Quirks and Quarks - Listening in on fish grunts, and more…

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Scientists recorded audio and video of 8 different kinds of rockfish living in the wild near British Columbia, and were surprised they could tell the species apart through their various grunts, pops and knocks, even though the fish are closely related.PLUS:DNA identifies four Franklin Expedition sailors — and solves a 160-year-old mysteryImmune cells that fight infection get a boost from food Radio waves let us see the unseeable: black holes, pulsars and volcanoes on VenusFrom the archives: What will the Earth look like in 2050?Quirks Question: If chicken and fish blood is red, why are they white meats? 

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, how your immune system fights its best fight after a good meal. Napoleon famously said an army marches on its stomach, which is you have to feed your troops, right? And that is absolutely that we found in the immune system.

and eavesdropping on rockfish to tell one type from another. It sounds like this croaking, grunting. It's kind of like a rar sound, and it's the most unique, and every time I hear it, it makes me laugh. Plus, DNA matches from the doomed Franklin expedition, an archival interview on climate change, a question about red blood and white meat, and how radio waves have allowed us to see the universe with different eyes.

All this today on Quarks and Quarks. 180 years ago, British explorer Sir John Franklin set out on an ambitious mission to find the Northwest Passage. He left England in 1845 and ventured into the Arctic with 128 men on two ships, the HMS Arabis and HMS Terror. That expedition turned into a disaster, with both ships getting stuck in the thick Arctic ice near King William Island in what is now Nunavut. For 19 months, the sailors sat, ice-bound, trying to break free with no success. Franklin, and nearly two dozen of his men, died. In 1848, the remaining crew abandoned the ships and set out on foot across the ice to find help. No one survived. The remains of about 30 people

have been found so far. Archaeologists like Dr. Douglas Stenton, who worked in New York, Univut for more than 25 years, have spent decades trying to piece together what really happened to the men aboard these ships. In recent years, thanks to new developments in DNA technology and contributions from surviving family members, Dr. Stenton and his team had linked two of the sailors to their remains. And in a new study, they've identified four more sailors and solved a 160-year-old mystery. Dr. Douglas Stenton is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the Graduate Faculty of Anthropology at Trent University. Hello and welcome to our program.

Hello, Bob. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, we know where the ships are now. They're in King William Sound and the archipelago of islands up there in the Northwest Passage. Where were the men found? Some of them got a fair distance. They were able to traverse the west coast of the island and then, southeast along the Simpson Strait Coast to a place called Starvation Cove. But the men that we've been studying got barely 65, 70 kilometers south.

Approximately two dozen of the men died there. Another large number of men died, we believe, in Tara Bay, based on Inuit testimony. And then smaller numbers died along the shorelines of Adelaide Peninsula and Kingway, My Island. So what's the challenge in doing DNA analysis on these remains? There are several challenges. The first is the condition of the remains, for the most part, had been exposed for more than 150 years to the vagaries of weather, and DNA deteriorates over time. And so in one sense, it was almost a proof of concept to see if we could, in fact, extract and sequence DNA from these bones. But we do have some good results as the identifications demonstrate.

Well, how did you go about figuring out their identities, who they were? Well, the key part of this is establishing two sets of data. We established the archaeological DNA data set. And then with the assistance of genealogists, we've been able to track down descendants of members of the Franklin Expedition. We currently have identified 33 descendants of members of the expedition, and all of those individuals very generously donated. DNA samples, which are then compared with the archaeological samples to search for a match.

Wow. So what did you find? Who were the sailors that you identified? Well, we've identified six in total. The first identification was John Gregory, the engineer, on HMS Aribus. And in 2024, we identified Captain James Fitz-James-James, who assumed command of HMS Aribus following Franklin's death. And Fitz-James's identification was interesting in that there was very clear evidence that his body had been subjected to cannibalism. There were cut marks on the mandible from which a tooth was extracted to identify him. And then last year was a banner year, I think. We had some tremendous work done by Katie Gorsalich, a genealogist working with us. And she tracked down four descendants of sailors. And so we identified William Oren and Abel Seaman from HMS Arabis, David Young, a boy from HMS Arabis,

John Bridgens, a subordinate officer steward, also from Arabis. And the fourth identification was Harry Pegler from HMS Terror, whose body was found in 1859 by the McClintock Search Expedition, a little over 100 kilometers southeast of Aribus Bay, where all the other identifications were made. Wow. What does this tell you about sort of when and how they died? Based on the information in the Victory Point record, the famous last note left when the ships were deserted in April 1848, we believe that they died probably shortly after that, probably in the month of May or June. And it's interesting that five of these men were from HMS, Aribus, and they all died. These five men died less than two kilometers.

from each other. And what's interesting about that, the fact that all five of the men that we've identified from these two sites are from HMS Arabas, which raises the question, where were the crews from the terror? One could imagine,

when setting off on the type of journey they were setting off on, that they would be safety in numbers, they probably were proceeding relatively slowly, that you would stay together. But it's interesting that, thus far, the only sailor from the terror

that we've identified is from Simpson Strait, and that's Harry Pegler. So what do you know about him? So the interesting thing about Pegler is there's been a contradiction about his identity for almost 167 years. McClintock found a pocketbook with a body that had some papers in it that Pegler had written on, and it included his semen certificate, which is a record of his naval service. It's kind of like a passport in a way of the different ships that he had served on. but he was dressed as a steward, but Pegler had never been a steward in the Royal Navy. And so this idea emerged that it really wasn't Pegler,

but it was a friend of his who was a steward and that Pegler had died and that this friend was taking Pegler's papers back to his family. But I began to question that based on my own research. And so we've demonstrated through our DNA analysis that it really was, in fact, Pegler. And he was probably wearing the uniform of a steward because he had been demoted. probably from misconduct sometime prior to the Arbus and Terra being deserted. Oh, so Pegler got himself in trouble and got demoted. You don't think he just borrowed the jacket to keep himself warm?

I don't, and the reason I don't, and others may disagree with me, is that he had been disrated a number of times on different ships, and he received, I believe, 20 lashes for mutinous conduct and drunkenness. and being just rated would not be an uncommon thing in the Royal Navy. Wow. But he did have a pattern of behavior. Well, now that you've identified some of these sailors through the DNA work, what would you like to find out next about the Franklin Expedition?

Well, first, I'd like to identify as many more of these individuals as we can. But the whole question of the chronology of the retreat that was attempted in 1848, There are a number of individuals and researchers who believe that it wasn't a single event and that the ships were remand. And I'm quite interested, and together with some of my colleagues, we're going to take a close look at that theory and see if we can shed some new light on that. So the story continues. Dr. Stanton, thank you so much for your time. It's been my pleasure, Bob. Thank you. Dr. Douglas Stanton is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology.

at the University of Waterloo, and the graduate faculty of anthropology at Trent University. Ah, for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea, tracing one warm light through a land so wide and savage, and make a northwest passage to the sea. You may have heard the old adage, starve a fever and feed a cold. Well, it turns out that advice was only half right. Recent experiments in both humans and mice have found that the immune system gets a boost from breakfast. Eating a meal nudges the immune system, or more specifically, T-cells to jump into action

more quickly. Our T-cells coordinate the body's response to viruses, bacteria, and other invaders by recruiting additional immune cells to go to battle against the attackers, take them out, and remember them the next time they show up. Dr. Greg Delghoff is a professor of immunology at the University of Pittsburgh and the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. He was a senior author on this study. Hello and welcome to our program. Thank you so much for having me, Bob. how did you go about looking at how food affects the T cells? We did a very simple study. We asked healthy donors to fast, you know, stop eating at 9 p.m., go to bed, and then come

into our laboratory before breakfast, and we will draw a sample of your blood. And we can get a lot of T cells from your blood. It's a great place to sample the immune system. And then we asked people to just go about their day, have breakfast, have lunch, and then after lunch, six hours later, come back and give us a second blood sample. And then we isolated the T cells, those immune cells, from those blood samples, and we asked what was different about them? What did that six hours of taking in a meal do? And it was pretty remarkable that the T cells that came from the post-lunch sample, they were better at doing the things that T cells do,

which is secrete chemical mediators to talk to other members of your immune system and to kill to find those target cells, those infected cells, and remove them. and famously said, an army marches on its stomach, right? Right. Which is you have to feed your troops, right? And that is absolutely that we found in the immune system. Wow. Well, what was it that the T cells were getting from the food that improved their ability?

That's a really cool question. It took us a while to actually figure this out. But the metabolites that enter your blood from a meal, from your gastrointestinal tract, they enter and they're in the liquid phase of your blood, which is called your serum. And we were inspired by the fact that we were, we could take this serum sample from the post-lunch draw and apply it to the fasted T-cells and convey that elevated metabolic phenotype on those immune cells, which told us it was something circulating in the blood. And so that allowed us to really use some metabolomics, which is

basically being able to find individual metabolites that are different. And we found that lipids, So the triglycerides, the components of your blood that arise from the fatty portions of the meal, that's what was really delivering this elevated metabolic phenotype to the fed T cells. Wow, lipids. So fatty foods help our T cells get to work. Well, how does that improve our ability to fight infection? The T cells that came from the fed sample, these lipids, were telling the T cells to get ready to prime themselves to make proteins. So how T cells do their jobs, right? How any cell does their job is that they need to translate their genes into proteins.

And then those proteins are the kind of chemical workers that do all of the biology in the cell. And what we found was that while the genes that were expressed weren't different, there was very, very many differentially abundant proteins in the fed T cells. And more importantly, when they were activated, they were far more likely to initiate the translation of new protein. And this meant metabolic genes, metabolic proteins, but also the immune proteins that are necessary to talk to other members of the immune system. Okay. So if the body's immune system, these T cells, need extra energy from a meal to be better at fighting infections, why do you think it is that when we get sick, we usually lose. our appetite. We don't want to eat. Yeah, that's up. That's something that we've been thinking about

ever since we came up with these initial data, right? And I can only speculate for what it's, for what it's worth here. But it is a major metabolic demand to undergo an immune response. So we do feel really, you know, if you get sick, especially if you get particularly sick, like a bad flu or, you know, something even more more serious, you're laid up. There's really, it's tough to get off the couch. Not eating is something, you know, called sickness behavior. Again, we can only speculate on this, but one hypothesis we have is that this is actually a trick that viruses play on us, is that part of their biology is to suppress our appetite during infection so that the kind of the viral production machinery in our cells gets the lion's share of the energy. And the kind of interesting

byproduct of that is that there isn't enough left for the immune system to eat. So that's something actually we're going to be exploring a little bit more, which will allow us to kind of pick apart whether or not feeding behavior is a product of the virus versus a product of the immune system. Whoever would have thought that viruses could be so clever. You know, it's so funny, we've been living together for billions of years, animals and viruses. And we've learned, you know, Bob, it's kind of interesting. If you look back at the most kind of famous and impactful discoveries in immunology over the last 50 years, we've learned most of it from viruses. By studying viruses, we kind of learn about the immune system.

Okay. So once you looked at the human T-cell response for food, I know that you moved on to mice. So what did you do there? In this study, we competed these T-cells that either came from a fasted mouse or from a fed mouse. And then we vaccinated them. We asked them, how would they create protection long-term? And so what we found very consistent with what we saw in people is that T-cells, that arose from the Fed mouse, not only were better at fighting the affection initially,

but they became memory cells to a much better degree. And so memory is that biochemical and genetic change that occurs when we get vaccinated, right? We're training our immune repertoire to find that virus so that if you get infected again, you won't get sick, right? The T cells will be better primed to fight that infection. So this suggested that the effect of meal was not just acute, that it could have long-term effects on the outcome of an immune response. How long? The T-cells that came from the fed mouse were far more prevalent, even a year after infection in the blood compared to the T-cells that came from the fasted mice. Wow, that's amazing. Now, I also know you did some work looking at how being fed might be able

to improve a type of cancer therapy. Tell me about that. We've been able to really design therapies. We call them immunotherapies. where we are able to mobilize a patient's immune system to fight their cancer, rather than targeting that cancer with chemotherapy and radiation and other things that could be toxic. And so one of the things that we were excited about in this study was a type of immunotherapy called our T-cell therapy. And the way that it works is you can take immune cells from a blood sample of a patient and essentially engineer them to see cancer cells. and then you deliver those T cells back to a patient, and those T cells can go and find cancer and eliminate it.

It's a very powerful form of therapy. And so what we found is that if we manufactured CAR T cells from the post-lunch sample, they lasted longer, they were more metabolically active, and they killed cancer cells in a humanized model system, so in a pre-clinical system, to a better degree than the T cells that we isolated from the fasted cells. Wow. Dr. Delgoff, thank you so much for your time. Oh, thank you for having me. Dr. Greg Delgoff is an immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh and the UPMC. Hillman Cancer Center. When life gets you down, you know what you got to do? I don't want to know what you got to do.

Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. What do we do? We swim, swim. Dore, no singing. Oh, ho. Oh, ho. I love to swimming. Dore. When you want to swim, you. See, I'm going to get stuck now with that song. Now it's in my head. Sorry. Despite what Disney Pixar's film Finding Nemo would have you believe, fish can't speak English.

And they surely can't sing delightful little songs about perseverance. But they do make noise. Even Aristotle wrote about it more than 2,000 years ago. But documenting those sounds and figuring out which fish is making them isn't easy. Recently, scientists from the University of Victoria have figured out how to eavesdrop on fish to tell one species from another. It may be a way for them to keep tabs on fish populations. Derry and Lancaster and her team managed to decipher some of the cliques and grunts made by eight different kinds of rockfish living off the coast of British Columbia. Producer Amanda Buckowitz spoke to Miss Lancaster to hear more about it.

I think it's hilarious to listen to these fish sounds. I get to spend my days figuring out the different noises of the fish in our oceans. And turning that into a tangible way to protect them and conserve them, I think it's awesome and I'm stoked that someone is happy to pay me to do this kind of work. My name is Daryan Lancaster and I'm a PhD candidate at the University of University of University of Lancaster and I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria. Rockfish are some of the most amazing fish we have here in British Columbia. There's 41 different species and they come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes and

colors. There's some that are really colorful like the canary rockfish is bright yellow. There's a vermilion rockfish which is this kind of cool, modeled red. And one of the things that made me most fascinated by rockfish in the beginning was finding out that they can live over 200 years, which is pretty rare in our oceans and just amazing to think that these fish are living on these older piles for hundreds and hundreds of years while we're living our lives up here on land. One of the main reasons why I wanted to study rockfish, other than the fact that there are these really long-lived fish, is they're really vulnerable

to fishing. When they're caught, they have this swim bladder inside them that expands rapidly, and it makes them really hard to catch and release. And because they're so long lived, it takes them a really long time to rebuild their stocks if they are depleted with overfishing. So studying them is something that's really important to me. A lot of the methods that we use right now to study and monitor rockfish can be destructive to the fish. Usually people were using tools like hook and line surveys. They're fished out and we know exactly where those species were, but after those hook and line surveys are completely. the fish are no longer in the water. We also use techniques like dive surveys and underwater video

monitoring, which is really effective and it's not destructive to the fish. But it's really hard to get a lot of kind of survey coverage with those techniques. So figuring out new faster, non-destructive tools to study rockfish is really important. When I was first approached about using acoustics to study rockfish, I was a little bit skeptical. A lot of these species are really closely related. And so I wasn't sure if we'd be able to tell the species sounds apart. And I didn't even know if a lot of these species were making noises. I'd never heard them when I was scuba diving. The sounds you record in the lab might not be the same or transferable to wild sounds. And fish also just don't respond the same way in tanks. They're often a little bit stressed out or they're not

exposed to the same number of species that they are in the wild. So even though we knew rockfish were making noises from tank studies, we didn't really know how this applied to their behavior in the real aquatic environments. And so we ended up finding over a thousand different fish sounds. So I'm really excited that we've got the results we have. So to capture the sounds, what we did is we took this amazing localization array, which has six different underwater microphones positioned all around it. And the array is huge. It's two meters by two meters by three meters.

It's this big PVC kind of underwater fish listening house. And we took it out to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Center on the west coast of Vancouver Island. And we set it out in these really amazing rocky habitats. And so we set up the array in these rocky habitats for 10 days at a time. And we record it all day and all night. And then we have these paired underwater video cameras that are able to visualize what species we're making each sound. My favorite sound is definitely the black rockfish.

It sounds like this croaking, grunting. It's kind of like a rher sound. And it's the most unique. And every time I hear it, it makes me laugh. The copper rockfish makes a lot of knocks and grunt noises. The knocks that it makes are kind of these low frequency, kind of thrumming sounds. And then the grunts, unlike the black rockfish, which makes really long grunting noises, these are usually pretty quick, less than a second.

And they often make these noises when they are being chased by other larger fish. Or sometimes they'll make these knocking noises in quick repetition when they are chasing their own prey along the ocean floor. We discovered that especially copper and quillback rockfish make these kind of distress grunting noises, and they make significantly more grunting sounds when they're being chased. They're scared.

It's kind of like them yelling or screaming, which I think is pretty relatable. I'd probably do the same thing if I was getting chased by a giant fish. One of the coolest things we discovered is that as fish get bigger, the sounds they make gets lower and lower in frequency. So little baby fish make these high frequency sounds. And then the larger adult fish make these lower grunting and knocking noises. And that's really interesting from both a listening perspective.

It's interesting to be able to tell that that's a baby fish making that noise. but also it's a huge thing to understand from a conservation perspective because if we know how big the fish are, we can start to do really important complex conservation management using stock assessment and biomass estimates. It's really exciting that we were able to capture a large variety of different fish sounds. We captured eight different species of fish making unique noises. And this is awesome because a few of these species, we didn't even know could make sounds before. The canary rockfish and the vermilion rockfish had never been recorded anywhere making

noises. So that was a first of its kind discovery. But it's also really exciting because we figured out that we can tell these sounds apart. So it means we can non-invasively, non-destructively monitor these rockfish using their sounds. This means we can start to develop fish sound detectors, kind of like the Merlin app that's commonly used in birding, but for fish. So we can take audio recordings and feed it into a fish sound detector and know exactly where these fish are living. And that's really the cornerstone of marine conservation, learning where your fish that you

want to protect live, figuring out how many are there. And then you can make marine protected areas or you can set fisheries, closures. You can do stock assessment because you know exactly the range of the species. you're interested in protecting. Daria in Lancaster is a PhD candidate in the Department of Marine Ecology and Acoustics at the University of Victoria. 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, how astronomers use radio waves to see our hidden universe. They've actually gone through the clouds hit the volcanoes and planes of Venus and come back and we can create these incredible 3D renderings of what the surface of Venus is like.

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. Humans have been staring up at the stars for as long as our species has existed. It was only more recently, just over 400 years ago, that we started using telescopes to study the night sky. Those first instruments used lenses and later mirrors to focus rays of visible light. Then, about 100 years ago, a whole new kind of astronomy was born, because the universe isn't just full of light. It's also awash in radio waves that our eyes can't see, but we can pick up with radio telescopes. And over the last century, radio astronomers have made all kinds of surprising

discoveries, uncovering some of the most violent phenomena that would otherwise be invisible. From finding evidence of our galaxy's black hole to discovering a massive. amazing spinning beacons in the sky called pulsars, and even revealing evidence of the big bang that sprang our universe into existence. Dr. Emma Chapman has devoted much of her career to this field, and now she's written a book about it called The Echoing Universe, how radio astronomy helps us see the invisible cosmos. Dr. Chapman is an astrophysicist and a Royal Society Research Fellow based at the University of Nottingham in the UK. Dr. Chapman, welcome to quirks and quarks and Thanks very much for having me.

One thing I couldn't help noticing in reading your book is how many radio astronomy discoveries were made by accident, including the discovery of radio astronomy itself? Just tell me a bit about that. How did we discover that the sky is full of radio waves? Yeah, it's funny how much of it is so antipitous, as you say, when you go back in the history. It all started in around 1933 with one man called Carl Janski, who worked for Bell Telephone Labs, Bell Labs back then in Holmdel, New Jersey. He was tasked with trying to make telephone calls brand new technology of being able to make a telephone call over the Atlantic Ocean clearer.

It was this kind of constant hiss and crackle. And they couldn't work out what it was. So he created this antenna contraption. It really does look like a set of criss-cross washing lines on a turntable. And he was able to try and kind of turn this around. It was on Ford Model T wheels that were being not used in the Great Depression. So it really was kind of gritty and just chucked together. And he turned it round and around and he was trying to work out, where is this hiss coming from? Is it from thunderstorms?

Is it from radio stations in New York? And no, it turned out that actually he needed to look up. And the antenna was tracking the noise across the sky. And it turned out that it was coming from the constellation of Sagittarius, which back then they knew was hosted the center of our galaxy, the center of the Milky Way. But now we know a little more. We know what's in the center of our Milky Way, and that's a supermassive black hole. Wow.

So radio astronomy was born out of an annoyance. There's something they were trying to get rid of and opened up a whole new branch of astronomy. So just for clarification here, what are radio waves? How do they differ from light waves? Well, they are light waves. So when we talk about light kind of colloquially in everyday language, we say we switch the light on, we're talking about optical light, the visible light that our eyes have evolved to see. But that's a really tiny portion of what's called the electromagnetic spectrum, which is all different, I suppose, categories of light, fairly subjective divisions, to be honest. I call them superpowers. So it's all light. It all travels at the speed of light. It's all an electromagnetic wave. But if, if you're a If it's really short wavelengths, you might be in, let's say, the UV wavelengths. And their superpower is that they're able to, well, kill germs. They're able to sterilise things.

If you go to slightly longer wavelengths and you'll be in the infrared, and you've all hopefully seen the beautiful infrared images that James Webb Space Telescope's coming out with, for example. And then you go to really long wavelengths, the longest wavelengths there are. So, you know, we're talking centimetres to metres to kilometres, to kilometres. That's the radio waves. Their superpower is that they are able to travel really long distances pretty much unperturbed. So through rain, through snow, across the globe. And that's why humans have used radio waves to communicate since, well, the early 1900s.

And that's why astronomers and anybody interested in space exploration uses radio waves to communicate it's out of the Earth's atmosphere and much, much farther out. So what does radio astronomy reveal about our solar system? Oh, so much. It's a big question. I think radio astronomy, there's this obstacle for people sometimes in that most people have at least seen a telescope, if not looked through one even for a moment. They can identify with it.

Radio is a little harder, but all we have to think about is being a translation. It's like a paint by numbers. So when we observe the universe in radio, whether that's black holes or the solar system, which I'll get onto, we receive this information. And all we have to do is say, OK, you know what? If it's got a wavelength of two centimeters, let's call that red. If it's got a wavelength of three centimeters, let's call that green. And it's like a paint by numbers. So we can get the same depth of information in terms of images.

But what's even better is that in the solar system, we can actually not just receive radio waves from the same. sun, for example, we can send radio waves and actively communicate with our solar system. So, so much of astronomy is passive. We have to sit and we have to wait. We can't design experiments and poke a black hole. We have to wait. But with radar astronomy, we can actually just use radio antennas, send out loads and loads of radio waves, just as the antennas would do with this radio program, except they're much stronger and they will go all the way to the moon or all the way to Venus. And Venus is one of my favour is because it can slip, they can slip under the clouds. So remember, radio waves have the superpower, which is that they can travel fairly unperturbed. Look at Venus with an optical telescope

in your backyard. You'll just see clouds. Look at it with the best telescope in the world optically. You'll just see clouds. Look at it with a radar telescope. The echoes will come back in a few minutes. So send your radio waves, echoes come back, and they've actually gone through the clouds, hit the volcanoes and planes of Venus and come back and we can create these incredible 3D renderings of what the surface of Venus is like. And they're quite, yeah, they're quite stunning. It's really astounding that you can discover the mountains on Venus

using similar technology that the police used to catch you speeding with their radar, bouncing off your car. Exactly that. And that's a really good thing to bring up because they do that and they measure your velocity, they measure your speed. And we can do that too. We get that information for free.

So not only do we get to kind of render what that landscape looks like, but we also get to find out how it's moving. And with Venus, for example, we worked out using these radar waves that its day was changing by several minutes quite randomly, quite chaotically. So it wasn't just a 24 hour a day like it is on Earth, but like it was a few minutes here, a few minutes there. And we think that's because the atmosphere is so heavy. it's actually dragging the planet.

It's actually breaking the planet and then accelerating the planet. So we get a huge amount of information with radio. You describe another accidental discovery in radio astronomy, and that is that the sun is a source of radio waves. Tell me about that. Absolutely, sure. So the sun is normally fairly quiet in the radio waves, and the galaxy would pop out.

But the sun can have tantrums, and when it's got lots of sun spots, lots of magnetic field chaos going on. It's all going on at the minute because we're at the peak of this sunspot cycle. What happens is that you can get flares of radio light. And this radio light can often accompany what's called a coronal mass ejection, which is loads of stuff, loads of plasma. And that can cause havoc.

When that comes to Earth, it can interact with our magnetic field. And it can do some pretty devastating things like overwhelm electrical circuits. The serendipitous part of this discovery that you alluded to was that in the Second World War, the way we found this out, unfortunately, was in England, our entire home defence radar network went down for two days. And no one knew why. And everyone was panicking, thinking, is it the Germans, you know, or the Japanese, like blocking, jamming our radar equipment? And one physics teacher called Stanley Hay, who was in charge of this radar unit, rang up the, Royal Greenwich Observatory and I can only imagine how the conversation went but it was something like excuse me is the sun doing anything unusual because every time it's up our radar network's going down and they went well um there is a gigantic sunspot at the minute uh i don't think it does makes radio waves but we've never really tried and um yeah it turned out that they could they could validate that a few months later and it turns out that yeah when the the sun is particularly active it can

create these radio flares, which can jam radio networks, cause interference, but it can also cause very pretty lights. You get these, the Aurora, the northern lights and southern lights with the accompanying corona must ejection. One underlying theme that you point out in your book is that radio astronomy has discovered some of the more bizarre objects in the universe. And let's start with pulsars, which again was another accidental discovery. It was. I was actually having tea at a conference with Jocelyn Belbenel, who is Radio Astronomy Royalty, because in the 1960s, what she did was she was working with a radio telescope in Cambridge that she created with her own hands, banging lots of wooden sticks into a field

and hanging metal wires between it, like a washing line again. And she traced a tiny repeating, pulsing signal over metres and meters of what was then, printouts. And what this ended up being was a spinning star. So at first they thought it was aliens because it was this repeating signal, couldn't work out what it was, what would be repeating, what does that in nature, nothing that they thought.

And then they realised that actually it was an incredibly compact source that could only be something called a neutron star. So this is a star that has collapsed down, if it's not collapsed down far enough into a black hole, but it's an incredibly dense object. And as it collapses, it's like a ballet dancer bringing their arms in as they're spinning. They start to go faster.

And so this neutron star is spinning. And it can spin up to thousands of times a second, a second. Wow. It will spin around. And as it does that, because of the incredibly strong magnetic fields involved, it can create jets of radio light, just like a lighthouse. And those jets can pass over Earth again and again. thousands of times per second, or if it's only once per second, once per second. And that's what

Jocelyn Bell-Banel detected these pulses of heartbeats of dying to dead stars, really, of these neutron stars. You can do some incredible things with these pulsars. You can actually test general relativity with these pulsars. So they are not just an interesting thing to add to the collection. Well, in keeping with the theme of our accidental discoveries, there was the evidence of Big Bang itself. How did that happen? Yeah, that happens in a similar way to the others, really. Somebody had set up a piece of radio equipment and it had an annoying hiss. They were actually just doing what's called a null test in astronomy, which is where you turn something on, where you're not expecting a signal and you check that there's silence, basically, because

otherwise there might be a problem with your equipment. That's what they were doing. But they heard a hiss and this hiss was coming from everywhere in the sky and the only thing that they could think that it might be was that there were two pigeons that were roosting within their radio telescope so I want you to imagine an ice cream cone on its side a big metal ice cream cone bit squashed a bit more square but roughly that and in there it was really nice and warm and two pigeons had roosted and left what the scientists called white dielectric material or to me a new pigeon poo all over over and they thought maybe that's it. So they actually managed to sell these pigeons for pigeon fancier, took them off, cleaned it all out, still hit a hiss and even worse than that, it turns

out that the pigeons were homing pigeons and they flew back. And sadly, they actually, they used a shotgun to get rid of that particular source of noise, except they died in vain because the noise was still there. And what that turned out to be was the afterglow of the Big Bang. So the Big Bang is a very energetic, very bright early process, very violence. And as it kind of cools down, what you get is this afterglow cooling over time. And yeah, the theorists actually rang this set of people up saying, I think you might have discovered something we were about to look for. And it matched precisely. But what I would say is that as much as it's kind of easy to draw out the serendipity of a lot of these things, in order to discover something like this, you,

not only have to kind of be in the right place in the right time, but you also have to have the right knowledge to recognize it. Well, these days we also have telescopes that collect infrared light, ultraviolet light, even x-rays. We have space telescopes. What role do you see radio astronomy playing going forward? I think there will always be an element of ground-based radio astronomy because it's just cheaper and easier to do. Whereas all the other wavelengths And as you just described, you have to be outside Earth's atmosphere to make kind of meaningful cosmological observations because our atmosphere blocks it. However, there is the element that the Earth is very noisy. So as much as we are concerned about light pollution for optical astronomy,

we're also concerned about light pollution in the radio, like how noisy the air is with radio waves we don't want to detect. So we work miracles on Earth already. If we were able to, for example, create an array of antennas on the far side of the moon, then what that would do we would be using the moon to shield ourselves from all of that earth-based noise. And suddenly, we'd have just a much quieter view of the universe. And so all of the observations that we've talked about so far, we'd just be able to do quicker and better. And I suppose the one exception that we just can't really do on Earth is reaching right back into the dark ages of the universe. so the time before even the stars had formed, or the first black holes,

which is my personal area of research is this, the first stars and the first black holes. And so that would allow us, it's such a faint signal, because it's traveled 14 billion years. Okay, it's really faint. So, yeah, that we might have to go to the far side of the moon. But we're going to have to do it quickly because a lot of other people are going and it's getting noisier all the time. Dr. Chapman, thank you so much for your time and thank you for the book. No, thank you.

Dr. Emma Chapman is an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in the UK and the author of The Echoing Universe, how radio astronomy helps us see the invisible cosmos. What will the Earth look like by 2050? That's a question that climate scientists have been trying to answer for decades. Long before the Paris Agreement, researchers used rudimentary climate models to see what affects carbon dioxide emissions might have on the planet by the middle of this century. Now, in honor of our 50th anniversary season, we rummaged through our archives and dusted off a 1982 special report on climate change.

Back then, the scientific consensus around climate change was starting to solidify. Then host Jay Ingram spoke with scientists and policymakers about what the planet might look like if we failed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Here's an excerpt from that conversation. Over the last 25 years, very precise measurements have shown that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing steadily. From 315 parts per million in 1957 to 343 parts per million in 1982. This time, it's not a natural fluctuation. It's quite clear that we are responsible for this increase

because we introduce carbon dioxide into the air by burning fossil fuels. Roger Ravelle is professor of science and public policy at the University of California in San Diego. He was one of the first scientists to point out the carbon dioxide problem. We expect that by the middle of the next century, the carbon dioxide content of the air will double compared to what it was, let's say, in 1880. That doubling should cause an average global rise in temperature

of about between 2 and 3 degrees centigrade and a rise of about 5 degrees centigrade here in these Canadian latitudes. An 8 or 9 degree rise in the wintertime in northern Canada, probably a 5 degree rise in the summertime in northern Canada. In other words, the temperature increase will be greater as we go away from the equator toward the pole. When you live in a cold climate, your first reaction to all this is great. The more carbon dioxide, the easier the winters and the warmer the summer,

But that's not quite the whole story. At mid-latitudes, I'll say the latitudes of the corn belt in the United States and the principal of present-day agricultural areas of the Soviet Union and most of the good deal of China, the climate would probably become drier. You'd have much more evaporation due to the rising temperature and much less precipitation due to the shifting of all the climatic belts away from the equator. so that irrigated agriculture particularly would probably be seriously affected. The impact of warmer global climate doesn't end at agriculture.

Dr. Michael McElroy, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Harvard University. To take the extreme view, and I say this is the extreme view, were I to propose that over the next 50 to 100 years, there was a serious chance that sea level on a global scale would rise by, let's say 15 feet, and the climate would become significantly warmer. I don't think that there's anybody responsible scientific body of knowledge that would allow that suggestion to be contradicted. Now, I appreciate that this is not the same as saying it's going to happen,

but if I can talk about the possibility of it happening, and if that cannot be turned off by present scientific understanding, that suggests we have an issue and a very serious problem. The sea level rise Dr. McElroy refers to would result from the collapse and melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, a layer of ice covering islands in the West Antarctic. The West Antarctic ice cap did disintegrate

125,000 years ago during a warm period. The temperatures, say 100 years from now, are likely to be much higher than they were then, so it may very well disintegrate again. The question is, how long would this take? 20-foot rise would inundate the Netherlands. It would inundate Bangladesh. It would cover about two-thirds of Florida.

Most big cities, which are built along coasts at low elevations, would have to move, or else you'd build very high dikes around them. The case of the Netherlands, it may be impossible to build higher dikes. The Dutch have been building their dikes higher and higher as their land has been sinking anyhow. And they've just about scraped off all of Holland to do it.

and another 20 feet might very well be almost impossible for them. A report from the National Research Council in the United States this summer concluded that the best estimate of global warming due to a doubling of carbon dioxide is 3 degrees Celsius. Is it inevitable that we're turning the globe into a hot house? Or will some of the warming be absorbed in the oceans? How will precipitation change? With so many answers unclear, what should we do?

Dr. Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado. How much proof do you need before one responds is the basic question? There are a lot of good analogies. Insurance is the best analogy. I don't plan to get in an accident, and I don't plan to have a health emergency, yet I'm willing to buy insurance against those contingencies.

So the question is, do we want to take this chance? Now, there are those who say, well, since it's uncertain, let's just wait until we're sure. But the longer we wait, of course, the larger the dose of CO2 and its consequences will have to adapt to. There are a lot of things you can do. First, you can invest in developing crop strains, that is, different varieties of plants, which

can handle extremes of weather or handle different weather patterns than today. We could also invest in developing alternative energy systems. If we find out that there is going to be a rise in sea level of five meters and 100 or 150 years if we continue doing this, we may very well want to get off the fossil fuel habit. Well, you can't just do that in five years or in some cases even 25 years. years. We have long-term economic commitments. Therefore, investing now, making strategic investments, just like in the case of the military, to develop alternative energy systems. So we have them to deal with these CO2 risks gives us the flexibility of responding. That was a special report

on climate change with former Quicks and Quarks host Jay Ingram, which aired on November 20th, 1982. Well, our listener question show is coming up fast, and our producers are hard at work furiously digging to find you some answers. So this is your last chance to be involved. Just send in your questions to quarks at cbc.ca. And we've gotten some real meaty mindbenders into our inbox, like this one from Brent Swain,

in Quadra Island, BC. He asks, fish blood is red, chicken blood is red, cow blood is red. Why is chicken meat and most fish meat not red?

Thanks for that, Brent. And here's your answer. Yeah, my name is Kevin Campbell, and I'm a professor of biological sciences at the University of Manitoba. Yeah, well, this actually has to do with a very closely related protein

to hemoglobin called myoglobin. Hey, so hemoglobin is found inside the red blood cells. whereas myoglobin is tissue-specific, and predominantly where we find it is in skeletal muscle. So as it turns out, there is myoglobin inside fish muscle, and there is myoglobin inside chicken breast, for example. But there's a much higher concentration of this pigment, which is also red-colored in mammalian meat, right? So if we're looking at a cow. Though if we look at pork, it's a lighter color of red. there's less myoglobin.

And if we look at things like seals and whales that have extremely high muscle myoglobin contents, their muscle actually even looks black. So the color difference has simply to do with the concentration of myoglobin as opposed to the red blood cells. And if we also look at things like chickens, well, their breasts are white

to owe into the low myoglobin content. But if you look at the drum sticks themselves, we call that maybe dark meat, right? That has the higher concentration of myoglobin. So it just has a higher oxygen requirement. So myoglobin plays a similar role in oxygen delivery, right? So hemoglobin carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues, but myoglobin carries that oxygen within the tissues to the mitochondria.

Right? And so tissues that need a lot of oxygen, like our skeletal muscles, have a higher concentration of myoglobin. Dr. Kevin Campbell is a professor of biological sciences at the University of Manitoba. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email once again is Quirx at cbc.ca.

Our web page is cbc.ca.ca. slash Quirx, where you can check out our past episodes and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast. Get us on SiriusXM or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google. Google Play. Corks and Corks is produced by Sonia Biting, Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Bukowitz, and Dan Falk. Our senior producer is Hannah Hogue. And special thanks to CBC Radio Archives,

Patrick Mooney, Ross Tawley, and Zoe Barraclough. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.