Quirks and Quarks - How Jeremy Hansen is prepping for the moon, and more…

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Next stop - the moon! Jeremy Hansen stops by our studio to chat about how he’s prepping to be the first Canadian to go to the moon.Plus:Santa’s reindeer may be losing their antlers –– and climate change could be the culpritReindeer are the only animal in the deer family where the females also grow antlers, and they typically have a full rack over the wintertime and drop them in June when they give birth. University of Guelph PhD student Allegra Love was monitoring reindeer on Fogo Island in Newfoundland, when she made a surprising discovery that female reindeer are losing and growing their antlers much earlier than usual. This can put more stress on the animal during a crucial part of their pregnancy, and the researchers think this could eventually lead to the reindeer losing their antlers altogether. The work was published in the journal Ecosphere.Pterosaur brains reveal clues about why these mighty fliers took to the skiesFlight has only evolved among vertebrates three times — in bats, birds, and first in pterosaurs. How pterosaurs first took to the skies was always a mystery to scientists, until the discovery of a fossilized 230-million year old pterosaur relative in Brazil. An international team, including Ohio University professor Lawrence Witmer, used an MRI for detailed analysis of the fossilized skull, to pinpoint the miniscule brain changes that happened as the animal developed the capacity to fly. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.Scientists are using AI to find life in 3 billion year old rocksEarth’s earliest signs of life are often incredibly difficult to detect. An international team of researchers have developed a new tool that uses AI to find “whispers” of life locked inside ancient rocks. Using this tool, the researchers, including astrobiologist Michael Wong from Carnegie Science, were able to detect fresh chemical evidence of life in rocks that are 3.3 billion years old. This tool can not only be used to explore the origins of life here on Earth, but also on Mars and other planetary bodies. The work was published in the journal PNAS.

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

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, it's final preparation time for Canada's first astronaut going to the moon. Some mixed emotions, there's some days we're finalizing a certain part of the training. It's the last time we're going to touch it before launch and it starts to feel very real.

And then there's other moments where I'm like, okay, it's still a lot of to do. I've got to get back to work. And tracking the brain power of long, extinct, mighty flyers. It might not actually take all that much brain power for an animal to take to the wing. Plus, using AI to pick up chemical whispers of life in three billion-year-old rocks, and reindeer that may be losing their antlers because of climate change. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. Well, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency have announced which four astronauts will head to the moon. The Artemis II crew includes the first ever Canadian to venture beyond the Earth's orbit. He's a master of science in physics, an F-18 pilot, and a Canadian astronaut.

Your mission specialist, Jeremy Hansen. It was only two and a half years ago when NASA announced that Canadian astronauts, Jeremy Hansen was selected for the Artemis II mission. He and three other crewmates will make history in 26 as the first astronauts to go back to the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. NASA's next chapter of lunar exploration called Artemis has the task of not just going to the moon to create a long-term human presence on and around it, but also to prepare forever more complex human missions to Mars.

NASA first tested their Orion spacecraft and space launch system back in the fall of 2022 when it blasted off for the uncrewed Artemis I mission around the moon. 50 years after we last left footprints on the moon, NASA's Artemis 1 is our first bold step towards getting us back there and pushing us farther than we've ever been before. But Artemis 1 was just a test flight. Artemis 2, when Hansen and his fellow astronauts will be sitting on top of the same launch pad, listening to a countdown just like this, 7, 6, is scheduled to launch no later than April 2026.

3, 2, 1, boosters in ignition, and lift off of Artemis 1. We rise together, back to the moon and beyond. When the Artemis 2 mission takes to the skies, the goal is to send Hansen and his crewmates around the moon, potentially going farther into deep space than any human has gone before. Of course, this mission isn't just about the awesome adventures and epic views, although there's still plenty of that. But over those 10 days, the astronauts will be gathering scientific data

to test the limits of their rocket and their own human endurance. In his last interview before hunkering down for final preparations for his upcoming mission, Canadian Space Agency astronaut and Artemis 2 mission specialist Jeremy Hanson is with us in our Quirks and Quarks Studio to tell us all about it. Hello, mission specialist Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Hansen. Welcome back to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. So how does it feel to be this close to launch after all this wave? Oh my gosh.

Some mixed emotions, there's some days where we're finalizing a certain part of the training. And so last time we're going to touch it before launch and it starts to feel very real. There's other moments where I'm like, okay, it's still a lot to do. I've got to get back to work. Well, how is your training going to be different from this point on as you get close to the countdown compared to what you've been doing up to this point? Well, some of it is exactly the same. You know, these simulators that we're in with the big team will continue to do those all the way down until quarantine.

In other ways, there's some final testing to do. So, for example, the last software load has just dropped. We've been making changes all the way through the training cycle, and now this is our final version of the software. So we have to go back and do some testing to make sure that we're, we haven't inadvertently put something into the software that could cause us a problem. Yeah. Now, you're a former jet fighter pilot, so how does that factor into your training? Well, the astronaut corps, just in general, we embrace aviation training because it's one of the few things that we do that can actually kill you. We have these amazing simulators, but you know

when you're in a simulator, you're going home at the end of the day, even if you make a mistake. and space is not like that. And so managing real risk is an important skill set that you want to exercise. You know, if you imagined, you know, I stopped flying fighter jets when I went to join the astronaut corps. And if I never did anything operational, truly risky and operational for years and years, and then all of a sudden I go to space, I just wouldn't have that strong muscle that you need to work through serious and dangerous situations. Well, now you're flying a brand new machine. This rocket that's only flown once, with no one on it, you're the first humans to get in it,

and you say you just dropped a download. How does that factor into your flight? Oh, it really changes things. When you're flying something for the first time, you're really looking at everything with a very critical eye. You have to be very careful not to make assumptions. We know what we designed it to do, and you can trick yourself into thinking it's all okay. You can sort of see what you want to see. You have to be very guarded and careful against that.

And so we very much have a test approach to this mission. We are questioning everything. We want to try absolutely every possible avenue of fixing an issue to make sure that they all work or we know which ones don't. I find myself now at this phase getting ready for flights, just spending more evenings and weekends in the simulator by myself and just trying things. Things that aren't necessarily the approved method, but I want to know what truly does work and what doesn't work. and I want to have absolute confidence in that. So it truly is a test flight. Yeah, it really is, absolutely.

Now your journey is going to take you out beyond the moon, and then you're going to loop around and come back without landing on the moon. That was first done in 1968 with Apollo 8. How is your flight going to be different from that one? There are some differences. The way I like to describe Artemis 2 is we're trying to do Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 in one mission. So Apollo 7, they stayed in Earth orbit. And so they tested their life.

It was the first time the humans had flown it on that capsule, just like us. So they did all their life support testing and their manual flight control testing in Earth orbit. And then Apollo 8 took the capsule out and flew it around the moon like we will. Actually, they flew it into lunar orbit. And in our case, since we want to do both, we are giving up a lot of propellant in order to stay in Earth's orbit for a day to test our. our life support systems and our manual controls. And so we have enough propellant to get into lunar orbit, but we wouldn't have enough to get back out of lunar orbit.

So that is why we're doing this free return trajectory. Well, we'll fly around the moon and come home. But you're also going past the moon. You're going much further into space than Apollo 8 did. Yeah, we will go further than Apollo 8. But from my point of view, that doesn't really make much difference, how far you go into space. It's just the act of navigating, flying around the moon.

And the really important part is you have to hit the Earth at the right angle on the way home. You got to make sure when you fall back to Earth, you're in the right spot. And, you know, with our heat shield, and I know a lot of people are aware, we had some issues with the Artemis 1 heat shield. We've done a lot of testing to understand it. But we didn't change it. We have the same heat shield as Artemis 1. But what we know enough now, how to mitigate the problems that we saw with that heat shield, But part of that mitigation is being very precise on our way home.

Apollo 8 gave us that famous Earthrise picture of the Earth above the lunar horizon. You're going to be further back. I understand you're going to see both the Earth and the moon in the same shot. Yes, we should be able to see the entire moon. When we're doing these simulations, we've got the camera out the window of the simulator, and we're photographing the moon. And you can get the entire moon in the field of view. obviously we have telephoto lens

we can zoom in as well but we can get the whole moon in the view and then you can get of course the earth rise and the earth set so that'll be pretty special to see that and it depends on the lighting of the day what exactly that's going to look like but we're really hoping for

full moon for us which will be a new moon for you here on Earth and then we're going to see some spectacular things you'll be the first humans to see that yeah it's pretty neat the geologists have really been hammering that into our heads that

you might make some really important observations from a scientific point of view. And it took me a while to believe them because I was a little bit skeptical because we have these great satellites orbiting the moon and the imagery of the moon is just absolutely spectacular. We're staring at it all the time, getting ready to go. And so it's hard to imagine that we could notice something

that they haven't noticed when they've been going through it with a fine-tooth comb But I'm now convinced that the human eye is an incredible instrument, and our brain is able to just kind of look across the surface of the moon and pick out things that are different. And they have been focusing in on specific areas that are different in the imagery that they have. And they want to know if we can tell if any of them are a different kind of different, is the best way that I can describe it.

And that might cue them into areas where they want to go and do more probing. They want to send the lunar rover in the, future or maybe a future human mission to explore why it's a different kind of different. That's amazing that you'll be able to see from a distance more than or differently than what they saw by actually being on the surface. What I would say is it's a different part of the moon. So the Apollo astronauts saw the near side of the moon because they always wanted the lighting on the near side and they made some of these observations. There's some great notes where they saw some things like look like Lunar Regulith was up in the...

it's not the atmosphere, but up in orbit around the moon. And they're curious about what caused that. They saw certain areas of the moon that seemed to have more of a brownish color. You and I look at the moon even through a telescope. It's gray. It's gray. It's all grays. It's either dark gray or it's light gray or some shade in between. But the Apollo astronauts, some of them remarked that they saw some brownish to reddish hues on the moon. And so they really want us to focus on looking for those differences.

Well, let's get into some of the signs that you'll be doing while you're on board. Just generally, what will your days be like? Somehow, every day of that nine and a half day mission is full. I can't even really explain to you exactly what we'll do every minute, but they somehow have found stuff for us to do the entire mission. Some of it is these manual piloting tests. Some of it is just maintenance fixing that, you know, I shouldn't say fixing, but we have maintenance to do on the toilet every day.

There's a radiation protection exercise, I guess, where we will take a bunch of the storage out of the lockers and put it up in the places that the spacecraft is a little weaker for radiation protection and just figure out how do you build a little fort to protect yourself from a solar event? Recently, we had an event where we had great northern lights here on Earth, but in space, we wouldn't have really loved that so much because we would have been getting a higher radiation dose.

And so how do we protect ourselves from that? You are going beyond the protective shield of the Earth's magnetic field. The space station is within that. So you're going into deep space. So how much more radiation will you be exposed to out there? So we were just talking about this recently with the experts on the team. The deep space aspect of it is not that much more significant, especially on a short mission.

So they're not really concerned about that. our biggest impacts are going through the Van Allen belts, you know, where the Earth does protect us. And because of our mission design, like I was saying, how we're spending a day in high Earth orbit and then going to the Moon, we go through the Van Allen belts four times on the mission. And so we know we're going to get a pretty hefty spike of radiation. But when you look at it, it's such a short duration while you're transiting the belt that we don't expect any long-term effects. But we don't really know.

we're still sort of learning space radiation, and that's one of the advantages of sending humans out there is we're going to continue to learn going forward. And those Van Allen belts, those are radiation belts that are around the earth itself, right? That's right. That's the magnetic field, and it concentrates these particles that are coming off the sun,

and as you fly through them, you're just getting a higher dose. That's why you see northern lights or southern lights on the planet. They're just like when you're in elementary school and you do the experiments with the magnets and a piece of paper on top, and you drop the iron filings, and they make that sort of toroid shape, that's the Van Allen belts around the earth. And as you fly through those rings,

that's where all the radiation gets trapped. You're doing an experiment on yourself with a wonderful name called Avatar. Tell me about that. Yeah. I really like this one. I think it's really fascinating. So the way we don't have to do much.

We have to donate blood. a couple of times. And so it's just like going to a regular blood donation clinic. They take your platelets and they go into the donation system. But then at the end of that donation, the investigator takes the innards of the machine that's doing whatever magic it does with your blood. And he ends up with bone marrow that he can use to replicate in these chips. And then so you end up flying a replica of us living cells on these chips, and they will be supported, that they'll be fed, if you will, during the mission. And so when we take off, there will actually be eight of us in the capsule, this identical

version of our cells on a chip. And when we get back, they're going to compare how the radiation affected our body and how it affected the chips. And if the results are the same, then that gives us a confidence that we could use them in the future to do research. And then you can send a thousand astronauts to see. space on these chips at a time and get some real data that would be useful to draw some conclusions on.

Wow. Be careful. You might be out of a job soon. They'll just send the chips up instead of you. Yeah, no, absolutely. What other experiments are you offering your body up for as a guinea pig? Well, we know that space has an impact on the immune system. And so this is another one that we're doing.

I know when I get back on next week in Houston on Monday, I'm starting another saliva. sampling a crusade. So every morning when I get up, I'll be collecting saliva in Houston. And then I go back and donate blood again for this avatar experiment. But that experiment with the saliva looks at our immune system and how space impacts it. Of course, we have a lot of data from the International Space Station where we've just celebrated 25 years of consistent human presence on board the International Space Station, which is an enormous milestone, super cool. And we've collected a lot of data. We've flown a relatively large. number of astronauts there. But now we're going into deep space. And so things are going to change again. And so we can compare these data sets. We're only four astronauts, but over time, we'll build up a data set to help us draw conclusions. What about monitoring just your physical activity, your metabolism and things like that? Absolutely. We wear something equivalent to a smart watch when we're on the mission. We collect data before we go, and then they compare it to the data on the mission. We'll wear it again back on Earth when we're back. And, and,

I don't know exactly what kind of magic they're going to pull out of those data sets, but I believe they'll do some good science. Well, especially since it's such a short mission. I mean, how much can your body change in only nine and a half days? Some people have been suggesting to us that this is actually a tough time period for the human body. Shuttle missions used to be roughly this long, right? It's like one to two weeks long, and your body does do quite a bit of transitioning. But you don't get to acclimatize one way or the other.

I won't have anything to judge it against, but it would be interesting for my colleagues on this mission, who have all been to space station for a long-duration mission, to see what they think about coming back after 10 days. We're actually doing another experiment where we've recently been in lunar surface suits and collecting data. So they put us through sort of an obstacle course in the lunar surface suit, you know, in this big contraption that simulates lunar gravity. And they've collected data on us. And then we go, we fly the mission, and we land. And when we get back to Houston, they, I'm sure, we'll not be excited about doing it at that moment in time.

But they'll put us back in these spacesuits, hook us up to this contraption and test us again, and just to see how we do. And then do it again a few days later and see how quickly our ability to operate in the gravity environment comes back. Boy. So you're already walking on the moon. Are you in line for a moon mission?

Like a landing moon mission? Oh, in my dreams? I am. Absolutely. In reality, probably not. but you never know. Yeah, well, let's get this one over first, right? Now, there's also a piece of Canadian technology on board.

There's a flywheel, an exercise flywheel. Tell me about that. Well, we've definitely been testing it in Canada, the National Research Council. We have this microgravity airplane where we can simulate microgravity, and so they've put the flywheel, the exercise device. So this is, if you've seen a rower in a gym, that's how I would describe it. Except in space, you don't need the seat to sit on. you just put your feet in the clips and then you grab the bar and you can move as if you're rowing.

So you can do an aerobic exercise. But what I prefer to do on it is more similar to weightlifting. And so you can change the dynamics of this machine. And then you can do things like that are close to doing a deadlift or a squat or a high pole with the bar. And that feels like you're getting a pretty decent workout. Now, you're a pretty tall guy. that capsule isn't very large. You've got other people in there.

Is that a problem just trying to find room to do it? Yeah, this will be interesting. We've never actually tried this in the capsule. And when somebody is flying back and forth on this flywheel, we're all going to be just hiding in the corners, I think, because it's going to be these huge bodies flying around. So it'll be interesting to see. The other thing is, I mean, we're all sort of questioning it a little bit,

but we have these huge solar arrays sticking off of the service module and the dynamics that we're going to put into the vehicle when we're exercising, it would just be interesting to see if we really can exercise hard on this vehicle and not damage the arrays. So that's one of the tests that we'll be doing up there. Oh, I see because the spacecraft is floating weightless in space. If you're moving around inside, it starts moving around in reaction. So does it have to adjust itself all the time?

We don't think the vehicle will have to respond much, but I think you could put in an oscillation. And if you got into resonance with the solar arrays, we're just going to have to really watch for that. Start flapping like a bird on that. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Wow, wow. What are the scientists on the ground really looking for in your mission? I think we all recognize that Artemis II is very light on science with respect to what we expect from the space program. But that's simply because we're constrained by up mass and volume for this.

mission. What I like to really imagine is what we can do going forward when we get better facilities, more up mass, build a station. We're going to be able to do a lot more in the future. But the subjects we've talked about so far really cover it. We're the biggest experiments, the human body. There's a lot of data set we have from the International Space Station. We now can compare our four results with results from the space station. They're hoping that we'll bring something back, but we might not bring anything back of significance other than maybe some inspiration for the future missions. But that's unexpected.

I mean, this is just a stepping stone along the way. This is Artemis, too. And we'll pass the baton onto the next crew, and they'll get back on the surface, and they'll start collecting samples, and that's where the real exciting science gets in there. Well, what you're doing is pretty exciting. What's it mean for you to be the first Canadian to go to the moon? Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a tremendous honor. It's a dream come true for me.

But what it really means for me is it's a reflection on our country, what we're capable of. I'm just such a huge fan of our space industry and academia and Canada. I saw it when I was in university, people like really using clever methodologies and how we leverage space to learn about our planet. And Canada has just been an early adopter of these things. I'm not sure why that is, you know, why we have these visionaries, but there are a number of things that we've just been early adopters of, you know, first of all, understanding the space environment early on. Third country in the world to send a satellite into space.

Why? Because we wanted to understand how we could use it to communicate. And then we start using it to communicate across the country. And then we start using space to understand our planet. And then we decide, I don't know how we got so bold, but we decide we're going to be the first country in the world to develop space robotics. No one had ever done it. And I applaud those visionaries because that took a lot of courage.

Imagine if the shuttle bay doors had opened up and here's that Canada arm one that we built. We wrote Canada and big letters on the side and it reaches out of the bay and then it breaks. It would have been a really public failure. It took a lot of courage to take on that challenge. And now we're on our third generation of space robotics. and we're using that technology for lunar surface robotics. Maybe we can be part of the logistics systems going forward. So that's a long answer, but it's because I'm so proud of Canada

and so excited for the mirror that this mission is to just remind us, hey, let's set big goals and let's chase them. There will be rewards at the end of that. Well, it's also a long story because we, as you say, we're the third country in space, but our satellite, Alouad I was launched in 1962, a year after the first man in space here, he could carry. So we've been out a long time. Yeah.

So where are we going from here? Well, right now, what I see, we have the ability to contribute on the world stage, and we have the ability to do it in a way that helps us here in Canada with jobs of the future and even tackling problems we have on the planet. For example, I love to point to health care and food security. We have this vast country, and we, as our population grows here, we're straining our health care system. The better we can, or the more we can use technology to deliver better health care to Canadians in all parts of the country, even in big cities. While we figure that out, we can take it to the moon with our international partnership and show them some of our creative solutions.

And if we really want to go to Mars, we have to learn to grow food in space. We have to be able to do that on the moon. And it's going to be super hard. But if we want to do it on the moon, then we certainly have to be able to do it in the Canadian Arctic. And that would be a game changer for a quality of life, having our communities, our Arctic communities, growing food. And these are just ways that we can do the right thing for our people.

And at the same time, create opportunities to send the next generation of Canadians to the moon and eventually Mars. Just one last thing. When you're strapped into the rocket and it's launched, day. It's not a rehearsal. It's not a simulation. It's the day the rocket is alive. It's filled with fuel. It's hissing. It's creaking. It's humming. It's doing all of those things. And the countdown is going according to plan. What do you think is going through your mind before it takes off when you're sitting there thinking, hey, I'm really going to the moon? It's exciting to think about.

You'll have to ask me after, because I don't know for sure. But my experiences in the past have taught me that it'll be game day for us, and it'll be mostly excitement. But there'll be a little burden our shoulders saying, are you sure this is a good idea? Absolutely. When we do these dress rehearsals and you walk up to the launch pad and, you know, in the future of the rocket, would be standing there and you imagine it just as you described it, it's talking to you. you. It's alive. And I love it when Reed Wiseman describes it sometimes. He's like, really, the only reason you actually get into the rocket when it's like that is because it would be too embarrassing

to walk away. Well, Jeremy, I wish you well on your flight, and thank you so much for giving us your time to talk about it. Yeah, it's a pleasure. And I really appreciate the encouragement that I've been receiving from Canadians. I'm so proud of the country for where we've gotten to. And, you know, Let's just imagine. This is just one more step in our journey. We're going to do some extraordinary things in the future, so let's get after it. And we're all behind you.

Thanks a lot. Thank you. Jeremy Hanson is an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency and mission specialist on the upcoming Artemis II mission to the moon. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quirks and Quirks 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, if reindeer are growing their antlers a lot earlier than usual, but no one else is around to see it, does it make a sound? I was the only one that saw it, so I turned to my more senior grad student friend and was like, they're growing antlers. And they really respectfully were like, I want to trust you, but we need to find some evidence. 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. I love this Christmassy time of year.

Especially when everything is running happy and smooth like it is this season. Nothing like that year of the big snowstorms. I don't know what we would have done without Rudolph to pull us through. In the classic 1964 movie Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Rudolph took part in the reindeer games where all the young male bucks buy to pull Santa sleigh at Christmas time. My name is coming.

And even though I'm your instructor, I want to be your pal, right? Right. My job is to make bucks out of you, so let's go. It turns out that depiction may be wrong. Santa's reindeer were actually likely all female, and we know this because of their antlers. You see, reindeer, also known as caribou, are the only species in the deer family where the females grow antlers. And they have a full rack in the wintertime, when the male's antlers have typically fallen off. So we just needed to clarify that before we tell you about a strange discovery that scientists made in Newfoundland. Recently, researchers working on Fogo Island spotted something unusual with the female reindeer there,

a trait that may eventually make it all the way up to the North Pole. It turns out the females are now growing and dropping their antlers much earlier than normal. Ms. Allegra Love is a Ph.D. candidate in the Integrative Biology Department at the University of Guelph. She was part of the team that made the discovery. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Hi, Bob. I'm happy to be here. First of all, why do female reindeer grow antlers? Well, for a while, researchers were really confused about this, and there were a lot of different hypotheses, but the one that has the most support is that they use them to help compete for the craters that they dig through the snow over the winter. So there's forage underneath the snow that

they're trying to access, but it takes a lot of energy to dig through the ice and snow to access that. So you don't really want your friend to come over and try and steal your snack. And So having these spiky antlers on the top of your head helps you protect that crater. And the leading evidence that supports this is that not every female caribou grows antlers, and the proportion of female caribou that grow antlers in a population increases with snow depth. So the deeper your snow over the winter, the more likely you are to have antlers. Oh, so they're using them for defense. Stay away from my territory here.

Exactly, yeah. They're trying to prevent other individuals from taking their hard-earned forge. Now, how does that compare with the male reindeer when they grow with their antlers? They have to do the same thing, but for some reason, it's not as important that they have them in the winter, potentially because they're not also genuinely pregnant during the winter. So what? The males are using them for display to buttheads with other males. The females are using them to find food and protection? Yes.

Now, what are the timeframes here with the females and the males? So the males grow their antlers over the summer. and then they have them in the fall during the rut, and then they drop them after that, so around November. Whereas females, particularly on Fogo Island, they grow them in the late summer, and then they hold them all over the winter. And then once they give birth in the spring,

around the first week of June, they drop them within a couple days of giving birth. Okay. So when did you first notice that something had changed with the females? So my research group goes out every spring to track this population on Fogo Island, and it was one of the first caribou that we saw in 2024, we were out in a group and saw this caribou through the trees and binoculars

and saw that she was growing antlers around the time that she'd be giving birth. So normally they have their mature antlers still and they haven't dropped them yet. And we saw that they were still velvety and only one to two inches long. And so I thought that was super weird. Well, yeah. What was your reaction when you saw that? Well, I was the only one that saw it and the caribou immediately ran off into the trees. And this was my only, my second year doing fieldwork.

turned to my more senior grad student friend and was like, they're growing antlers. And they really respectfully were like, I just have never seen that and I didn't see this. So I want to trust you, but we need to find some evidence. Well, was this just one animal or were they all doing it? What was really weird was that none of the animals that we saw had their mature antlers from the winter. So it looked like they had all lost their antlers early. And then a handful of individuals we saw four were growing their antlers while still pregnant. So has this ever been reported before? Yes, in some populations,

animals that don't give birth that aren't pregnant will grow their antlers around this same time frame. And there's a couple observations of populations where a small proportion of pregnant females will have their antlers growing at the same time. But it's never been reported across the entire population. Okay, so I'm just trying to get this straight here. Normally when the females are pregnant, when they give birth, they drop their antlers after they give birth.

And here you're seeing reindeer that are pregnant, but they're growing antlers. Is that the idea? Yes. What do you think is causing this earlier growth pattern? So we had a few different hypotheses. It became this big mystery of our field season, which generated a lot of excitement through the field team. But the leading hypothesis that we've been exploring is that it's been an environmental cue. So we know that pregnant females, we think that it's a hormonal spike that causes the loss of the antlers,

but not every female caribou is going to be pregnant over the winter, and they still need to lose their antlers too. So there's an alternative pathway. And we think that because there's been some earlier warming on Fogo Island and reduction in snow cover, that this alternative pathway is being triggered in pregnant animals instead of just animals that aren't pregnant. So how much earlier are they dropping their antlers? We think that they're dropping them about three to five weeks early. Boy. Well, if they're dropping them early, but they're still pregnant, and then they start growing new ones, what's that mean for the Ranger in terms of, I don't know, the energy that it takes to do that? Yeah, so being pregnant, very energetically costly time, and so is lactation after the calves are

born. And the way that they normally stagger these things is that they're pregnant, then they lactate, and then as they're weaning off their calves, then they start growing their antlers. So taking this very costly activity of growing bones and putting it at the same time as pregnancy and lactation potentially could have an impact on reproductive success. And that's something that we're going to be looking into with this population as we continue to track the timing of the antler growth and how the calves are doing. Oh, I see, because the antlers are made of bone, that's a lot of calcium coming out of the body up onto the head. Yeah, absolutely. And just a lot of, it's a huge cost to the animal to grow that every year. So how could that affect their pregnancies? Well, Caribou are able to

sometimes self-abort their pregnancies if they're not in good body conditions. So if it's been a lean year and they haven't been able to get a lot of resources in the summer, it's possible that if they're trying to also grow antlers while pregnant, then maybe the pregnancy wouldn't come to term. And alternatively, maybe they'll stop growing antlers at all. So if they don't have enough resources to grow those antlers, we know that sometimes individuals won't grow them if they're not in good condition. I mean, is this a threat to their health? Yeah, it potentially could affect their overall health. A caribou are a species at risk, and a lot of the populations across Canada are in decline anyway.

So when you add something like this that's throwing a normal cycle a little bit out of whack, it could potentially impact the overall population's health. But I think more likely we'll just see them stop growing these antlers because it's not something that they have to do every year. But that could potentially impact how well they can compete for resources over. the winter as well. So there's sort of these trickle-down effects or cascading effects that can impact health for the individuals and therefore the whole population. So I'm just going to say how far could this go? If there's no snow, if the climate change continues to warm up and they don't have to dig in the snow, maybe they don't need them. Yeah, basically. Like selection probably selected for these females

to have antlers because it was beneficial in the winter. And if we see shorter winters with less deep snow, maybe it's no longer beneficial for them to grow them. Hmm. So does this mean that Santa Sled could be pulled by antlerless reindeer in the future? Yes, exactly. Ms. Love, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I was really excited to be here. Ms. Allegra Love is a Ph.D. candidate in the Integrative Biology Department at the University of Guelph. This film made in 1903 records the first flight of this primitive biplane making aviation

history. As the two brothers prepare to attempt the first catapulted takeoff, man's age-old dream of flight becomes a reality. As much as humans dream about being able to fly, it was never in our evolutionary cards to take to the skies without a mechanical aid. In fact, flight has only evolved three times in vertebrates over 500 million years, in bats, birds, and in pterosaurs. And we while we know a fair deal about how birds and bats develop their abilities to fly, terosaurs have always been a bit of a mystery. They just seem to have popped up in the fossil record with the ability to fly ready to go. But in a new study, scientists reveal the recent discovery of a 233 million-year-old fossil of an ancient terasaur relative and how it's

helping us understand more about how they first developed the capacity to fly. Dr. Lawrence Whitmer is a professor of anatomy at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine at Ohio University. He co-authored the study. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, nice to talk to you. Now, before this discovery, what did we know about how pterosaurs actually flew? Yeah, well, we've known quite a bit about pterosaur flight, the aerodynamics of their flight and the structure of their wings for some time. These fossils turned up a long time ago, and they have peculiar wings compared to birds. Birds, of course, have feathers attached to their arms, but pterosaurs, the wing, is actually made out of skin. They have a greatly along pinky finger

to which the flight membrane attached. So we've known a lot about terosaur flight and their flight apparatus for a long time. What we didn't really know a whole lot about was sort of what's happening in the cockpit, the flight computer, if you will, the brain. Well, some of these Terosaurs got fairly large. I mean, they were the size of airplanes. Do we even know how they were able to fly at that size? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, because these terosaurs are indeed the largest flying organisms ever.

They were extremely light. So their skeletons had hollow bones. Their bodies were relatively modest in size. And the thought is that some of the largest ones were able to, in a sense, leap off the ground. and when they deployed their wings, then they could engage their flight muscles and actually do flapping flight. There are also pterosaurs the size of sparrows. And so they sort of run the gamut from sort of airplane size down to little bird size. Well, tell me about this terasaur relative that you found.

What's it look like? Well, that's the thing that's always plagued studies of pterosaurs is that they appeared in the fossil record, 220 million years ago, basically looking like pterosaurs. And so we never really had sort of an intermediate. And so what we're very excited is a series of fossils started turning up in Triassic rocks in Brazil, 233 million years old. And we actually found something called Xylerpitan, which it looks kind of like a regular little sort of proto-dinosaur sort of animal, running around on four legs with lightly built bodies, sort of vaguely looking like a lizard, but it actually had a number of subtle traits that actually link it to pterosaurs.

Could it fly? No, this thing absolutely couldn't fly. Sort of got regular little arms and legs. There's a good chance it was arboreal, and so in a sense it was that aspect of its biology may have been a good sort of way to start out for a flying animal, living up in trees. Well, how did you study this fossil to find out what would lead to flight? Yeah, well, that was a key part. And so when you see T-scan something, what that allows us to do is to, in a sense, peer inside,

to look through the bone, also to look through any rocks that's still entoming the specimen. And then we can use powerful software to, in a sense, try to digitally highlight and sort of extract the structure of what's inside what we call the brain case. Well, when you looked at the shape of the brain of this fossil, what did you see that was in common with the pterosaur? Yeah, in some respects, not that much. just a few features of its brain sort of tipped its hand that it was on its way to pterosaurs. The visual centers, a part of the brain called the optic lobe, was somewhat expanded like we see in pterosaurs. But really, and that's kind of a story here, is that there wasn't that much about the brain of exalurpaton that really sort of said, like, well, that's the brain of a terasaur. That's not really how it worked.

And so the kind of the key thing for us is it's a very different story for how birds evolve their brains. Well, how does the pterosaur brain compare to a bird brain? Teresaur brains are in some ways fairly similar. They have some expansion of the higher centers of the brain, the cerebrum, as well as the cerebellum, which is the part of the brain associated with motor coordination. Terosaur brains, however, remain relatively small. They had relatively small brains, and the reality is that birds actually largely inherited their brains from their dinosaurian relatives.

So if we look at the brain of very bird-like dinosaurs, like the velociraptors of Jurassic Park or some of these other small-feathered bird-like dinosaurs, they pretty much. much have the same brain structure as early birds like archaeopteryx. What we see in terosaurs, though, is that it looks like, in a sense, they almost built their brains from scratch. Ixalurpereton does not really have the brain of a terasaur. A couple of features maybe helped it along the way, but it's not like birds where they basically inherited the brains from their dinosaurian ancestors and then took to the wing. And so one of the outcomes, of this is that it might not actually take all that much brain power for an animal to take to the wing.

Okay, so let's put this all together then. Going back starting 222 million years ago, what's this tell you about the evolution of flight? Right. It tells us that, in a sense, building the flight apparatus, building wings and muscles that can power flight are indeed the key factor and that there are obviously there's some very important sensory and motor coordination that has to take place that has to evolve. And birds and pterosaurs have some similar traits of the brain, even though they're smaller in pterosaurs. And so there are some base level things for a, in a sense, a flight-ready brain. But it seems like the expansion of the brain that we see, for example, in birds probably took place not because of flight, but probably

because of their enhanced behavioral capabilities, their cognitive abilities, their intelligence, if you will. Birds have, and certainly some kinds of birds like crows and parrots, have a remarkable behavioral repertoire. They are smart, basically, by what we would call human standards. And so terosaurs, you know, we're less so, shall we say. So based on what you've learned, what impresses you about pterosaurs and their ability to fly? Well, the exciting thing about this research is that we're finally, finally, finally getting a glimmer as to where pterosaurs came from and how they might have started their path to being these volent animals.

I mean, they started out like, you know, for 70 million years, they were the only ones flying around, the only vertebrates flying around. birds didn't come around until about 150 million years ago or so. So that's a remarkable thing. The thing, and this is what always is true about the fossil record, is we get this one fossil that really tells us something, but all it does is it wants us to know about more fossils. Dr. Whitmer, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Bob. Dr. Lawrence Whitmer is a professor of anatomy at Ohio University's Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens, Ohio. Life has a long and rich history on our planet. But the further back you look, the harder it is to find evidence of that life. One strategy is to look for the traces of biological matter left behind in rocks, what scientists call biomolecular evidence.

But it's tricky, because rocks don't stay put. They get pushed around and heated up by geological forces. And over the eons, all of that upheaval. takes a toll on any biomolecules that might have been there. And that makes it hard to distinguish signs of living matter from ordinary inorganic matter. But this is where artificial intelligence comes in. A team of researchers used AI to identify faint chemical whispers of life in rock more than three billion years old.

Dr. Michael Wong was part of the team behind this research. He's an astrobiology and planetary science researcher at the Carnegie Institute, for science in Washington, D.C. Dr. Wong, welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thanks for having me, Bob. It's a real pleasure. First of all, tell me about these rocks that showed signs of life more than three billion years ago. Where did they come from? Well, first of all, we gathered a ton of rocks from all around the globe, thanks to the generous

donations of some of the world's leading paleobiologists, these incredible folks who scour the earth looking for the most ancient rocks and carefully curating them. Now, these 3.33 billion year old rocks that we found Science of Life in come from South Africa. Okay. So what exactly are you looking for in these rocks? When life exists, it's made up of organic molecules. And when life dies, those organic molecules become buried in rocks. And so what we're looking for really is the patterns in those organic molecules that can indicate whether or not they were generated by a living creature or were generated some other mechanism. Geology itself is known to create organic molecules as well. So we find a ton

of diverse organic molecules, say, in meteorites floating in space. But the difference between the molecules in a meteorite and the molecules that were created by a living organism has to do with a process known as evolution. Selection for function sculpts the distribution, the distribution, the the relative amounts of those different molecules in life, whereas their ability to just stick around unaltered for billions of years determines what we find in ancient rock samples that had no life in them. How do you identify them? Ah, yeah, so we identify them using an instrument. Basically think of it like an oven, an oven that not only bakes your cake, but tastes it for you too. And then at the very end, we ionize those molecules so that they can be counted by a mass spectrometer.

These types of instruments are flown to interplanetary destinations all the time. There's one sitting in the belly of the Curiosity rover on Mars as we speak. There's one being planned to be sent to Saturn's Moon Titan to apprise the chemistry of that far away enigmatic world. So how then did you use artificial intelligence to look into these rocks and find those molecules that indicated they came from life. So basically for a vast majority of our samples, we knew the answer. We knew, okay, this was once a living organism.

You know, this was a piece of a tree. This was a fungus that somebody picked up off the ground on a hike. And then we also had a bunch of samples that we knew were not alive. Like this was a meteorite that came from space. And we were able then to teach the machine learning algorithm. This is what life looks like. This is what life doesn't look like. It's almost like training of facial recognition algorithm, the one that you use perhaps to open your phone, or those apps where you can take a picture of a plant and it can identify the species.

Those machine learning algorithms are trained in the very same way like facial recognition, but instead of using facial features, using these thousands of chemical features instead. So once you educated your AI system to know the difference between life and non-life and these molecules, how good was it at picking them out of these ancient? rocks. It was astonishingly good. When it comes to differentiating modern life, like living cells today, from non-living materials, it was 98% accurate. It gets a little bit worse, but still an astonishingly good number for ancient life versus non-life. So the discrimination between fossilized ancient organic matter and non-living organic matter was 92 to 93%, which is still pretty great. Wow. Now, what about the different types of life on Earth back then? Could it do that? Yeah, so one of the startling things about this study that surprised even our own team was that we were

able to pick up traces of photosynthetic life in rocks as old as two and a half billion years. Now, that's really astonishing because nobody's been able to use molecular evidence to identify signs of photosynthesis in rocks of that age. do know that oxygenic photosynthesis, this kind of light harvesting metabolism that plants do on a regular daily basis evolved at that time in Earth history. So there are other mechanisms by looking at the environments, the minerals, the isotopes of sulfur, et cetera, to point us to the fact that, yeah, those organisms evolved around then. But what's astonishing for us is that we're able to look at the chemistry of these rocks and identify the leftover pieces of the corpses of the culprits that actually

produce that oxygen, which is absolutely astonishing. So what kind of organism was doing that, using photosynthesis to put oxygen into our atmosphere? So these would have been the ancestors of what we call cyanobacteria, blue-green algae that soak up sunlight and create sugar by splitting water with that sunlight and combining it with carbon dioxide. Wow. So that's two and a half billion years ago. What about these rocks that were 3.3 billion years ago? Yeah. So in rocks as old as 3.3 billion years, we were able to find evidence for organic matter that showed the patterns of life. The oldest molecular evidence for life up until our study took us back to about 1.6 billion years. And so we've essentially doubled the interval in which

you can use fossilized organic matter to find evidence for life through molecular. analysis, thanks to the power of AI. Well, the search for life and other world has been one of our greatest quests. How do you think your new technique might raise the possibilities that we'll actually find it out there somewhere? Yeah, one of the great things about our technique is that it has the potential to spot life even if that life is very different from life here on Earth. So life on Earth uses a very small subset of all the possible building blocks and

ingredients and chemical cycles that you could imagine life taking advantage of. And it is, you know, a lot of people do expect that life on Mars or an icy moon might use different chemistry to perform its functions. And so how could we possibly spot that kind of life? Well, it's not going to be by looking for supposed smoking gun diagnostic molecules, because again, those might be different for that life elsewhere. Instead, by taking this holistic approach, by looking for the patterns of life, we might be able to spot a pattern that completely baffles us and puzzles us. And in our machine learning approaches, forms its own unique group that is distinct from both all known sources of organic molecules that have nothing to do with life and from all of the

distributions of organic molecules that we see in life on Earth. If we saw something that puzzling out there, we might be looking at an alien biochemistry. Dr. Wong, thank you so much for your time. Oh, thank you so much for having me on board, Bob. Dr. Michael Wong is an astrobiology and planetary science researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. And that's it for Quarks 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. 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, and Dan Falk. Our senior producer is Jim Lebbins, and our acting senior producer is Sonia Biting. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening.

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