Rise of the zombie bugs, and more…

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.

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.

Nobel Prize 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 wrong.Yogurt with a creepy-crawly secret ingredientA team of researchers has duplicated an ancient recipe for yogurt that uses a unique ingredient to initiate fermentation: ants. They added squished ants to fresh milk, buried it in an anthill to incubate it, and enjoyed zesty yogurt soon after. A microbiological analysis showed that the ants contributed a bacteria to the yogurt that is also present in sourdough starter.An ancestor of the largest dinosaurs was a dog-sized bipedResearchers have discovered a 230 million year old fossil high in the Andes of Argentina that is the precursor to the giant, long-necked sauropod dinosaurs like the iconic brontosaurus. This animal, however, is a two-legged herbivore that likely weighed less than 20 kilograms.Nobel in physics awarded for laying the groundwork for quantum computing Quantum tunneling is a strange phenomenon in which subatomic particles can pass through apparently impenetrable objects like magic. This year’s Nobel prize in physics was awarded to a team that discovered that this strange quantum phenomena can happen on larger scales too, and how their superconducting circuit also absorbs and emits energy at distinct energy levels, laying the groundwork for quantum computers.Neanderthals systematically rendered fat from animal bonesScientists think that the fragmented bones of at least 172 animals discovered at a Neanderthal site in Germany represent the remains of a large-scale processing site where they extracted nutritious and useful fat. This could be used for a range of things, from skin protection to preserving meat similar to pemmican.Moose are hot. Are they bothered?During the fall rut moose, particularly the males, are very active searching for mates and competing with rivals. This activity generates a large amount of heat, which could be a problem as moose don’t sweat. Scientists are investigating if, in a warmer climate, this might be interfering with their reproductive success.

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 we’ve learned in the last 50 years, and hazarding some risky predictions about what the next half century could hold. Our panelists were:Evan Fraser, Director of Arrell Food Institute and Professor of Geography at the University of Guelph, co-chair of the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council, a fellow of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau foundation, and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.Katie Mack, Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.Luke Stark, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario, and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Global Scholar with the Future Flourishing Program.Laura Tozer, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Toronto and director of the Climate Policy & Action Lab at the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough.Ana Luisa Trejos, a professor in the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering and Canada Research chair in wearable mechatronics at Western University in London, Ontario.Yvonne Bombard, professor at the University of Toronto and scientist and Canada Research Chair at St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto, where she directs the Genomics Health Services Research Program.

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 wrong, and how she was able to get close to the wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park. Scientists can predict what colour a person is looking at based on brain activityScientists can predict what colour a person is looking at based on brain activityDo you see what I see? New research says you do. Using brain imaging technology, scientists were able to predict what colour a person was looking at by reading their brain activity. This suggests that everyone responds essentially the same way to certain colours. Michael Bannert, a postdoctoral student at Tuebingen University in Germany, led the research published in the Journal of Neuroscience.A Mars rover spots strong evidence of ancient life on the red planetEarlier this month, NASA revealed that their Perseverance rover gathered what could be the strongest evidence yet that life may have existed on Mars. Using the rover's scientific instruments, scientists identified two minerals in an ancient river that they say are most often found as a result of microbial life here on Earth. They also set aside a sample for a future return mission. Joel Hurowitz, a geologist at Stony Brook University, says he can't wait to get the sample back to Earth to find out if it truly is a sign of life. It was published in the journal Nature.Life at the limits: searching for 'Intraterrestrial' life deep within the Earth’s crustA new book explores the latest research into the search for life deep inside the Earth, where the sun doesn't shine and oxygen doesn't reach. Scientists travel to some of the most geologically dangerous regions of our planet to understand how life forms in extreme environments, and answer deep questions like the origin of life on Earth and what life might be like off of our planet. Karen Lloyd, a subsurface biogeochemist from the University of Southern California, is the author of Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life On Earth.

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 was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. Chimpanzees’ taste for ripe fruit is equivalent to two drinks a dayChimpanzees in the wild can eat about 10 per cent of their body weight worth of fruit each day, and all of that fruit contains small amounts of alcohol. A team of scientists, including Aleksey Maro from the University of California Berkeley, wanted to understand just how much alcohol the chimps were getting from all this fruit. Three different methods of analysis over three years revealed the chimps were consuming the equivalent of two standard drinks a day. This suggests an evolutionary explanation for the human taste for ethanol. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.Sea life says make homes, not bombsAfter the defeat of Germany in 1945, an estimated 1.6 million tons of munitions were dumped into the Baltic sea off the German coast. A team of researchers, including marine biologist Andrey Vedenin from the Senckenberg Research Institute, wanted to understand how this potentially toxic legacy had affected sea life. They were stunned to discover thousands of animals surviving on the abandoned weapons despite the toxic burden they carried. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.Structure of social media sites 'inherently lead to something problematic'Our experience of social media sites is that they often descend into extremism, divisiveness and conflict, but this may be a feature, not a bug. In a pre-print study on arXiv, scientists simulated social media interactions between AI-generated participants to test various interventions to see how they'd impact the problems that emerge, such as the rise of echo chambers, the concentration of influence and the amplification of polarized voices. Petter Törnberg, a University of Amsterdam computational social scientist, said he was disappointed to learn that none of the interventions worked.Your brain’s two halves hand off perception like a baton in a relay raceWhen something passes from one side of your visual field to the other, something amazing happens, according to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Matthew Broschart, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, tracked how the visual parts of each half of the brain, connected to each eye, do a coordinated dance to create a unified visual perception in primates. The bear necessities of tracking B.C. grizzlies with machine learning softwareScientists and guardians from five First Nations of the Nanwakolas Council are working together to track individual grizzlies across the southern Great Bear Rainforest  in B.C.. Using camera traps and machine learning techniques, they've developed an automated system through the BearID Project to identify individual bears and track them over the landscape. We spoke with conservation scientist and director of the BearID Project, Melanie Clapham, and Tashina James-Matilpi, from the Tlowitsis First Nation, the project's guardian logistics coordinator for the Nanwakolas Council.

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 Columbia, are calling for more scrutiny of the chemicals that go into car tires, since so much ends up in our environment. Their paper was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.Fecal Transplants seem to have lasting metabolic effectsTransplanting the gut microbiome has been held out as a hope for a range of disorders, from obesity to mental health issues. A study that followed obese adolescents four years after receiving a fecal microbiota transplant from healthy individuals has shown positive impacts on the recipients' weight and metabolic health. Dr. Wayne Cutfield, a pediatrician and professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said they also found after all this time that the donor bacteria have remained established in the recipients' gut microbiome. The study is in the journal Nature Communications. An ant queen clones sexual slaves of another species for her daughtersIn a truly bizarre tale from the animal world, researchers have discovered a species of ant where the queen gives birth to males of two totally different species. Somewhere along their evolutionary path, these Messor ibericus queen ants in southern Europe developed an ability to clone male Messor structor ants for her daughters to mate with and to produce a hybrid working class. Jonathan Romiguier, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Montpellier in France, said these M. ibericus ants essentially domesticated ants of another species. The study was published in the journal Nature. Why other apes can’t walk a mile in our shoesA feature that distinguishes humans from other primates is the ability to walk upright. The major evolutionary change in the structure of our pelvis that allows for our bipedalism has now been traced genetically and developmentally. Human pelvic blades initially form in the embryo like other primates, but then flip their growth from vertical to horizontal, to give the human pelvis its unique basin shape. This new research led by Terence Capellini, Chair of the human evolutionary biology department at Harvard University and postdoctoral student Gayani Senevirathne, was published in the journal Nature.Women glow. So do men. Understanding our 'inner light'You might have been told by an admirer that you have a unique glow. In two groundbreaking studies, researchers have demonstrated the reality of that poetic compliment. Using ultra-sensitive instruments capable of detecting individual photons, Canadian researchers have imaged a biological source of incredibly faint light, known as Ultraweak Photon Emissions (UPE), that has potential as a future non-invasive diagnostic imaging tool. Daniel Oblak, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary, oversaw a study where they unequivocally demonstrated that living things, like mice, give off an extremely faint glow that dims when they die. His study was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. In a separate study, Nirosha Murugan, — an assistant professor of tissue biophysics at Wilfred Laurier University — discovered that these UPEs can also detect different mental states in the brain. That study was published in the journal iScience.

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, including new results announced this week confirming a 50-year-old prediction by Stephen Hawking about how black holes merge. Mavalvala is the dean of the school of science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The latest discovery was reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.What wild killer whales sharing food with humans says about their intelligenceAfter an experience of being offered a recently killed seabird by an Orca, cetologist Jared Towers decided to document other instances of killer whales approaching humans to share a snack. Towers, the executive director of the marine research nonprofit Bay Cetology, found dozens of examples of this behaviour. It’s a perhaps unique example of a wild creature sharing food with humans for its own diversion and curiosity. The research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.Sweat science — This research really was 90% perspirationWhile the biology of perspiration is relatively well understood, the physical process by which water excreted from our skin cools us is not. This motivated engineer Konrad Rykaczewski to strap himself into a specialized full-body, tube-filled suit to observe how water emerges from sweat glands over the skin. Rykaczewski, a thermal and materials engineer at Arizona State University, found that sweat rises out of sweat glands in pools, eventually spilling out and soaking the top layer of the skin. The research was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.What came first, the tomato or the potato?As it turns out, the potato came from the tomato. By tracking their genetic lineage, an international team of researchers, including University of British Columbia botanist Loren Rieseberg, have found that the noble potato actually resulted from the tomato naturally cross-breeding with another unrelated species, more than eight million years ago. The research was published in the journal Cell.Bringing science education to the incarceratedWe speak with a scientist who spent much of his summer working in Canadian prisons doing brief, but intense, science education courses. Phil Heron created the Think Like a Scientist program to teach critical thinking skills to those who may have had negative experiences with education. He believes that the scientific method will help people understand how failure in life, as in science, can be a pathway to success.We spoke to:Phil Heron, assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Scarborough campus, in the department of physical and environmental sciences and founder of the Think Like a Scientist program.Dalton Harrison, founder of Standfast Productions and former program participant finishing a masters degree in criminal justice and criminology.Phoenix Griffin, university student in criminal justice and criminology and former program participant.Jamie Williams, a director with Spectrum First Education and a co-facilitator of Think Like a Scientist.

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 kittiwake, as a part of a long-term research project that monitors the health of the birds to help understand the health of the world’s oceans. Eaton and O’Dacre are graduate students working under Emily Choy at McMaster University in Hamilton, OntarioDodging lions and mongooses to monitor what wild dogs are eating in MozambiquePhD student Nick Wright spent his summer in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. After a brutal civil war wiped out 95 per cent of the large mammals in the park, much work has been done to bring back a healthy wildlife population, to mixed success. Nick was monitoring wild dogs this summer to learn what they’re eating, and what effects their recent re-introduction has had on the other animals. Wright is in the Gaynor lab at the University of British Columbia.Saving ancient silk road graffiti from dam-inundationThe legendary silk road is a network of trade routes stretching from Eastern China to Europe and Africa, used by traders from the second century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Travelers often left their marks, in the form of graffiti and other markings on stone surfaces along the route. Construction of a dam in Pakistan is threatening some of these petroglyphs, and an international team is working to document them online while there is still time. Jason Neelis, of the Religion and Culture Department, and Ali Zaidi, from the Department of Global Studies, both at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, are part of the team.Prospecting for World War II bombs in an Ottawa bogPablo Arzate's tests of sensor-equipped drones developed for mining uncovered 80-year-old relics leftover from World War II bomber pilot training in the Mer Bleue bog southeast of Ottawa. Arzate, the founder of 3XMAG Technologies from Carleton University, says his newly-developed technology revealed a trove of unexploded ordnance lurking beneath the bog’s surface. Technology allows examination of Inca mummies without disturbing themAndrew Nelson and his team spent the summer in Peru devising new methods of non-invasively scanning Peruvian mummies dating to the Inca period – so they can study them without unwrapping them. In Peru, ancient human remains were wrapped in large bundles along with other objects.  Nelson is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Western University in London, Ontario. This work is done in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture of Peru.Eavesdropping on chatty snapping turtles in Algonquin ParkSince 1972, scientists have been spending their summers at the Algonquin Park research station to monitor the turtles living in the area. In recent years, the researchers discovered that these turtles vocalise –– both as adults, and as hatchlings still in the egg. So this summer, Njal Rollinson and his students set out to record these vocalisations to try and understand what the turtles are saying. Rollinson is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto.

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!