Quirks and Quarks - Making snake bites less deadly, and more…

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

On this week's episode: tracking down a stellar explosion, climate apathy, arctic foxes are key in northern food web, why golf balls lip out of holes and making snake bites less deadly.

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, a solar explosion from another star was so strong that if it was here, it would blast our atmosphere away. I had some response since we got this,

people saying new irrational fear unlocked. You know, one day the atmosphere. obviously just disappears. And deconstructing the mystery of the golfer's curse, the dreaded lip-out. Golfers spent an awful lot of time practicing and sitting at the last moment. His physics waiting to jump on them and ruin their day. Plus, breaking through climate apathy, the critical role of Arctic foxes in northern food webs, and mitigating deadly snake bites.

All this today on quirks and quarks. You could say our son has been rather. restless lately. It's been experiencing several powerful solar flares, followed by ejections of huge clouds of magnetized plasma that led to dazzling displays of northern lights. They stretched down in some places as far as Florida. But until now, we had never observed an explosion of gas like that, called a coronal mass ejection, coming from another star. Well, that recently changed when astronomers poured over decades of data from powerful telescopes and found a record of one. But that stellar find could also spell bad news for another coveted scientific

quest, the search for life on other planets. Dr. Joe Cullingham is a radio astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam. He's also the lead author on the study. Hello and welcome to Corks and Corks. Thanks, Bob, having me. First of all, let's just get the rundown here. These explosions are coronal mass ejections. What are they? How do they happen on the sun? Yeah, so the sun has a really complicated magnetic field, and sometimes these fields get tangled and they snap, and that causes the ejection of this really hot plasma from essentially the corona, the outskirts of the sun. And that spills into planetary space and can drive the beautiful aurori as you mentioned earlier.

Ah, if one is aimed at our planet and hits us. Yes. So what was the thinking going into your study about why we'd never seen a coronal mass ejection coming from another star. The reason why we haven't seen one from another star is because the way we usually traditionally search for coronal mass ejections from the sun is that we can block out the disc of the sun using what's called a coronagraph, that kind of a fancy sunglass essentially. You block the main photometric disc, and then you can see the outskirts of the sun. And this is where you can really trace the motion of the plasma as it gets ejected from the sun.

But stars are just so far away, so you can't do it that way. And so what we did was we used a tracer of a coronal mass ejection, what's called a type 2 radio burst. Take me through that. Yeah, so when a coronal mass ejection pushes and leaves the star, it actually generates really bright radio emission that has a characteristic kind of burst that travels from high frequencies to low frequencies. And that burst encodes the density and the energy of that coronal mass ejection. So is this sort of like a sonic boom that supersonic aircraft can create? but with plasma? Yeah, that's some analogy exactly.

It's a shock front essentially. So like a ship moving through water, you know, sometimes you see a shock preceding the ship, or also exactly you mean, you know, a supersonic boom. And so it's like that, but in the radio. So how are you able to detect one going around another star? Yeah, so we use the really sensitive telescope called Lofar, which is situated in the Netherlands, but it's run by a whole bunch of European countries. And it's the most sensitive low-frequency radio telescope in the world.

So we could hunt through decades, as you mentioned, of data on lots and lots of different stars with this telescope. Why was that search so difficult? Where do I begin? The tough part was, one, the data rate. Radio astronomy has the most maybe hardcore data rate of any astronomy out there. And so we collected petabytes of data. And that's the raw data. To get into a form you can use, you have to put it through lots of computers.

And so that took roughly a decade of time. And also we're using it. It's a new telescope, so it took a long time to understand how to use it. Just for definition, what's a petabyte? A petabyte is a thousand terabytes, which is a thousand gigabytes. So a million gigabytes. Boy, that's a real needle in a haystack search. Yeah, it really is kind of hunting for that cosmic needle.

So once you spotted one, what did you see? Yeah, so we saw something that was really. energetic, much stronger than the sun has ever performed. And so that's a big problem because it comes from a type of star called an M dwarf or a red dwarf. These can be anywhere from 10 to 50 percent times of the mass of the sun. And that's why they're called red dwarfs, because the lower mass, they put out lower energy, hence the red color. And that really, what we found is the energy of the CME is so much, it doesn't bode well for a planet around these types of stars. If the star is smaller, it has more powerful explosions? Well, it could be. Yeah, these stars.

have much stronger magnetic fields than our sun. So about a thousand times more stronger. And the energy of that release is connected in some way. And so that's what we hypothesize at least. So even though they look tiny, they're really violent. So if one of these violent explosions from a red dwarf was to happen on our sun, what would that do to the earth? Oh, well, it wouldn't be a good time for us, I don't think. It might be beautiful for a period of time with Aurora. They'd probably propagate all the way down to the equator. You could be in Malaysia or the middle of Africa and enjoying a great view of the Aurora. You're not stuck in Norway or Antarctica or Canada. But after that, I think the problem that we found particularly for a potential pun around this star is that the coronal mass ejection that's traced by

this radio burst is so strong. It would compress the magnetic field to the surface. And why that's a problem is because our magnetic field kind of acts like a shield in front of this activity. And so once you lose that, now you're just exposed to the stellar wind and that can just strip your atmosphere. And so that means like, great, you know, you're a planet around another star, but you just completely lost your atmosphere and you look a lot more like Mars than you do like Earth. So it would burn the atmosphere off essentially. Yeah, the way I try to think of it is kind of like sandblasting. You know, I don't know if anyone's ever sandblasted a car or paint.

You know, essentially you just like, just eradicate that your atmosphere via this activity. Wow. Well, how common are these small red dwarfs? in our galaxy. So yeah, the reason why this is particularly important is because while with new coronal mass ejections happened on our sun, we really didn't know if they happened on these M-dwarf, these red dwarfs. And why that's important is because these are the most common stars in the galaxy, about 80% by number. And so a big effort in astronomy is going to find Earth-like planets. And so you don't ignore the most common hosts of planets out there, these M-dwars. And so that's where

our study is really important to find how often these things emit coronal mass ejections. We found they're rare. These bright events are once every 500 years, but 500 years is a long time to us. It's not a long time to geology or to a planet. So what does this mean for our hunt for life in the galaxy? Yeah, so, I don't know. I don't want to be a bearer of grim news, but it kind of looks that way. The problem that we have is that if we, a lot of our efforts,

are dedicated to these M-Nwarfs because they're by number that and you hope to find an earth-like planet around them. But what our study suggests is that maybe you find these planets at the perfect spot from the star in what we call the Havel zone or maybe the Goldilocks zone you might have heard it called exactly where liquid water can exist on the surface based on the radiation put out by the sun in a continuous way. But now from this study we know that sometimes a star has this violent eruptions. And so not even a very strong magnetic field, could protect an atmosphere around these things. And so it doesn't bode well for the most common finding an Earth 2.0 around the most common stars in the Milky Way.

Sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie here. You've got a civilization on a planet doing really well and then all of a sudden their star erupts. Yeah, I had some response since we got this people saying new irrational fear unlocked. You know, one day the atmosphere just disappears. Yeah, I don't meet it like that. Luckily, we're very far away from our sun. when you're in the habital zone around these end wars, you're a lot closer. And so that means your chances of interaction are much higher.

And number two, the energetics are a lot more. So, yeah, not great for planets around M dwarfs, but I wouldn't worry about us too much here on Earth. Dr. Calingham, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you, Bob. Dr. Joe Calingham is a radio astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam. Ten years on from the Paris pledge to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, a sobering message.

President Lula, you have called this the COP of truth. I could not agree more. And the art truth is that we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5 degrees. That was CBC's Susan Ormiston, reporting from the COP 30 Climate Summit in Brazil. In his opening remarks, UN Secretary General, Antonio Gutierrez had strong words about our future if we don't limit our carbon emissions. It could push ecosystems past irreversible tipping points, expose billions to unlivable conditions, and amplify threats to peace and security. Every fraction of a degree means more hunger,

displacement and loss, especially for those least responsible. This is moral failure and deadly It's a powerful message, the kind we've heard many times before. Yet the latest figures from the Global Carbon Project show we are on track to emit more carbon dioxide from fossil fuels this year than ever before. And despite the barrage of natural disasters we've seen, like wildfires, hurricanes and floods, many are simply tuning out the climate crisis. Like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water, it's getting hot so grass. gradually, we stop paying attention. And this is something Dr. Ratchett Dubay wanted to investigate,

to see if there's a better way we can communicate the urgency of this crisis. Dr. DuBet is a computational cognitive scientist and assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, Bob. Thank you for having me. What made you realize that we might be that frog in a pot of boiling water? I think for me, one of the most interesting data that I've seen is that belief in climate change in America has been steadily rising in the past 10 to 15 years. So more and more people are believing that climate change is real and it's happening.

More people are also getting worried about climate change. But the most interesting graphs for me and the data for me is that the percentage of people across all political aisles that say that climate change is an important issue for them, and it's a voting issue for them, has remained relatively stable at around 35% to maximum 40%. So climate change was just not a talking point in the last election in America. So I think that to me is a very interesting aspect that's going on, right? So people believe climate change is happening. People somehow think that climate change will be bad for America or for the rest of the world,

but it's just not a voting issue. People don't care about climate change. And that has just remained steady in the last 10 to 20 years. So I think that to me was the first aspect that I just found super puzzling and super important to study. So how did you study this effect? So in this study, what we found was that when we present people temperature data, like when we show, you know, how the temperature has changed in the past 50 years, 200 years, for different towns across Europe and America, and we showed them that rising trend over a period of time, and we asked them, how worried are you about climate change? and how important do you think climate change is an issue, people think it's kind of an important issue,

maybe they're slightly worried about climate change. But when we presented the same underlying trend in a different format, in a discrete format, where we presented people how much the local lake in a particular town has changed over a period of time, whether or not it used to freeze and does it freeze now. Then people's worry and urgency about climate change was significantly higher when they were presented at a temperature data.

you know, maybe in the 1940s, 1980s, it used to freeze a lot, but now it doesn't freeze as much. When people see this, it gives them this kind of thing like, oh, things have really changed, right? It used to happen, something used to be good, and now it's not good anymore. Whereas when we are presenting people, this temperature data, and I would argue, like, when we talk about carbon dioxide emissions and things like that, it is very abstract in a perception. Right. Like, you know, it's getting hotter, so what, right? But when we help people recognize and understand that climate change is already affecting their lives right now, and it will affect their lives in personal, dramatic consequences, then people sit up and take more notice about climate change. So why does that affect happen? Why the lake freezing would snap people out of this, seeing climate change as a new normal?

I would say there are two aspects to it. So that's the mere fact that I'm talking about lake freeze. You're already kind of imagining, you know, back in your childhood days, you could go to your local, lake, you could maybe go ice skiing, there was a bit of a winter tradition about it, and now that's loss, right? When I'm talking about a lake used to freeze, a lake doesn't freeze, you're immediately doing some kind of vivid mental imagery about this scenario. When I'm talking about temperature, there's probably not much concrete imagination that you're doing when I'm talking about temperature or carbon emissions.

The other aspect to it is people think that things have suddenly changed when we talk about lake freeze. even though this change in the lake freeze has been gradual in our perception, right? Like, it's not like until 1980, it always used to freeze and then suddenly after 1980, it stopped freezing. You know, there are some years where they were to freeze. You know, that's natural variation. That will also happen, right? But this lake freeze aspect snaps us out of this.

Things are slowly, slowly changing, but it's like, oh, things are suddenly dramatically changed. So why do you think we humans tend to do this to sort of adapt to things? Basically, what happening with climate change is our minds are gas. gaslighting us into thinking it's not a big deal. Even though I've been working on climate change five to ten years almost now, I still sometimes think it's going to be okay. And what happens with climate change is that if you look at in the last 50 years or last

100 years, the rate at which we have emitted carbon in the atmosphere is unprecedented and insane. But in our daily perception, in our window of cognition with our limited memories and a limited attention span, climate change is only leading. to slow and gradual changes in daily weather. Right? So there will be some days that are particularly warm. There will be some winters that are particularly warmer and, you know, maybe lake has not frozen or something like that. But in our daily experiences, climate change is not leading

to drastic changes instantly right now. In our small window perception, climate change seems very slow and very gradual. Even though, you know, if I was to magically transport you 30 years in the past, you'd be absolutely blown away by how different, you know, your summers used to be and our winters used to be. And I would say that this argument also applies to other aspects to, right, like rising inequality, our adaptation to gun violence, or political violence for that matter too. Right. So that, I think, is the biggest tragedy of climate change. That it's happening really fast in Earth cycle, but in our perception, it's happening way too slowly. Now, beyond the freezing lake analogy, I understand that you were in Los Angeles during

the terrible wildfires, the beginning of 2025. What did you experience? I was. I just moved to L.A. I could see the fires from my balcony, actually. We were just at the edge of the evacuation warning sign, but we decided to evacuate when the ashes were pouring down, basically. It was pretty, pretty horrible, very anxiety-inducing, too. I think I feel very lucky because if the winds had gone a different way, it could have been even more devastating than it was. So I think we had lucked out a bit over there. And we had to evacuate and we were lucky enough that we had a set of friends that we could stay at their place for a week before we could come back to a place. So what would you say to a listener who's ready to surrender to climate change as a new normal

and has just tuned it out? I would say to the listeners is that there's a big difference. between an earth that is warm by 2.5 degrees or 3 degrees. I do say that we need to use a kind of a binary framing to communicate about climate change. But I would encourage us to get away from a binary kind of thinking in terms of thinking about the consequences of climate change. We have to deal with the effects of climate change for the centuries to come now. Every degree of warming that we can prevent is going to save countless lives and it's going to save countless number of sufferings.

Dr. Dubay, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Bob, so much. Dr. Ratchett Dubay is a computational cognitive scientist and assistant professor at UCLA. Polar bears are the unsung heroes of the Arctic food web. As the apex predator at the top of the food chain, how well they do has a trickle-down effect for other animals in their ecosystem. Recently, scientists discovered how polar bears throughout the Arctic leave behind a whopping 7.6 million kilograms of meat a year from their kills. And as University of Manitoba wildlife biologist, Holly Gamblin recently told as it happens,

one animal that makes a feast of these leftovers is the Arctic Fox. My research advisor has done research that has shown that Arctic Fox population numbers are impacted by the fitness and success of polar bears out on the landscape. So polar bears making kills and fattening up can actually impact Arctic fox populations from year to year. Working on the coast of Hudson Bay out of Churchill, Manitoba, scientists have uncovered the critical role Arctic Foxes play as a mobile link between the tundra and sea ice food webs. But our warming climate could be the thread that unravels at all. Dr. Sean Johnson-Bice led this research at the University of Manitoba. He's now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota.

Hello and welcome back to Quirks and Quarks. Hi, Bob. Thanks for having me again. First of all, tell me about the Arctic Fox. How has it been a mobile link between the tundra and the sea ice? So the Arctic fox primarily resides on the Arctic tundra year round. That's where they breed during the springtime. But in wintertime, they will often leave the Arctic tundra and actually move on to the sea ice. So the places like Hudson Bay are frozen over wintertime.

And so they can basically just move readily onto the sea ice. And while they're on the sea ice, they can access then all of the foods that the sea ice offers, which in this case, primarily are ring seals. So Arctic foxes can actually kill ringed seal pups. But they're often actually more known for the fact that they will often scavenge kills left by polar bears. So polar bears are what we refer to as blubber specialists. And as you just mentioned, they will leave a lot of this carrying on the landscape. They'll make it kill, consume only the blubber of the seal, and leave the rest of the carcass for species like arctic foxes. And so foxes with their ability to traverse between the tundra and sea ice, they basically act as, as you mentioned, these sort of mobile linkages between the two environments.

Okay, so that's what they do on the sea ice. Now, what about when they're back on land? The food that they consume on the sea ice can actually benefit their population by increasing their reproductive. success, meaning that they will be more likely to produce litters, or they'll basically just survive longer as adults by having this extra food source. And then in the springtime, when there are now more foxes on the land back on the tundra, in turn, they can then increase their predation on other species on the tundra. In this case, what we see is that Arctic foxes, with more of them on the land, increase their predation rates on goose nests in and around our study area near

Churchill. Oh, and what other animals do they eat besides goose? So on land, their other primary prey items are lemmings and other small rodents like lemmings. But what we have seen in our area is this long-term decline in lemming abundance, which has led to perhaps a greater reliance of Arctic foxes on other food sources, such as these marine foods. Well, how is this balance then between the linked food webs on the tundra and the sea being disrupted because of climate change? Yeah, so Arctic foxes, when they rely on the sea ice for these important marine foods during wintertime, climate change is impacting their ability to access those foods in numerous ways. So firstly, we're seeing climate change is leading to shorter sea ice seasons on Hudson Bay.

And these shorter sea ice seasons are linked to declines in ring seal abundance in the area. So there's fewer seals. Then with fewer seals, we're seeing also fewer polar bears in the area. And so with fewer seals, fewer bears, and basically a shorter time for foxes to access these marine foods on the sea ice, we're then seeing now that those changes are cascading to the Arctic fox population and sort of restricting their ability to get these important winter foods. And the long-term result of that is that we have seen a long-term decline in Arctic fox population. as well in our study area.

In addition, climate change is impacting the lemming population on land. So I mentioned that there has also been a long-term decline in lemmings, and we think that that is primarily linked to changes in the snow conditions caused by climate change. And so these Arctic foxes then are really getting hammered both in the tundra and the sea ice environments through these climate-driven changes in their food supply. Well, what about their impact on the geese? So Arctic foxes, when there's more of them on the landscape, then that means that they can basically increase their predation rates on geese.

So with fewer foxes, then you would think that geese may in turn be increasing in abundance. But another caveat or another wrinkle in this whole story here is that we're actually seeing more red foxes coming on to the tundra. So the Churchill area is unique because it sits at the intersection of three biomes, the tundra and the sea ice, as we mentioned before, but also the boreal forest is just about 10 kilometers inland from the tundra area. And so what we have seen is that red foxes are basically taking advantage of this declining Arctic fox population and moving on to the tundra in their place there. And so even though there may be fewer Arctic foxes over the long term, we're seeing more red foxes. And so they may be sort of replacing that ecological role that

Arctic foxes are having and then therefore also predating these goose nests. So you kind of get this really climate-driven ecological chain of events that is occurring across multiple ecosystems here and sort of totally reshaping these food webs in the process. This idea of the red foxes moving north. This is a continuing story as climate change in the Arctic happens. I mean, we hear about grizzly bears going up as populations of polar bears go down. So it's one species changing to another one or with the same ecosystem. It's incredible how it's all linked. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, grizzly bears is another good example because actually in our primary study site here, Wupusk National Park, there's also been an increase in grizzly bears noted on the landscape as well.

So you're seeing this sort of transition of these ecosystems, particularly in places. And in our around Churchill, which is at the low Arctic and sort of right on that border between the tundra and boreal forest, those ecosystems that are sort of at the range or the boundaries or transition zones between two different biomes, they can be extremely susceptible to the effects of climate change. And that's something that certainly through long-term monitoring efforts by ourselves and also our collaborators have started to document these long-term changes to the food webs there. Dr. Johnson-Bice, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Bob. I appreciate you having me again. Dr. Sean Johnson-Bice is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, investigating deadly snake bites at 1,000 frames per second. Some of them, because they're milked quite frequently, they actually drip venom from their fangs as they are approaching the prey. And it's quite a scary sight, really. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit.

But things are pretty good. That is, until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave in the Fix. The 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. That is the sound of utter disappointment. That lip-out caused professional golfer Wyndham Clark the player's championship last year with over $4 million in prize. money. A lip-out is something that can happen to both amateur and professional golfers alike. It's where a ball gets putted towards the hole, except instead of going in, it skims around the edge before popping out and continuing along its way. Look how far down the ball got.

It is long being called golf's greatest mystery, because there was no telling what could cause a put to go, oh, so wrong, when a similar one could sink the ball into the hole perfectly. In a new study, a group of scientists who specialize in mechanics think they've solved this mystery once and for all, and figured out that it's not just bad luck that can cause a lip-out, but precise physics involving speed and spin. Dr. John Hogan is a professor emeritus in the School of Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology at the University of Bristol in the UK. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, and thanks to having me on. For all the non-golfers out there, what excrues?

exactly is a lip-out. Okay, so you are a golfer, you've got a three-foot putt to make, and all the crowd is watching you, and you gently put the ball towards the hole. It looks as if it's going into the hole, and it races round the rim of the hole, and it refuses to go in, and it comes out in some other direction, maybe 180 degrees, 270 degrees from its original direction. Occasionally, even, it can go partly into the hole and pop back out of the way. again. And unfortunately, that is not a putt of the ball. You have to try again. Okay, so there's two kinds. One where it stays up on the rim and one where it dips down and comes back out again. Why did you want to try your hand at solving this mystery from an

engineering point of view? Are you a golfer? No, I'm not a golfer at all. It's one of these things which you see a lot. And my colleague and I were thinking, well, could we explain this using mechanics rather than just think of it as a kind of random event? And so we got to get to having done some work on basketball, and we decided to use mechanics, which is the study of the action, the motion of bodies and the action of forces, and off we went. So tell me then, how did you investigate it? Okay, so basically you start out with Newton's Laws of Motion, and you have them from the point of view of the ball rolling along the ground, rolling along the rim of the hole, and rolling

into the hole itself. And we managed to put those equations all in terms of the same variables, like the speed and the spin and so forth of the ball, which meant we could connect up the different types of motion. And after several months of doing this, we were able to discover the basis of the lip out. Okay, well, let's talk about the rim up where the ball doesn't go down into the hole.

It just goes around the rim and out again. What's going on there? Okay, so think about it the following way. Imagine you're balancing a pencil on the end of your finger. Okay. Now, you can kind of do it if you're lucky, but usually what happens is it falls one way or the other. Now imagine that you've got your pencil balanced on your finger, and you're rotating your finger in a circle. So the point of the pencil represents the point of the ball on the rim, and the circle is the whole of the golf hole.

That's more or less what we discovered is what we called a golf. balls of death. These are the motions which exist but are never really obtained because you have to hit the rim of the golf hole with exactly the right speed in exactly the right place. And of course, you never actually do that to get that sort of motion. And so it just goes around the rim of the hole and then pops back out again. So it could go either way. As it approaches the rim, it could fall in or out. Exactly. What determines that? Okay. So imagine you're hitting the ball right into the the center of the hole, okay? It will just creep up to the hole and pitch into the hole. But so it's momentum going forward. It's, it, it's speed going into the hole is turned into

pitching into the hole. Now, imagine you don't quite hit it directly into the, um, the center of the hole. You hit it to the side. You've still got a bit of forward momentum, but you've also got a bit of pitching momentum into the hole. And it's the, it's a competition between these two. if the competition is exactly equal between the momentum going forward and the momentum going into the hole, you get this motion around the rim. If you slightly get the balance out, and most golfers will do that, it either scoots past the hole, zooming along the rim, or it goes into the hole. And it's this balance between the two momentum that's deciding this unfortunate turn of events.

Okay, so the momentum wants to keep the ball going in a straight line. the pitch, as you say, is when it leans over to go downwards into the hole. That's exactly it. And whichever one wins, that determines where the ball goes. But if the momentum wins, it keeps going. Exactly right. It's simply a competition between the two. And if the momentum of the putt is more enough,

it'll just scoot around the side of the hole and disappear off out, away, back onto the green. If on the other hand, it's not hit so hard, then the pitch into the hole is sufficient to get you a, successful put. Oh, okay. So a softer put. If it's slower coming in, it has a better chance of falling in the hole. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's one of our, I mean, I'm not a golfer, so you've got to ask golfers whether this is true, but it would seem to me that you don't want to hit it too hard. Okay. Now, what about this other case where the ball goes down into the cup, then pops back out

again? How can that happen? Okay, so that's a weird one. So, and I imagine you've got your ball off the rim and it's going into the hole. There are sets of circumstances where it goes along the side of the hole and starts to spin, okay? And that means it's spinning about an axis which is perpendicular to the side of the hole. Then the process was reversed where the spinning stops, the ball comes back up again and pops out again. So it's a bit like a skateboarder. If you watch a skateboarder standing on the lip of about to start their run, they don't. dive down and they come back up again the other side of the ramp. It's a bit like that. Oh, I see. So the ball is riding the walls of the hole. It's riding the wall. It's a bit like

the wall of death, but it's kind of starting at the top of the wall of death and going down a little bit and coming back out again. And while of death. That's where they do it with motorcycles. They ride around the walls. They're with motorcycles. Yeah, exactly. It's a funny set of circumstances, but it does happen. Now, now if the ball touches the bottom of the hole, what happens then, then usually you have a different set of equations then you've got to, you lose energy on impacting you quite often hear the ball eating the bottom, especially if you have a lining of the hole which is made of plastic or something, then that absorbs an awful lot of the of the energy of the ball and it stops and it stays in the hole. So that's a successful part, you know,

so you managed to do it. It must be so frustrating to actually see the ball go in, think you made the shot and then it pops back out again. Well, if you go onto YouTube, you can see the reactions of several golfers doing it. And, you know, I think a lot of it's bleaked out. I do have an awful lot of sympathy for them because, you know, golfers are so professional. They're so, they spend an awful lot of time practicing. And sitting at the last moment is this physics waiting to jump on them and ruin their day. So what can golfers do if they want to avoid?

this ball of death, as you call it. It's obviously to aim for the dead center of the hole. And then at the second need to make sure you arrive at the edge of the hole with as little speed as possible. You don't want this momentum going forward to dominate the dynamics. You just want to arrive there and the golf ball just sits at the edge of the rim of the hole and just falls in. And then you're done.

Just one last thing. Now that you've figured out the physics of the golf put, are you going to take up golf yourself now? I think it told me that the decision not to take up golf was a very good one. Dr. Hogan, thank you so much for your time. Okay, nice to talk to you, and good luck with your program. Dr. John Hogan is a professor emeritus in the School of Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology at the University of Bristol in the UK. Globally, snake bites are a huge problem. Estimates suggest that over 5 million people, people are bit every year. And of those bitten, 140,000 people are killed. And many more are left

permanently disabled, either through paralysis, limb amputations, bleeding disorders, or irreversible kidney damage. Only about 15% of these reptilian predators are a danger to humans, but those that are owe a lot of their evolutionary success to their speed and agility in how they unleash their attacks, and by the toxins they expel in their hypodermic needle-like fangs. In a recent study, scientists in Australia wanted to understand what exactly happens when snakes strike. So they got high-speed video cameras, ballistic

gel, and 36 species of angry, venomous snakes to make science magic happen. Dr. Alistair Evans is a zoologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He co-led the study. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi Bob, thanks for having me. What was your team hoping to learn with this high-speed video footage? A lot of my research is focused on feeding in animals

and how animals use their teeth to feed. So here we were trying to find out how the diversity of snakes are using their fangs to first capture their prey and then inject their venom. So by using high-speed cameras and multiple cameras from different angles, we can 3D reconstruct the movement of the snakes as they get closer and then finally bite into their prey. Well, you're dealing with venomous snakes here. So how do you safely capture video of all the snake attacks?

Well, what we do is we went to a venom production facility, which is in Paris, and they have over 50 species that they regularly use to milk to get the venom from them. So we set up an experimental arena that's basically glass on five, sides, about a meter long each side, and a snake inside that. And so we could position the cameras so they would see the snake strike across the picture. And we present each snake with a long metal stick. And on the end of that is a block of silicon gel. And what made the the silicon gel attractive to the snakes? Well, partly because it was there, and partly because we heated it up to 38 degrees.

Oh, they just go after the heat? You didn't have to bait it with food or anything? We didn't bait it with food, no. So what did you see when you looked at the high-speed footage? Well, we can see the dramatic strike that many of the snakes have, so they tend to be sitting there in a coiled position or with their head up. And as the strike happens, many of them will start moving just the front part of their body and their head towards the prey. and I guess the most dramatic ones were the vipers where they have fangs that are able to fold out of their mouth.

So they fold back to be lying against the roof of their mouth essentially. And as they open their mouth, those fangs fold down until they're finally sticking out sort of at right angles to their jaw and ready to bite. And some of them, because they're milked quite frequently, they actually drip venom from their fangs as they are approaching the prey. and it's quite a scary sight, really. Wow. So the fangs are sticking out like a couple of daggers that go down into the prey? Essentially, yes, still pointing down

like we expect to most fangs, but otherwise they were folded back in the mouth. Do all snakes have that? Do their fangs work the same way? No, no. So the other groups of snakes that we looked at, the other families, the lopards have fixed fangs at the front of their mouth.

So I guess that's what you'd normally expect snakes to have. So the alapids are ones that are found in Australia and in Asia. So their fangs tend to be shorter than the fangs of the vipers because they can't fold them back. And if they got much longer, they would get in the way. So vipers can get very long fangs because when they fold them back out of the way, they're not in the way. And then the third family, colubrids, they have fangs that are towards the back of their mouth, which seems like a strange place to put fangs, but I guess that's what evolution does sometimes, finds a solution that's not necessarily seems obvious, but when those types of snakes then strike, they have to open their mouth

sufficiently to be able to get the prey in towards the back of the mouth where the fang is. And then once they've got their jaws on their prey, they move their heads a bit side to side, essentially dragging their teeth over the surface of the skin of the prey and cutting it. And that seems to then enable the venom to be injected more easily into the prey. Whoa. That sounds so good. Well, why would the attack strategies of these different species differ so much? Well, we know that many snakes have different hunting styles, essentially.

So we looked at snakes that are ambush predators, so they sit behind bushes or trees, and they jump out just as their prey is getting close enough. We have pursuit hunters, so they're ones that are more likely to chase. their prey and others that they're a lot more passive in their hunting. So we compared to the maximum speed across those hunting styles and we found that the ambush hunters were the fastest. And so that's not surprising at all given that they're the ones that really have to be able to catch their prey by surprise and only move a short distance. So that short distance means that they can concentrate their speed to be able to get as fast as possible. We also found that those snakes that fed on mammals

were the fastest. So mammals have a high metabolic rate and they have a higher response time. The nervous system means that they can respond to cues much faster. And so those species that concentrated on mammal prey tended to be faster as well. Now when you say fast and slow, how fast are you talking about here? So the vipers tended to be the fastest. The fastest moved about four and a half meters per second, which is roughly the length of a room in a second. The second family called the Lappids. They tended to be quite fast on the whole. We also looked at Calubrids, and they tended to be quite slow, and they move their whole body much slower in order to get to their prey. What can we learn about snake fangs and how they work with this

footage? Well, the earliest work that was trying to understand the very quick movement of snakes was trying to say, well, are snakes able to position their head so that their fangs strike first or does their lower jaw strike first or are they sort of opening their mouth? So we collected information on which part of the snake hit the prey first to find it if it was the fangs or the back of the mouth or the jaw or sort of all of it together. And so now we have a very good idea for the different species and the families of how that difference happens. So is there anything we can learn from this to perhaps prevent snake bites? I think there. I think there, key thing that we find here is how very fast they are for many snake species. And I mean,

there's obviously a lot of good advice out there about making sure that you don't get bitten by snakes. And mostly that is we should just stay away from snakes. They have their own territories often. They have their own locations. And they're going to be much more scared of us than we are of them. They're really quite small and low to the ground. And so if we leave them alone, they are really almost never going to approach us or try to bite. The main place that people are bitten is on the hand, which tells you that they were stretching out to, you know, move the snake in some way, or poke the snoke, and that's how you get bitten.

And what we can really tell is that we will never move faster than a snake. Those snakes are moving faster than our bodily reactions, our nervous system and our muscles can react to move out of the way. Dr. Evans, thank you so much for your time. No problem. Thanks a lot. Dr. Alistair Evans is a zoologist at Monash University in Australia. On top of how blisteringly fast they move, another reason snake bites can be so deadly is because the anti-venom for those bites is costly to make and difficult to obtain.

Each snake species needs a different anti-venom to counteract what may otherwise be a lethal bite. So getting it wrong can make the difference between like. type and death. But now a group in Denmark has come up with a potent, broad-spectrum anti-venom cocktail that they say can cover 17 of the most lethal kinds of snakes. Mr. Nick Berlett is a PhD student in the Antibody Technologies Group at the Technical University of Denmark. He's part of the team behind the work. Hello and welcome to our program. Hello, Bob. Now, before we get to your study, tell me how we currently make anti-venoms that you thought you could improve on. Yeah, so antivenoms have been around for a long time since 1895, actually, when it was invented.

And since then, the process has been that we immunized large animals, like, for example, horses, with the phenoms of one or several snake species for a long period of time, so that this animal can develop antibodies against the toxins present in these phenoms. And then the blood of these animals is collected, the antibodies are purified out of it, and then these antibodies are injected into humans to save their lives. Wow. So when you get an anti-venom, you're getting horse blood into you, basically. Basically, yes.

Very pure, though. They're purified, but, yes, horse antibodies, for sure. Well, how effective are they at reversing the effects of a bite? So if you get to the clinic in time and you get the right antivenom, then they are definitely life-saving. But they have flaws as well. They have, first of all, batch-to-batch variability. So not every horse reacts to this immunization of venom is the same way.

In a way, it's similar to how not every human reacts to vaccinations the same way. Then, secondly, we are injecting horse antibodies into humans, like we mentioned before. And your immune system will recognize those as foreign. It has the potential of creating side effects where your immune system starts attacking the antivenom as well. And maybe even allergic reactions can occur. And then thirdly, for example, There is a limited broad species coverage, so you really need to know which snake bit you. And not everybody can do that.

So very often you need to actually kill the snake and bring it to the hospital to show which snake bid you so that you get the right antivenom to save your life, for example. Well, take you through your work. What makes your antivenom different from what we're getting from horses? So what we did was we wanted to find nanobodies. And these nanobodies are very special types of antibodies. They are antibody fragments that originate from animals in the camel family. So, for example, llamas and alpacas have these special antibodies.

And we engineered these nanobodies, which are both smaller and more stable than ordinary antibodies in current antivenoms. And we developed them to bind very strongly and very precisely to many different but similar toxins. And in this way, we enable our antivenom to neutralize the venom of a lot of different snakes species from the same region. So you're using a part of an antibody rather than the whole thing? Yeah, exactly.

You get the same effect. Yes. So what range of snake toxins does that allow you to cover? So we are targeting seven toxin families. So we have neurotoxins which would paralyze you. We have cytotoxins which destroyed the cellular membrane of any cell that comes into contact with, which leads to this very severe local. tissue damage. There's phospholipusate tubes which also cause these cellular membranes to be cut apart.

There are some dendrotoxins which can cause you to get spasms uncontrollably. So there are seven different families that we target with these eight nanobodies. Wow. Well, how are these these eight nanobodies able to cover all of those effects? So what we did was we took two camelids, So one alpaca and one llama and we injected it for a long period of time with the venoms of the 18 most medically relevant elaborate snake species from sub-Saharan Africa. And that took us one and a half years where we immunized these llamas and alpacas, which have these special antibodies. So then we took their blood and took the DNA for their antibodies.

And then we basically tried to fish out which ones were broadly neutralizing these toxic families. So in our case we had to use animals once in our production method, whereas the current animal-derived antivenoms, they need to keep using animals all the time. Oh, well, how do you produce them if you don't use the animals? So we can produce it in either bacteria or yeast in large bioreactors. That sounds a bit abstract, but maybe you can think of these large tanks where we ferment beryn, we can perform it something similar, like a very big fermentation tank. Wow. Well, how well does it work? How did you test it out?

So first of all, we tested in the lab, and then we got to this mixture of these eight that we thought had a fair shot, right, at neutralizing these 18 snake venoms. So we went into preclinical testing in mice, and what we did there was we used a standardized method that is recommended by the World Health Organization, where you take your anti-venom, and then you take the venom that you want to test it on. you mix it together and then you inject it intravenously into a mouse and then you see and observe if the mouse dies or not which is quite brutal I may add

but it has to be done because I hardly know of anyone who is willing to volunteer to just try and see if they survive a snake bite so this is very important and we did this for all the 18 snake phanoms and we found that for 17

out of these 18 we were able to save all the mice. Wow. So what was your reaction when you saw that so many of them survived? Yeah, it was really a eureka kind of moment. Like a lot of high fives were given back in Denmark, a lot of happy faces. But we actually didn't want to be too eager yet because, well, I hardly know of any snake that premixes an antivenom with its venom before injecting it into you.

So we also wanted to more accurately simulate a real-life case of a venomation. where we would have a time delay after which we then inject our antivenom. And there we saw that for some it worked perfectly. So for some venoms, we saw that old demise survived. But it had a harder time with some specific venoms. So there is still room for improvement. But already seeing that 17 of the 18 were neutralized in a WHA recommended method was a very big thing. And we also tested it with one traditional anti-venom to have a benchmark.

And we were outperforming it. So it was really a cool thing to see. Now, you say that you can grow your nanobodies in yeast or bacteria. So what about the cost? Yeah. So we made an estimation. And what we found was that we think that by using these yeast or bacteria to produce it with, we think less than half of the current price.

Which is important for Africa? For sure. And not only Africa, also Southeast Asia and everywhere. it's really important to keep this as cheaply as possible. So another benefit of these nanobodies is that they are more stable. So hopefully you can bring these antivens more closely into the field instead of having to go to a hospital to actually get it. So that will also probably help reduce the casualties there, we hope.

Well, it sounds like there's tremendous potential here, but you've only tested this in mice. So how soon? How soon will you be doing human trials with this? So we are looking to obtain more funding to work towards these clinical trials. And with the right support, and I am forever an optimist, I would say two, three years with the right support. We can start trials. How well do you anticipate it working for humans?

So considering the cobras right now are very, I'm very convinced that with the mix of these eight right now, we can neutralize the cobra venoms. For the mambas, we will very likely need one or two nanobodies more before we can actually start the trials for those because there are some toxin families we might need to address still. But we are improving on that. But for the cobras, I think it already will very likely work. Mr. Berlert, thank you for telling us about it.

And thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you so much, Bob. And I hope you all have a nice day. Mr. Nick Berlett is a Ph.D. student in the Antibody Technologies Group at the Technical University of Denmark. Well, it's that time of year again. We're getting ready for our ever-popular holiday listener question show. Mark Ferguson from St. John's Newfoundland sent us a great question about the shape of fruit. Thanks for that, Mark. But we need more. So, send us your science questions, and we'll see if we can get an answer for you. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week.

to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca.ca. You can find our web page at cbc.ca.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 Livia Diring. Our senior producer is Jim Leibons. And our act. Senior Producer is Sonia Biting. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.