Quirks and Quarks

Summer is fieldwork time for many scientists. We talk to researchers who have been busy hiking on fresh lava, capturing thousands of ticks, shooing away moose from their study sites, and even spelunking for Neanderthals — all in the ever-important quest for data.

Quirks & Quarks has been taking your burning questions for 50 years. And while we thought we might have answered every question there is, our listeners proved there are always more science questions for us to tackle. Including:

From doubting our doubts to sleuthing out scientific fraud, this week we revisit some of our favourite stories about humans.

For our 50th anniversary celebration last October, we spoke with some of Canada's top scientists about their predictions for the future. We revisit our conversations with:

From filming a black hole to flaming hot water ice on Neptune, we revisit some of our favourite space-related stories from the past season.

On this week’s best of Quirks & Quarks, we revisit our annual holiday listener question show, with fascinating queries like:

We'll satisfy all these scientific curiosities and many more!

From the science of how we sweat to solving golf's greatest mystery, we revisit some of our favourite summery segments from the past season.

From elephant whiskers to Arctic rhinos and even science programming in prisons, we revisit some of our producers’ favourite stories from this season. Including:

We revisit our conversations with authors of some of the year’s most fascinating science books in our annual holiday book show. Featuring:

Plus, science journalist and BookLab podcast co-host Dan Falk reviews The Martians by David Baron, Dinner With King Tut by Sam Kean and The Mind Electric by Pria Anand. 

From tiny T. rexes to a car-sized sea monster, we revisit some of our favourite stories about predators in their prime, like:

From camping out on 'bird poop island,' chasing down wild dogs in Madagascar, or even looking for bombs in a bog in Ottawa –– no one quite does summer like scientists. This week, we revisit some of the hijinks that Canadian researchers got up to last year as they left their labs to get their hands dirty in the field.

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Quirks & Quarks has been taking your burning science questions for half a century. And while we thought we might have answered every question there is to answer over the years, our listeners proved there are always more fascinating head-scratchers for us to tackle.

Like:

Some of the oceans biggest, most powerful predators, like certain sharks and tuna, are “mesothermic” or warm-bodied. Running hot allows them to rapidly convert their food to energy and heat, helping them swim faster and hunt in cold waters. But that advantage may become a disadvantage in a warming climate, meaning these fish need to find new ways of cooling off, or face a new threat to their survival.

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Gold miners working in the Yukon regularly find ancient ground squirrel burrows throughout the permafrost, many containing fossilized feces. Researchers analyzing these well-preserved poop piles found they contain some of the oldest DNA ever recovered, dating from 30,000 to 700,000 years ago. Tucked inside were traces of a wide range of ancient animals, including woolly mammoths, grasshoppers, steppe bison, ancient horses, American cheetahs, as well as hundreds of plant species.

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150 years ago, Charles Darwin noticed that birds and humans were both drawn to bright plumage and elaborate display. He called this interspecies esthetic appreciation a “shared taste for the beautiful.” Now, in a recent study, an interdisciplinary team of scientists built an online game exploring the mating calls of 16 different species and discovered, to their surprise, that humans and animals agree on which sounds are more attractive.

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The newly described Tylosaurus rex was a violent bus-sized Komodo dragon-like creature with serrated teeth. Dubbed the ‘T. rex of the sea,’ it would have occupied the top of the food chain in the marine ecosystem over 80 million years ago.

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Scientists recorded audio and video of 8 different kinds of rockfish living in the wild near British Columbia, and were surprised they could tell the species apart through their various grunts, pops and knocks, even though the fish are closely related.

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In a study inspired by a field of dandelions, researchers wanted to know why, when you blow on a dandelion seed head, only the seeds closest to you take flight. They found that a dimple in the seed heads where the seed attaches is larger on one side than the other, and that the seeds consistently broke off from the smaller side of that dimple. Once they take flight, each dandelion seed uses its unique shape to catch a ride on the wind.

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On the morning of August 10, 2025, a landslide in a fjord along the southern Alaskan coast triggered a mega tsunami. It generated the second highest wave ever recorded that reached up to 481 metres above sea level. A new study suggests that catastrophic events like this are more likely to occur as our climate warms and glaciers melt.

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Cocaine and many other chemicals and drugs are found in many waterways, but especially around wastewater treatment plants. Scientists exposed wild juvenile Atlantic salmon to cocaine and its byproduct to see how it impacted their behaviour in the wild. As a result, the fish swam twice as far, which could put them in more danger.

IDEAS, hosted by Nahlah Ayed is a weekday podcast that explores how ideas shape our world.

“One of your tribe is enough.” That’s what Margaret Rossiter was told when she said she wanted to study female scientists in the ‘70s. Nevertheless, Rossiter persisted. She found and documented hundreds of women whose contributions to science had been overlooked, under-credited and misappropriated. Then she made history herself by coining the term “The Matilda Effect” to describe why those women failed to get the credit they deserved. 

Who is Matilda? Matilda Joslyn Gage was a suffragist erased from history. She was known as being too radical for Susan B. Anthony. This episode of IDEAS shares her story.

You can find more episodes of IDEAS wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/IDEASxQQ

Seabird poop plays a surprising role in bringing life to barren islands, spreading nutrients throughout the ocean, and even creating wealth for an ancient human empire.

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We tend to think of animals like snakes, rats and even cockroaches as pests, but in her new book, biologist Marlene Zuk says there's a lot we can learn from these less than desirable creatures, if we just give them a chance.

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There's been a growing movement to develop new technologies to replace at least some of the animals used in scientific research. Researchers across Canada are working to create these tools, to usher in a new animal-free era for medical science.

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On their mission around the moon, Jeremy Hansen and his crewmates will become the only four people on Earth to ever lay eyes on the entire far side of the moon. Since joining the space program, the Artemis astronauts have been undergoing intensive geological training to help train their eyes to look for lunar features that satellites can't pick up. 

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New research confirms that dogs were the first animal to form a domestic relationship with humans, dating back to the end of the last Ice Age almost 16,000 years ago.

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An unusual hellscape of a planet found 34 light years from Earth has a deep ocean of molten magma surrounded by noxious, hot, rotten egg-type fumes. It just may be the most uninhabitable alien landscape we've ever come across.

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We used to think that of our primate relatives, chimps were the more aggressive ape and bonobos were more peaceful. A recent study found that bonobos are just as antagonistic as chimps, but it's the females targeting males.

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You may have seen Black Hole, the image, but have you heard of the upcoming Black Hole, The Movie? This week, astronomers launched a new campaign to capture video footage of the supermassive black hole pulsing at the heart of the M87 galaxy.

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Starfish don't have brains, and yet they're able to mobilize hundreds of tiny hydraulic tube feet to get around. Now scientists are getting an understanding of just how they do that.

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(Correction: A previous version of the dark matter story referred to a study published last fall that mapped the distribution of dark matter, but the study was published on Jan. 26, 2026.)

From the pressurized space suits to living in underground spaces, it's clear that living on Mars would cause irreversible biological changes to any humans living there, to the point that it may be impossible for them or their descendants to return to Earth. With bigger heads and lighter bodies, might we also end up looking like Martians?

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An elephant’s trunk is incredibly strong and rugged, and yet it is one of the most sensitive touch organs in the animal kingdom. New research reveals that this sensitivity is partly powered by over 1000 whiskers.

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Researchers made the surprising discovery that Alaska beluga whales have swinging sex lives — and that could be their key to survival in the warming Arctic.

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Scientists spent nearly 25 years studying close to 800 polar bears in the Barents Sea region and discovered that those polar bears seem to be doing just fine, even though melting sea ice is also a major issue.

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Some dogs are more adept at learning language than others. Researchers studying these special dogs discovered that, much like toddlers, these smart furry canine companions can pick up words just by eavesdropping on their owners' conversations.

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We may share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, but somewhere along the evolutionary line to us, our brains took a major detour. New research suggests that chimpanzees can rationally weigh evidence, a trait that used to be thought as uniquely human.

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An unassuming fossilized slab in the basement of a museum in Brazil turned out to be 110-million-year-old dinosaur vomit, and inside that vomit were the bones of two strange, seagull-sized pterosaurs.

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On this week’s episode of Quirks & Quarks, it's our ever-popular and always satisfying Holiday Listener Question Show that includes: 

Why did a Canadian astronaut's eyesight change when she went to space? 

How is the dust inside our homes changing? 

Why do some professional athletes stick out their tongues when they play?

Why are most fruits round, but bananas and pineapple are not? 

What would have happened if the dino-killing asteroid never struck Earth?

We'll satisfy all these scientific curiosities and many more!

In 2000, Quirks & Quarks celebrated its 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.

We talk to authors of some of this year’s most fascinating science books in our annual Holiday Book Show.

INCLUDING: 

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.

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Santa’s reindeer may be losing their antlers –– and climate change could be the culprit

Reindeer 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 Newfoundland, when she made a surprising discovery that female reindeer are losing and growing their antlers much earlier than usual. This can put more stress on the animal during a crucial part of their pregnancy, and the researchers think this could eventually lead to the reindeer losing their antlers altogether. The work was published in the journal Ecosphere.

Pterosaur brains reveal clues about why these mighty fliers took to the skies

Flight has only evolved among vertebrates three times — in bats, birds, and first in pterosaurs. How pterosaurs first took to the skies was always a mystery to scientists, until the discovery of a fossilized 230-million year old pterosaur relative in Brazil. An international team, including Ohio University professor Lawrence Witmer, used an MRI for detailed analysis of the fossilized skull, to pinpoint the miniscule brain changes that happened as the animal developed the capacity to fly. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists are using AI to find life in 3 billion year old rocks

Earth’s earliest signs of life are often incredibly difficult to detect. An international team of researchers have developed a new tool that uses AI to find “whispers” of life locked inside ancient rocks. Using this tool, the researchers, including astrobiologist Michael Wong from Carnegie Science, were able to detect fresh chemical evidence of life in rocks that are 3.3 billion years old. This tool can not only be used to explore the origins of life here on Earth, but also on Mars and other planetary bodies. The work was published in the journal PNAS.

Scientists are shedding light on the strange, car-sized, armoured fish that lived 360 million years ago in what is now Cleveland.

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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.

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.

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.

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.