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. 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. Cantu has transformed the space into an indoor aeroponic garden. The system works by spraying plant root...

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 m...

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...

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, the...

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. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control recently reported that this year's flu season is one of the latest in the past 30 years.Even though the flu hasn't been making big headlines this year, there is still good reason to remain vigilant in fighting...

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? We’ve gotten along this far without a phone book for the hordes of germs in almost every nook and cranny on the globe. But consider some of the very practical things bacteria do for us. They break down stuff in ...