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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

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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00:54:09

Eradicating plagues forever, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/06/06

<p><strong>Energy with a grain of salt</strong></p><p>Researchers have developed a new sodium metal powered fuel cell with up to triple the output for its weight of a lithium-ion battery. The team from  MIT, including Yet-Ming Chiang, think these fuel cells could have enormous potential for electric vehicles — including flight. They say sodium can be electrically produced from salt on a large scale to facilitate this technology. The research was published in

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00:54:09

Why music makes us groove, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/05/30

Mutant super-powers give Korean sea women diving abilitiesThe Haenyeo, or sea women, of the Korean island of Jeju have been celebrated historically for their remarkable diving abilities. For hour after hour they dive in frigid waters harvesting sea-life, through pregnancy and into old age. A new study has shown they are able to do this because of specific genetic adaptations that appeared in their ancestors more than a thousand years ago. These genes make them more tolerant to the cold, and decrease

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00:54:09

How to live forever, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/05/23

Chimpanzees lay down mad beats to communicateApart from their rich vocal palette, chimpanzees drum on trees to communicate over long distances. A new interdisciplinary study, led in part by PhD student Vesta Eleuteri and primatologist Cat Hobaiter from the University of St. Andrews, has explored the details of the rhythms they used, and found that different populations drum with rhythms which are similar to the beats in human music. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.An

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00:54:09

Why the Information Age seems so overwhelming, and...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/05/16

Chimpanzees use medicinal plants for first aid and hygieneResearchers have observed wild chimpanzees seeking out particular plants, including ones known to have medicinal value, and using them to treat wounds on themselves and others. They also used plants to clean themselves after sex and defecation. Elodie Freymann from Oxford University lived with the chimpanzees in Uganda over eight months and published this research in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.Why this evolutionary dead

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00:54:09

Using microbes to solve crimes, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/05/09

The beginnings of our end — where the anus came fromOur distant evolutionary ancestors had no anuses. Their waste was excreted from the same orifice they used to ingest food, much like jellyfish do today. Now a new study on bioRxiv that has yet to be peer-reviewed, scientists think they’ve found the evolutionary link in a worm with only a single digestive hole. Andreas Hejnol, from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, said he found genes we now associate with the anus being expressed in the worms in

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00:54:09

Wild fish can tell us apart, and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/05/02

The ‘bone collector’ caterpillar covers itself with body partsIt’s like something from a horror movie. A creeping, carnivorous creature that in a macabre attempt at disguise and protection, covers itself with the dismembered remains of dead insects. This super-rare caterpillar is one of the strangest insects in the world. It lives on spider webs inside of trees and rock crevices in a 15 square kilometre radius on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu. Daniel Rubinoff, from the University of Hawaii Insect

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00:54:09

Understanding heat extremes and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/04/25

All the colours of the rainbow, plus oneResearchers have fired lasers directly into the eye to stimulate photoreceptors, and produce the perception of a colour that does not exist in nature. They describe it as a “supersaturated teal,” and hope the technique will allow them to better understand colour vision and perhaps lead to treatments for vision problems. Austin Roorda has been developing this technology using mirrors, lasers and optical devices. He is a professor of Optometry and Vision Science

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00:54:09

What the dinosaurs did and more...

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/04/18

How a helpless baby bird protects itself from hungry huntersThere’s not a more vulnerable creature in nature than a baby bird. Tiny and immobile, they’re easy pickings for predators. But the chicks of the white-necked jacobin hummingbird have evolved a unique defence. They disguise themselves as poisonous caterpillars to discourage those that might eat them. Jay Falk, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado and Scott Taylor, director of the Mountain Research Station and associate

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00:54:09

How human noises impact animals, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/04/11

A tree has evolved to attract lightning strikes — to eliminate the competitionScientists working in Panama noticed that a particular tropical tree species was frequently struck by lightning, but was infrequently killed by the strikes. Forest ecologist Evan Gora found that Dipteryx oleifera trees were often the last ones standing after a lightning strike, which can kill over 100 trees with a single bolt. His team discovered the giant trees were more electrically conductive than other species, which

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00:54:09

Our bodies and brains fight weight loss, and more…

Quirks and Quarks ·

2025/04/04

An attractive new strategy for brain surgeryA Canadian team is developing minimally-invasive micro-tools for brain surgery that can be operated by magnetic fields from outside of the skull. The tools, including scalpels and forceps, will enter the cranium through small incisions, and then be controlled by focused and precise magnetic fields. Eric Diller is associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Toronto and his research was published in the journal Science

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