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WBEZ's Clever ApesEpisodes
Episodes of WBEZ's Clever Apes
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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
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 t
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
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
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 tw
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 t
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 h
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, rememb
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
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 da
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 o
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.
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