How Giant Whales Fill Up on Tiny Creatures

How Giant Whales Fill Up on Tiny Creatures

Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Radio Archive, Episode 582 , Segment 2

Episode: India and the US, Laptop Bans, Bone-Marrow Donation

  • Jun 27, 2017 11:00 pm
  • 17:20 mins

Guest: Jean Potvin, PhD, Professor of Physics, St. Louis University The largest creature on the planet survives by feeding on some of the smallest life forms. It’s the blue whale, and every day it consumes up to 4 tons of shrimplike animals called krill, which are only a couple of inches long. The secret to getting enough of its teeny-tiny food to maintain its huge body lies in the blue whale’s comb-like rows of teeth, called baleen. Jean Potvin at St. Louis University has been using the laws of physics to unlock the feeding secrets of baleen whales.

Other Segments

Are Laptop Bans Really Effective?

20 MINS

Guest: Sheldon Jacobson, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Airplane security seems to be a moving target: when officials got wind that terrorists were cooking up explosives made of liquids and gels, along came the 3 oz carry-on limit. Then came the attempted underwear and shoe bombers, so now we have to take off our shoes and get a full-body scan to check our underwear before boarding a flight. Laptops already have to come out and be turned on for scanning. Recently, the US banned laptops in the cabin of flights coming from 10 airports in the Middle East. That prohibition may soon extend to all international flights in and out of the US. Do these widening bans on carry-on items make us that much safer? Where does it end?

Guest: Sheldon Jacobson, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Airplane security seems to be a moving target: when officials got wind that terrorists were cooking up explosives made of liquids and gels, along came the 3 oz carry-on limit. Then came the attempted underwear and shoe bombers, so now we have to take off our shoes and get a full-body scan to check our underwear before boarding a flight. Laptops already have to come out and be turned on for scanning. Recently, the US banned laptops in the cabin of flights coming from 10 airports in the Middle East. That prohibition may soon extend to all international flights in and out of the US. Do these widening bans on carry-on items make us that much safer? Where does it end?