The Last Show with David Cooper
Jesse Rogerson: Spider Monkeys Know Things - January 27, 2026
28 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. As the planet warms, there are a lot of negative downstream consequences. See what I did there? Stream, because streams of water flowing off the glaciers. But nobody ever thinks about the penguins, the poor penguins.
And the good news is the penguins might be adapting to warm weather. We're here with Jesse Rogerson. We're covering science news. Jesse is a professor at York University, an astrophysicist. I said that right. Jesse, welcome to the program.
Nailed it. Thank you.
Chapter 2: How are penguins adapting to climate change?
Thanks for having me.
So the penguins, I worry about them. When I think of the ice caps melting, I think, what will the penguins do? I don't care about us. I don't care about the rest of the planet. I care about the penguins. but things might actually not be so bad for them.
Well, it depends on the species. So one thing to keep in mind here is that all climate change, climate change happens everywhere and it affects the entire earth, but it is accentuated, the effects of it in different ecosystems. And one of those is at the poles, both north and south.
And in the Antarctic, the warming that's happening across the planet is about four times faster than the warming elsewhere on the planet, on average.
So it's, you know, it's accelerating.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's a problem. And so what these scientists, they're worried about the penguins too. So they went down, they set up a whole bunch, they had these all like 70 time-lapse cameras. So they were like, set up all these cameras near the breeding grounds of these various species of penguins, specifically the Adelie, the Chinstrap, and the Gentoo.
And they were just monitoring, they started monitoring in 2012, and they were looking at where they set up their breeding grounds, when they do it, how long it lasts, the number of chicks, all that stuff, right? All the stuff that goes with breeding.
And over this 10-year time span of tracking it, what they noticed is that as things got warmer, all three of the species they were tracking started doing their nesting and their breeding earlier and earlier and earlier, so much so that some of them were as much as 24 days earlier than normal in the spring. Is that a bad thing? Well, it depends on your species.
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Chapter 3: How does climate change impact biodiversity among penguin species?
The human team. All right. This last science story is so cool, and it's in your wheelhouse. You are an astrophysicist. An old map of the sky that we thought was completely lost to time, like this old parchment paper kind of thing, it was discovered, and it tells us what the sky looked like a long time ago, which is kind of cool because...
the sky shifts a bit, like, you know, our, I don't know, stars change their position and stuff. Am I understanding this right? Yeah.
So this was a, I teach a course called history of astronomy and we do the entire history of astronomy. It's mostly from a European perspective, unfortunately, but it does a decent job of covering the story from early, early humans, 10,000 years ago or so up until today. And one of the big parts we focus on is ancient Greek astronomy and like
600 BCE to about 200 CE or so, that ancient Greek into ancient Rome. And one of the most notable people during that time was this guy named Hipparchus. Hipparchus was apparently one of the best observers on the planet. He would go out, he would observe the sky, and he made very meticulously drawn maps, according to lore.
Now, his original maps of the sky have been lost, but they were copied and changed and added to by other philosophers of the time, Ptolemy and Al-Sufi, to name a couple. But the original maps of Hipparchus have apparently not been seen. So enter this group.
What they did is they, what people used to do is they used to reuse parchment paper, parchment, you know, if nobody's been using it for a while, they would like use some chemicals, they would wash off all the ink and then they would write over top of it. And so they've been, this group has been
looking at all these old ancient parchments and finding and seeing that there's, there is, you can see it with your eyes that there's stuff smudged on there from like the last time it was used. But how do you like get the information out? And they use a technique called x-ray fluorescence. And they, the different inks light up in different ways depending on the light that you hit on it.
And if you do it in the correct way, you can see like layer one, layer two, layer three, layer four, all the way down.
We just have about a minute. What did they discover in these old parchments or whatever?
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