WBEZ's Clever Apes

Exact statistics are hard to come by, but it is generally accepted that a majority of the world’s population speaks more than one language. So if we want to better understand how the brain works, how it processes sound and language, it might be a good idea to study the brains of bilingual people.

Today, motion capture is used in movies and video games to create realistic movement in animated characters. In the Motion Analysis Lab at Rush University Medical Center, Dr. Kharma Foucher uses motion capture to study hip osteoarthritis.

 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.

As kids, we usually learn about nature from a decidedly human point of view: The world exists in relation to us. But an eclectic group of researchers are challenging that. They've started looking at the way Native and non-Native children come to learn about nature, and they've found some distinctive differences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just the other day, I was feeling lucky because I haven't gotten a cold or flu this winter. Maybe all that hand washing and hand sanitizing was paying off.  Maybe, maybe not? It turns out that this year's flu season is just off to a late start.

Microbes are by far the most abundant life form on the planet. The numbers are so big, they're almost comical: maybe five million trillion trillion bacteria on earth, and that's conservative. And yet we know shockingly little about who's living where, and what they do.So, big deal, right?

The human brain is full of wonder, mystery, perhaps even spirit. But it's also a machine.

Often in science, a new insight doesn't fit in with the old patterns. That means something, of course, is wrong – either the fresh idea, or everything we thought we knew leading up to it. In the latest installment of Clever Apes, we consider two of these curveballs.

So we just finished explaining how the gut is our second brain. How to top that? How about this: Your gut is its own planet.The human intestine hosts an entire civilization of microorganisms – about 100 trillion by most estimates. That's many times more than there are cells in your body.

In researching the human gut over the last few weeks, I've learned at least 10 things that have blown my mind. Here is one: Your intestines are your second brain.The gut has its own nervous system – called the enteric nervous system – that is highly sophisticated and can basically think for itself.

Memory can be a tricky thing. As we learned in yesterday's episode of Clever Apes, our earliest recollections are re-written in our brains every time we think of them.

I'm sitting at a picnic table in our screened-in porch. It's my third birthday party, and I'm opening presents. I unwrap a Tonka truck, and drop to the floor to start playing with it.That's been my earliest memory ever since I can, well, remember.

Charles Darwin ushered in modern biology with his explanation of how different species evolve. But his work leaves us with a paradox: Why should dozens or even thousands of species coexist in a single habitat? The theory suggests they ought to duke it out until just a few winners dominate.

In pop culture, we tend to pigeonhole scientists into a few stereotypes: out-of-touch nerds (Jerry Lewis' Nutty Professor), bumbling head-in-the-clouds types (Doc Brown) or obsessed madmen (Dr. Frankenstein/Moreau/Jekyll/Strangelove).

From industry to pop culture to the military, we've long been captivated by robots. We tend to imagine them as our mechanical mirror images – reflections of our most efficient, coldest selves.

The Tevatron particle collider shut down in September of 2011. Once the highest-energy collide in the world, it is survived by its descendants, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Just a week after the September 11th attacks, nerves still raw, America was hit with its worst-ever biological attack. The anthrax letters set off a new wave of panic, and reminded scientists how little we understand some of the world's most dangerous germs.

We may not think of it this way, but we hear in 3-D. Good thing, too. It's how we know what direction to turn when we hear footsteps or where to look for our kid in a crowded playground. But this depth of field is almost impossible to capture on tape.

Do you ever get the feeling we're all living in an illusion, man? And, like, what we see is really just a movie, you know, projected from the edge of the universe? And stuff?

Photosynthesis is one of the oldest biological processes on earth. Microorganisms figured it out more than two billion years ago, and completely transformed the planet.

As we human beings have come up against our limits throughout history, we've managed to invent tools that can overcome them. Using tools we can fly, restart a human heart, photograph galaxies and amoebae.

Say the original Declaration of Independence burned up. No problem, you might think – we have pictures of it. But then say someone discovered that a word had been scratched out and replaced.

Scientists love a quest, and so does the media. Just about every field has some “holy grail” or other. A database search for just the last six months shows about a thousand instances of this phrase popping up in relation to science.

Last time around on Clever Apes we dipped into realms of science that some might consider disgusting. Now we turn to the science of disgust itself. What is disgust, and where does it come from? There are a few places where scientists can look for clues, starting with what disgusts people.

Let's consider the beauty of a seething swarm of carrion beetles picking clean the carcass of a dead rat.Sorry – were you eating breakfast?To a scientist, that grisly scene might evoke the cycles of ecosystems, the connectedness of life and death, and the elegant efficiency of a life form sculpted b

  Brontosaurus? A sham. Triceratops? Awkward adolescent. Tyrannosaurus Rex? A total wuss. OK, maybe T-Rex was no wuss, but it definitely lacked dignity. It walked all bent over, may have been an opportunistic scavenger and possibly even had feathers.

Let's talk a little bit about testosterone, shall we?Sure, it's a loaded topic, tied up with what behaviors are supposedly “male.” But of course both men and women have it, and it seems to play a big role in the kind of people we wind up becoming.

Embryonic stem cells are certainly a loaded subject. They come with built-in controversy over how they are obtained – a human embryo is destroyed in the process.

 Our senses tell us about the world, but they also reveal a lot about ourselves. On the latest installment of Clever Apes, we find that research into cochlear implants helps us understand how all hearing is really both mechanical and subjective, machine and mind.

 Hey Clever Apes fans! We've selected a few highlights from our first six months and wrapped 'em all up in an hour long broadcast special.  Why do kids play with fire? What happens when robots and theater mix? And why do some people age so well?

Pain may be the most immediate and undeniable of human experiences. And yet it's not obvious what it is, or where it comes from. Aristotle thought pain was basically an emotion, located in the heart.

When we heard there was a study about the connection between marital relations and chronic pain, we couldn't help but think of classic TV shows where marriages are stressed by back pain.

Gordon's pez: Tensor glyphs baffle a spouse, who calls Clever Apes for help. (Image courtesy of Gordon Kindlmann)"I heard about your show and thought immediately of my husband, Gordon Kindlmann, who is a professor at University of Chicago.

Malcolm MacIver with one of his weakly electric fish. He's colaborating on an art installation with Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim, called "Scale," opening in Europe.

 We've always assumed that cognitive decline was just the cost of a long life. But some people manage to sail into old age without ever paying a price in mental sharpness.

The ol' memory banks tend to slip a little as we get older. No surprise there.

It may be the ultimate symbol of human mastery over nature's power: fire. On this edition of Clever Apes, we consider why flames fascinate us. Eons of evolution have written fire into our DNA -- no wonder kids like to mess with matches. AUDIODownload this episode, or subscribe to the podcast.

Science doesn't always tell us what we want to hear, and our record of accepting unwelcome findings is less than stellar. We have been known to shoot the messenger; or at least lock him up until he concedes that the universe revolves around the earth.

So much of science is about finding patterns -- repetitions that let us predict outcomes for given circumstances. The universe is full of these rhythms -- from the vibrating loops of string theory to the orbits of stars and planets to the pulsing of our heart.

What if during the World Cup finals, a unicorn pranced out onto the field. Or a woman on stilts appeared. Or, say, Wilford Brimley. You'd probably notice, right? Not necessarily, as psychologist Daniel Simons has shown.

The apes are us -- the latest version of a critter that has evolved to be curious. This thirst of ours seems to be hard-wired -- to know ourselves, to find truth and to seek beauty in the universe.