Quirks and Quarks

00:00 Chamo-me Shannon Maldonado, sou a fundadora da Yaoi, uma loja de souvenirs com artigos artesanais e peças selecionadas por artistas. Escolhi a Shopify porque depois de experimentar outras plataformas, esta foi sem dúvida uma das mais intuitivas. Para mim, foi importante pensar onde estaríamos no futuro. Todas as ferramentas para analisar as vendas, como a gestão de inventário, estão ali mesmo, no nosso dashboard. Comece a sua avaliação gratuita em shopify.com. 00:31 This is a CBC Podcast. 00:38 Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quirks and Quarks. Back in grade school, the first assignment of the year was often an essay, How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Well, to kick off our new season, we're taking you to the field to hear how scientists spent their summers. So today you'll hear from a wildfire scientist with a whodunit on his hands. His research plots in Newfoundland were destroyed over and over again, but then the culprits were caught on camera. 01:07 E aí é quando nós começamos a descobrir que não foi nós apenas visitar esses sites. Há blackbears, caribou, moose e seus cabos, rabbits, lynx, owls. Todos esses foram capturados em esses pictures. 01:23 E nós vamos treinar a terra terra em Ujbekistan em busca dos últimos Neandertals. 01:29 Você sabe, quando nós temos esses momentos, é incrível. É como estar em um time machine e ir para trás. 01:38 Plus, nós vamos estompá-los em Há-Wai, track um agressivo de doença em UConn, breed milhão de tiques em Nova Scotia, e nós vamos para Montreal para ter uma olhada detalhada sobre como os dias escorchando, afetam a nossa saúde. All this today as we launch a new season of Quirks and Quarks. To do research in the wilderness, scientists often have to contend with the quirks of nature. Sometimes that means weather delays or hiking long distances over rough terrain. 02:11 Other times, like in our next story, that means having to deal with animals, destroying your research setup time after time, year after year. That's the situation Dr. Lucas Brujo faced this summer. He's a wildfire research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service at the Atlantic Forestry Research Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Here he is. 02:40 I have a site that I specifically call The Problem Child. 02:44 Because every time I went to that site... It was damaged in one way or another. And of course, this is the site where I have to walk through a field, walk through a forest, walk across a bog. It's one of the more challenging sites to get to, so all of that combined is just incredibly frustrating. There are a lot of questions and a lot of sleepless nights about how you're going to make this work, especially since it's something that you think is very important. 03:18 Hi, my name is Lucas Perho. I am a wildfire research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service at the Atlantic Forestry Research Center. So wildfires in Atlantic Canada have historically been few and far between. Of course, all forests have the capacity to burn, and they have burned in the past, but... With climate change and continued warming and droughts, we see this change in fires on the landscape. 03:48 So one of the fires that I have been studying for the last few years is the 2022 Central Fires Complex Burn, located just south of Grand Falls, Windsor, on the island of Newfoundland. 04:02 As flames eat across central Newfoundland, people there have been told to be ready to leave at a moment's notice. The region is under a state of emergency. The threat? The worst wildfires in more than half a century. 04:16 In around late August, there was a series of thunderstorms that went through the region. And what's important to note here is that for a month prior, there had been a significant drought period, which, you know, for a wet maritime province, this was quite concerning and really disrupted our understanding of how fires and people interact on the landscape within Atlantic Canada. I thought this was an excellent opportunity to understand how these forests are going to regrow after these record-breaking wildfires. 04:53 But I also acknowledge the fact that climate change is going to be playing a factor in these post-fire landscapes. And we really need to have an idea not only to understand how forests regrow after fire, but also how they regrow in a world of climate change. And so I set out a manipulative seed and seedling experiment where I would walk out into the woods and we would establish these plots where we would put down seed of black spruce, red pine, eastern larch, a very common species in this area. 05:28 And then paired it with a manipulative temperature experiment where we essentially put little mini plexiglass greenhouses on the landscape that would raise the temperature anywhere from one to three degrees and do the exact same thing. So that was our climate change experiment. 05:49 So in the summer of 2023, the following year, myself and my colleague Brandon went out and we hauled these greenhouses out to about 19 sites across the three different berms within that region. 06:09 There were many times walking through the woods where I asked myself why I was doing what I was doing and why I positioned those sites so far from the comfort of We like to visit these sites upwards of three to four times a year to kind of have periodic check-ins. And upon arrival of some of our sites, when we were checking in with them, the OTCs or the greenhouses had been completely obliterated. 06:41 And by obliterated, I'm talking broken, smashed smithereens. The temperature sensors had been removed out of the ground. E tínhamos outras áreas que eu não sabia como eles poderiam chegar lá. 06:59 A componente da pesquisa de pesquisa era a verificar a snow depth variabilidade durante o tempo. E então, nós estabelecemos time-lapse cameras que pegam daily pictures cada dia. Mas também, eles capturam movimentos de qualquer coisa. E aí, nós começamos a descobrir que não era apenas nos visitar esses sites. There eram animais como blackbears, caribou, moose, e seus cachos. Rábis, lynx, owls, all of these were captured on these pictures. 07:33 And we started to realize that they were just as curious about these contraptions and potentially the research inside as we were. Going to the sites this summer, of course, three years into the experiment, I was prepared for some damage to occur. And I always like to say if five or less have been damaged, that's to be expected. And 11 of the 19 were damaged. 08:05 The sinking feeling that you feel when something that you've worked so hard for is not working out. 08:12 And trying to pivot in your brain while still doing the research is very heavy. And going from one site that's broken to the next site that's broken, the sinking feeling gets lower and lower. And then you go to a site that's not broken and then you go to five that are broken. But there are some quite lovely pictures that are captured when you see the amount of joy that potentially a black bear is experiencing by actually sitting in a greenhouse and playing with that plastic and taking that temperature sensor and moving it beyond where I thought it would go. 08:55 In addition, we think about the quintessential Newfoundland moose, who is very curious. Images of them, either all four of their legs standing fully within the greenhouse, not breaking a single thing, which is very impressive. Ou, por exemplo, um novo cão realmente dormindo e usando o OTC como um backrest. 09:32 We're starting to really dive into the details of the data that we've collected. Interestingly enough, seedling height growth, so those seedlings that we planted, was much higher, significantly higher in the OTCs than in the regular control plots. So this is saying that potentially a warmer climate might be more suitable, especially in Atlantic Canada, for seedling height growth. However, the survival of those seedlings was lower in the OTCs. 10:03 So there's kind of like this inverse relationship that maybe these warmer environments are great for height growth, but over the long term, we might be seeing a decrease in the amount of survivorship because of this heat. O que é isso? 10:40 Mas há tantos questões que eu comecei a descobrir, não só por estar em esses espaços e vendo vários componentes da ecossistência, mas também por esses fotos. Você sabe, talvez há uma questão de pesquisa, eu gosto de ideia de como se tornando a burn. Então, quem são os animais que estão visitando esses sites, como quando estão visitando esses sites, dependendo sobre o ano que é depois da burn. thinking about how much food is available in year one compared to year three. Those are all super interesting questions to me. 11:16 I'll say at the end of the day, yes, the research gets damaged to some capacity, but we're in nature. This is their habitat. We are only visitors to this spot. 11:29 Dr. Lucas Brujo é um wildfire research scientist com a Canadian Forest Service at the Atlantic Forestry Research Center in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Forty anos atrás, Canadians não tinha que se preocupar muito sobre os ticos e os alimentos que eles carryam. Os winters foram só muito para eles para survive. But thanks to our warming climate, you can find about 40 different kinds of ticks in Canada, including black-legged ticks, the ones that spread Lyme disease. 12:08 And while most of us do our best to avoid ticks, Dr. Nicoletta Ferroni is not one of them. Ela e sua equipe tem que estão coletando e coletando também, e coletando também. Dr. Ferroni é um bioquímista na Acadia Universidade de Wolffville, Nova Scotia, e o diretor do Canadá Tic Research e Innovation Center. Olá, e bem-vindo ao nosso show. 12:30 Olá, Bob. Obrigado por ter me. 12:31 Primeiro, dizem-vindo sobre tics. All I know é que eles são muito pequenos e eles bitem. O que são eles? 12:38 Tics are not insects. They are arthropods. They can be defined as occurrence. They cause many diseases because they carry pathogens. But they are quite fascinating if we think about their ecology, their behavior, their evolution. 12:57 They are almost totally blind, so they rely very much on olfaction to find a host and to get a successful blood meal. 13:09 Wow. When you say olfaction, you mean they smell their way around? 13:11 Yes, they smell the way around and they have a very unique organ that is found only in ocarins like mites and spiders, which is called the Haller's organ. And it's located basically on their front legs. In fact, ticks, quando they are hunting for a potential host, they like to climb on tall grasses and wave their legs in the air, try to capture any smell that can direct them towards a potential host. 13:44 Wow, that's amazing. So how have ticks spread so rapidly in Canada? 13:49 I would say the change in the climate and also the different fluctuation of the wildlife population really create the perfect condition of the tick densities to increase. 14:04 We know we can get Lyme disease from the bite of a black-legged tick. What other illnesses can they carry? 14:10 They have the ability to carry different pathogens, bacteria. 14:15 They can also carry the pathogen that causes anaplasmosis, which is a new emerging diseases that, unfortunately, we are seeing the incrementing cases in Canada, specifically in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Mas também podem carry protozoa, e isso é, por exemplo, babesia. E esse tipo de patógen deve ser tratado diferente do que usando regular antibiótico treatment. Mas eles podem também carry virus. 14:46 Por exemplo, o Poisson virus. And they can also cause some allergy reactions, such as the alpha-gal syndrome, which is an allergic reaction to mammalian products. So they are a nasty creature. 15:05 Wow, no kidding for something so small. Now, you've been busy this summer setting up the Canadian Tick Research Centre. How's it been going so far? 15:14 We have set up the lab. We bought all the equipment necessary for the pathogen testing. We have created a biocontrol area. We call it a containment room where we can safely keep the ticks inside to avoid any possible escape and creating a reeling facility that is ethically sustainable. 15:39 How many ticks are you going to be breeding? 15:42 The idea is starting with 1,000, 2,000 ticks, but the idea is growing up to 10,000 in the next five years. 15:51 10,000? 15:54 Yes. Wow. 15:55 What are you planning to do with 10,000 ticks? 15:58 So we plan to breed black-legged ticks and American dog ticks, which can be used for research purposes and can be sold to other researchers in Canada and abroad for performing experiments and doing research on ticks and learning more about ticks. 16:21 Well, how did Canadian scientists get enough ticks to study before you built this center? 16:25 The only reliable source of ticks is in Oklahoma, at the Oklahoma State University. But you can imagine that these ticks are coming from colonies that were raised and they grew in a different environment and different climate conditions that are not really reflecting what we have here in Canada with our ticks today. 16:51 Oh, I see. How much does a tick cost if you need to buy it from the U.S.? 16:56 One adult of like a tick costs five U.S. dollars at the moment. Yes, plus shipping fees. 17:03 That can add up, five bucks a tick. 17:06 Yeah, it can be expensive. 17:08 How do you collect the ticks for your colony in the first place? Where did you get them? 17:12 We basically use pieces of white cloth and we drag those cloths on the grass and we walk for 7, 10 meters. And then we flip the cloth and we collect the ticks because they can get attached to that. And we usually go on parks, on trails, inside the vegetation, the bushes. And sometimes we collect even 500 ticks in just one hour. And then we bring them in the lab. 17:44 And usually those ticks, these are wild ticks that need to be treated. We give them a bath. to clean them from any fungal infection or any external pathogen that they can affect them. And we breed them and usually through the breeding process, we expose them to antibiotics so they are cleared out from any pathogen and so on. 18:08 You're giving new meaning to a picnic now when I put a blanket on the grass. Exactly. 18:14 Holy cow. Once you get the ticks in the laboratory, how do you feed them to keep them alive? 18:20 We use an artificial feeding system where we basically use cow blood that we purchased from a Canadian company. We have created basically an artificial membrane that reproduces human skin or animal skin that is basically in contact with the blood. E os ticos são sete-se no outro lado. E com a mão parte, eles vão pierce-se por essa membrana, para que eles possam acessar o sangue. 18:51 Quando eles estão completamente engorged, eles vão se detachar e se derrubar. 18:57 E eles vão começar a lutar. 18:59 E como quantos gatos do você get de um tic? Entre 2,000 a 3,000. 19:03 2,000 a 3,000 de cada tic? 19:05 Sim. 19:05 Wow. Do you have some advice on what people can do today to protect themselves from ticks when they're outside? 19:12 Of course, it's always a good practice to wear proper repellent products. It's also a very good practice to wear proper clothing. And do always your tick check after you come back home. 19:29 Dr. Poloni, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. 19:33 Dr. Nicoletta Ferroni is a biochemist at Acadia University and director of the Canadian Tick Research and Innovation Centre. 19:58 This past summer, biologists from Wilfrid Laurier University traveled to the Yukon and Northwest Territories. They helicoptered into forests and braved bugs to investigate a fungus that's been attacking aspen trees there. It's called aspen running canker disease and the researchers first came across it unexpectedly when they were studying caribou habitats. 20:23 Aspen é uma espécie muito importante, não muito muito para humanos no norte, mas definitivamente para os animais. Aspen, especialmente quando é jovem e jovem, pode ser uma forma de nutrição para muitas especies. Eu acho que o hares, o moço, definitivamente, eat it. Então, é parte da maior ecossistência. Aspen é uma espécie mais grande espécie na América do Norte. 20:48 Mas ainda, pequenos impactos de como bem a espécie está fazendo a sua saúde e a sua abundância podem ter cascadinho efeitos durante o ecossistema. 20:58 Hi, I'm Colin Bonner, and I'm a postdoctoral fellow in the Forest Ecology Research Group at Wilfrid Laurier University, working with Professor Jennifer Bolzer. And this summer I was working throughout the central Yukon between Dawson City and CarMax and Mayo and Ross River. And then I also did a brief stint in Northwest Territories. So right now I'm working on a project in central Yukon called the Firescar Project. And it was kind of a big collaborative effort with the Yukon government and some First Nations to look at how caribou habitats recovering after fires. 21:30 Caribou require really old stands for lichen growth, which is their main winter forage. And as fires increase in frequency, there's less of these old growth stands available with really big biomasses of lichen to sustain caribou in the winter. And we had this collaborator on the project named Jill Johnstone and she is from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and she had recently attended a workshop there where they were discussing this new tree pathogen that they they're seeing in Alaska that's causing a lot of mortality in Alaska on trees. 22:03 Oh, there's one over there. 22:05 There's been certainly a lot of recent mortality out here. And it's consistent with the canker because you see how they're in the subdominant canopy. So they would be experiencing a lot of light competition. 22:21 So aspen running canker is a tree canker. So usually these are considered diseases that infect injured or already dying trees. Aspen running canker kind of immediately seemed unique in how fast it kills a tree. So it shows up in the tree as this bright orange linear feature that goes up and down the tree. And so the reason it's called a running canker is because it appears to run down the tree from top to bottom very quickly. E então, as it spreads horizontally across the trunk of the tree, it starts to also leave behind this band of black dead tissue, because the tree is just dying so fast. 23:00 Other fungal pathogens on aspen usually kill it in maybe 5 to 10 years, but aspen running canker can kill them within a season. It actually is quite interesting to look at because you see when you wet the trees, aspen is covered in this white fluffy powder that's considered a natural sunscreen. When you wet the tree, you can see through that powder and kind of rub it off. And you see this bright green tissue, which is the healthy photosynthetic aspen tissue. And then you will see a very stark contrast with this 23:29 bright orange diseased layer and then this black necrotic tissue that's already dead okay this one this one certainly has that orangey tinge and yeah if we if we spray it down here right i can see a little bit of a ridge further up the stem there yep i think this one definitely has it a lot of down stems here But look, see, look at that. 23:55 Oh. 23:56 Yeah, it looks like maybe that one succumbed to Aspen running canker. 24:00 Yep, I think so. We've got some ongoing mortality in here. 24:07 E então, é muito fácil identificar essa linha de cor, e tudo você tem que fazer é wet a aspen. É também muito fácil encontrar na hora da rainha, por isso mesmo. E então, nós pensamos, ok, vamos fazer isso, vamos incorporar isso no resto do nosso research, mas a coisa é, o resto do nosso research é rapidamente indo para sites. And so when we're randomly looking, we really don't find much aspen running canker at all. We find it in much less than 1% of trees. That said, when we go to our sites, we also developed this protocol where we were like, okay, we discovered that aspen running canker is not that common in Yukon, at least not yet. 24:43 But if we go out and look for it at our sites, how often do we find it? And then we find it more regularly. 24:51 So we got our helicopter time, we were all very excited to get in the helicopter and fly out to try and look for these aspen running hanker far from human activity. I would say the biggest challenge of our field work or the biggest inconvenience, we're not hiking on trails, which is what you imagine when you go into the mountains. We are going directly towards a point randomly placed in the woods. And so that means whatever's in our way, we kind of have to go through In the Yukon, a lot of these north-facing slopes are so wet that they have this really thick moss layer. 25:22 And so you're hiking uphill through really thick moss, and it feels like you're hiking uphill through soft snow. Aspen is considered by some to be a fire-resistant species. 25:34 Some even call it the asbestos of the forest species. 25:38 Crown fires spreading through a conifer stand will actually stop at an aspen stand, which is really important because it's these crown fires that contribute a lot to wildfire severity and spread. And the reason for that is that it does have these really moist leaves. It also has a lot of water in its bark tissue, in part because its bark tissue is very active, it's very fleshy, and it may be good at preventing fires because it's so moist. So, actually, Whitehorse is building a big ring of aspen trees around it in order to help stop future fires that may encroach on the community. 26:11 That's something that's being done in other places as well. If a lot of those aspen do start to die, then they become dead standing wood. And as Jen said to me, you know, aspen burns just as well as anything else when it's dry. 26:23 . . . . . . 26:53 Sometimes I can close my eyes in a picture that I'm standing in the middle of a Martian or a lunar desert, obviously with breathable air. 27:03 . . . . . . 27:31 This summer was a real scorcher, with high temperatures breaking records across Canada and around the world. 27:38 Extreme heat can be harmful to our health, and even deadly. This is true especially for older people and people with disabilities, like 74-year-old Montreal resident Hazel Kennedy. 27:51 I've always struggled with heat, but more as I got older because of the asthma, because I can't breathe with the heat, so I don't go outside either much. With the humidity, you're in more pain, so therefore your blood pressure rises. 28:08 Exactly what heat does to the body and how is still not well understood. And while Health Canada recommends an upper indoor temperature limit of 26 degrees Celsius, that number itself is based on limited evidence. 28:23 Which is why this summer Hazel is taking part in a multi-year research study to track in fine detail how those scorching hot days can impact the body. 28:33 I figured it would be good to know what's going on, you know? 28:38 This project is part of a growing body of research looking into heat and health, led by physiologist Dr. Daniel Gagnon, a researcher with the Montreal Heart Institute. Dr. Gagnon, welcome to our program. Thank you for having me. 28:53 Tell me about this research project you're working on with Hazel. What is it that you're doing? 28:58 So, essentially, it's a three-year project where we're trying to determine indoor temperatures when the body's physiological responses, but also our perceptual responses, start to change. And the reason why we're doing that is because usually when the body's physiological responses or perceptual responses start to change, it kind of precedes more serious consequences that could lead to health problems when it's hot. 29:27 What sort of people do you have taking part? 29:30 So right now we're recruiting mostly older adults. So on average so far, the mean age is approximately 70 years who live in social housing units that are managed by the Office Municipal d'Habitation de Montréal. And the reason why we recruit that population is because it's generally considered a group or a segment of the population that's vulnerable to the effects of heat on health. E também porque nós temos um bom trabalho relacionamento com a ofice, que expressa interesse em esse research e que tem sido muito, muito útil para nos ajudar a recrutar pessoas e promover a projeto dentro da residência. 30:12 Bem, aqui é Hazel, descreva-se o tipo de informação que ela está dando para este projeto. 30:17 Ok, quando você wake up in the morning, você check a color de sua urina. E aí você weighe-se. E aí, nós temos a blood pressure, nós temos a temperatura, e nós também temos perguntas no dia. Como você se sente? Você está tão warm, tão tão cold? E aí, no dia, você tem uma boa noite ou uma boa noite. E aí, você faz isso três vezes a dia. 30:43 Now, that's a lot of data. What can this information tell you? 30:47 Yes, so it's a very demanding project for the participants, and we feel very, very fortunate to have participants who are interested and involved and really motivated to get through this. So we really wanted to try and capture as much information as we could, which I think is really what makes our project unique relative to what other projects have done in the past. So what we try to do is really capture, obviously, the indoor environmental conditions, so temperature, humidity... 31:19 Mas nós realmente queremos combinar ou pairar isso com as muitas físicas e perceptual respostas possível. E a razão para isso é que talvez se nós apenas focamos em uma série de sete de measurements, nós não vamos ver subtle changes como função de, you know, diferenças em indoor temperatura. But if we can capture a wider range of responses, we might be able to pick up on more subtle things that have been relatively understudied previously in previous research. 31:53 Oh, I see. So you're trying to set the parameters here. Here are the boundaries where people are going to be affected and set the limits. 31:59 Exactly. And for good reason, there's been a lot of focus in the heat and health research space on things like hospital admissions or mortality. But that's what I consider mostly the tip of the iceberg in terms of heat impacts. Obviously, before people get there, they probably don't feel very well. It probably affects their daily activities. And obviously, that presents challenges. And that's hopefully one barrier that we want to overcome and provide some initial evidence on how heat affects people more on a daily basis before there's more serious health outcomes like ending up in the hospital or dying. 32:38 Well, what are some of these subtle effects that heat can have on people that we don't hear about? 32:43 Well, the first thing is we just, we're uncomfortable. So if it's, we've all experienced it, but we're uncomfortable in our home, doing our activities, maybe we don't sleep very well. So it can affect obviously multiple facets of our lives, including, for example, sleep quality and duration, our mental health, our mental well-being. And then it can progress to, let's say, subtle physiological changes. So maybe our heart beats a little bit faster, it beats a little bit harder. Maybe we're just a little bit dehydrated, but that accumulates over several days and that could cause a health problem. 33:19 And maybe our blood pressure is also affected. So we're really trying to capture a little bit of all of that. 33:27 Well, are there ways to adapt to the heat so that we don't experience these adverse health effects? 33:33 Absolutely. We know that the body has a tremendous ability to adapt to heat exposure. The only problem is that we need to expose ourselves to a considerable amount of heat and on a regular basis. For example, we just completed a project where we asked older adults, so mean age was approximately 70 years of age, to take hot baths seven consecutive days for one hour and a half each time. And the temperature of the water was 41 degrees Celsius, so almost like a hot jacuzzi. 34:07 And what we saw is that the older adults were able to adapt to heat exposure just as well as younger adults, so let's say approximately 30 years of age. 34:18 So it really showed that even with older or more advanced age, the body still retains its ability to adapt, but we don't know what the minimum stimulus is and whether we can do it in a more practical way that would be accessible to a lot of people. 34:36 Isso é incrível. Você quer adaptar a água e exposar a água. Sim, exatamente. 34:40 Então, é só que se queremos ser físicamente fit, nós precisamos de físicamente trein. Então, se nós queremos nosso corpo a melhor lidar com a água e exposição, nós precisamos de exposição. 34:52 Bom, então, se você tiver resultados de esse projeto, o que você espera acontece com essa data? 34:57 Well, we will obviously analyze everything and report back to Health Canada, which is actually funding this study. And what I hope is that it can help guide their recommendations that are existing. So whether it's a refinement or just supporting maybe the recommendations that are in place right now are just fine and hopefully it will reinforce it. And I think also, well, unfortunately, we're going to face more and more severe heat conditions in the coming years. So I think we need guidance now to help protect those populations who are most vulnerable to health impacts to hopefully minimize those impacts going forward. 35:38 Dr. Gagnon, thank you so much for your time. 35:40 It's my pleasure, anytime. 35:43 Dr. Daniel Gagnon is a physiologist at the Montreal Heart Institute and associate professor at the School of Kinesiology and Exercise Science at Université de Montréal. 36:03 Earlier this year, the Artemis II crew, including Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, took a trip around the moon. It was the first time humans left our planet's low Earth orbit since 1972. 36:16 Getting humans out to space, let alone to explore other planets and moons for scientific purposes, is a complicated, challenging affair, to say the least. So, we have satellites scanning celestial bodies to collect information about them. Mas como nós fazemos isso? Bem, para isso, pesquisadores têm que escourar os próximos do nosso planeta para encontrar os próximos análogos para o que eles encontram em espaço, para fazer algo chamado ground-truthing. 36:46 E para dois cientistas da Universidade de Western, o que esse ano meanto estompar-se em água em Hawaii para aprender mais sobre a Terra. 36:55 Here's planetary geologist Dr. Catherine Nish and PhD student Sashank Banga to tell us about it. 37:09 Sashank and I were, you know, just landing in Kona, got a message from our colleague that Kilauea was erupting that day. So I've been to a lot of volcanoes in my life, and I very rarely have seen a volcano erupt. And I guess that's a good thing, right? You don't want to get, you know, hurt by an act of lava flow. But the lava in Hawaii, I like to call it lava you can run away from. It's not that hazardous. It's pretty slow moving. You can kind of easily predict where it is. So if you're going to see an active lava flow, Hawaii is one of the best places to see it. 37:43 And we didn't get out there until the next day and it had already stopped. So I've still yet to see a really actively erupting volcano. 37:51 Olá, meu nome é Catherine Niche. Eu sou professor de ciência da Universidade de Western University. Eu sou um geologista de planetaria, que significa que eu estudia a geologia de outros planetas, principalmente. Agora, além de ser um geologista de geologia, você não pode apenas ir no campo e pôr-se com um rock e pôr-se com um rock. Isso é muito caro, muito risco. O único lugar que nós temos sempre enviados humanos é o mundo. So we really rely on what we call remote sensing imagery, images taken by satellites and telescopes of these other planets. And then we have to make inferences about the geology that's happening there, which, you know, can be difficult to do. 38:27 Three, two, one. Main engine ignition and liftoff of the Atlas V rocket with LRO Elacrosse. 38:38 So the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a NASA mission, which has been in orbit around the moon since 2009. So we're up to 17 years now. And I've been involved with the mission since it began. One of my first projects when I first started working on LRO, I discovered these amazing impact melt flows that we see all over the moon. So these are formed when an asteroid strikes the moon. It actually melts the surface and forms something that looks an awful lot like a lava flow flowing out from the rim of the crater. 39:09 E então, eu estava fascinado por esses impact melt flows, e eu estou tentando entender o seu propósito. E uma maneira de fazer isso é olhar para o fluxo de lava flows na Terra. Nós não temos nenhum impact melt flows na Terra, realmente. Eles estão destruídos muito rapidamente através de erosão. 39:24 So the best analog we have are these fresh lava flows like we see in Hawaii. Because it has some of the freshest lava flows on Earth, indeed, the day before we got there, it was forming new lava. This is brand new, fresh lava. And why that's important is because when we look at other planets, they're not subject to the same sort of erosional processes we see on Earth. So they're not nearly as degraded as the sorts of features we see on Earth. So we want to get the freshest, most pristine examples of lava on Earth. In order to understand what's going on on other planets. 39:55 And Hawaii has that in spades. So by understanding their roughness properties and how they tie back to radar images, that helps us understand the roughness properties of these impact melt flows on the moon using the radar data taken by LRO. 40:10 Hi, my name is Sashank Banga. I'm a fourth-year PhD student with Catherine Nish at Washington University as well. And I study LIDAR and radar remote sensing. So we use different kinds of instruments to study places on Earth that are similar to other planets we call planetary analogues and other planets themselves. 40:28 Well, Sashank is currently involved with a grant I have with the Canadian Space Agency. But the real reason I wanted him to come is because he's our lab's LIDAR expert. So I have a backpack LiDAR system, and he's the one who's the real expert at operating and processing the data from that instrument. 40:47 So LIDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. It's kind of like radar and sonar. So the concept is very similar, as in you send pulses of something out. In the case of LIDAR and radar, you send light. LIDAR particularly emits infrared light, the light that our eyes cannot typically see. And the LIDAR measures the time it takes for the pulses to leave the instrument, hit an object and come back, which is a fraction of a second or even smaller, and use that to measure how far away an object is to centimeter or millimeter precision. In this particular case, the LIDAR is situated on a backpack. 41:18 It doesn't look like a hiking backpack. It's a little odd looking. It has this metallic frame with a bunch of sci-fi looking things. And on top, there's a sensor that spins hundreds of times per minute and all the while shooting these invisible laser pulses. It's a little awkward to wear. It's about, I'd say, maybe around 20 kilos with the latter instrument on top of it. It's certainly not the easiest thing to walk with, but it gives us incredible data and it allows me to travel to incredible places. So I'm not going to complain about that. 41:58 So, in Hawaii, we made three stops where we took the lidar out. So, the idea was to get very detailed scans of different types of lava flows. 42:07 I'm sort of the preparatory person and the takedown person. So when he's ready to go, I'll help him get the backpack on. It's kind of awkward to get on by yourself. So try to be there for support. And then I take pictures of him when he's walking around to kind of get a sense for the landscape. But also, you know, it's just fun to take pictures of other people. 42:31 O ideal para fazer com qualquer LIDAR, seja drone-based ou pedestre-based, é o que é chamado de lawn-mower. Então, você faz uma espécie de volta e volta, mas, na realidade, isso não é muito possível no pavimento. Então, esta vez, fizemos loops. Para conseguir o máximo de cobertura possível, passamos em uma espécie de circulação possível. Então, começamos ou terminamos na mesma localização. 42:59 So, wearing the backpack ladder, which is a bit top-heavy, is kind of like, you know, giving a piggyback ride to a toddler. 43:05 And it's unpaved terrain, so there's a lot of undulations. 43:09 It's going up and down, sometimes you're walking on inclines, all the while trying to, like, try not to fall off, not just because you don't want to hurt yourself, but... O instrumento também é muito caro e sensível, então é sempre na sua mente. 43:21 Sim, você não pode realmente tomar longas. 43:23 Às vezes você tem que assistir o passo, especialmente no mais rúgido ou rúf lava flows. Não é fácil de tomar o passo sem pensar. Você tem que pensar em cada passo, senão você pode acabar com você, que não é uma boa coisa. 43:44 Well, yeah, now the real science begins, I guess you could say. So there's a lot of steps that happen after the fieldwork ends. First of all, you have to process the data. And then, you know, the data analysis can take several years as well, trying to really get into the nitty gritty of the data and trying to figure out what it can tell you. And then, you know, once we have the data, then you can do the fun work of trying to, you know... pull out the pieces that will help you better understand the moon and compare it to the radar data we have of the moon and the earth. And it's often very different from what you'd expect when you're looking at just a plan view image from say an orbiter. 44:19 I've been very surprised in going to places that I hadn't seen before. You know, you make inferences based on what you see from these images, but sometimes you're wrong. Often you're wrong. And so you really do have to go there and poke around and see what's there for yourself. 44:34 Yeah, so there's this proverb that goes, tell me and I forget, teach me I'll remember and involve me and I'll learn. So I think fieldwork really involves me. Sometimes like, you know, I can kind of close my eyes and like in a picture that I'm standing in the middle of a Martian or a lunar desert, obviously with like a breathable air. 44:52 And it's where all the learning you do in the classroom through textbooks and courses really clicks. 44:58 Dr. Catherine Nish is a professor of earth sciences at Western University and Sajunk Bunga is a fourth year PhD student also at Western University. 45:12 Whatever happened to the Neanderthals when they went extinct 40,000 years ago? 45:18 It might surprise you to find out we don't have a good answer for that question. 45:22 But there is a team of international archaeologists trying to figure it out, including a geoarcheologist from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. The researchers are casting a wide net across Eurasia, from Iberia to Siberia, to locations where Neanderthals were previously found to have lived. Their goal is to piece together what ultimately led to the demise of our distant ancestors, the Neanderthals. 45:53 Dr. Francesco Berna is a geoarcheologist at Simon Fraser University and the University of Siena in Italy, where he's from. 46:03 He's been getting his hands dirty this summer, digging for clues in the search for the last Neanderthals in his home country of Italy, as well as in Uzbekistan, and now in Kyrgyzstan. Hello and welcome to our summer science special. 46:18 Hello Bob, thank you for having me. First of all, what kind of evidence are you looking for to figure out what happened to the last Neanderthals? 46:27 Personally, I work mainly on paleoenvironmental evidence, so like paleoclimatic proxies, paleosedimentological proxies. And the rest of the team is looking at material culture proxies, like different type of stone tools. And another part of the team, they will look at genetics and human remains, if we'll ever find some. 46:53 So, in other words, you're looking at the environment, the past environment that Neanderthals lived in. 46:57 Yes, particularly we are focusing on the last 60,000 to 40,000 years ago when Neanderthals started to disappear and their landscape was replaced by modern humans. So, a lot of modeling based on genetic data and environmental data showed Central Asia must have been an area where Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interacted. And so refining the chronologies of these interactions and the spatial distribution of the two species, so the latest Neanderthals and the earliest sapiens, will definitely allow us to better understand what led to the Neanderthals' demise and what led to the success of Homo sapiens. 47:58 Now, I know we don't know exactly why the Neanderthals disappeared, but what are some of the theories, some of the ideas of what happened to them? 48:05 There is several hypotheses that the Neanderthals had a demographic issue within the Neanderthals population, which was smaller in numbers, but also apparently had a lower genetic diversity compared to modern humans. So eventually they kind of died out. Other hypotheses, you know, were claiming some kind of major environmental stressor, like, for instance, there is around 42,000 years ago, there is a significant drop for a few centuries of the magnetic field. 48:48 que permitem a bombardeção dos cosméticos na Terra, e isso causou dançamento para a população. E também temos a hipótese de mega-eruptos que coolam a Terra em uma maneira severa. E então há diferentes hipótese. 49:11 Bom, que é uma lista de possibilidades para a extinção da Neandertal. Agora, o tipo de caos de Neandertal escolhidos para viver em? 49:20 Então, o que é interessante, em Uzbekistan, esses caos são muito alto. Então, é a peculiaridade lá, que nós precisamos olhar para o alto elevado. 49:29 Por que você acha que os Neandertal escolhidos caos que são tão alto? 49:36 Não sei, mas, você sabe, que é o que estamos tentando encontrar. Claro que... 49:41 A terra de 40,000 a 60,000 anos atrás foi significativamente diferente. 49:49 So the valleys were less deep. We know that some sides of the valleys are lifting, some are subsiding. So, you know, we're trying to reconstruct exactly what kind of environment was there. But what we can say, maybe because the high elevation, the cool and dry, that's why, you know, the remains are better preserved there. 50:12 Então, quando você finalmente chegar à um cave, o que você está procurando? O que você está procurando lá? 50:18 Vamos olhar para a abertura, vamos olhar para os aspectos de trabalho, o quanto é o terras em frente, o quanto é o depósito. Alguns desses depósitos são muito, muito profundamente antes de chegar aos neandertal de ferramentas. Nós sabemos que os neandertal usam usar para ferramentas de ferramentas e fazer suas ferramentas. Esse é o nosso marco. 50:48 E então, se encontrarmos as ferramentas de ferramentas e essas ferramentas, nós estamos procurando para os restos humanos que podem ser colocados anatômicos para os neandertal ou homo sapiens. Ou o que estamos tentando fazer agora é extractar o antigo DNA dos sediments e tentar ver se temos sequências que podem ser assignadas a Neanderthals ou Sapiens, ou quando estamos em Central Asia, também um outro grupo chamado Denisovans que são pessoas em Siberia e em algum lugar de Asia com Neanderthals. 51:35 Well, take me inside one of these caves where you know the Neanderthals lived. How homey is it? What's it like in there? 51:44 Normally, where we found Neanderthals, they are no very deep caves. I mean, they are deep caves, but Neanderthals would live just outside and in the entrance. 51:57 E eles são muito homi. Agora, a difícil parte é que, como eu disse, neandertal deposits são muito profundamente comparado ao nível atual do floor da cave. Então, você tem que imaginar que a cave era half-empty e, possivelmente, era muito maior e estava projetando mais fora. 52:27 So normalmente are beautiful places. And personally, I think they were choosing these places near, you know, water stream, but also water sources that were kind of permanent. 52:40 Wow. So there was, it was a room with a view. They could see out if they were up on a cliff. 52:46 Absolutely. There are some Neanderthal caves here in Italy that they are prime view, prime locations, right on the shore. Mas você tem que saber que, você sabe, basicamente, naquela época, o shore provavelmente foi quilômetros away, porque da revalorização do se level, certo? 53:05 O que é que você está em um cave, sabendo que 60,000, 50,000 anos atrás, Neanderthals lived there? 53:16 Oh, for me, it's hard to describe, but, you know, when we have those moments, it's amazing. You know, it's like being in a time machine and going back, you know, 40,000 or 60,000, even more sometimes. Actually, in 1K, we probably find something that is 140,000, so much older. 53:39 So it's fantastic, but it's really not what we are looking for. 53:45 Mas isso ainda deve ser incrível quando você holde uma arma em sua mão em sua mão que alguém usou todo o tempo ago para fazer dinner e você tem isso em sua mão. É como se mexer com alguém do passado. 53:57 Exatamente. É como se mexer com a humanidade. É não há mais nenhum. 54:04 Dr. Berner, muito obrigado por seu tempo. Obrigado, Bob. Foi um prazer. 54:10 Dr. Francesco Berna is a professor of geoarcheology at Simon Fraser University and the University of Siena. 54:21 . . . . . . . 54:49 Quirks & Quirks is produced by Sonia Biting, Rosie Fernandez, and Amanda Buckowitz. Our senior producer is Hannah Hoag. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening.