WBEZ's Clever Apes
By Chicago Public Media
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Podcast Description
“Clever Apes” is a nano-sized show with a cosmic scope. It tells the stories of the Chicago-area’s rich scientific community, its quirky characters and the fascinating, often mind-bending questions they’re out to answer.
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CleanClever Apes #25: Curveballs from space | Often in science, a new insight doesn’t fit in with the old patterns. That means something, of course, is wrong – either the fresh idea, or everything we thought we knew leading up to it. In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we consider two of these curveballs. One has already rewritten the solar system's history. The other seemed, for a while, like it might mean the universe is either left-handed, or shaped like a small doughnut.For starters, many of us learned in school that the solar system formed by a nice, orderly process. Tiny things gently coalesced into bigger objects, settling into this pleasant little arrangement of planets and moons. But now, scientists think it was probably a bloodbath, with would-be planets snuffed out in cataclysmic collisions. In some parts of the solar system, as much as 99.9 percent of the material that was once there has been completely ejected from the solar system.Mark Hammergren, Adler Planetarium astronomer and Friend to the Apes, is trying to recover that lost history. He’s searching for traces of planetesimals, a nearly extinct race of giant asteroids that were the seeds of our planets. Their story shows just how rough of a neighborhood the early solar system was. Jupiter, for example, probably lurched around like a bull in a china shop, its gravity knocking asteroids and planetoids into each other and, in many cases, out of orbit completely.The fate of those ejected bodies leads to one of the most evocative consequences of this model of solar system formation: interstellar space could be thick with “rogue planets,” whipping through the blackness. Some, says Hammergren, could even still be heated by their molten cores, leading to the speculative, but awesome, possibility that some could harbor life.Second, the story of a curveball that threatened to topple some very basic ideas about space and time. Scientists, including the Adler’s Chris Lintott, started several “citizen science” initiatives, which enlist the help of tens of thousands of people at their home computers to help sort through data. In this case, they’re categorizing pictures of galaxies from the Hubble Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. People log on, look at a galaxy and enter its shape, orientation and, if it’s a spiral, which direction the arms are moving. Before long, Lintott noticed that they were getting significantly more counterclockwise galaxies than clockwise galaxies. This was a little scary.There’s no reason there should be a bias toward one or the other, because it all depends, of course, on which way you look at the galaxy. If there is more of one kind than the other, that would have some very spooky implications (for example, the universe might be quite small and doughnut-shaped). It would require scientists to throw out well-established axioms about the universe.So Lintott and his team worked to get to the bottom of this crazy observation. I won’t give away the punch line, but let’s just say the answer caused Lintott to invoke this quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Click the “listen” button above for the whole story. Lintott, by the way, is a fascinating fellow in his own right. Besides his gig at the Adler, he does research at Oxford, hosts a long-running series on the BBC called The Sky at Night, and even wrote a book on cosmology with the guitarist from Queen.Anyway, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 1/31/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Another gut check | So we just finished explaining how the gut is our second brain. How to top that? How about this: Your gut is its own planet.The human intestine hosts an entire civilization of microorganisms – about 100 trillion by most estimates. That’s many times more than there are cells in your body. You may think you’re the center of your own universe, but in a sense you’re just a walking ecosystem for this teeming population of bugs.The good news is, most of them are beneficial to us. Our intestinal flora help us digest food, excrete waste and even train our immune system. That is kind of old news, but only recently have scientists begun to uncover just how central a role our microscopic gut workforce plays in our overall health.Here is one surprising connection – or rather, hypothesized connection: The gut flora may have a hand in breast cancer risk. Dr. Ece Mutlu of Rush University Medical Center is investigating this possibility. Click the “Listen to this story” button above to hear our interview with her.It goes something like this: As the bacteria go through their little lives, eating and excreting, they produce many different compounds. Certain bugs are involved with hormones, specifically estrogen (listen to the interview to hear how Dr. Mutlu started thinking about this hint: it involves sewage treatment plants). Some bacteria break down estrogen, some activate it. Depending on what food we eat, we might encourage the growth of some bacteria or suppress others. That in turn could lead to higher levels of estrogen exposure, which is known to increase the risk of certain kinds of cancers (at least in some people).This is still in the early stages of study. But it’s a hallmark of the new ways in which researchers are thinking about the gut flora. Science in general is good at identifying correlations (say, diet and cancer risk), but often less good at teasing out the mechanism behind it – the reason why some environmental factor influences a disease or condition. The gut bacteria are becoming prime candidates to make a lot of those links.I, for one, am becoming a bit fanatic about this subject, so expect more down the line. Meanwhile, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast (so you won’t miss out on cool interviews like Dr. Mutlu), follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 1/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #24: Gut feelings | In researching the human gut over the last few weeks, I’ve learned at least 10 things that have blown my mind. Here is one: Your intestines are your second brain.The gut has its own nervous system – called the enteric nervous system – that is highly sophisticated and can basically think for itself. Columbia University neuroscientist Michael Gershon, who coined the phrase with his 1999 book The Second Brain, says the gut can function just fine in a decapitated person. In fact, you can pull the gut out of someone, drop it in a nutrient bath in a lab, and it goes right on digesting.In the last few years scientists have been discovering all kinds of surprising connections between the brain in your belly and the one in your head. Many neurological conditions also have gastro-intestinal components, though it’s never been clear why. The assumption has been that the brain disease causes the G-I problems, but scientists at Rush University Medical Center are investigating a hypothesis that would turn that theory upside down.It goes like this: Parkinson’s disease patients seem to have unusually leaky intestines, which let toxic materials, like pieces of gut bacteria, slip between the cells lining the intestines. It’s possible that this could inflame the nerves and cause a particular protein, called alpha synuclein, to fold up wrong. That in turn could trigger a chain reaction of misfolded proteins that travel up the nervous system, burning “like a slow fuse” up to the brain over the course of decades, eventually causing Parkinson’s disease.It’s still pretty speculative, but gut leakiness has now been linked with a bunch of other neurological diseases. In general, the gut and the trillions of bacteria that live there are turning up as strong candidates to account for correlations that have eluded explanation. For example, scientists have long suspected that weight gain increases one's risk of breast cancer, but the reason why has been mysterious. Stay tuned for more on why gut bacteria could be the missing link: We’ll post an interview in a couple of days.Meanwhile, elsewhere in today’s episode we have a cautionary tale about what happens when we fail to respect the needs of our inner bug civilization. Antibiotics, in addition to killing infectious bacteria, also take a toll on our healthy gut biota, leaving room for an aggressive bug called Clostridium difficile. It causes an absolutely miserable, sometimes lethal, hospital-acquired infection that is reaching epidemic proportions in the U.S. It’s bad enough that some have turned to a particularly stomach-turning therapy: fecal transplants. Researchers at Loyola University Medical Center and the Hines VA in Maywood, Ill. are trying to save you from having to even think about that. We visit them and find out how.Believe me, I could go on … but I’ll spare you for now. As always, subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 1/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Skipping down memory lane | Memory can be a tricky thing. As we learned in yesterday's episode of Clever Apes, our earliest recollections are re-written in our brains every time we think of them. This can increase the chances of subtle or even drastic changes to those memories over time.We asked our colleagues to share their earliest memories with us and some interesting themes emerged: parental discipline, the birth of a younger sibling, and some memories closely associated with family photos. WBEZ producer Susie An was nice enough to share her memory of running through a sprinkler as a toddler. But is it a real memory or just a recreation based on the photo above?You can listen to her memory and several others in this podcast extra.My own early memory is of my father teaching me to swim at a local community pool. It is sort of a jumble of images and sensations in my mind. I remember jumping into the water, holding on to his neck for dear life, and being taught to hold my breath as we plunged beneath the surface.Join in the fun and share your earliest memory in the comments. | 12/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #23: First memories | I’m sitting at a picnic table in our screened-in porch. It’s my third birthday party, and I’m opening presents. I unwrap a Tonka truck, and drop to the floor to start playing with it.That’s been my earliest memory ever since I can, well, remember. But as the years wore on, something weird started happening. I started to feel less attached to the person in that memory. Now, I feel like I’m seeing the memory through someone else’s eyes, watching myself push that truck on the green astroturf carpet. I’m not even sure it’s a real memory anymore.This has been on my mind because my own son recently had his third birthday. It got me wondering what his first memory will be, and more broadly, what is the nature of early memories? How reliable might they be, and how important to the construction of our identities?On the latest installment of Clever Apes, we dig into what science has to say about early memory. Young kids actually have lots of memories that don’t make it into long-term storage. The phenomenon, called “childhood amnesia,” is not very well understood. But it seems to have something to do with the lens through which we see the world, and how it changes from early childhood (say, age three) to the more verbal period starting around age five or six. It’s tough to bridge that divide, and that may explain why I’m having a hard time connecting with my three-year old self.And there’s another reason: memories are made from networks of neurons in our brains. That wiring gets used for lots of things, and so with each new memory, the networks change a little. When we remember something, we effectively rewrite it. That means that in some sense, each time we reflect on a memory, we’re putting a little more distance between ourselves and the actual event. Recent research suggests we’re even doing this in our sleep.It’s enough to give a fellow a dose of existential distress. But there’s an upside too: A Chicago researcher has demonstrated ways that parents can reinforce and help solidify a child’s memories. If you listen to the show, you can hear me trying this out on my son, Ezra. I bribed him with M&Ms to get him to sit still.Watch this space in the next day or so for a collection of first memories from our colleagues here at WBEZ. You can also get it via podcast. We’re on Twitter and Facebook, too. | 12/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #22: Paper covers rock | Charles Darwin ushered in modern biology with his explanation of how different species evolve. But his work leaves us with a paradox: Why should dozens or even thousands of species coexist in a single habitat? The theory suggests they ought to duke it out until just a few winners dominate. And yet we have such magnificent biodiversity all over. More than 2,000 species of trees share a single acre of rainforest in the Amazon. So what gives?Listen to the episode:Clever_Apes_22_Paper_covers_rock.mp3The answer might lie in a game you probably mastered before you were 12: rock, paper, scissors. Any pairing of two species (say, “rock” tree and “paper” tree) will almost always lead to the weaker one going extinct (so long, “rock” tree). But introduce a third species – “scissors” tree – and you close up into a stable loop, where all three can coexist. This has been known for a while, and observed in natural settings among side-blotched lizards in California and bacteria growing in a dish.University of Chicago ecologist Stefano Allesina scaled it up with a computer model, and showed it could indeed explain big, complicated systems like the Amazon jungle or underwater kelp forests. In fact, you can have as many species as you want coexisting, with one big caveat: Strangely, it has to be an odd number. That means no fourth throw in roshambo, though “rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock” is safe.Dig even a little deeper, and it seems that rock, paper scissors describes a basic mathematical concept that appears in all kinds of systems, as shown in game theory. Whether it’s economics, political science or biology, any system where competitors have different advantages that can’t be ranked from best to worst probably has a little rock, paper, scissors tournament hiding in there somewhere.Incidentally, actual rock paper scissors tournaments have been gaining steam, thanks largely to the efforts of the World Rock Paper Scissors Society. If you want to learn how to crush the competition (and never change a diaper again! Oh wait, that’s probably just in my household), check out their strategy tips. You can also practice against a robot here.Finally, we inaugurate our recurring series, Ask an Ape, in which we answer science-y questions posed by listeners. Please weigh in with your own question in the comment section below, tweet us, post to our Facebook wall, or call our hotline: 312-893-2935. | 11/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #21: Secret lives of nuclear scientists | In pop culture, we tend to pigeonhole scientists into a few stereotypes: out-of-touch nerds (Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor), bumbling head-in-the-clouds types (Doc Brown) or obsessed madmen (Dr. Frankenstein/Moreau/Jekyll/Strangelove). In truth, research shows that the picture is a bit more nuanced, but scientists still have to work uphill to convince people they are three-dimensional people.Which is what makes it so much fun to pull back the curtain on the secret identities of a couple of local players in nuclear science. It would be one thing if their after-hours passion was playing in a cover band or tap dancing (both noble pursuits). But in the case of Marius Stan and Dan Pancake, these guys are entitled to some serious hipster cred.Listen to the episode: Secret lives mix for web.mp3Marius Stan is a chemist, physicist and computational materials scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, doing theoretical work and computer modeling on materials for nuclear reactors and such. He also has a recurring role on what might be the best show on television, Breaking Bad.Dan Pancake runs nuclear cleanup projects at Argonne, spearheading the technically complex work of removing radioactive uranium and plutonium from the lab. He’s also a chef and restaurateur, owner of a new (and well-reviewed) fine-dining Mediterranean restaurant in Berwyn.On this edition of Clever Apes, we reveal the secret lives of nuclear scientists. Just think of what other hipness lurks below the surface in labs and biology departments across our region.As always, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 11/8/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #20: Reimagining Robots | From industry to pop culture to the military, we’ve long been captivated by robots. We tend to imagine them as our mechanical mirror images – reflections of our most efficient, coldest selves. But some modern robots look more like a sack of flour than a person.In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we visit an accidental roboticist who’s reimagining the most basic concepts of robotics. He’s taken the same principle that makes a vacuum-packed bag of coffee hard and bricklike, and translated it into a robot that might one day pick up your toddler’s toys or collect intelligence from an enemy bunker.Listen to the episode: Robots episode WEB.mp3The concept is called jamming, and it’s really simple. Suck the air out of a bag of granular material, and you reduce the room around each grain just enough that it can’t move past its neighbors. The whole thing seizes up, and behaves like a solid. Let out a little air, and it liquefies again. This works for ground coffee, ball bearings, molecules, even big objects like cars in a traffic jam.Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago recognized the power of that phenomenon. You can effectively change a material from solid to liquid and back again without having to melt or freeze it. And it’s dirt cheap: indeed, you could use actual dirt. This probably has a ton of applications no one has thought of, but one of them that’s now underway is a soft robot. Jaeger, along with the company iRobot and colleagues at the University of North Carolina and Cornell University, are developing prototypes of a squishy soccer ball that can move, change shape, and may soon be able to pick up almost anything. It’s a fundamental change in thinking about robots. Instead of using “smart” components (like little nanobots equipped with microprocessors), Jaeger is making a shapeshifting robot with dumb particles of sand or plastic beads. The smarts emerge when all those particles work together.After dropping in on Jaeger’s lab (one of the more fun, freewheeling physics labs you’re likely to encounter), we pay a visit to the Chicago Area Robotics Club. There, robot enthusiasts are trying to harness robots’ inherent awesomeness to promote science and technology among young people. They’re also working on a curriculum for Boy Scouts looking to earn the new robotics merit badge, which was just introduced last spring. Great idea, Scouts … but maybe some clever ape can help you redesign the patch, eh?As always, subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 10/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #19: Godspeed, Tevatron | The Tevatron particle collider shut down in September of 2011. Once the highest-energy collide in the world, it is survived by its descendants, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Tevatron was 28.If ever a machine was deserving of an obituary, it is the Tevatron. Housed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron spent decades at the frontier of science. Its collisions offered glimpses into nature’s secret places, on the tiniest scales and highest energies ever probed.Listen to the episode: Clever_Apes_19_Godspeed_Tevatron.mp3But last year the frontier moved off the Illinois prairie, over to Europe, where the LHC has dwarfed the Tevatron into obsolescence. Nearly anything the Tevatron could do, the LHC can do better. And so the government pulled the plug, with the Tevatron going dark on Friday, September 30. In this installment of Clever Apes, we take a moment to remember the good times – the tau neutrinos, the luminosity records, the strange-B oscillations … and of course, the one thing normal people may have actually heard of, the top quark. That was the Tevatron’s high water mark, discovering the linchpin of the Standard Model – a kind of periodic table of fundamental particles and forces.And we consider the real value of basic science. Quarks don’t end recessions. Neutrino oscillations aren’t going to solve global warming. But there are a few benefits that belong on the balance sheet in the Teavtron’s favor. One is that, like NASA, pushing at the boundaries of our knowledge tends to bring ancillary benefits. In Fermilab’s case, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and specialized radiation therapy for cancer are part of the accelerator’s lineage.But more basic than that, is that this kind of research into the nature of nature seems like part of the human condition – lab director Pier Oddone calls it the “inquiry gene.” Another Fermilab director – founder Robert Wilson – said it incredibly eloquently in 1969. He was testifying before Congress, and it feels so appropriate for this week that I include it here in its entirety:SENATOR PASTORE. Is there anything connected in the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?DR. WILSON. No, sir; I do not believe so.SENATOR PASTORE. Nothing at all?DR. WILSON. Nothing at all.SENATOR PASTORE. It has no value in that respect?DR. WILSON. It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with those things. It has nothing to do with the military. I am sorry.SENATOR PASTORE. Don't be sorry for it.DR. WILSON. I am not, but I cannot in honesty say it has any such application.SENATOR PASTORE. Is there anything here that projects us in a position of being competitive with the Russians, with regard to this race?DR. WILSON. Only from a long-range point of view, of a developing technology. Otherwise, it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country, but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending. | 9/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #18: Biological weapons | Just a week after the September 11th attacks, nerves still raw, America was hit with its worst-ever biological attack. The anthrax letters set off a new wave of panic, and reminded scientists how little we understand some of the world’s most dangerous germs. So the government chartered 13 labs to study these pathogens, as well as aggressive infectious disease agents. Given that the anthrax strain sent through the mail was thought to have been stolen from a lab, it’s no surprise that the new labs are highly secure.But Clever Apes got inside one.listen to the full episode:Clever_Apes_18_Biological_Weapons.mp3OK, all we really did was ask, and they said, sure. But it’s still kind of an otherworldly experience to see how people work with deadly bugs like anthrax, plague, MRSA and others.The Howard T. Ricketts Laboratory is run by the University of Chicago, and located on the campus of Argonne National Laboratory. In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we largely skip over the science (more on that coming in a few days), and consider instead what it’s like to work at a place like the Ricketts lab. How do you take a coffee break when you’re in containment? How does your pizza delivery guy get through multiple layers of security? Do you worry about bringing plague home to your kids?One exciting thing that we learned: the producers of the new movie Contagion consulted with the staff at U of C and the Ricketts lab, and even recruited some as extras. Biosafety chief John Bivona was one of them, and he says the film gets the lab protocols exactly right, down to the inspection stickers on equipment. He says the 1995 film Outbreak, on the other hand, is a case study in what not to do in a biosafety lab. People in that movie were wearing their respirators upside-down, for goodness sake.For another take on biological warfare, we head to the “wet lab” at the Field Museum, where Leo Smith specializes in venomous fish. It turns out there are many, many more of them than there are venomous snakes or scorpions, and yet we know next to nothing about them. Smith says the ever-growing catalog of known venomous fish could be a treasure trove for developing new drugs.So put on your Hazmat suits, and don’t forget your Cipro. Gosh, remember the Cipro craze?Meanwhile, subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 9/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #17: Deep listening | We may not think of it this way, but we hear in 3-D. Good thing, too. It’s how we know what direction to turn when we hear footsteps or where to look for our kid in a crowded playground. But this depth of field is almost impossible to capture on tape. That’s where we come in.On this episode of Clever Apes, we experience the mind-bending world of binaural recording. It’s an episode best enjoyed with headphones – preferably good quality over-the-ear headphones (though earbuds will work OK). The surround sound effect we demonstrate is lost when you listen through speakers.Listen to the episode here: Clever_Apes_17_Hearing_the_third_dimension.mp3And for this episode, we’re also offering a higher-quality mp3 for download.The magic of binaural recording gets back to why we have two ears in the first place. When you hear a sound, the sound waves hit each ear at slightly different times, with minute differences in intensity and wave phase. Specific populations of neurons in the brainstem are finely tuned to each of these variables. They can also interpret the disruptions in the sound waves caused by your head and your ear flaps. All this data gets plugged into the superior olivary complex, where the brain computes the sound’s source and location.You can replicate this effect by imitating the orientation of the human ears with special mics. Often this is done with something called a kunstkopf (German for “art head"), which is simply a dummy head with mics tucked into the ears. They look awesome and creepy. For our purposes, two human subjects – Bob Schulein and Don White – volunteered their own heads for this duty. The results sound unlike any other audio you’re likely to hear. It may be the best facsimile of what it’s like to experience live sound – it is a record of what the ears actually hear.Bob Schulein is the founder of ImmersAV Technology. He produces HD video and binaural audio of musical acts, and was kind enough to demonstrate for us in the Jim and Kay Mabie Performance Studio here at WBEZ. Here is a sample of a performance by the Michael Anropol Trio, featuring Arnopol on bass, John Moulder on guitar and Erik Montzka on drums.There are lots of fun binaural recordings available online, including the popular virtual barbershop. Also check out ImmersAV’s offerings here.Meanwhile, there’s still time to enter the contest to win a Clever Apes lab coat! Submit a science question for us to answer or suggest a name for our little purple ape friend. You can leave a comment here, enter on Twitter of Facebook, or call our hotline at 312-893-2935. While you’re at it, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast. | 8/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #16: New dimensions | Do you ever get the feeling we’re all living in an illusion, man? And, like, what we see is really just a movie, you know, projected from the edge of the universe? And stuff? Hey, we out of Cheetos?At some point, the line faded between adolescent/stoned/sci-fi speculation and high-order theoretical physics. The concept is this: All the stuff of the universe actually lives on a two-dimensional shell at its boundary. What we experience is a 3D holographic projection of that information. (And let me not be too flip – the theory is a product of very complex math that emerges from black hole physics. No bong hits involved, as far as I know.) If this idea sounds familiar to you, we did attempt to tackle it once before, in the very first episode of Clever Apes.Listen to the current episode here:Clever Apes_16_New dimensions.mp3Now, a year later, we chronicle how physicist Craig Hogan is looking to actually test this theory with an experiment in the lab. Not everyone believes he can do that. Scientists are digging so deep into the fundamentals of the universe that a lot of the ideas (string theory, for instance) may be impossible to verify in experiments. Meanwhile science, as you may recall from 7th grade, is all about testing hypotheses. So Hogan set out to do an end-run around the limits of our powers of observation by homing in on a little side effect of the holographic principle that we may, in fact, be able to detect. We’ll see if it works.We stick with math (but not the scary kind!) for the second segment in this episode. The universe may be flat, but music, it turns out, has three- and even four-dimensional shape. That’s according to Princeton University music theorist and composer Dmitri Tymoczko. Music, he says, can be described by mathematical relationships that, in turn, can be plotted in a geometrical space. Granted, it’s a funny-looking geometrical space, but still. The result, for something like Chopin’s E minor prelude, can be seen here: The idea here is not to turn art into cold data. Rather, it suggests that artists also have an intuitive grasp of the way sounds like to organize themselves. One cool consequence of this equivalence between music and geometry is that one can also go the other direction: You could imagine sculpture, landscapes, even dance being translated back into music. If you’re still confused, check out Tymoczko’s book or CD, to see and hear more.Finally, don’t forget to enter the Clever Apes lab coat giveaway! Just pose a science question for us to tackle, or suggest a name for our apey mascot, and you can win a custom Clever Apes lab coat.As always, subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 8/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #15: Trick of the light | Photosynthesis is one of the oldest biological processes on earth. Microorganisms figured it out more than two billion years ago, and completely transformed the planet. Sure, there was life before photosynthesis, but unless you like breathing rust, it probably wouldn’t have been your bag.Photosynthesis put oxygen into the air, fueled the plants that feed us and formed the organic molecules that would become fossil fuels. Life on earth is positively drenched in sunshine, and yet the basic processes of how green things turn light into energy are still shrouded in mystery.Listen to the episode here: Clever Apes_15_Trick of the light.mp3In this installment of Clever Apes, we consider why photosynthesis, a concept familiar to most third-graders, remains a puzzle to science. And we’ll find out how a research team at Argonne National Laboratory has begun to crack the code.Plus, how a Chicago scientist homes in on tiny atomic clocks to figure out how long it’s been since the sun shone on a specimen. That can tell you when, say, a layer of sediment was covered over, and consequently how old stuff buried in that layer is. The optical dating technology has already led to major discoveries, including one that helped overturn the conventional wisdom about when North America was settled.Listen up, subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter, and find us on Facebook. | 7/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Toolmakers | As we human beings have come up against our limits throughout history, we’ve managed to invent tools that can overcome them. Using tools we can fly, restart a human heart, photograph galaxies and amoebae. Tools are so central to our humanity that we used to think they defined us: “Man the Toolmaker.”That notion began to unravel in the 1960s, as Jane Goodall discovered that humans aren’t the only clever apes around. Chimps, too, make and use tools. It was an existential turning point: As Goodall sponsor Louis Leakey famously responded, “Now we have to redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”That line has only gotten fuzzier since then, thanks in part to work done on chimps and gorillas at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. In this installment of Clever Apes we’ll meet a few of these crafty primates, and consider what the tools can teach us about the toolmakers.Listen here:Clever_Apes_Toolmakers.mp3Then we’ll pivot to another tool that probes – in this case, one that analyzes art (and, it turns out, artists). It’s an X-Ray fluorescence spectrometer, but we prefer to call it the “science gun.” We see it in action at the Art Institute of Chicago, thanks to conservation scientist Francesca Casadio.Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, find us on Facebook. | 6/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #13: Origin stories | Say the original Declaration of Independence burned up. No problem, you might think – we have pictures of it. But then say someone discovered that a word had been scratched out and replaced. Without the original document to examine, we might never know what that discarded word was … or how close we came to being a nation founded on the right to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of waffles.”Clever_Apes_13_Origin_Stories.mp3There’s power in the original – whether it’s a document, the mold of a famous sculpture, or the standard of a common measurement, like the kilogram.Scientists who name a new species keep an artifact of its origin. It’s called the holotype – the standard by which a new species (or genus or subspecies) is designated. It turns out there are a whole bunch of these locked away in secure cases in Chicago – more than 500 just for mammals. It’s like a tiny National Archives of biology.On this round of Clever Apes, we consider origins, from the concrete example of a monkey holotype, to the murk of the beginnings of consciousness. On that point, we check in with Malcolm MacIver of Northwestern, whom we visited last year to hear a choir of singing fish he helped create. Those fish inspired his theory on the origins of consciousness, which he first laid out in several blog posts. He dates it back to our emergence from the primordial oceans, when all of a sudden we could begin to see much farther. That meant more time to plan, to consider possible futures. And that, by at least one formulation, is the essence of consciousness.As always, subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, find us on Facebook. | 5/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #12: Seeking the grail | Scientists love a quest, and so does the media. Just about every field has some “holy grail” or other. A database search for just the last six months shows about a thousand instances of this phrase popping up in relation to science. They refer to: stem cells, a zebrafish gene switch, a pregnant sturgeon, vegetation structure data, a fabricated brain, variable valve timing in combustion engines, tolerance-immune drugs, lab chimps and a recipe for royal jelly. Among many, many others.Remember the good old days, back in ancient Rome, when there was just one grail to worry about? It's become enough of a cliché, in fact, that the prestigious journal Nature has supposedly banned its use (though see the royal jelly link above to disprove that one). But the idea of the holy grail still can provide a little window into how science works. On this week's Clever Apes, we consider two cases that have something to teach us about the way cutting-edge science gets done.Clever_Apes_12_Seeking_the_grail.mp3The first example may qualify as a quest worthy of Quixote: cold fusion. This is energy produced by nuclear fusion, achieved not in a bomb or a stellar furnace, but at room temperatures. There are some pretty rigid laws of nature that make this particular grail seem unattainable. But it sure is tantalizing: cheap, clean, abundant energy from something like saltwater.Cold fusion captured the nation's attention in 1989, when two chemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, shocked the world by announcing that they'd found it. Obviously that didn't really work out, but the story of the men behind that spectacle is a fascinating one, told in a forthcoming documentary film called “The Believers.” The title fits well with the religious metaphor of the holy grail, and suggests a revealing paradox about faith and science.Incidentally, the 137 Films gang's last movie, “The Atom Smashers,” was about another holy grail of physics: the search for the Higgs Boson, or God Particle. That one is still very much at the forefront, and new rumors about its supposed discovery continue to pop up regularly.Out at Fermilab, where they're searching for the Higgs, cosmologists are also trying to close in on one more holy grail: dark energy. That's the other quest we consider in this round of Clever Apes. At the moment, the stuff makes up more than two-thirds of the universe and may ultimately dilute us all to a thin soup of cold elementary particles … and yet we know almost nothing about it. Our story takes us to the labs and warehouses where scientists are trying to capture maybe the most enigmatic stuff in the universe. If it's stuff at all. Listen up, subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook. | 5/11/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #11: Deconstructing disgust | Last time around on Clever Apes we dipped into realms of science that some might consider disgusting. Now we turn to the science of disgust itself.Clever_Apes_11_Deconstructing_Disgust.mp3What is disgust, and where does it come from? There are a few places where scientists can look for clues, starting with what disgusts people. We did a decidedly unscientific survey of kids at the Museum of Science and Industry, and the results line up pretty well with what actual experts say. They break out in a few categories: bodily secretions (blood, vomit, feces, puss), animals that could carry disease (insects, vermin), and certain foods (pot pies … don’t ask). A few common ones our pint-sized sample group didn’t bring up, thankfully, include corpses and incest.Then there’s the strong physiological response to disgust, especially nausea and facial contortions. According to psychologist Paul Rozin, that evidence indicates that disgust has its origins in avoiding toxic agents in stuff we eat. Evolutionary anthropologist Dan Fessler adds that the feeling then gets generalized to all sorts of other things, from sexual mores all the way up to our deepest moral convictions.One place where Rozin and Fessler part ways: Rozin, one of the forefathers of disgust theory, believes disgust serves to distance us from our most animalistic behaviors: dying, procreating, eating, pooping. By this view disgust is existential armor, protecting us from having to come to terms with our bestial nature. Fessler is skeptical of that argument (in part because of his own experimental results). He argues the disgust response has become a way to define and protect boundaries – from national borders right down to the boundaries of our own bodies.In any case, disgust seems to be a basic human emotion, written into our nature by evolution, shaping and shaped by our culture. Subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook. | 4/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #10: Yuck | Let’s consider the beauty of a seething swarm of carrion beetles picking clean the carcass of a dead rat.Sorry – were you eating breakfast?To a scientist, that grisly scene might evoke the cycles of ecosystems, the connectedness of life and death, and the elegant efficiency of a life form sculpted by eons of evolution to be the perfect flesh-removal machine. To most of the rest of us, it’s just gross.Yucky stuff has always been part of the mystique of science – alluring for some, forbidding for others. In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we consider the dirty work of science, from the “bug room” at the Field Museum to the lab where scientists analyze dead critters found in food.But we aim not to titillate. Oh no. In this part one of our two-part series, we hope to show how the yucky can also be elegant. So hold your nose and listen. Clever_Apes_10_Yuck.mp3Subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook. | 4/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #9: Demystifying dinosaurs | Brontosaurus? A sham. Triceratops? Awkward adolescent. Tyrannosaurus Rex? A total wuss. OK, maybe T-Rex was no wuss, but it definitely lacked dignity. It walked all bent over, may have been an opportunistic scavenger and possibly even had feathers. Feathers.There’s no question: The dinosaurs of our youth have been irrevocably humbled. And yet movies, kids’ books and advertisements still perpetuate all kinds of misconceptions about dinosaurs that scientists long ago left behind. So why is it that dinosaur myths die so hard?We consider that question in the latest installment of Clever Apes. Eminent Paleontologist Paul Sereno joins us talk about which dinosaur myths bug him, and why they might not all be bad. We’ll also sort out, thanks to Chicago comic Dan Telfer, which is the best dinosaur. Oh yes, there’s an answer.Listen to the latest installment: Clever_Apes_Demystifying_Dinosaurs.mp3Dan, as you’ll discover, is a dinosaur maven. Check out his web site and his CD, Fossil Record. Also, watch this space later this week for the special extended-cut, rated-PG-13 video of Dan’s performance, and a behind-the-scenes interview.As always, subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook. | 3/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Testosterone drives a hard bargain | Let’s talk a little bit about testosterone, shall we?Sure, it’s a loaded topic, tied up with what behaviors are supposedly “male.” But of course both men and women have it, and it seems to play a big role in the kind of people we wind up becoming. Testosterone is considered an “organizing hormone,” meaning the amount of it present in the womb has lifelong effects on how a baby’s body and brain will develop.Adam Galinsky is a psychologist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Being in the business school and all, he was curious how prenatal testosterone levels affect the way people act in a bargaining situation.Listen to the interview with Adam GalinskyTestosterone podcast (1).mp3But before you can do that, you have to measure how much testosterone someone was swimming around in in the womb. This turns out to be pretty easy.Look at your hand. If your ring finger is longer than your index finger, you probably had a lot of testosterone in your prenatal bathwater. If the two fingers are more equal, or if your index finger is longer, you had less. Now, consider that this hormone, which determined the structure of your digits, also has a big role in how your brain is built.Galinsky says it appears that testosterone is uniquely associated with a sensitivity to status. So he designed an experiment to see how people at a negotiating table behave when they perceive an insulting offer. A subject (the “responder”) is told that another person (the “proposer”) has been given $40 and can choose how to divide it up between the two of them. Some of the responders are told they’ll be getting an unfairly low share – just $5. Next, the roles are reversed, and the study subject gets the money and gets to decide.Here’s where the testosterone figures in. People with higher levels of prenatal testosterone were much more likely to retaliate with a low-ball offer, while lower-testosterone subjects were more likely to respond with a fair offer – even to the person who had just screwed them. So Galinsky says high testosterone seems to correlate with an aggressive response to losing face – though not necessarily to aggression more generally. And furthermore, the correlation holds for both men and women.It seems to me that this means that before negotiating, you should photograph the hands of the person across the table from you. Measure those fingers – and you may learn a surprising amount about how that person’s brain works.Subscribe to the Clever Apes podcast, follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook. | 3/23/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Brain in a dish | Embryonic stem cells are certainly a loaded subject. They come with built-in controversy over how they are obtained – a human embryo is destroyed in the process. But they also carry, in a very real sense, a kind of pure possibility.Hear the extended interview with Christopher Bissonnette:Bissonnette 2-way.mp3Stem cells have the ability to transform into any type of cell in the body, from liver to eyeball to bone marrow. How the cells of the body know what to turn into has long been one of biology's deep mysteries. But scientists now have a pretty good idea of how to give the cells instructions in the lab. But as recently minted Ph.D. Christopher Bissonnette will tell you, the process is inexact, time-consuming, tedious, maddening and, occasionally, hugely rewarding.Bissonnette toiled for some six years in a cramped little lab at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Earlier this month, he and his colleagues revealed the fruits of their labor: neurons made to order. Specifically, the kind of neurons that are among the first to go in Alzheimer's Disease. So how do you turn stem cells, these blank slates, into just one of the more than 200 cell types that make up the human body?According to Bissonnette, the answer, at least at first, is to essentially mimic the conditions the cells experience in the womb. That means, first of all, keeping them well fed in their little petri dishes. These ain't your goldfish – you can't skip a day and then double the food later. They're so demanding that after a bike accident broke two bones in Bissonnette's wrist, he went in to feed his cells before hitting the ER.The cells are then soaked in various growth factors, which are solutions that contain different proteins, for very specific amounts of time. This is supposed to approximate the chemical environment of a developing brain. Trouble is, you rarely know going in exactly which factors to use when and for how long. So Bissonnette tried a little of this, a little of that. Toward the end of each six-week growth cycle he'd check to see what he had. At first, it was a salad of dozens of different kinds of brain cells,. Then trial after meticulous trial, he refined the process over the course of years. He went from getting a handful of the kinds of neurons he wanted to a majority … and finally, to dishes made almost entirely of the beautiful, long-tailed, technicolor-stained cells he was after.Now Bissonnette's work has been taken up by colleagues, who are refining a process that can make the cells without using embryonic stem cells (though it's worth noting that the original experiments all used federally approved cell lines). They take skin cells, convert them first into stem cells, and then into the proper neurons. The hope is, eventually, that scientists could grow new neurons from an Alzheimer's patient's own cells, which could replenish the ones that have died in the brain.Listen to the feature story on this research. Subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook. | 3/16/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #8: Sense abilities | Our senses tell us about the world, but they also reveal a lot about ourselves. On the latest installment of Clever Apes, we find that research into cochlear implants helps us understand how all hearing is really both mechanical and subjective, machine and mind. Then we meet a mathematical neuroscientist (or would that be neuro-mathematician?) who has solved the equations behind visual hallucinations (hint: it involves a fun romp into quantum field theory! Oh yeah, and it also may help explain cave art and religion … more on that in a future post.)Clever Apes_110228_GS.mp3Meanwhile, as we discuss in the episode, cochlear implants work largely on the same principle as the vocoder (hear a fascinating history of the vocoder from our colleagues at Sound Opinions). This involves encoding sound – as in, ripples in air pressure – onto a piece of white noise. The result is that familiar robotic-type sound that lovers of Kraftwerk know so well. Dr. Valeriy Shafiro offers a fine demonstration of the effect at his lab's web site (heard only in Internet Explorer, I'm afraid). You can plainly hear how speech comes across much better than environmental sound.Another Rush University researcher, Julia Cheng, is doing work on cochlear implant patients' ability to appreciate music. Incidentally, Mary Callahan, the patient in the story, says she can really only appreciate music that she remembers from when she had in-tact hearing. She laments that she went deaf when Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" was topping the charts, leaving her musical palate very limited. Though I have to say that Lauper has worn better than I ever would have expected.Also, you’ll notice Clever Apes is a tad shorter this month than in past episodes. This is part of what we hope will soon become the new-look, twice-monthly Clever Apes, heard regularly during Morning Edition and via a more robust podcast. So don’t hate.As always, subscribe to our podcast, follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook. | 2/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Studying UFO's | In our recent Apes in Space episode, we profiled astronomer J. Allen Hynek. His career studying the heavens took a turn when he was hired by the United States Air Force in their official investigation into the UFO phenomenon. He became a trailblazer in the study of unidentified flying objects, also known as ufology. In 1973, he founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in a northern suburb of Chicago.The organization is currently headed by Scientific Director Mark Rodeghier who took over from Hynek in 1986. The recent economic downturn forced CUFOS to close its office and move operations to the basement of Rodeghier’s home in Chicago. We visited Rodeghier to learn more about the Center’s work and talk about the stigmas and other difficulties that ufologists face. | 2/14/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #7: Apes in space | J. Allen Hynek makes his cameo in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Few things have changed humanity’s self-image in quite the same way as human space travel. Whether it’s seeing that famous image of the Blue Marble spinning through blackness to the rise of UFO sightings, reaching space has rejiggered how we imagine our place in the universe.We begin this installment of Clever Apes with a remembrance of J. Allen Hynek, perhaps the best-known American ufologist … or at least, the best-known ufologist with an actual science background. He chaired the astronomy department at Northwestern University, and worked as a consultant on the Air Force’s official UFO investigation, Project Blue Book. Along the way, he transformed from skeptic to believer. As a debunker, he was the first person to write off UFO sightings as “swamp gas.” Later, as a full-throated UFO enthusiast, he invented the “close encounters” classification system. Incidentally, he consulted on Steven Spielberg’s movie, and even has a cameo. He also has a great beard.Next we consider what it would take to kickstart human settlement of space, and along the way we ask what it takes to get people to do big things. I mean really big. Like build a 10,000-person space colony within the next 10 years or so. Anita Gale is an engineer at Boeing who works on the space shuttle program, and she’s done some deep thinking about those questions. She also runs a contest for high school kids to design a plausible space settlement. We caught up with her at the International Space Development Conference in Rosemont, Illinois, to talk space real estate.Finally, we honor the contributions of one very clever ape to the space program. Fifty years ago today, HAM the Astrochimp became the first ape in space (see our earlier post). | 1/31/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Special Broadcast | Hey Clever Apes fans! We've selected a few highlights from our first six months and wrapped 'em all up in an hour long broadcast special. Why do kids play with fire? What happens when robots and theater mix? And why do some people age so well? All these questions and more will be answered (or at least pondered).The special aired today at noon and will repeat on Sunday 12/26 at 8pm. But just in case you miss it, you can hear it here or by subscribing to our podcast.And don't forget to follow us on facebook and twitter! | 12/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #6: Show me where it hurts | Pain may be the most immediate and undeniable of human experiences. And yet it’s not obvious what it is, or where it comes from. Aristotle thought pain was basically an emotion, located in the heart. Ancient Egyptian physicians argued pain was more of a sensation, and nudged its source up to the brain. By the 19th century, science was starting to get the hang of the nervous system, and proposed there were essentially “pain organs” that existed to convey pain signals from the body -- say, your stubbed toe -- to the mind. (Learn more about historical theories about pain)These days, scientists understand pain to involve all that stuff – emotions, nerves, the mind – all at once. It’s a complex experience, giving rise to pain in limbs that aren’t there anymore, to changes in brain circuitry and strange, super-senses, and even to subtle, almost lyrical characteristics in something as nasty as a bee sting.Pain has become a kind of portal into the inner life of the body and mind. In this installment of Clever Apes, we take a look inside. Listen here, or subscribe to our podcast. | 11/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: "No really...Your spouse IS a pain" | When we heard there was a study about the connection between marital relations and chronic pain, we couldn't help but think of classic TV shows where marriages are stressed by back pain. Archie and Edith Bunker from CBS's All in the Family seemed to fit the bill perfectly. The Rush University Medical Center study is showing how pain is as much an emotional and cognitive phenomenon, as it is a medical one. Dr. John Burns, a professor of behavioral sciences at Rush, is lead investigator on the study that measures how criticism from one's spouse can affect chronic pain suffering. He talked to us about his work and the difference between chronic and acute pain. | 11/18/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #5: Decoding science | Gordon's pez: Tensor glyphs baffle a spouse, who calls Clever Apes for help. (Image courtesy of Gordon Kindlmann)"I heard about your show and thought immediately of my husband, Gordon Kindlmann, who is a professor at University of Chicago. I would love it if you would consider interviewing him, mostly because I am hoping you’ll be able to explain what he actually does so that I can understand it and explain it to others.”This email is how the latest installment of Clever Apes came about. I took up Anne Dodge’s challenge, and attempted to understand and get across Gordon’s esoteric research — which turns out to be both practical, and, I would argue, even inspiring. Anne Dodge and Gordon Kindlmann look to bridge the communication gap. (Gabriel Spitzer / WBEZ)If you’ve ever felt like scientists speak a different language from the rest of us, this one is for you. | 10/25/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Light sabers and a fish choir | Malcolm MacIver with one of his weakly electric fish. He's colaborating on an art installation with Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim, called "Scale," opening in Europe. (Gabriel Spitzer / WBEZ)One of the things I've discovered meeting all these clever apes is that the boundary between science and art is a porous one. Science is a highly creative pursuit -- it depends on discovering new connections, making guesses about mysterious gaps in our knowledge and then imagining possible outcomes. In some ways, even science fiction is born of the same impulse as rigorous science. In that spirit, I'll be joined tonight on stage at Northwestern University by four preeminent scientists to discuss how their fields, and science in general, are portrayed on the big screen. It's called "Mutants, Andriods and Cyborgs: The Science of Pop Culture Films." We'll screen some great moments form sci-fi cinema, and talk light sabers, genetic master races, mind-wiping and, of course, robots. Still some seats left!One of the experts joining us is Malcolm MacIver, who works at the intersection of biology, robotics, neuroscience and engineering. Much of his work centers around weakly electric fish, for reasons that may not at first be terribly obvious. These animals provide a tailor-made model for studying neural responses to stimuli.And they have another property, which inspired an extracurricular activity. Click the listen link above to learn about Scale, an art installation made up of a choir of weakly electric fish. Visitors will be able to "conduct" the choir with a modified Wii-mote. It debuts next month in the Netherlands, but I'm pulling for a stateside showing soon. | 10/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #4: The March of Time | We've always assumed that cognitive decline was just the cost of a long life. But some people manage to sail into old age without ever paying a price in mental sharpness. These "super-agers" may have a lot to teach us about how the brain slows down and how dementia and senility work. They might even reveal whether there are protective factors against illnesses like Alzheimer's Disease. On the latest installment of Clever Apes, we dive into the science of super-aging. And we get to know one super-ager in particular -- a 93-year-old renaissance man who happens to be a leading brain scientist. His twin passions give him a unique perspective on aging: he's a world authority on a brain signaling network that is, among other things, implicated in Alzheimer's; and for almost 40 years, he's been fixated on the question of self-consciousness, and the nature of the I. Download the full episode here, or, better yet, subscribe to our podcast. | 9/27/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: A new tangle in our thinking about memory | The ol' memory banks tend to slip a little as we get older. No surprise there. It's so common that scientists have long believed some memory loss is just a normal part of aging -- perhaps even pre-programmed into our brains' lifecycle. But new research from Rush University Medical Center suggests something different -- that even mild cognitive decline seems to be connected to full-blown dementia. Rush's Robert Wilson led a project as part of the Religious Orders Study examining 354 brains that came from Catholic nuns, monks and priests. They found that gradual memory loss was closely associated with so-called tau tangles in the brain -- one of the pathologies that characterize Alzheimer's disease. Here's our news story on the finding, and above is an extended interview with Wilson.How you take the findings depends a lot on how you think about these issues connected with decline, dementia and death. Some people might be alarmed by it: that mild forgetfulness that I'm experiencing may actually be an early sign of Alzheimer's. Yikes! On the other hand, this could be good news. For one, it means that any future therapies that are effective against Alzheimer's might also be able to head off the low-grade memory loss once thought to be an unavoidable part of aging. And furthermore, by potentially helping to diagnose Alzheimer's earlier, this research may get us a step closer to identifying those therapies or drugs or whatever. On a related note, some people seem to be immune to the formation of those nasty tangles, and others form fewer or are less affected by them. Some portion of those people not only escape dementia, but manage to stay extremely sharp well into their 80s and 90s.These "Super Agers" raise questions about why it is that people age, what it means to age well, and what lessons might be drawn from such highly successful old folks? Those, in turn, are the questions that we'll tackle in the next Clever Apes: The March of Time! That installment is coming your way on Monday, September 27th. So set your podcast-o-meters now and tune in, too. | 9/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #3: Playing with Fire | It may be the ultimate symbol of human mastery over nature's power: fire. On this edition of Clever Apes, we consider why flames fascinate us. Eons of evolution have written fire into our DNA -- no wonder kids like to mess with matches. AUDIODownload this episode, or subscribe to the podcast. By now fire is an utterly mundane part of our everyday life. And yet it seems to hold at its core some bit of magic. So in explaining fire -- like the incomprehensible inferno that consumed 19th-Century Chicago -- we're drawn to the mythic, the otherworldly. This edition of Clever Apes puts a persistent legend about the Chicago fire under the microscope of science. Finally, we bring you stories of playing with fire -- just don't call it pyromania -- from Clever Apes listeners. Subscribe to the podcast. | 8/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: A mechanical fable of truth-to-power | Science doesn't always tell us what we want to hear, and our record of accepting unwelcome findings is less than stellar. We have been known to shoot the messenger; or at least lock him up until he concedes that the universe revolves around the earth. In this podcast installment of Clever Apes, we meet a Chicago artist inspired by the story of Galileo Galilei. Galileo's discoveries radically recast our picture of the known universe, and for his trouble he was denounced and arrested. Christopher Furman of Chicago Robotic Theater helped produce a play on that theme of outcast truth-tellers with a very unusual cast.Get more stuff like this by subscribing to our podcast, and tune in the last Monday of August for the next full installment of Clever Apes. | 8/5/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #2: The Shakedown | So much of science is about finding patterns -- repetitions that let us predict outcomes for given circumstances. The universe is full of these rhythms -- from the vibrating loops of string theory to the orbits of stars and planets to the pulsing of our heart. On this episode of Clever Apes, we delve into these deep rhythms. When you're walking and not consciously thinking "put one foot in front of the other," that's because little drummers are keeping time for you in your brain. If you want to see what the planet looks like deep beneath the crust, then you can use the earth's vibrations like sonar to scan the structures. And if you use beats and rhythms to crow about your lab, than you best watch out for rival science MCs. Speaking of which, in this episode you'll hear about the particle physics community's answer to Tupac and Biggie. Here are the videos, starting with the initial salvo by AlpineKat on behalf the CERN's Large Hadron Collider. And here's Fermilab's answer by funky49. Prepare for bloodshed. | 7/26/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes: Invisible Gorillas | What if during the World Cup finals, a unicorn pranced out onto the field. Or a woman on stilts appeared. Or, say, Wilford Brimley. You'd probably notice, right? Not necessarily, as psychologist Daniel Simons has shown. In the late 1990s, Simons produced a video in which players dressed in either black or white are passing around a basketball. Viewers were told to count the number of passes from just the white team. Mid-play, a person in a gorilla suit wanders into the middle of the frame, beats his chest, and walks off stage-left. Only about half the people watching the video noticed the gorilla "¦ the rest just thought they saw a very boring basketball game. (Fun fact: The original gorilla suit was used to frighten children in the name of science!)If this video sounds familiar, it's because that particular clever ape is now famous -- effectively ending his career as an invisible gorilla. But Simons, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, has managed to turn that notoriety into an advantage. He designed a new video, recreating the earlier one, but adding a couple of other unexpected events. (I won't spoil it -- check out the video for yourself). And he posed this question: would people who know about the invisible gorilla be any more likely to notice the other surprises? In other words, does expecting the unexpected make you any better at spotting it? Not so much. Simons reports in an article out today that people who knew about the gorilla were actually slightly less likely to notice the other unexpected events in the new video. This phenomenon has the schmancy name of "inattentional blindness," meaning if you're not looking for it, you may not see it. It suggests that our eyes are not simply neutral camera lenses -- they're full of blind spots and myopias, which change according to instructions from the brain. And, Simons says, it also implies that we have some hard limits on our attention. We can instruct ourselves to watch out for something specific, but we can't simply switch into "attentive mode," where we'd be ready for all comers. Something to think about next time I'm driving my car while talking on the phone and drinking coffee and practicing origami and watching the Daily Show on my dashboard DVD player. But I can tell you this: If a guy in a gorilla suit wanders into traffic, I'll totally be ready for him. | 7/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClever Apes #1: Seeing in the Dark | The apes are us -- the latest version of a critter that has evolved to be curious. This thirst of ours seems to be hard-wired -- to know ourselves, to find truth and to seek beauty in the universe. So much of scientific understanding can be traced back to the curiosity of a bunch of clever apes. Clever Apes is a nano-sized show with a cosmic scope. It tells the stories of the Chicago-area's rich scientific community, its quirky characters and the fascinating, often mind-bending questions they're out to answer. Today we get the first monthly dispatch from the frontiers of science, without ever leaving the Chicago region. "Like" us on Facebook, follow @CleverApes on Twitter, or email with feedback. And of course, subscribe to the podcast. Keep up with evolving science from Clever Apes. | 6/21/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 36 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
Fascinating
The brief podcasts offer intriguing insights into a wide range of scientific subjects to those of us who love science but are not necessarily very good at it. I am always left wanting more!
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