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PODCAST

Quirks and Quarks

CBC Radio"s Quirks and Quarks covers the quirks of the expanding universe to the quarks within a single atom... and everything in between.

science earth sciences

All Episodes

00:54:09

A 25-year-old time capsule with science predictions...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/12/25

Twenty-five years ago, Quirks & Quarks celebrated their 25th anniversary by travelling forward in time — to 2025 — to find out how science had changed in the years since. In this fictitious future, our present, Zargon the robot, wakes up a Bob McDonald clone from the year 2000 to speak with scientists about 25 years of science. It's a mindbending audio time-capsule with predictions that were oddly prescient, sometimes unsettling or wildly wrong.

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00:54:09

Whales, sex, and rocks — it's our holiday book show!

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/12/19

We talk to authors of some of this year’s most fascinating science books in our annual Holiday Book Show.INCLUDING:Questioning the purpose of whale song — for love or echolocation?Journeying through deep geological time to better tackle problems of the futureBiological sex is complicated but that's what helps animals like humans thriveMini reviews of: The Martians by David Baron, Dinner With King Tut by Sam Kean and The Mind Electric by Pria Anand.

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00:54:09

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

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/12/12

Next stop - the moon! Jeremy Hansen stops by our studio to chat about how he’s prepping to be the first Canadian to go to the moon.Plus:Santa’s reindeer may be losing their antlers –– and climate change could be the culpritReindeer are the only animal in the deer family where the females also grow antlers, and they typically have a full rack over the wintertime and drop them in June when they give birth. University of Guelph PhD student Allegra Love was monitoring reindeer on Fogo Island in

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00:54:09

Cleveland’s ancient car-sized sea monster had bony...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/12/05

Scientists are shedding light on the strange, car-sized, armoured fish that lived 360 million years ago in what is now Cleveland. Plus: The cosmic collider that gave us our moon came from our own solar system, soccer fanatics' brains are wired differently than regular fans, industrial chemicals are hurting our microbiome, and scientists are using our brains to build a better computer.

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00:54:09

The environmental costs of nation-building, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/11/28

On this week’s episode: a mini tyrannosaur is a new species, ants redesign to avoid illness, toxic lead gave humans the edge over Neanderthals, invasive fish are evolving to avoid eradication attempts, and how big mining projects — and attempts to hurry them along — can spell bad news for the environment.

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00:54:09

The mystery of the drunken trees, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/11/21

This week: bees trained to keep track of time, eating small amounts of plastic can kill ocean animals, scientists spot winds blowing from our black hole, a "one-two punch" earthquake may be coming for the Pacific coast and what “drunken trees” can tell us about our warming climate.

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00:54:09

Making snake bites less deadly, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/11/14

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

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00:54:09

The pros and cons of geoengineering, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/11/07

On this week's episode: studying a rare visitor to our solar system, eating saturated fats can mess with our internal clocks, holding hands with our 2 million year old ancestors, woodpeckers drill into trees like hammers, and the pros and cons of geoengineering.

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00:54:09

Sleuthing out scientific fraud, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/10/31

On this week's episode: selling sunlight on demand, rhinos roamed Canada’s Arctic 23 million years ago, making a more precise parachute using kirigami, the winner of this year's prestigious Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal and uncovering widespread scientific fraud.

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00:54:09

Rise of the zombie bugs, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/10/24

On this week's spooktacular episode: Wolves are afraid of the big bad human, methane spewing from Montreal’s largest snow dump, screaming babies make us hot to get our attention, baby pterosaurs died in a torrential storm and mind-controlling parasites turn bugs into zombies.

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00:54:09

Moose are hot and bothered, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/10/17

Nobel in Medicine for a leash on our immune systemOur immune system has enormous power to defend us against the wide range of pathogens and invaders that nature sends at us. But it’s a double-edged sword, and can target its powerful weapons against us as well. This year’s Nobel prize in Medicine or Physiology went to a group who discovered a critical mechanism that keeps the immune system in check, under normal circumstances, giving them new insights into the diseases that occur when it goes

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00:54:09

Celebrating 50 years of Quirks & Quarks!

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/10/10

On October 9, 1975, CBC listeners across the country heard David Suzuki introduce the very first episode of Quirks & Quarks. 50 years and thousands of interviews later, Quirks is still going strong, bringing wonders from the world of science to listeners, old and new.On October 7, 2025 we celebrated with an anniversary show in front of a live audience at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. We had guests from a range of scientific disciplines looking at what

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00:54:09

Life at the limits, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/10/03

Remembering Jane: a conversation with Jane Goodall on her storied careerScience lost a unique pioneering figure this week. Jane Goodall — primatologist, conservationist and activist — died at the age of 91. In 2002, she visited the Quirks & Quarks studio to talk with Bob McDonald ahead of the Canadian launch of her IMAX film Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees. Bob and Jane spoke about how a girl growing up in urban England developed a love for animals, why scientists critical of her work were

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00:54:09

Tracking Grizzlies in B.C with AI and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/09/26

Let’s go, Grue Jays!New kinds of birds are not usually discovered while browsing Facebook, but an ornithologist spotted something he’d never seen before in a photo, and tracked down the strange bird. Brian Stokes, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered it was actually a previously unknown hybrid of the familiar blue jay and a green jay, better known from southern parts of North America. Climate change likely played a part in bringing the two species together. Their research

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00:54:09

Understanding our inner light, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/09/19

Dust from car tires can be bad for fish — what might it do to us?As car tires wear, they shed billions of ultrafine particles of rubber that contain a complex mix of chemicals, including one called 6PPD-Quinone that’s been linked to mass die-offs of migrating salmon. Now researchers are sounding the alarm that this chemical is accumulating in humans, and we have no clear understanding of its toxicity. An international team of scientists, including Rachel Scholes from the University of British

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00:54:09

Science in Prison and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/09/12

10 years ago we first saw gravitational waves — what we’ve seen sinceIn September 2015, LIGO—or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—captured the ripples in spacetime produced by the cataclysmic merger of two black holes, from over a billion light years away. This discovery confirmed Einstein’s hypothesis about gravitational waves and gave astronomers a new way to explore the cosmos. In the decade since, LIGO’s scientific team, including physicist Nergis Mavalvala, has been busy,

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00:54:09

Our Summer Science Special

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/09/05

Every summer, Canadian scientists leave their labs and classrooms and fan out across the planet to do research in the field. This week, we’re sharing some of their adventures.Camping out on a remote island with thousands of screaming, pooping, barfing birdsAbby Eaton and Flynn O’Dacre spent their summer on Middleton Island, a remote, uninhabited island that lies 130 kilometers off the coast of Alaska. They were there to study seabirds, in particular the rhinoceros auklet and the black-legged

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00:00:17

Quirks & Quarks will return in September

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/06/27

We're on hiatus for the summer, but we'll return with new episodes on September 6. In the meantime visit our website at cbc.ca/quirks to browse our archives. Have a great summer!

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00:54:09

Scientific Sovereignty — How Canadian scientists are...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/06/20

Politically-driven chaos is disrupting U.S. scientific institutions and creating challenges for science in Canada. Science is a global endeavour and collaborations with the U.S. are routine. In this special episode ofQuirks & Quarks, we explore what Canadian scientists are doing to preserve their work to assert scientific sovereignty in the face of this unprecedented destabilization.Canadian climate scientists brace for cuts to climate science infrastructure and dataU.S. President Donald Trump’s

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00:54:09

Our Listener Question show

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/06/13

Have you ever wondered how particle accelerators work? Or what microwaves really do to food? Have you spent time pondering the mystery of how ice ages changed the Earth’s rotation or why whales haven’t figured out how to breathe underwater? Well you’ll find out all this and more on our Quirks & Quarks listener question show!

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