Ever since the massive 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, the world's eyes have been fixed on the crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant. Explosions, radiation leaks, maybe a meltdown — a truly terrifying situation for the people of Japan and for the world. But with so little good information coming out of Fukushima, what exactly is going on? And what does this mean for nuclear power in Japan and in the rest of the world? In this podcast, Dr. Theo Theofanous talks about the latest developments at Fukushima. Theofanous is a professor of chemical ... Read More
Japan’s Earthquake: Deciphering the Fury
March 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The events that have afflicted Japan since the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami of March 11 are all too well known, but the events that occurred before and the even more ominous events that may occur in the near future are less known. With the help of seismologist Chen Ji from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Curiouser & Curiouser host Jai Ranganathan explains the plate tectonics underlying the enormously powerful earthquake, how that crustal shift generated a deadly tsunami, and why that release of pent-up fury may presage even greater violence in the future, and not ... Read More
Fishing for Answers in Marine Sanctuaries
March 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It's a zero-sum game for people and the environment. For one to win, the other must lose — particularly for the desperately poor in tropical countries. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. But is it actually true? Dr. Tim McClanahan, a marine biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, talks about his research with poor fisherman in Kenya who eke out a living fishing — usually overfishing — on threatened coral reefs. When marine reserves that excluded fishing were created on some of these coral reefs, local fisherman stood in fierce opposition. Contrary to expectations, the ... Read More
Can We Avoid Devouring the Planet?
March 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
What's for dinner? Ever more people with ever increasing purchasing power, particularly in developing nations, means that a lot more food is going to be needed to feed humanity. But where are the new farmlands going to go, in an already crowded planet? Is it possible to feed the world without also plowing under every natural area? This question is especially pressing in the tropics, where the the majority of available land for agricultural expansion is located. Dr. Holly Gibbs, a geographer and postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, has been tracking the growth of agriculture in ... Read More
Nuclear Weapons and Conservation: Connecting the Dots
February 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Hydrogen bombs and environmental conservation are two things that do not go together. Except at a nuclear site in South Carolina, where ecologist Nick Haddad has constructed one of the biggest ecological experiments in the world. Taking advantage of a large forest that has grown up around the Savannah River nuclear facilities, he has carved massive islands of grassland into the forest, through clear cutting, and connected some of the islands together, through yet more clear cutting. Why do this? One of the major priorities in conservation today is to connect together protected areas ... Read More
Hanging Around in the Rainforest
February 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Biologists are fascinated by tropical rainforests partially because they contain all sorts of biological oddities found nowhere else on earth. One example in the Amazon are ant-gardens, which are plants growing out of ant nests that are attached to vines and trees, resembling nothing so much as potted plants hanging from a ceiling. These natural pots and the plants that grow in them are very common in the rainforest and are entirely brought together by ants, but why? Dr. Elsa Youngsteadt, an insect biologist at Sigma Xi, discusses the careful ant engineering that goes into ant-gardens. ... Read More
Life Under Constant Pressure
February 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Feeling under pressure? Try being a mile underwater. More than 70 percent of the earth is ocean floor, an environment as lethal to human life as outer space. With pressures hundreds of times stronger than on the surface, no sunlight, and near freezing temperatures, it is hard to imagine that anything could survive on the bottom of the ocean. Dr. Craig McClain, a marine biologist at the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, has taken robot submersibles to the ocean floor. He discovered an astonishing number of species thriving on the seafloor: a comparable number of animals to what ... Read More
Spiderman on Broadway? ‘Been There, Done That,’ Say Ants
January 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Most people think of cities as the opposite of nature, but the truth is that urban areas are teeming with life. Crows, dandelions, and squirrels - to name just a few - are not most people's idea of wild life, but all sorts of species are found in cities. We see the pigeons and the house sparrows all around us on a daily basis, but because biologists have generally avoided studying the species found in cities, we actually know next to nothing about the ecology of urban species. In many ways, the Brazilian rainforest is better known to ecologists than the concrete jungle. Dr. Rob Dunn, an ... Read More
Recovery of the Island Fox
January 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the most dramatic and successful recovery efforts for an endangered species can be found in the Channel Islands, just offshore of Southern California. Even though the islands are currently almost unpopulated, they haven't been spared from the impacts of human actions. A combination of over a century of ranching and of the effects of the pesticide DDT had left many of the unique species on the islands teetering on the brink of extinction. In particular, the Island Fox, the most prominent unique species on the the Channel Islands, had quickly declined to under a hundred less than 10 years ... Read More
Your Brain, Behind the Scenes
January 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
We are always moving objects around us. But the seemingly trivial movements that we do all day (reaching for a coffee cup, grabbing a jacket, etc.) turn out to be not so simple after all. Behind the scenes and totally unconsciously, our brains are doing a tremendous number of calculations to establish where we are in relation to objects around us. As our vision is such a primary sense, it had been thought that the first step for the brain in planning movement was to create a visually based map of objects around us — even for objects that we couldn't see. But in a recent paper in the journal ... Read More
