What is attention capitalism doing to our minds? What is all this tariff chaos doing to our money? How can we get better at growing older? We look at these kinds of big questions here on The Current, our award-winning podcast that brings you stories and conversations to expand your worldview. My name is Matt Galloway. And like you, I'm trying to wrap my head around what's going on right now. We look for solutions to wicked problems. We listen to each other and we try to find delight.
This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Bob MacDonald. Welcome to Quirks and Quarks. On this week's show, senior mutant ninja divers. Scientists find a population of incredible women divers with genetic adaptations that give them superpowers. And the fact that they're doing this, you know, into their 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe even 90s, depending on the diver, to me is just absolutely superhuman. And honey, I shrunk the Nemo.
Not a Disney mashup, but coral reef fish responding to warming water. We go and catch all of the little fish on that anemone, so that particular group, and we measure them underwater. And it was there that we realized. Actually, they were doing shrinking. Plus, tonight's dessert special is edible robots, studying stormier weather, and the science of groove. All this today on Quirks and Quarks.
On the Korean island of Jeju, there are women with extraordinary abilities. The indigenous population of women there have remarkable swimming and diving abilities, which they use to collect food underwater. They can spend many hours a day in frigid waters diving deep to the seafloor. They continue this through pregnancy and well into their old age.
Dr. Melissa Ilardo, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah, took a deeper look to find the source of their superhuman ability. Hello and welcome back to Quirks and Quarks. Thank you so much for having me back. First of all, tell me about these women and their remarkable abilities. These women, the henyo, are absolutely incredible. So henyo actually means sea women, and they spend essentially their whole lives diving.
They're diving for things like abalone, sea urchin. They harvest seaweed. They've been known to spear an octopus. And they're diving in extremely cold waters as well. How cold? The water gets to around 10 degrees Celsius at the surface during the winter. Yeah, certainly colder than I could tolerate. And how long do they stay down?
You know, we don't really know because they, you know, it hasn't really been documented the lengths of their dives. And the women that we're seeing now have an average age of around 70. So, you know, we can measure how long they're diving now, which tends to be around 30 seconds. Oh, 30 seconds. So they're not like these extreme people who can hold their breath for five or 10 minutes or so.
They may be, but they're diving really functionally. And so for example, when they're diving for sea urchin, sea urchin tend to be quite close to the surface. So in 30 seconds, they can actually collect a lot of sea urchin and then kind of move on to the next patch. Oh, I see. And how deep would they go in their deepest dives?
In their youth, I think they used to dive well over 10 meters. Now they tend to dive a bit shallower. But again, they're on average 70 years old. So what do you find remarkable about this? Well, it's absolutely incredible.
that, you know, just what percentage of time they spend underwater. So if you watch them dive, you know, you see them come up to the surface and they make this characteristic sumbisori sound, it's called. So they have this whistling sound and you can tell that they've surfaced. And then pretty much as soon as...
you've found them in the water, they're going back underwater again. And the fact that they're doing this into their 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe even 90s, depending on the diver, to me is just absolutely superhuman. Wow. And how many of these divers would they make in a day?
So they dive now for about four to five hours. And that's actually restricted by the government because the government's trying to keep them safe. So I think if it were up to them, they'd be diving, you know, for eight hours a day or longer. Yeah, but diving in 10 degree cold water. I mean, that's hard on the body. So how did you investigate what was behind these abilities?
So I partnered with an amazing collaborator in Korea, and she's been working with this population, looking at their physiology for over a decade. We found that they have adaptations in two cents of the word. They've actually trained themselves to have a greater heart rate response to diving.
When you dive, your heart rate decreases. And this allows you to conserve more oxygen because as your heart is beating more slowly, you know, you're using up that oxygen more slowly. And they actually have a greater response. So their heart rate just plummets when they dive. tell that this is a training effect because we see it only in Henio divers and not in their genetically similar non-diving relatives.
Okay, so they're trained for that, but what genetic differences did you find and what do they do? We found a genetic adaptation that seems to have evolved in this population that actually also decreases their diastolic blood pressure during a dive. So naturally, our diastolic blood pressure will increase when we dive, but this can actually be extremely...
dangerous for someone who's pregnant. And these women die throughout their pregnancy, often up until the day that they give birth. So having this constantly increased blood pressure would actually increase their risk for blood pressure-related pregnancy disorders. So they've actually evolved genetic variation that protects them, we think, from this effect. Diastolic blood pressures, is that the pressure between heartbeats?
Yes, right. So when you get your blood pressure measured, you have these two numbers. And diastolic is the second of those numbers that's often ignored because we don't really think of it as a major contributor to hypertension or high blood pressure. But it actually may be. important in this situation. Okay. Now, what about cold tolerance? Did you find any genetic adaptations there?
We did. So we actually didn't measure cold tolerance from a physiology perspective. But in the genetic data, we saw a gene that's been evolving in this population that's related to something called the cold presser test. And so this is where you stick your...
hand in a bucket of ice water, essentially, and hold it there for a few minutes. And it's actually commonly used as a measure of pain tolerance, because as you can imagine, that's quite an uncomfortable thing to do. But it sounds a lot like hen-yo diving in the winter. You know, I mean, they're essentially... diving in an ice bath. And up until the 80s, they were doing this without the protection of wetsuits. How far back in time do these genetic modifications go?
We think that it started, you know, natural selection on this gene started around 1200 years ago. And so we wonder if this was around the time when the diving population of Jeju transitioned from maybe men and women diving together to only women. Oh, the men don't dive. That's right. It's all female divers on this island. They joke that the men of Jeju are actually pretty lazy.
So 1,200 years back, does that mean that there was some kind of genetic bottleneck where the population got really small and then came back up again? There have been a few genetic bottlenecks in Jeju's history. And so that could have been a contributor. But that's something we still have to kind of figure out. Are there any other health benefits associated with these gene differences that these women have that enable them to tolerate the cold and have lower blood pressure?
So we noticed that the population of Jeju Island, so everyone from Jeju is essentially equally likely to have descended from a diver. And we noticed that the population of Jeju Island actually has a really low rate of stroke mortality compared to the rest of Korea.
kind of environmentally a lot of things are very similar between these populations and yet a lot fewer people die from strokes in Jeju and so we wonder if the same genetic mechanisms that are protecting pregnant women while they're diving may also protecting the population of Jeju now from dying from strokes. You mentioned that the divers who are doing it today are older now. Why aren't young people picking this up?
Being a henyo, according to them, is just a really hard life. So they're spending, like I said, hours and hours in this extremely cold water. A lot of them have lost loved ones to the sea. And so these women kind of see it. as they don't necessarily want that for their daughters and their granddaughters. And they're really proud that their children and their grandchildren are kind of...
going out in the world and doing different things with their lives. But there is actually a new generation of people coming even from mainland Korea to try to help preserve this incredible culture. Dr. Leonardo, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Melissa Ilardo is an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah.
Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence are playing an increasingly important role in our world, and that can sometimes be a little alarming. But a new application of robotics is meant to be comforting, even celebratory. after you get past your initial reaction, which is probably, what the heck? Because European scientists have produced an edible robotic cake. It's all about marking their progress in developing systems for edible automation, for medicine, research, and entertainment.
And Dr. Mario Chironi from the Italian Institute of Technology based in Milan is ready to cut you a slice. Dr. Chironi, welcome to our program. Hello, nice to meet you. First of all, what is a robotic cake? Well, a robotic cake is cake that has some features and some parts that can interact. It has some small robots in it.
Some small robots. What are they? What do they look like? The team in Lausanne realized some gelatin soft robots, which are on top of the cake. These are like some bears that they can move. added also some edible batteries on the side to provide some power. And these are chocolate batteries. These are proper batteries. They provide power, but they are made with a lot of chocolate, so they are also tasty. And these batteries can...
Light up some cake candles. Okay, so you got moving gummy bears and chocolate batteries. Let's talk about the gummy bears. How do they move? Yeah, these gummy bears are basically activated by inflating them. They are like a sort of programmed balloon. So they move their arms in a sort of bracing movement and they nod with their heads so that they give this feeling of intervention.
interaction. These are the gummy bears. Oh, I see. So they're not electronic. They're just using air pressure to move. Yes, in this demonstration, yeah. It's a demonstration of a wider project where we are also activating this sort of robot with electrical parts. But for the CAKE demonstration, we resorted to... pressurized motion. Now, would these gummy bears still be moving when you eat them? That'd be kind of strange. No, I can assure that they will be totally immobile when you eat them.
This is an interesting point you touched because there are applications of edible robotics where they could help in ingesting food, where it's not possible to intake food. So some movement that can be... program could help people to ingest food. They are sort of crawling down your esophagus so that you can ingest food that you would not be able to ingest at all if you have, for example, you are affected by dysphasia.
We have a group in Bristol that is targeting especially this sort of application. Sounds like eating worms where they would crawl down your throat. It sounds a bit scary like that, but no, it's a similar approach. So we are exploring ways of making food. interactive and so also giving some functionalities like this
And you don't have to worry about disposing of the robotics afterwards because you digest them. Yeah, exactly. That is the foundation of all this project. Basically, we are trying to make both edible electronics and edible robotics exactly... because we are envisioning many, many applications where We don't want any way to add and increase electronic waste. And this solution would be completely degraded in the environment without creating any further waste.
Now, tell me about your chocolate batteries that illuminate candles on the cake. How do they work? So in this case, we actually showed the first edible rechargeable battery two years ago. In that case, we used a BizWox case. which is not very tasty. So we were not really satisfied about this part. And so we were able now to basically make them in a proper kitchen.
the gummy bears with a different casing and you need a little bit of mastery of how you handle chocolate but that's just the casing which gives the taste inside What makes the battery work is basically a couple of molecules which are the core of the battery and these molecules make the two poles of the battery. We know that batteries have a plus and minus pole, right? You have to use them that way. So you need two different molecules which are edible and can be charged and distributed.
And we found them into riboflavin, which is basically a vitamin B2, and quercetin, which is another... You find them in capers, for example. So there's a supplement. So these two are mixed into carbon electrodes to create a lot of volume. And this carbon is activated carbon, which is already used to bake.
Black... bread for example and you have a core of the battery and this is a perfectly edible actually these things are already used in food industry that's amazing so you're just using organic molecules two different kinds to do the pulls of the battery batteries usually need an electrolyte in the middle what are you using for that is exactly right so we use water with an acidic salt and then what what
uh makes the battery so you in the battery you need also a separator so you don't want to short-circuit the two electrodes and we use nori the same algae used to make sushi basically so all these things together make it work and I had the possibility to taste one of these chocolate versions because now being made in a kitchen rather than in a research lab, we can actually eat. And I will say that the contrast of the acidic electrolyte and the chocolate is quite nice. It's salted chocolate.
Now, I know it doesn't take very much power to light an LED candle. What else do you see these edible batteries being used for? They have already enough capacity, so enough energy inside to make some simple circuits work. And this means that we can already work on some prototypes of... miniaturized small and smart pills. Smart pills would be pills that are completely edible in this case, that they use an edible battery inside to power up some sensors so that we can ingest this pill.
census can tell us something interesting on our health. For example, how much time it takes for us to digest when we are taking some food. What is the pH level of our stomach or intestine. And so they would allow us to collapse. more data on our health and that in a completely safe way. Well, I think maybe I'll order a robo cake for my next birthday. I'm actually planning to be able to cook myself the chocolate batteries in my kitchen so that I can prepare them for my daughter.
birthday. It's been a few months, so I think I have enough time to learn. Well, good luck with your experiment on your daughter. Dr. Kaironi, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much. Dr. Mario Chironi is with the Italian Institute of Technology based in Milan. When you think about clownfish, you may think about Nemo, thanks to the Disney film. But according to new research, the clownfish may have more in common with another Disney movie, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Scientists working in Papua New Guinea have discovered that clown anemone fish have the remarkable ability to shrink in size. Melissa Versteg, a Ph.D. researcher at Newcastle University's School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, led this study. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, thank you so much for having me. First of all, tell me about the clown anemone fish. Besides what we see in the movie, what's it really like? Yeah, so clown anemone fish live on anemones on coral reefs.
And that anemone is stuck on the reef. It doesn't really move around much. And so the anemone fish are also really bound to that one anemone habitat. Now, the anemone, that's the animal that looks like a flower, right? It's got these things that stick up and the fish swims around among those. Yes, that's right. So the anemone, it's related to corals and it's got these tentacles that have stinging cells. And the fish are living in that particular anemone without getting stung.
How did you realize that the clown and enemy fish was able to shrink? What we do every month is we go and catch all of the little fish on that anemone, so that particular group, and we measure them underwater. So we look at their length. We don't look at how skinny they are, but just how long they are to see have they grown or not.
And it was there that we realized actually they were doing shrinking. So they were able to not lose weight necessarily, but really lose in length. How much were they losing? So it's very nuanced with these guys. So when they grow, it's also only just a couple of millimeters here or there because they're adults. So we're not expecting a lot of growth. But they're shrinking.
generally was about one to two percent of their total length. And we saw some extreme cases where they would shrink up to seven percent of what their size was at the beginning of that month. Wow. Now you say their length, so is it just they're getting shorter or is the fish overall getting smaller? Yeah, that's a great question. We measured that they were getting shorter.
And it's to do with the logistics of being in the field that makes it really hard to then see what other aspects of the fish are getting smaller. So whether they're also losing weight or whether other aspects are changing. Well, how do you actually measure a fish when you're underwater?
It's easier than you might think. So the anemones, we know where they are. They've got little ID tags on the reef. And so we catch all of the individuals on one anemone and then we just measure them with calipers. Wow. So do you have any idea how the fish are able to change their size? No, we don't know what is underlying what we're finding. We can speculate a little bit that it might be something to do with bone resorption.
But at this point, we're not quite sure what's causing it. And that's something that we'd love to work on next. Bone reabsorption, what's that? Vertebrates generally wouldn't be expected to shrink. But there are a couple of studies that show that... Some vertebrates have a capacity, so backboned animals like us, they have a capacity to reabsorb some of the elements and minerals that they have in their bones, in their muscles.
And so that would then allow an individual to get slightly smaller, which if you think about the amount of energy it takes you to run. a household if you make that household just slightly smaller then you need slightly less energy for that so you're trying to pull back or downsize if you will so that you've got a little bit more energy to keep you going
Wow. So it could be their skeletons are actually getting smaller. Right? Yeah, it could be something like that. But at this stage, we don't know. But we do know that there's... fish in juvenile stages that are able to reabsorb some of their bone and muscle material. So what would cause the clownfish to shrink in size in the first place?
From what we're finding, we see that it's related to heat stress and it's related to their complex social structure. And it could be that the heat stress in and of itself is enough for larger fish. that have lower thermal tolerance to need to shrink. It could also be an indirect effect where, for example, heat affects the food availability.
And so there's just not enough food around for them. And so that that could be causing it. And it could potentially also be numerous other things that are causing them to shrink. Now you say that there's a group of the clownfish in the anemone. Do they all shrink together? Yeah, they live in these social groups. And this particular type of anemone fish, the clown anemone fish,
They have a really strict size hierarchy. So you're not allowed to get too big compared to the higher ranked individual in that group. because that poses a threat. So everyone has to stay in line and has to maintain a size. What we were finding is that the male subdominant, so the female, she's the biggest, she's the dominant, it's her territory. just below her in the breeding pair is the male, he would show a little bit more of a dramatic response. So while both of them would...
would be able to shrink, his response would be a bit more dramatic. And we also found that the females would be more likely to shrink if her size in relation to that of the male allowed her to shrink. I guess, more safely while still maintaining that really important size boundary. Now, if the conditions improve, can the fish grow back to normal size again? Based on what we were seeing, which was quite phenomenal.
We found that the fish that have the ability to shrink a little bit, when they do then grow over the time span of a month, that growth is also a little bit more... exaggerated compared to the ones that don't so there's more plasticity but you can also imagine if you have to shrink at certain times because the environment demands you do then overall
you're not necessarily getting as big as the anemone fish that are able to grow little bits all the time. Well, do other fish do this? Well, so it's not been observed. This individual... shrinking when you need to and bouncing back when you can. That's not been observed in coral reef fish before. In fact, that shrinking has not been observed in coral reef fish before. And so we're not entirely sure how widespread this ability is.
But we do know that if you think of it on more population levels, that fish are not growing as big over their lifespan. as they used to. And so this finding that an individual could actually kind of downsize and then bounce back when it can, that could potentially give us a bit more of an explanation as to why we're finding that overall. fish aren't getting as big as they used to. Just one last thing. What went through your mind when you first realized that these fish have shrunk?
Oh, Bob, I died. I did not know what to do. I thought I had a little bit of a panic. I know that our methods were really good. So we just stuck with the science. But we also didn't get the time to... analyze any of that data until i got out of the field right and so i did i was there in kimby um studying these guys for six months and so it wasn't until later that year that we realized whoa this is a real thing and it comes with all of these amazing um
other skills of you know that being able to bounce back as well and being able to survive better and being able to do it in in a sort of a coordinated fashion with your breeding partner um so yeah it was super surprising but I definitely freaked out initially Well considering what we're hearing about the damage to the coral reefs around the world, does this give some hope that maybe the fish can survive these changes?
Yeah, so I think there is a limit as to how far we can keep pushing these guys. But it's definitely a nice illustration of the resilience that we can find on coral reefs and that nature has these genius. ways to help animals navigate environmental stresses. Ms. Verstegue, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Bob. It was really fun to be here. Melissa Verstegue is a PhD researcher at Newcastle University.
It was over 30 years ago that Clifford Olson first called me. Secret phone calls from Canada's most notorious serial killer. I knew I was killing the children, but I couldn't stop myself. Now it's time to unearth the tapes, because I believe there are still answers to be found. I'm Arlene Bynum from CBC's Uncover. Calls from a killer.
Available now. I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quirks and Quirks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, stormy science. A new lab is opening in Canada to help scientists study extreme weather and destructive storms.
You take them out of the field and they see buildings being destroyed and people on their worst day and they've lost everything and you interact with them. It changes your view of the world. It changes the way you view your role. When people talk about finding your groove, they're usually referring to a sense of being in sync with your life. But feeling the groove is something else entirely.
Usually, it's in response to a certain type of music, with a rhythm that drives you to tap your toes and shake your booty like there's no one watching. While a scientist in France wanted to dig into what this feeling of groove was all about, to ultimately gain some insight into how we process rhythms. Quirks & Quarks producer Sonja Biting spoke with him to learn all about it.
If you think about it, why do people dance? When we listen to speech, we don't dance. When we watch a movie, we don't dance. When we eat, we don't dance. And dancing is universal. In every culture in the world, people dance. So it's something that is universal, but that is very specific. You dance only to auditory stimuli, not all the auditory stimuli, only to music.
And not all music, no one dances in reaction when you listen to Mozart and so on. Only to music which is called groovy music. My name is Benjamin Morillon. I'm a French researcher working on auditory cognitive neuroscience. I study mostly speech and music perception and processing. because these are the two kind of stimuli that are uniquely human and you know that are part of our culture.
First, this study was not so much about music. We used music because it was a convenient stimulus and paradigm. But what we were interested in is how the brain, as humans, we anticipate in time what will happen. We are very interested by this idea that We don't process information. We don't perceive the world as a passive machine that is just perceiving things. But we constantly anticipate what will happen because we have memory.
We have expectations and we spend our entire time to try to predict what will happen. And we can predict many things. We can predict where something will happen, when something will happen. What will happen? And me, I'm interested in the temporal aspect, so when something will happen. And music, you know, it's very rhythmic. There's a lot of temporal irregularities, so music is the perfect kind of stimulus to study predictive timing.
When you listen to music, usually the tempo is around 2 Hz, 120 BPM. So very slow music. You know, when you learn to play the piano, usually you start to play at 60 BPM is equal to 1 Hz. And when you listen to very fast music... Like, it's crazy music. It's 150 BPM. It's like 2.5 Hz. So basically, music is between 1 and 3 Hz, let's say.
Why is it so? Is that because before computers and so on, music was produced by movements and we naturally move at around two hertz. When you walk, when you clap your hands, you know, when you tap the beat. Movements, we cannot move super fast. If you try to tap as fast as you can, clap your hands, you will maximally move at 5 Hz maybe, and after 10 seconds you will be very tired.
So, first what we did with my colleague Daniel Eschen, we're working at the same institute, and he's a musician by training, we decided to develop a set of musical stimuli that are very well controlled for all the parameters that we want to investigate but that also tend to produce this wanting to move phenomenon, the groove phenomenon. So at first we designed 36 different melodies that are simple, so that's not things that you will listen to in the dance floor. Because these are for the laps.
but they are very controlled. The volume is the same, the duration is the same, the number of notes is the same, the instruments that are used are the same. Everything is controlled except for what we call the degree of syncopation. It's basically reflecting the complexity of the rhythm. So if the syncopation is very low, the rhythm is very simple. If the degree of syncopation is very high, there's a lot of complexity in the rhythm.
All the melodies that we created, we used a tempo of 100 BPM, number of beats per minute, which is the same thing that I'm saying that it's a tempo of two hertz. So there's two beats. per second and then we did some behavioral experiments online asking people to estimate if the music was initiating this groove feeling. It's very clear there's a big consensus of what is the groovy music inside the melodies that we have created.
neither the more simple rhythms or the more complex rhythms that produce this natural urge to move, what we call the groove. It's like a sweet spot where it's... A bit complex, but not too much. Of course, some music you want to dance more or less, but if we ask people to tap with their fingers as if they were dancing, to see... When people listen to these melodies, at what speed do they move? We see that they basically dance at the tempo and whatever the melody.
whether it's a groovy music or a non-groovy music, they tend to move at two hertz. Because then we looked at brain data and we investigated... brain dynamics and we looked at the different frequencies in the brain and what we use is a brain imaging method which is called the magnetoencephalography and this machine is good because it's recording brain activity with a precision
of less than one millisecond, so we can see the evolution over time, the time course of activity in the brain. And it has also many different channels, like in our case, our machine has like 250 channels. And so we can... reconstruct where the brain activity is coming from, from the different regions of the brain. So we have participants going into this scanner and listen passively to the melodies.
And then at the end we say, was this a groovy or not groovy melody? And then we can associate the brain recordings of this melody to the behavioral rating to do later analysis. So we see mostly that there's activity in the auditory cortex because we perceive sounds. So we activate the regions that are dedicated to the processing of sounds, that are connected to the ears. But then we were wondering...
Which brain regions are more activated when you want to dance? And when you want to dance, even if you're not moving, you tend to activate more the regions involved in movements, so regions called from the motor cortex. And what we see nicely in our data is that we see the entire pathway that connects the auditory cortex and the motor cortex, and it's a pathway that is called the dorsal auditory pathway.
If you ask someone, how do you see the world? People will say, okay, I see the world with my eyes. And then I have my visual cortex that receives the information from the eyes and that processes information. But if we ask people, how do we perceive time? One domain of neuroscience is the study of time and timing and time perception and temporal anticipation, what I said at the beginning, like predictive timing. And what is very striking is that it seems that at least when...
You perceive time embedded inside rhythms. We perceive time with our motor system, which is very surprising. You know, it could be any type of neurons. And it seems that... Because the motor system is very precise, you know, to coordinate the different muscles, the different movements, it's like a clock that is very fine-tuned and very precise at the sub-millisecond scale.
This clock, this type of neural network, is recycled to estimate durations. So for me, that's a fascinating discovery, that we perceive time even if we don't move. even if we are laying down, not making any movement, we activate the regions that are usually called motor regions, but they are not only doing motor stuff, they are also doing time perception stuff.
So maybe we should rename them and then call them timing neurons instead of motor neurons. And because these are the same neurons and the ones that are involved in movement then you naturally move to music. This is not very surprising because when you dance you have the motor system, when you listen you have the auditory system. What was more interesting for us is to study what are the brain dynamics involved.
You can connect different regions, but you can connect them at different frequencies. So it's brain waves like... delta wave, the beta wave, and wanted to investigate if these different brain waves were characteristic of this wanting-to-move phenomenon.
When we look at brain rhythms, some of these rhythms are imposed by the stimulus. Because the tempo is at 2 Hz, the bass is doing a melody, but the drum is at 2 Hz, of course you will see brain activity at this rate, because we perceive the sound. What we wanted to see is that there are some intrinsic brain rhythms that are not driven by the stimulus but that are the signature of the brain activity.
Within this bend that we call the delta bend, we observed, of course, a strong activity at 2 Hz that is driven by the stimulus, but we also observed an activity at 1.4 Hz. So just below, a bit slower.
along this dorsal auditory pathway that I mentioned, that was predictive of if the participants were finding the music groovy or not. And it seems to originate... in these parietal regions which connect the auditory and the motor cortex which are regions that are known to be involved in auditory temporal attention and attention in general so if you do a task of spatial attention
whether it be auditory or visual, you will see also these kind of regions. So we find a region that is known to direct attention, either in space or in time. And here we find that it's... the key player to orient attention in time. That's why my hypothesis is that if we present music at this speed... Then it will be optimal for participants to pay attention in time, because that's processing speed of information, basically, if you want. And for music, 1.4 Hz seems to be the optimal speed.
to just process the information. So we plan to do a short follow-up experiment where we will present the same melodies but at different speeds. And my hypothesis is that if we present a music that is at 1.4 Hz, the external rhythm imposed by the music will nicely align with the intrinsic rhythm of the brain activity. And I think... that the music should be more groovy. So even if speech is less rhythmic, you don't dance in reaction to speech and so on. I have a dream that one day...
This nation will rise up. The idea is that there's still a rhythm because when we open and close the jaw, we modulate the volume of the sound and it's what creates a syllabic rhythm. That all men are created equal. Currently, we are doing an experiment where we're trying to see if we can anticipate in time, not during music, which is obvious, but during speech processing. And for example, for that we developed a deep neural network model.
that is trying to predict not the content of the information, you know, but just the temporal aspect. I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea. And what we found is that indeed, even for speech, even if it's less obvious than for music, we also anticipate in time and we predict. And that's helping us to keep track of what is said, to keep our attention in time.
So that's why our current claim, so it's a theory, that it's because it's encoding durations, okay, timing and time information. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you? So the idea is that we can keep track.
of the speech information, but what is the rate at which we keep track of the speech information? We want to investigate now if when you listen to speech, and it's a bit difficult, so it's speech in noise, do you naturally activate this region also? keep track of the flow of speech. And if you activate more this region, do you understand more, better what is said? That's a bit how we want to make the connection between music and speech.
So we perceive time with our motor system. We also anticipate in time and we predict and that's helping us to keep track of what is said to keep our attention in time, you know. And groovy music has this complexity in the rhythm that naturally activates your timing neurons. That's, for me, the heart of the discovery. That was Dr. Benyamin Morian, an auditory cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France.
Late last year, Western University launched the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory, and it couldn't have come at a better time. Because with the new U.S. Administration's Department of Government Efficiency tearing through science budgets, one of the potential targets is the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Severe Storm Laboratory. It's a lab that has studied severe weather since 1962, but in recent weeks, proposed budget cuts mean the lab's future seems uncertain.
A scary thought for a place that studies extreme weather events like tornadoes, flash floods, hail and lightning storms to figure out how to reduce how deadly these storms can be. The only other lab like it is the European Severe Storms Laboratory, which launched in 2006. But now, with a Canadian lab on board, there are three centers studying these extreme events. at a time when storms are hitting more often, with less predictability, and affecting more people on our planet than ever before.
Producer Amanda Buckowitz was at the launch, and she spoke with some of the scientists there about the excitement around this new endeavor. It's a stormy day in southwestern Ontario. Rain is pouring down, lightning is striking fast, and thunder is rumbling all around. What a perfect day. for the world's top storm scientists to gather and talk shop. I saw the lightning flash, and I hear the thunder, and it's like, really? Are you serious?
My wife actually called me and said, you know, you've got a thunderstorm coming. I thought it was very appropriate. The reason they're all here is to celebrate the launch of the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory at Western University. We're trying to identify really the impacts and all the data that occurs every time one of these severe storms happens. no one else in the country is systematically collecting it all so we're trying to collect what actually happens
Greg Kopp is the executive director of this new lab. He's excited for the potential to better understand the unique weather patterns in Canada. Storms are different in Canada. Especially, you know, we're sitting here in southern Ontario. I'm in London and there's three great lakes.
40-50 minute drive from from where i am and those lakes affect the storms in in profound ways and so we have different things with it we we want to see what happens so that we can start documenting and finding those patterns and then When you find those patterns, you can find the solutions. Here, they're combining meteorology and engineering to not only figure out how to predict what storms will hit where,
but also how to build structures that can take the beating that the storms will deliver. Well, the definition of a natural disaster is that the local community can't recover on their own. They need outside help. And if we have... rising levels of disaster and losses, we're not going to be able to recover as fast as it keeps coming. It's something that we can't afford to ignore. According to Paul Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for...
catastrophic loss reduction at Western University. So of the payments made by insurance companies, about 60% are related to severe storms, but storm damages have been rising year after year. We're on a trend that is unsustainable. Within 25 years, the current trend would take us to $100 billion a year of damage. And Canada just cannot afford $100 billion worth of damage.
Part of it is aging infrastructure. Part is a growing population, and where we've decided to build our homes, like near waterways and in floodplains. But a big part is that climate change is affecting how different weather systems work together, making them less predictable. We're seeing in the data that we're collecting changes in the patterns. So in the U.S., for example, it's been established that tornadoes are moving from the traditional tornado alley into the southeast.
We're seeing, for example, more tornadoes occurring in southern Ontario and in southern Quebec now. The years that we've had wildfires, we're seeing less severe storms in those summers because we think the smoke... is affecting how the storms develop and they seem to become less intense and so you have these really complicated interactions
The lab itself is a continuation of the work these researchers are already doing on tornadoes and hailstorms, something they study both out in the field and at their state-of-the-art wind tunnels here at Western. Oh yeah, I love the wind tunnels. That's my happy place. Yeah, so we have boundary layer wind tunnels, which are for studying large scale storms like hurricanes and large scale winter storms to get wind loads on buildings.
We also have something called the Windy Dome, which is the largest tornado simulator in the world. So you can create a tornado that's about a meter in diameter, which is big enough to do scale model testing. So you learn a lot from that. And then also being in there, it's just kind of fun watching it. You put smoke in and you can watch the vortices. You know, there's a reason people chase storms. They're beautiful to look at. They're exciting. And to do that in the lab is really a lot of fun.
They're now adding a team to research flash flooding, which has become more of a danger to Canadians each and every year. Like last year's flash floods that hit the greater Toronto area on two separate occasions.
racking up a billion dollars in damages. Those storm systems were devastating. I think that's a really challenging problem because the flash flooding... filters through our built environment in complex ways and it's going to be a little bit different one of the big outcomes of flash flooding is is basement flooding and so that's inside people's houses so we can't get that kind of information from our
As an engineer, Dr. Kopp sees the threats to buildings and infrastructure as something he wants to help prevent. Their work has already been used to help update building codes and inspired a pilot project of a tornado-resilient community built in St. Thomas, Ontario. And one of the best parts, he says, is taking students out of the classroom and into storm-battered areas to really drive home the importance of the work that they do.
Take the engineers, you know, they learn how to design things in their classes, but you take them out of the field and they see buildings being destroyed and people. on their worst day and they've lost everything and you interact with them it changes your view of the world it changes the way you view your role in design as an engineer it changes how you think about these things and so
Ultimately, it's the next generation that helps transform our society. And, you know, we do it one student at a time. Ultimately, the work done in the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory will be helping researchers across disciplines, like the engineers who want to build better structures, but also meteorologists looking to improve forecasting and warning systems.
and insurers who want to better understand risks. They're all here on this stormy day to celebrate the lab's launch. Like John Allen, an associate professor of meteorology at Central Michigan University. We know that severe weather is a global problem and half of, I think, that problem is really not having quality observations, quality information from local scientists who can provide the insights that allow us to...
improve resiliency and forecasting. And Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. We believe, as a field, that the atmosphere doesn't care where you are. And so knowing, having people in different places looking around is just a big deal. And Tanya Brown-Giamonco from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Well, I think, you know, all of these different groups that are working to try to understand the hazards themselves, if we know more about the hazards, we can figure out more ways to do something about it. looks at how buildings fare during extreme events.
Well, one of the things that we definitely see is that there's just more stuff out there. As our populations have grown, as they've kind of expanded what used to be small cities into much larger cities, there's just more stuff for the hazards to hit, whether that's tornadoes. hurricanes, earthquakes. There's more stuff that can be damaged. And all this stuff means that even without climate change's effects, we'd still be in trouble, according to meteorologist Dr. Brooks.
the Mid-South, and we've probably had a 10% increase in the number of tornadoes in the last 40 or 50 years. Well, we've got 40% more population and homes and all that stuff. Even if climate hadn't changed, we'd expect to be seeing more damage now than we did 40 years ago. Dr. Allen says that part of the new lab's strength is the multidisciplinary approach. I think one of the interesting things that comes from the engineering community's perspective is...
It's more long-term thinking, right? It's how we make ourselves more resilient into the future so that we don't have to completely demolish houses and replace them on a constant basis. And so I think that the insights that the engineering community can provide about what... we can do to our structures to make them more resilient is absolutely critical. There are researchers here from all over the world, South America, Australia, Asia, Europe, and of course, North America.
Severe storms are a global concern, and no one is immune to the destruction that they can bring. There's also new hazards emerging in places that don't usually see severe storms. like here in Canada, where last year tornadoes touched down in Vancouver and New Brunswick, far away from their usual hotspots. So for Dr. Cobb, he's excited about the potential for this lab to help further gather the data we need. to build a stronger, safer, and more resilient Canada.
There's new hazards emerging. Jasper, the Jasper wildfire was amazing. There was very high wind speeds there. So we sent a damage survey team to see if there was a tornado in that. And last year in the Kelowna fires, we documented. the first fire tornado in Canada. And so there's just a changing nature of these hazards that we're trying to understand. For Quirks and Quarks, I'm Amanda Buckowitz. Amanda Buckowitz is a producer at Quirks and Quarks.
And that's it for Quirks and Quartz this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is quirks at cbc.ca or just go to the contact link on our webpage at cbc.ca slash quirks. where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play.
Quirks and Quarks was produced by Megan Foster, Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Buckowitz, and Sonia Biting. Our senior producer is Jim Levins. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.