Voyager approaches one light-day away, and more…

On this week’s episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:

Voyager 1 on the edge of reaching historic one light-day milestone

On Nov. 18, Voyager 1 spacecraft will be 25.9 billion kilometres from Earth — the first human-made object to reach a distance of one light-day. Bob McDonald watched Voyager 2 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Aug. 20, 1977, alongside Jon Lomberg, the space artist and design director for the Golden Record, the time capsule aboard both spacecraft. They reconnect to chat about the launch and the meaning of the mission. Joe Westlake, a space physicist and director of NASA’s heliophysics division, explains how the Voyager spacecraft continue to make scientific discoveries about the galaxy beyond our solar system, almost 50 years later.

Renewable energy could help avoid a ‘global meltdown’ — if we pick up the pace

As the U.N.’s annual climate change conference kicks off in Turkey, the planet is on the edge of surpassing the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 C climate target. Researchers say that global efforts to lower carbon emissions must accelerate if we’re to avert a “global meltdown.” John Pomeroy, a hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan with a new study in Science about the precariousness of our planet’s icy poles, said even if we hold at 1.5 C, that would put Canada in “a very bad spiral, into dysfunction.” In a different study, published in Nature Climate Change, Corinne Le Quéré, a Canadian climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, found that between 2019 and 2025, 59 countries, including Canada, lowered their carbon emissions while also increasing their GDP, but she says there’s still much more work to do in the transition towards renewable energy. 

New research suggests that while there have been some gains in the global transition away from fossil fuel emissions to clean energy, a further acceleration will be needed to avoid a ‘global meltdown.’ (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)

Scientists find strongest evidence yet of dinosaur blood

Researchers say they’ve discovered fossilized evidence of blood inside a 115-million-year-old dinosaur leg bone. A team led by Kliti Grice, a geochemist from Curtin University in Australia, was surprised to find molecular evidence of heme, an iron-rich molecule found in blood, inside a dinosaur bone. Further research led to the discovery of microscopic structures that resemble red blood cells, as well as other chemical fingerprints of blood. After using 30 different methods, the team published their results in the journal PNAS. Grice says the results offer strong evidence that some biomolecules can persist much longer than previously thought under special burial conditions.

Scientists have discovered traces of dinosaur blood preserved in this unassuming thigh bone for 115 million years. (Curtin University)

Recounting the feathered connections between humans and birds

Over the course of human history, birds are ever present — in our art, on our clothes and on our dinner plates. But that obsession has led to their decline — and even extinction. Surveys show that the North American bird population lost nearly three billion adult breeding birds between 1970 and 2019 alone. Pete Dunne is the former director of the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey. He has written over 20 books about birds, and his latest is Under Their Wing: How birds shape the human experience.

Prolific birder Pete Dunne explores the many ways the history of human development has been linked with birds, in his book Under Their Wing: How Birds Shape the Human Experience. (Chelsea Green Imprint / Penguin Random House)

How you respond to medications depends on your genes

You never really know exactly how your body will react to new medication until you take it. For some medications, they may work differently because of the person’s DNA. Researchers already know about the links between some genes and medications, but it’s often not put into practice — in part because we don’t have a lot of information about how common these DNA variations are across the world. In a new study, published in Science, Philip Empey, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and his colleagues looked at 100,000 Americans from a wide range of ancestral backgrounds to get a better sense of how common these genetic differences were.

A digital rendering of the human genome. (Mario Tama /Getty Images)