies, I guess. Well, how common is this same-sex behavior in different cricket species? So we looked at eight species. We found it in every species. It ranged from 0.7% to about 25%, but it averaged somewhere around 10 to 15% of individuals engaging in this behavior. Oh, so not all the males do this? Yes. Most males do not. So what does that tell you about that variation, why some species barely do it at all and others do it a lot? So we think that this could be an indication of some sort of selection pressure to these are closest related species that we looked at. And the variation means that there are likely selection pressures recently that have caused this sort of divergent in the amount of individuals who do this behavior. Well, if it's selected, what would be the advantage of same-sex behavior? We found that it reduced aggression. So aggression is a costly behavior.

you risk injury. Crickets are known to cannibalize. So it is a high-risk encounter. But if you court, the other individual is less likely to attack and more likely to actually return courtship instead. More peaceful society. Exactly. Why is this important to know? Oh, that's a good question. It is an inherent part of biology. I found records of this behavior through my PhD in nematodes and acanthacephalins, the little worms, the parasitic worms that live inside of us. And I found examples of it in fish, in birds, in mammals, in insects. It's

everywhere. And it's a behavior that is often not discussed because of its association with human queerness or it's often pathologized. And so understanding this with greater depth can help us understand the evolution of sexual behavior and the evolution of sociality within insects and within broader animals. Well, what about insights into human sexuality? This is the question I'm always scared to get because I kind of don't think it actually matters. We know it's natural and I think that is an important thing to reiterate because I am a queer person who was told homosexuality is unnatural growing up and learning

that this is a thing that happens all over the animal kingdom was really validating. But beyond that, I think it is kind of dangerous to continue looking at nature to decide anything about humans. And human sexuality is on sort of a different level of comprehension than we have with animals. We can talk to people about it and we can understand them. Whereas with animals, we are kind of just watching behaviors. And the more we understand that, the more we understand the natural world, but for humans, there's so much more looking inward that we have to do and acceptance that we have to do before we can really start comparing ourselves to the natural world. But we're not unusual in the broader picture. Exactly. Yes.

Dr. Green, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Dr. Thomas Green is a behavioral ecologist and sexologist in the Department of Biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quirx 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, honing in on the genetic switch in mice to turn a bad dad into a good one. That was really exciting to us because this is a region that for maybe four decades has been

implicated in maternal care behaviors. 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 in 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. I got it. I got it. I got it. I'm patched it. If you saw the movie Contact, you might remember Jody Foster's character listening intently with her headphones hooked up to a radio telescope. She was listening for any signal that may have come from an intelligent alien civilization far from Earth. Whatever it is, it ain't local. In the movie,

Spoiler alert, they did find such a signal, changing life for people on Earth from that moment forward. In real life, this hasn't happened yet. But astronomers have definitely been looking. Their quest goes by the acronym SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. One approach they launched way back in 1999 invited the public to join in on the search through a project called SETI at Home. People could sign up their computers to help analyze data, mostly collected using the Erecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. In a little over 20 years, they collected 12 billion signals of interest. And now, after a lot of data crunching, scientists have finally narrowed those signals down

from 12 billion to the top 100. Dr. Eric Corpola is an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the SETI at Home Project. Dr. Corpola, welcome to Corks and Corks. Thanks for having me. Take me back to when SETI at Home first launched. How groundbreaking was it to get the public involved at that time? Actually, it had never been done before like this. A very smart person named David Getty had realized that millions of people were joining the Internet at that time.

and that their computers could analyze scientific data. And he realized that if you took data from radio telescopes, you could perform a better analysis on it than you could using the computers that were sitting at the observatory itself. Well, how did the people at home contribute to the project? We recorded data at the Erosibo Radio Telescope primarily, and we sent that data out, divided it into small chunks that we sized to be something that could be analyzed on a home computer at the time.

In 1990, your computer was a lot less powerful than the one that you have right now. So we divided the data up into chunks, send it out to our volunteers. Their computers analyzed the data and sent any potential signals back to us so we could do further analysis on them. Well, how did you begin sifting through all of that data and through these, what, 12 billion signals of interest that you got? Yeah, so our volunteers in all that analysis they did sent back to us about 12 billion potential signals. The vast majority of those signals were definitely indications of intelligence, but of human intelligence. Humans make a lot of radio signals.

Our cell phones, our computers give off. radio signals, even though we don't want them to. And that kind of stuff gets picked up by radio telescopes relatively easy. So what makes a signal interesting enough or weird enough to say, hey, we need to take it closer. Look at this one. So what you're really looking for is a signal that if you see something at one spot on the sky and you come back, say, a year later and look at the same spot on the sky and you see the same signal, that starts to get you excited. In the SETI at Home dataset, we covered most parts of the sky about 12 times. And so we would be really excited if every time we looked at a spot on the sky, all of those 12 times, we saw the same

signal. We didn't see anything like that, unfortunately. We also wanted to eliminate anything if you look at one spot on the sky and see a signal, and then you look somewhere else and you see the same signal, that type of signal is likely to be interference, and so we eliminate that sort of thing. Okay. So get me down to what you're really looking for. You're down to 100 signals now. What makes them stand out? They are the things that we saw multiple times. The best ones, we saw three out of the 12 times that we looked at a spot on the sky. So not something. So not nothing that we've seen is 12 of 12, but 3 of 12 is not bad. We're looking for things where the frequency has not changed in the number of years that we've been looking at it. And we're

looking for things that are seen over the entire duration of the project. It's less exciting if you look at a spot on the sky and then look at it two minutes later and you see the same signal. that's likely to be some local source of interference. Are there particular frequencies that you're looking for that would indicate that this came from a civilization? We concentrate our search on a range of frequencies that are associated with natural emission from hydrogen. Any astronomer in the galaxy who wants to study how the galaxy is structured knows that hydrogen is almost everything that's out there. and since every astronomer in the galaxy is looking at this frequency, if you wanted to attract attention,

you would probably send your signal very near to that frequency. Now, you're also assuming that the aliens are using radio waves. What if they're communicating in some other form? That is a good point. As a discipline, SETI doesn't only concentrate on radio. We started in radio because that's the easiest way for us to detect interstellar signals. But we also look for signals using optical telescope. E.T. could build giant lasers and point them at us to send a signal.

So we do look for that sort of thing. But SETI at home was a radio-only project. So now that you're down to these 100 signals, what's the next step? So we're taking the 100 potential signals, and we're going to the Fast Radio Observatory in China. The Fast Telescope is the 500-meter aperture spherical telescope, F-A-S-T. It is currently the largest single-d-dish radio telescope in the world, and we're collecting data there and analyzing it to see if any of the signals repeat, if any of them are still there. If there are, we'll definitely let you know.

So what is the SETI at Home project taught us about the feasibility of crowdsourced data gathering like that? I think SETI at Home taught us that this sort of project is both feasible and it can be attractive to volunteers to do this sort of thing. Other projects of this sort have sprung up looking for cures for cancer, trying to find pulsars in the galaxy, looking for pulsars that are in close orbits, and some mathematical problems have been tackled using this type of computing. Well, how optimistic are you that you'll find a true signal from an alien civilization from your final 100 signals or eventually even at all? I can't say that I'm really optimistic.

current SETI projects are doing things like observing a million stars, and it sounds like a lot. But when you consider that there are a few hundred billion stars in the galaxy, it's really just scratching the surface. So there's still a lot to be explored. So I think it's quite unlikely that we will find ET really nearby and in the near future. That's too bad, really. It would be nice to know if there was someone else out there. Yeah. I think that question has been on people's minds for thousands of years.

Who else is out there? It would be nice to find out. Dr. Corpola, thank you so much for your time. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Dr. Eric Corpola is an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the SETI at Home Project. Now, as we just heard,

SETI research involves pointing telescopes to the sky looking for potentially interesting radio waves. And where SETI at home relied on the public to process data from a single telescope, another SETI initiative, Breakthrough Listen, uses several telescopes to cover more of the sky, to target nearby stars and galaxies. All of these efforts utilize radio waves, and there's a certain logic to that. Radio signals can pass through clouds, no problem. and we can detect them day or night. But it turns out stormy space weather might be muddying up some of the very radio signals we're looking for.

Dr. Vichel Gajur led this latest research. He's a staff astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and a project scientist for Breakthrough Listen at the University of California, Berkeley. Hello and welcome to our program. Thanks for having me, Bob. What made you suspect there might be an issue with how we search for extraterrestrial? intelligence with radio waves. In SETI, what we are doing is we are looking for this particular class of signal called

narrow-bed signal, where we expect the signal to be concentrated all its energy at a single frequency. And there are a number of spacecraft that goes explore our solar system. When we look at a narrow-bent signal coming from them, we typically tend to see those signals getting spectrally broadened. Now, this is a very well-understood, very well-known phenomena, but something that we didn't really that was going to impact the way we were doing steady. Okay, so I'm just trying to picture this.

The signal that you're looking for, if I was looking at, like in the oscilloscope with a wave, it would be a spike sticking up? Ideally speaking, if the signal is truly narrow-bent, then yes, it will look like a needle. What we have actually proved is that it is not necessarily need to be a needle. It will be more like a needle with a wide wings around it. So it will be more broadened than what we initially anticipate. Oh, I see. Okay, more spread out. So how does space weather come into this?

So space weather is the reason why signal no longer remain needle-like, but they become spectrally broadened. Now, when I talk about space weather, this is not the space weather of our own sun. We are talking about the space weather of exoplanetary system that we aim to target. So when we do our searches, we point our radio telescope to our, a known system sometime or sometimes even we don't even know that there are any planets around it but we observe a large number of stars. When we observe any star if there is any planet around those stars, the signal from these planets will definitely pass close to the star

and they will experience the space weather of their own star. So the effect that what we brought to everyone's attention was that our own sun is causing the spectral broadening similar way, the spectral broadening should also be happening for these exoplanetary systems as well. When you talk about the space weather on these stars, you mean like on our sun when we see these big flares that happen that give us the northern lights and interrupt our communication? Absolutely. Like sun has a constant, what we call stellar wind, which actually throws out the charged particle around its medium, and this medium is called the interplanetary medium. and as you already mentioned, sometime it also emits these large eruption called CMEs or coronal mass ejection,

which are much more disruptive. So in our study, we kind of studied both of these effects. Now, with the amount of interference from the star, depend on what type of star it is. That is absolutely correct. Our sun-like star is relatively quiet star, but if you go to the other classes of star that we typically find more frequently are these red dwarf, M-dwar star. If you look at the Milky Way galaxy, I think roughly around 75% of the stars are Red Dweb star. One of the other great aspect of these stars are they are longer-lasting. In fact, there is a saying that none of the M-dwarf stars who have ever been born have died yet in the entire history of the universe. So they last pretty long, which means that there are really good

places for life to evolve and become intelligent, and they are much more sort of larger in number. So hence, the idea is that what happens if there is indeed an extraterrestrial civilization around M.12 star. Now, the M.D. Star, on the other hand, even if they are larger in number, they are slightly more active than our Sun. So the interplanetary medium environment around M.D. Star are going to be much, much more disruptive than our Sun. So it sounds like we're going to have to adjust what we're looking for so that we don't see these needles, as you say, on the spectrum. We have to see something that's more spread out. That is absolutely correct. So that is one of the other outcome of our study, that future search tools need to adapt, and they don't

necessarily need to look for a narrow-band signal, but they need to look for the spectrally-broaden signal. Boy, SETI is often referred to a search for a needle in a haystack. You're saying the space weather's interfering with it, the haystack just got bigger. Yeah, on the other hand, we can say that the needle is actually slightly bent, which makes your job slightly easier, that if you do indeed detect a signal that shows these particular feature of spectral broad-bendness, it's a really, really good indication that it is coming from some kind of like an IPM environment. We are also suggesting that there could be signals in your data,

but we just didn't see them because you weren't looking for them. is absolutely correct. I'm also part of the breakthrough listen project. Breakthrough recent started in 2016 and over the last 10 years we have collected I think around more than 10 to 20 petabytes. This is not 10, they're talking about petabytes of data we have collected. Now with all the data we have not been searching for these spectrally broadened signals so yeah it is indeed possible that signal might still be hiding in the petabytes of data that we have collected over the last 10 years or so and there are already efforts

on their way to search for these spectrally broadened signals that might even be hiding right now as we speak. Although I should mention that SETI at Home is probably one of the very few programs that actually adapted this search strategy in which they search for slightly broader signal. So it's a good start that SETI at home has done. But in order for us to really put constraints on the prevalence of extraterrestrial life or any potential radio signal, I think we need to search for several gigahertz frequencies. How optimistic are you about actually detecting a signal from another civilization? I think the likelihood of us finding life, it certainly has gone up.

Number one reason is that now we have more advanced tools, which we didn't have before. This allows us to kind of capture much wider bandwidth. We can look at things in a much better way, which we were not able to do before. So with the advancements of like artificial intelligence and modern graphical processing units of GPUs, we are able to kind of do a lot more. So that's why I'm very optimistic that even if we might have missed something over the last 60 years or so,

but with the changing sort of new infrastructure and new tools becoming available, the future seems bright. Dr. Gajar, thank you so much for telling us about it and good luck in your search. Thank you so much, Bob. Dr. Vishal Gajur is a staff astronomer at the SETI Institute.

and a breakthrough listen project scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Ooh. If you had a good dad or you are a good dad, then you're a rarity in the animal kingdom. You know what I'm saying? I'm like, what in the world? Don't do it here, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Really?

I'm the same thing. Because good dads like this are hard to find. We think a lot of like, huh? Of the nearly 6,000 kinds of mammals, fewer than 5% of fathers stick around to actually help nurture and raise their young, like coyotes, wolves, certain monkeys, and of course, humans. Well, new research is investigating just why there's such a spectrum of fatherly behavior in the animal kingdom. And it turns out, at least in the African striped mouse, there seems to be a particular switch in the brain that can turn a dead. into Dad of the Year. Dr. Forrest Rogers led the study.

He's a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, thanks for having me. Why did you want to look at fatherhood in the African striped mouse in particular? So African striped mice are behaviorally fascinating to me for a few reasons. African striped mice are in a rare group of mammals where fathers stick around after mating and engage in care with their offspring.

But they're also in this group of manuals that we call cooperative breeders, where they're perfectly capable, even without reproductive experience, of showing considerable care to offspring that are not their own. And so you have these young bachelors that come across a pup and are totally capable of taking care of it. On top of that, it gets deeper because Africans, striped mice are incredibly socially flexible. So they dynamically change their behavior according to environmental conditions, often coordinated with season. And so from one season, they can live together

in these kind of large collective groups where they all save energy and sunbates together. But then in other seasons, they're outforaging for food, creating territories, and taking care of babies. Well, when you say the fathers are taking care of babies, what do they actually do? Every animal you look at shows care in slightly different ways. So in humans and other primates, that's really important to do caring, to feed our babies, to make sure they're safe. And African striped mice do rodent versions of this. So they'll retrieve pups. But more importantly, they will sit on top of pups and make sure that they're nice and warm because pups have a lot of trouble staying warm.

And then as pups get older, they'll engage and sort of. social behaviors like grooming and sometimes what looks like play behavior. Now, are all of the striped mice fathers good fathers? No. So even amongst the genetic fathers, we see some variation. So some of the dads are more caring than others. But amongst these reproductively inexperienced males, when they come across an unfamiliar pup, some of them are really good caregivers. So they'll engage in care at the same level as a father. But others are completely ambivalent, so they acknowledge that the pup is there, and then they kind of ignore it for the remainder of the test, which in our

case is usually about 20 minutes. And others engage in behavior much more like what you would expect out of a laboratory mouse, which is to attack the pup. Wow. So what did you do to try to figure out what was behind why some of these mice fathers were good dads and others were not? We noticed that, there seems to be a difference in parental care if they're in a group setting versus social isolation. And so we replicated that in the lab. We isolated some males and we kept other males in little bachelor groups. Think about your local university fraternity. And we then tested the males with with pups to see what they would do. And what we had found is that in these group house males, there was a lot of variation, like some males that are care. the majority of the others were ambivalent, and then there were some that attacked.

But what we saw in the socially isolated males is that they were particularly caring, the majority of them were carrying, and a few were ambivalent. So we got really curious about what was driving the variation. And so what we did was that we looked at neural activity in the brain after an experience with a pup, and we found that this one region called the medial pre-optic area of the hypothalitis, or MPOA for short was really important for paternal care. So it was more active in the more caring ones. And that was really exciting to us because this is a region that for maybe four decades

has been implicated in maternal care behavior, so care and moms. So we wanted to get at like what was going on in that brain region. So we used a tool called single nucleus RNA sequencing. It sounds fancy, but really what it does. is it allows us to get an idea of how genes are functioning at a cell-by-cell basis within a very particular area of the brain, in this case the MPOA. And we were able to identify that there wasn't any machinery that individuals needed to give care. They all had the pieces and parts that they needed. But the machinery, so to speak,

was variably turned on. And what really surprised us when we looked at the molecular signature and individuals that were aggressive towards pups versus those that were caring was that the aggressive animals had a buildup of this gene called Agudy. Okay, so there's a gene in their brain that either becomes active or less active, and that determines whether or not they're good dads or bad dads. Yeah, if they have more of this gene expressed in the brain, they're worse at taking care of pups. If they have less of it, they're better at taking care of pubs.

Okay. So what's determining whether or not this gene is going to be active or not? Yeah, so we confirmed that everything was real by over-expressing this gene with viral tools. And we saw that if you overexpress the gene, males reduced the amount of care they gave, and some of them even became aggressive. We also thought that maybe there's something about the social environment, because we had also seen that a Goody was more highly expressed in group house males than single house males. What we found was that when you take males out of group housing, put them into social isolation, they became

particularly good dads and their Agouti levels dropped. Well, so the environment is having an effect here. Exactly. Yeah. So we think that there's something important about the social environment in particular that's driving changes and their behavior. So what is it in the social environment that makes that difference. Yeah, we don't know yet. We have a few hypotheses. One could simply be that when they're group house, they're experiencing higher population density, and that has lots of things that it contributes.

So there's competition for food. They may think that they're competing for territory. Now, you did your work on mice in a laboratory, but how can we extrapolate this out to human behavior? We certainly don't want to say a few things. We don't want to say that dads should feel bad about themselves if they're not as active as fathers as they want to be. And we certainly don't believe that there's a magic pill that dads can take to make them more parental. And we certainly, certainly don't want dads to go into social isolation. But, you know, we think that lots of mammals, including humans, have these mechanisms that help them take an information about their environment. and consciously or unconsciously make decisions about how to proceed with the resources they have. And it's got to be the case that humans have some mechanism by which they're doing this. Whether or not that's the same mechanism, we have no evidence for that.

But there's certainly got to be some mechanism that promotes this difference. Dr. Rogers, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Dr. Forrest Rogers is a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. And that's it for Quirx 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. Where you can 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, Libya Diring, and Dan Falk. Our acting senior producer is Sonia Biting. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.