10 years ago we first saw gravitational waves — what we’ve seen since

In 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 intelligence

After 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% perspiration

While 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 incarcerated

We 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 birds

Abby 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, Ontario

Dodging lions and mongooses to monitor what wild dogs are eating in Mozambique

PhD 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-inundation

The 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 bog

Pablo 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 them

Andrew 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 Park

Since 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!