No Featured Image

Free Radicals Radio: Bring on the bugs!

Babes in the woods Get outside Can a walk in the woods really change us? Scientists are beginning to think so. There’s evidence to suggest that being in a busy city environment can reduce the brain’s capacity to remember things and lower self-control. Kids are driven to school and back, and off to soccer practice, and then when they get home, they turn on the computer or TV and settle down to an evening of screen-tertainment. The growing children and nature movement suggests children’s problems with obesity, attention span and lack of understanding of the environment are connected to less … Read more…

Featured Image

Climate change may alter malaria patterns

Malaria has long been endemic in Kenya’s humid lowlands and its tropical coast. But in recent decades there has been a spike in the number of malaria epidemics in the East African Highlands—an area where the people living there have little experience with the disease. The East African Highlands are high above sea level. Traditionally, the cool breezy climate has been inhospitable to mosquitoes. But in the late 1990s average temperatures in Kenya’s highlands were as much as 4 degrees higher than normal and the incidence of malaria jumped 300 percent. Many experts believe that climate change is fueling this … Read more…

Featured Image

Arctic radio

Free Radicals When the CCGS Amundsen, a Canadian research ice breaker, left its home port of Quebec City in July 2007, it embarked upon a historic 15-month expedition that would have it travel across the Arctic and overwinter in the Beaufort Sea. The scientists on board the  Amundsen might spend their days hunting for ice algae, fishing for zooplankton, or surveying the contours of the nearby ice floes. The sounds of them at work were featured on Free Radicals (science, culture and connection), a radio program that airs on CKUT (90.3 FM Montreal) on Mondays. Listen to the show (August … Read more…