Scientific minds have studied the way we walk for thousands of years. Aristotle and Hippocrates both wrote on the subject of what is today called gait analysis, or more broadly, motion analysis. The field began to take significant leaps forward with the advent of photography. For the first time, we could observe motion that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.
Clever Apes is dead. Long live Clever Apes.
It's a sad day here at WBEZ. Our clever host, Gabriel Spitzer, has left the station and is heading to Seattle.
First off, this episode is sort of a goodbye. I will be departing my beloved WBEZ shortly to strike out for new adventures. I’ll include my weepy valedictory at the bottom of this post. But the story this week is important, so before your attention wanders …
As kids, we usually learn about nature from a decidedly human point of view. The world exists in relation to us. People are the stars in this scenario: We are Hamlet, while nature is like Denmark – the place where we happen to be. The conventional wisdom has been that this is a universal way the mind develops its awareness of the natural world.
We’ve seen and heard some pretty sweet stuff while producing Clever Apes, but in our latest excursion, we got to taste something very sweet. We recently visited the kitchen-laboratories of Chef Homaro Cantu. You may know him from his many appearances on television, on the web, or eaten at his restaurants Moto and iNG.
Our tour began in a recently converted former office in the basement of Moto.
It seems like economics is a purely human invention, far removed from the jungle. But scientists say our ancestors were spending and investing for millions of years. So our behavior when we manage our portfolio or climb the corporate ladder resembles nothing so much as the interactions of apes or monkeys. In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we consider how our financial activity has deep parallels in the primate world. And furthermore, many of our most important financial decisions come from even more primitive impulses, deep in our lizard brains.
The University of Chicago’s Dario Maestripieri is a professor of comparative human development, evolutionary biology, neurobiology and psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience. (I usually abbreviate titles, but his makes me happy). He studies the intersections among our minds, our primate cousins, and evolution.
As we mark the one-year anniversary this week of the natural and nuclear disasters in Japan, it seems like a good time to reflect on Chicago’s deep and complicated nuclear history. Chicago is the cradle of nuclear energy, but it’s also the place where some of the first doubts about the wisdom of nuclear technology emerged.
During World War II, the so-called “Metallurgical Laboratory” at the University of Chicago became the center of the United States’ efforts to develop a working nuclear reactor. The project was led by physicist Enrico Fermi, an Italian Nobel Prize winner with an ever-present slide rule. In 1942, beneath the stands of a defunct football stadium, he began building a structure so crude that it was literally called a “pile.” Chicago Pile 1 was a stack of graphite and uranium, with control rods inserted at key points.
We bring you a guest post today from Faraz Hussain, who studies biochemistry at Illinois Institute of Technology. Faraz is a student of Joseph Orgel, the biologist researching preserved dinosaur tissue whom we profiled in the latest episode of Clever Apes. Here, Faraz introduces us to a completely different way of bridging the eons to bring dinosaurs into the present day. – Gabriel Spitzer
Dinosaurs’ 180 million-odd year reign may be considered a lively old romp by most, but some clever apes would prefer to study these fossils in the flesh. One particular suborder, the theropods, never really went extinct at all. The birds that descended from them are the nearest living relatives today of both raptors and tyrannosaurs—perhaps none more so than the humble hen.
Dinosaurs loom large in our imaginations not just because they were in fact enormous, but also they are so ridiculously old. There has always been a big, impenetrable curtain separating us from prehistoric life. Sure, we have some ancient bones, but those had long since turned to stone. Any actual tissue, the stuff of flesh-and-blood creatures, is irrevocably lost, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years in most cases. Maybe a few stray organic molecules could persist for a few million if, say, they were frozen deep within primeval ice.
So, needless to say, it came as something of a shock when Mary Schweitzer discovered that she had some 68-million-year-old dinosaur tissue on her hands.
The find was and is controversial.