Cat faces are more expressive than you think; Cats can get sick with coronaviruses – and get better with COVID-19 antivirals; Cats are built to purr; Cats can make it harder to get away with murder; Even when they're curled up in your lap, cats have "one paw in the wild".

These bats copulate for hours with enormous penises but without penetration; Jumping spiders think it matters if you’re black and white; Forewarned and three-armed; Red snow in the morning, climate scientists take warning; We need to save biodiversity to preserve billions of years of natural experiments.

Hummingbirds sidle sideways to slip through tiny gaps; Do you speak fish? A new online dictionary of fish sounds debuts; When girls are in the audience, all-boy choirs change their tune; Ancient whales - tiny and titanic - from 40 million years ago; Alien blobs lurk inside our planet, and could be feeding supervolcanoes; Quirks & Quarks Listener Question.

Edible fats and oils could be synthesized from fossil fuels; Sea stars lost their tails to get a head; Southern Right whale skin samples helps tell the story of their history and future; Music soothes physical as well as emotional pain; Does biology trump free will? A behavioural scientist argues we have no choice; Quirks listener question — Fires and oxygen.

Canadian AI researcher wins Herzberg medal, cautions world about his work; Pro football player lifespan depends on the position they play; Killer whale blubber is telling a sad story about pollution; Smart glasses help blind people see with sound; The most powerful solar storm ever struck before it could do much damage.

We’ll see a century of major melting of Antarctic ice, no matter what we do; For Halloween — How your body’s microbiome will help recycle you after you die; Climbing down from trees could be why we can throw a baseball; Brain waves from false memories look different from real ones; Finding the biological signature of long COVID.

A metal mission — NASA launches a spacecraft to Psyche; Hungry Hippos don't chew very well; Music makes your heart go pitter-pat just like other people's hearts; Cicadas boom and trees get busted; Understanding the risks and rewards of deep sea mining.

A Nobel Prize for colourful quantum dots; A future supercontinent will make Earth uninhabitable; Scientists use lasers to melt lunar dust into bricks to pave a lunar highway; How Neanderthals took down a mighty cave lion; The evolution of women.

Nobel prize winners set the table for mRNA COVID vaccines; Human conversation scares African wildlife more than lions; James Webb Telescope is opening our eyes to young black holes; Evidence of fires in the La Brea tar pits suggests an explanation for extinction; Finding concrete solutions to one of the world’s hardest environmental problems.

What a trilobite ate and what ate it; Antimatter falls down, much to the relief of physicists; Hospitals have controlled C. difficile outbreaks — but people are bringing their own; Some early cows – and cowboys – in the Americas came from Africa; Ugly babies: A new book looks at cute-challenged but fascinating baby animals.

A special bonus episode of CBC Radio's program looking at the world of medicine. Pediatrician and vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez warns the anti-vaccine movement has morphed into a dangerous anti-science force. In The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist's Warning, Hotez says failing to act now will threaten governments’ ability to fight serious infectious diseases.

Vatican scientist will be among the first to study space rocks delivered from the heavens; The base of the food chain in Great Slave Lake has been altered as climate changed; The stone age was probably also the wood age; Investigating what makes a good bat-condo; Climate change is making marine heat waves more frequent and intense – and that's changing life in the ocean; Listener question:What impact do solar flares have on the planets closer to the Sun than Earth?

Whale scientist see the birth of baby sperm whale for the first time; A robot that runs on gas is an explosive new innovation; Reduced pollution from ships led to a warmer climate; An octopus's garden off Costa Rica; Only we can prevent forest fires? It depends on location.

Reintroducing a rare butterfly to a restored ecosystem; Studying Vancouver’s bats in front of a curious audience; Investigating whether Arctic methane seeps could tell us about life on Mars; Revealing the hidden worlds in Pacific ocean depths; Plan a, forget it. Plan b, oh well. Plan c study Saskatchewan ticks; Dodging wild boars while doing archeology in southern Italy; Sidewalk gardens keep harmful chemicals out of streams.

Quirks & Quarks is on Summer Hiatus. Please check back in September for new podcasts or visit our archives at cbc.ca/quirks.

We close out our season with another edition of our always enlightening, always intriguing listener question show. We have answers to questions like: What would happen if a comet side-swiped our atmosphere? What determines a bird's speed of flight? Can you store light in a battery? How did large dinosaurs support their incredible bulk? All these and much more this week on the Quirks & Quarks Question Show.

Dragging STEM forward - LGBTQ scientists perform their work for inclusion; Lucy was swole! Scientists reconstruct a 3.2 million-year-old hominid’s muscles; Canada Jay siblings fight to see who lives at home, and who moves out; Baby skateboard gives a boost to preemie development; Cockroach baits don’t just kill, they’re driving evolution of the pest’s love life.

A gene therapy for cat contraception; Octopuses edit their genetic code on the fly to adapt to changing temperatures; Termites could inspire energy efficient air conditioning; Corals may bleach because rising temperatures drive viral infections; A new book looks at the fragility and malleability of the mind.